behalf, create the verbal and
metrical expression of the thoughts; for in these last is the inspiration
that brings into the light of existence both words and music. Yet nothing
seems to hinder, but that if endowed for perfectly accepting and
appropriating the thoughts, he may then become in secondary place
inspired, and a creator for the "new utterance." In all our observation of
the various constitutions bestowed, in different men, upon the common
human mind, nothing appears to forbid that an exquisite and mastering
faculty of language, such as shall place the wealth of a mother-tongue at
command, and an exquisite ear and talent for melodious and significant
numbers, may be lodged in a spirit that is not gifted with original
invention. Much rather, the recognition of the compensating and separable
way in which faculties are dealt, would lead us to look from time to time,
for children of the Muse gifted for supereminent Translators. Do we not
see engravers, not themselves exalted and accomplished masters, who yet
absorb into their transcript the soul of the master? Dryden's phrase,
"_have a genius_," seems to express this qualified gifting--the
enthusiasm, and the narrower creative faculty excellently given, and kept
alive and active by cultivation and exercise.

Hoole's _Orlando Furioso_, and _Jerusalem Delivered_, are among the
world's duller achievements in the art of Translation. They have obtained
some favour of public opinion by the interest which will break through
them, and which they in their unambitious way singularly attest--the
interest of the matter. What is the native deficiency which extinguishes
in them every glimmer of the original Style? The clerk at the India-House,
or some other house, had not, in the moulding of heart or brain, any touch
of the romantic. And Ariosto and Tasso are the two poets of Romance. Take
a translator of no higher intellectual endowment than Mr Hoole--perform
some unknown adjuration to the goddess Nature, which shall move her to
infuse into him the species of sensibility which grounds the two poems,
and which we have said that we desiderate in the bold Accountant,--read
the poems through with him, taking care that he understands them--as far
as a matter of the sort may be seen to, teach him, which is all fair, a
trick or two of our English verse to relieve the terrible couplet
monotony--run an eye over the MS. on its way to the printer, and he shall
have enriched the literatur