have a gloss upon them at the first which time wears off, the works of judgment are like the diamond; the more they are polish'd, the more luster they receive. Such is the difference betwixt Virgil's Eneis and Marini's Adone. And, if I may be allow'd to change the metaphor, I would say that Virgil is like the Fame which he describes:

Mobilitate viget, viresque acquirit eundo.

Such a sort of reputation is my aim, tho' in a far inferior degree, according to my motto in the title-page: Sequiturque patrem non passibus æquis: and therefore I appeal to the highest court of judicature, like that of the peers, of which your Lordship is so great an ornament.

Without this ambition which I own, of desiring to please the judices natos, I could never have been able to have done anything at this age, when the fire of poetry is commonly extinguish'd in other men. Yet Virgil has given me the example of Entellus for my encouragement: when he was well heated, the younger champion could not stand before him. And we find the elder contended not for the gift, but for the honor: nec dona moror. For Dampier has inform'd us, in his Voyages, that the air of the country which produces gold is never wholesome.

I had long since consider'd that the way to please the best judges is not to translate a poet literally, and Virgil least of any other. For, his peculiar beauty lying in the choice of words, I am excluded from it by the narrow compass of our heroic verse, unless I would make use of monosyllables only, and those clogg'd with consonants, which are the dead weight of our mother tongue. 'Tis possible, I confess, tho' it rarely happens, that a verse of monosyllables may sound harmoniously; and some examples of it I have seen. My first line of the Eneis is not harsh:

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate, &c.

But a much better instance may be given from the last line of Manilius, made English by our learned and judicious Mr. Creech:

Nor could the world have borne so fierce a flame

where the many liquid consonants are plac'd so artfully that they give a pleasing sound to the words, tho' they are all of one syllable.

'T is true, I have been sometimes forc'd upon it in other places of this work; but I never did it out of choice: I was either in haste, or Virgil gave me no occasion for the ornament of words; for it seldom happens but a monosyllable line turns verse to prose; and even that prose is rugged and unharmonious. Philarchus, I remember, taxes Balzac for placing twenty monosyllables in file, without one dissyllable betwixt them. The way I have taken is not so strait as metaphrase, nor so loose as paraphrase: some things too I have omitted, and sometimes have added of my own. Yet the omissions, I hope, are but of circumstances, and such as would have no grace in English; and the additions, I also hope, are easily deduc'd from Virgil's sense. They will seem (at least I have the vanity to think so) not stuck into him, but growing out of him. He studies brevity more than any other poet; but he had the advantage of a language wherein much may be comprehended in a little space. We, and all the modern tongues, have more articles and pronouns, besides signs of tenses and cases, and other barbarities on which our speech is built by the faults of our forefathers. The Romans founded theirs upon the Greek: and the Greeks, we know, were laboring many hundred years upon their language before they brought it to perfection. They rejected all those signs, and cut off as many articles as they could spare; comprehending in one word what we are constrain'd to express in two; which is one reason why we cannot write so concisely as they have done. The word pater, for example, signifies not only a father, but your father, my father, his or her father, all included in a word.

This inconvenience is common to all modern tongues; and this alone constrains us to employ more words than the ancients needed. But having before observ'd that Virgil endeavors to be short, and at the same time elegant, I pursue the excellence and forsake the brevity. For there he is like ambergris, a rich perfume, but of so close and glutinous a body that it must be open'd with inferior scents of musk or

civet, or the sweetness will not be drawn out into another language.

On the whole matter, I thought fit to steer betwixt the two extremes of paraphrase and literal translation; to keep as near my author as I could, without losing all his graces, the most eminent of which are in the beauty of his words; and those words, I must add, are always figurative. Such of these as would retain their elegance in our tongue, I have endeavor'd to graff on it; but most of them are of necessity to be lost, because they will not shine in any way but their own. Virgil has sometimes two of them in a line; but the scantiness of our heroic verse is not capable of receiving more than one; and that too must expiate for many others which have none. Such is the difference of the languages, or such my want of skill in choosing words. Yet I may presume to say, and I hope with as much reason as the French translator, that, taking all the materials of this divine author, I have endeavor'd to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age. I acknowledge, with Segrais, that I have not succeeded in this attempt according to my desire; yet I shall not be wholly without praise, if in some sort I may be allow'd to have copied the clearness, the purity, the easiness, and the magnificence of his style. But I shall have occasion to speak farther on this subject before I end the preface.

When I mention'd the Pindaric line, I should have added that I take another license in my verses; for I frequently make use of triplet rhymes, and for the same reason, because they bound the sense. And therefore I generally join these two licenses together, and make the last verse of the triplet a Pindaric: for, besides the majesty which it gives, it confines the sense within the barriers of three lines, which would languish if it were lengthen'd into four. Spenser is my example for both these privileges of English verses; and Chapman has follow'd him in his translation of Homer. Mr. Cowley has given in to them after both; and all succeeding writers after him. I regard them now as the Magna Charta of heroic poetry, and am too much an Englishman to lose what my ancestors have gain'd for me. Let the French and Italians value themselves on their regularity; strength and

elevation are our standard. I said before, and I repeat it, that the affected purity of the French has unsinew'd their heroic verse. The language of an epic poem is almost wholly figurative; yet they are so fearful of a metaphor, that no example of Virgil can encourage them to be bold with safety. Sure they might warm themselves by that sprightly blaze, without approaching it so close as to singe their wings; they may come as near it as their master. Not that I would discourage that purity of diction in which he excels all other poets. But he knows how far to extend his franchises, and advances to the verge, without venturing a foot beyond it. On the other side, without being injurious to the memory of our English Pindar, I will presume to say that his metaphors are sometimes too violent, and his language is not always pure. But at the same time I must excuse him; for, thro' the iniquity of the times, he was forc'd to travel, at an age when, instead of learning foreign languages, he should have studied the beauties of his mother tongue, which, like all other speeches, is to be cultivated early, or we shall never write it with any kind of elegance. Thus by gaining abroad he lost at home; like the painter in the Arcadia, who, going to see a skirmish, had his arms lopp'd off, and return'd, says Sir Philip Sidney, well instructed how to draw a battle, but without a hand to perform his work.

There is another thing in which I have presum'd to deviate from him and Spenser. They both make hemistichs (or half verses) breaking off in the middle of a line. I confess there are not many such in the Fairy Queen; and even those few might be occasion'd by his unhappy choice of so long a stanza. Mr. Cowley had found out that no kind of staff is proper for a heroic poem, as being all too lyrical; yet, tho' he wrote in couplets, where rhyme is freer from constraint, he frequently affects half verses; of which we find not one in Homer, and I think not in any of the Greek poets, or the Latin, excepting only Virgil; and there is no question but he thought he had Virgil's authority for that license. But I am confident our poet never meant to leave him, or any other, such a precedent; and I ground my opinion on these two reasons. First, we find no example of a hemistich in any of his Pastorals or Georgics; for he had given the last finishHC XIII-3

ing strokes to both these poems: but his Æneis he left so uncorrect, at least so short of that perfection at which he aim'd, that we know how hard a sentence he pass'd upon it. And, in the second place, I reasonably presume that he intended to have fill'd up all those hemistichs, because in one of them we find the sense imperfect:

Quem tibi jam Troja

which some foolish grammarian has ended for him with a half line of nonsense:

--peperit fumante Creusa:

for Ascanius must have been born some years before the burning of that city; which I need not prove. On the other side, we find also that he himself fill'd up one line in the Sixth Eneid, the enthusiasm seizing him while he was reading to Augustus:

Misenum Æolidem, quo non præstantior alter
Ere ciere viros-

to which he added, in that transport, Martemque accendere cantu: and never was any line more nobly finish'd; for the reasons which I have given in the Book of Painting. On these considerations I have shunn'd hemistichs; not being willing to imitate Virgil to a fault, like Alexander's courtiers, who affected to hold their necks awry, because he could not help it. I am confident your Lordship is by this time of my opinion, and that you will look on those half lines hereafter as the imperfect products of a hasty Muse; like the frogs and serpents in the Nile; part of them kindled into life, and part a lump of unform'd unanimated mud.

I am sensible that many of my whole verses are as imperfect as those halves, for want of time to digest them better; but give me leave to make the excuse of Boccace, who, when he was upbraided that some of his novels had not the spirit of the rest, return'd this answer, that Charlemagne, who made the paladins, was never able to raise an army of them. The leaders may be heroes, but the multitude must consist of

common men.

I am also bound to tell your Lordship, in my own defense,