of his verse. He is every where above conceits of epigrammatick wit, and gross hyperboles: he maintains majesty in the midst of plainness; he shines, but glares not; and is stately without ambition (which is the vice of Lucan). I drew my definition of poetical wit' from my particular consideration of him: for propriety of thoughts and words are only to be found in him; and where they are proper, they will be delightful. Pleasure follows of necessity, as the effect does the cause; and therefore is not to be put into the definition. This exact propriety of Virgil I particularly regarded, as a great part of his character; but must confess to my shame, that I have not been able to translate any part of him so well, as to make him appear wholly like himself. For where the original is close, no version can

9 Here, for the first time, it is observable that our author has restrained and qualified his notion of wit, by adding the word poetical to it; and if he had done so in the former passages, where he has introduced the same topick, (see vol. i. p. 412, and vol. ii. p. 151,) his definition of wit, would, perhaps, have been less exceptionable. It is clear, that by wit, he means that sharpness of conceit (as he elsewhere calls it) and splendour of imagery, which is suited to poetry; and it is remarkable that he here informs us, he had VIRGIL particularly in view, when he gave this definition of poetical wit; the very author whom Addison has named for the purpose of shewing the impropriety of this definition of wit, when considered in its ordinary acceptation. Their reasoning on this subject, therefore, resembles the game of cross-purposes.

reach it in the same compass. Hannibal Caro's, in the Italian,' is the nearest, the most poetical, and the most sonorous of any translation of the Æneids; yet, though he takes the advantage of blank verse, he commonly allows two lines for one of Virgil, and does not always hit his sense. Tasso tells us in his letters, that Sperone Speroni, a great Italian wit, who was his contemporary, observed of Virgil and Tully, that the Latin orator endeavoured to imitate the copiousness of Homer, the Greek poet, and that the Latin poet made it his business to reach the conciseness of Demosthenes, the Greek orator. Virgil therefore, being so very sparing of his words, and leaving so much to be imagined by the reader, can never be translated as he ought, in any modern tongue. To make him copious, is to alter his character; and to translate him line for line, is impossible; because the Latin is naturally a more succinct language than either the Italian, Spanish, French, or even than the English, which by reason of its monosyllables is far the most compendious of them, Virgil is much the closest any Roman poet, and the Latin hexameter has more feet than the English heroick.'

of

The best edition of Annibale Caro's version of the Eneid, according to Baretti, is that of Trevisa, printed in 1603, in quarto. There are many more ancient editions of the same work. Annibale Caro died at Rome in 1566.

2 Surely there is a great impropriety in talking of the feet of an English verse. English metre is regulated, not by feet, but by the number of syllables in each line, duly accented. VOL. III.

D

Besides all this, an author has the choice of his own thoughts and words, which a translator has not; he is confined by the sense of the inventor to those expressions which are the nearest to it: so that Virgil studying brevity, and having the command of his own language, could bring those words into a narrow compass, which a translator cannot render without circumlocutions. In short, they who have called him the torture of grammarians, might also have called him the plague of translators; for he seems to have studied not to be translated. I own, that endeavouring to turn his Nisus and Euryalus as close as I was able, I have performed that episode too literally; that giving more scope to Mezentius and Lausus, that version which has more of the majesty of Virgil, has less of his conciseness; and all that I can promise for myself, is only that I have done both better than Ogleby, and perhaps as well as Caro. So that, methinks, I come like a malefactor, to make a speech upon the gallows, and to warn all other poets, by my sad example, from the sacrilege of translating Virgil. Yet, by considering him so carefully as I did before my attempt, I have made some faint resemblance of him; and, had I taken more time, might possibly have succeeded better; but never so well, as to have satisfied myself.

He who excells all other poets in his own language, were it possible to do him right, must appear above them in our tongue; which, as my Lord Roscommon justly observes, approaches nearest

to the Roman in its majesty; nearest indeed, but with a vast interval betwixt them. There is an inimitable grace in Virgil's words, and in them principally consists that beauty, which gives so unexpressible a pleasure to him who best understands their force. This diction of his, I must once again say, is never to be copied; and since it cannot, he will appear but lame in the best translation. The turns of his verse, his breakings, his propriety, his numbers, and his gravity, I have as far imitated, as the poverty of our language and the hastiness of my performance would allow. I may seem sometimes to have varied from his sense; but I think the greatest variations may be fairly deduced from him; and where I leave his commentators, it may be I understand him better: at least I writ without consulting them in many places. But two particular lines in Mezentius and Lausus, I cannot so easily excuse. They are indeed remotely allied to Virgil's sense; but they are too like the trifling tenderness of Ovid, and were printed before I had considered them enough to alter them. The first of them I have forgotten, and cannot easily retrieve, because the copy is at the press; the second is this:

When Lausus died, I was already slain.

This appears pretty enough at first sight, but I am convinced for many reasons, that the expression is too bold; that Virgil would not have said it, though Ovid would. The reader may pardon it, if he

please, for the freeness of the confession; and instead of that, and the former, admit these two lines, which are more according to the author:

Nor ask I life, nor fought with that design;

As I had used my fortune, use thou thine.

Having with much ado got clear of Virgil, I have in the next place to consider the genius of Lucretius, whom I have translated more happily in those parts of him which I undertook. If he was not of the best age of Roman poetry, he was at least of that which preceded it; and he himself refined it to that degree of perfection, both in the language and the thoughts, that he left an easy task to Virgil; who as he succeeded him in time, so he copied his excellencies; for the method of the Georgicks is plainly derived from him. Lucretius had chosen a subject naturally crabbed; he therefore adorned it with poetical descriptions, and precepts of morality, in the beginning and ending of his books: which you see Virgil has imitated with great success in those four books, which in my opinion are more perfect in their kind than even his divine Eneids. The turn of his verse he has likewise followed, in those places which Lucretius has most laboured, and some of his very lines he has transplanted into his own works, without much variation. If I am not

3 Lucretius died in the year of Rome, 699, when Virgil was fifteen, and Horace ten years old.

4 Vide MACROB. 1. vi. c. 1. 2.