ines; nay,
Horace himself could scarce have done it to a Greek poet,

'Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio:'

either perspicuity or gracefulness will frequently be wanting. Horace
has, indeed, avoided both these rocks in his translation of the three
first lines of Homer's _Odyssey_, which he has contracted into two:--

'Dic mihi, musa, virum, captae post tempora Trojae
Qui mores hominum multorum vidit, et urbes.

'Muse, speak the man, who, since the siege of Troy,
So many towns, such change of manners saw.'

But then the sufferings of Ulysses, which are a considerable part of
that sentence, are omitted--

[Greek: Hos mala polla
Plachthe.]

The consideration of these difficulties, in a servile, literal
translation, not long since made two of our famous wits, Sir John
Denham and Mr Cowley, to contrive another way of turning authors into
our tongue, called, by the latter of them, imitation. As they were
friends, I suppose they communicated their thoughts on this subject
to each other; and, therefore, their reasons for it are little
different, though the practice of one is much more moderate. I take
imitation of an author, in their sense, to be an endeavour of a later
poet to write like one who has written before him on the same
subject; that is, not to translate his words, or to be confined to
his sense, but only to set him as a pattern, and to write as he
supposes that author would have done, had he lived in our age and in
our country. Yet I dare not say that either of them have carried this
libertine way of rendering authors (as Mr Cowley calls it) so far as
my definition reaches, for, in the Pindaric Odes, the customs and
ceremonies of ancient Greece are still preserved. But I know not what
mischief may arise hereafter from the example of such an innovation,
when writers of unequal parts to him shall imitate so bold an
undertaking. To add and to diminish what we please, in the way avowed
by him, ought only to be granted to Mr Cowley, and that, too, only
in his translation of Pindar; because he alone was able to make him
amends, by giving him better of his own, whenever he refused his
author's thoughts. Pindar is generally known to be a dark writer, to
want connexion, (I mean as to our understanding,)