have done, to his very faults. Mr. Chapman, in his translation of Homer, professes to have done it somewhat paraphrastically, and that on set purpose; his opinion being, that a good poet is to be translated in that manner. I remember not the reason which he gives for it; but I suppose it is, for fear of omitting any of his excellencies. Sure I am, that if it be a fault, it is much more pardonable than that of those who run into the other extreme, of a literal and close translation; where the poet is confined so straitly to his author's words, that he wants elbow-room to express his elegancies. He leaves him obscure; he leaves him prose, where he found him verse and no better than thus has Ovid been served by the so much-admired Sandys. This is at least the idea which I have remaining of his translation; for I never read him since I was a boy. They who take him upon content, from the praises which their fathers gave him, may inform their judgment by reading him again, and see, (if they understand the original,) what is become of Ovid's poetry in his version; whether it be not all, or the greatest part of it, evaporated. But this proceeded from the wrong judgment of the age in which he lived; they neither knew good verse, nor loved it: they were scholars, it is true, but they were pedants; and for a just reward of their pedantick pains, all their translations want to be translated into English.

If I flatter not myself, or if my friends have not

flattered me, I have given my author's sense for the most part truly; for to mistake sometimes is incident to all men; and not to follow, the Dutch commentators always, may be forgiven to a man who thinks them, in the general, heavy grosswitted fellows, fit only to gloss on their own dull poets. But I leave a farther satire on their wit, till I have a better opportunity to shew how much I love and honour them. I have likewise attempted to restore Ovid to his native sweetness, easiness, and smoothness; and to give my poetry a kind of cadence, and as we call it, a run of verse, as like the original as the English can come up to the Latin. As he seldom uses any synalephas, so I have endeavoured to avoid them as often as I could. I have likewise given him his own turns, both on the words and on the thought; which I cannot say are inimitable because I have copied them; and so may others, if they use the same diligence: but certainly they are wonderfully graceful in this poct. Since I have named the synalepha, which is the cutting off one vowel immediately before another, I will give an example of it from Chapman's Homer, which lies before me, for the benefit of those who understand not the Latin prosodia. It is in the first line of the Argument to the First Iliad :

Apollo's priest to th' Argive fleet doth bring, &c.

There, we see, he makes it not, the Argive, but th Argive, to shun the shock of the two vowels

immediately following each other.

But in his

Second Argument, in the same page, he gives a bad example of the quite contrary kind : Alpha the prayer of Chryses sings,

The army's plague, the strife of kings.

In these words, the army's,-the ending with a vowel, and army's beginning with another vowel, without cutting off the first, which by it had been th' army's, there remains a most horrible ill-sounding gap betwixt those words. I cannot say that I have every where observed the rule of this synalepha, my translation; but wheresoever I have not, it is a fault in sound. The French and Italians have made it an inviolable precept in their versification therein following the severe example of the Latin poets.

in

Our countrymen have not yet reformed their poetry so far, but content themselves with following the licentious practice of the Greeks; who, though they sometimes use synalephas, yet make no difficulty very often to sound one vowel upon another; as Homer does in the very first line of Alpha:

Μήνιν ἄειδε, Θεὰ, Πηληϊάδεω Αχιλήος—

It is true, indeed, that in the second line, in these words, μυρὶ ̓Αχαιοῖς, and ἄλγὲ ἔθηκε, the synalepha in revenge is twice observed. But it becomes us, for the sake of euphony, rather musas colere severiores, with the Romans, than to give into the looseness of the Grecians.

I have tired myself, and have been summoned

by the press to send away this Dedication, otherwise I had exposed some other faults, which are daily committed by our English poets; which, with care and observation, might be amended. For after all, our language is both copious, significant, and majestical; and might be reduced into a more harmonious sound. But for want of publick encouragement, in this iron age, we are so far from making any progress in the improvement of our tongue, that in few years we shall speak and write as barbarously as our neighbours.

Notwithstanding my haste, I cannot forbear to tell your Lordship, that there are two fragments of Homer translated in this Miscellany; one by Mr. Congreve," (whom I cannot mention without the honour which is due to his excellent parts, and that entire affection which I bear him,) and the other by myself. Both the subjects are pathetical, and I am sure my friend has added to the tenderness which he found in the original; and, without flattery, surpassed his author. Yet I must needs say this in reference to Homer,-that he is much more capable of exciting the manly passions, than those of grief and pity. To cause admiration is indeed the proper and adequate design of an epick poem; and in that he has excelled even Virgil.

6 The lamentation of Priam for his son, Hector, from the twenty-fourth Iliad. Congreve's first play, THE OLD BACHELOR, had appeared in January 1692-3, and in the following month went through three editions.

Yet, without presuming to arraign our master, I may venture to affirm, that he is somewhat too talkative, and more than somewhat too digressive. This is so manifest, that it cannot be denied in that little parcel which I have translated, perhaps too literally there Andromache, in the midst of her concernment and fright for Hector, runs off her bias, to tell him a story of her pedigree, and of the lamentable death of her father, her mother, and her seven brothers. The devil was in Hector if he knew not all this matter, as well as she who told it him, for she had been his bedfellow for many years together; and if he knew it, then it must be confessed that Homer in this long digression has rather given us his own character, than that of the fair lady whom he paints. His dear friends, the commentators, who never fail him at a pinch, will needs excuse him by making the present sorrow of Andromache to occasion the remembrance of all the past; but others think that she had enough to do with that grief which now oppressed her, without running for assistance to her family. Virgil, I am confident, would have omitted such a work of supererogation. But Virgil had the gift of expressing much in little, and sometimes in silence; for though he yielded much to Homer in invention, he more excelled him in his admirable judgment. He drew the passion of Dido for Æneas, in the most lively and most natural colours that are imaginable. Homer was ambitious enough of moving pity; for he has