m being always equal to our diligence.

Chaucer, who is generally considered as the father of our poetry, has
left a version of Boethius on the Comforts of Philosophy, the book which
seems to have been the favourite of the middle ages, which had been
translated into Saxon by King Alfred, and illustrated with a copious
comment ascribed to Aquinas. It may be supposed that Chaucer would apply
more than common attention to an author of so much celebrity, yet he has
attempted nothing higher than a version strictly literal, and has
degraded the poetical parts to prose, that the constraint of
versification might not obstruct his zeal for fidelity.

Caxton taught us typography about the year 1474. The first book printed
in English was a translation. Caxton was both the translator and printer
of the Destruction of Troye; a book which, in that infancy of learning,
was considered as the best account of the fabulous ages, and which,
though now driven out of notice by authors of no greater use or value,
still continued to be read in Caxton's English to the beginning of the
present century.

Caxton proceeded as he began, and, except the poems of Gower and
Chaucer, printed nothing but translations from the French, in which the
original is so scrupulously followed, that they afford us little
knowledge of our own language: though the words are English, the phrase
is foreign.

As learning advanced, new works were adopted into our language, but I
think with little improvement of the art of translation, though foreign
nations and other languages offered us models of a better method; till
in the age of Elizabeth we began to find that greater liberty was
necessary to elegance, and that elegance was necessary to general
reception; some essays were then made upon the Italian poets, which
deserve the praise and gratitude of posterity.

But the old practice was not suddenly forsaken: Holland filled the
nation with literal translation; and, what is yet more strange, the same
exactness was obstinately practised in the versions of the poets. This
absurd labour of construing into rhyme was countenanced by Jonson in his
version of Horace; and whether it be that more men have learning than
genius, or that the endeavours of that time were more directed towards
knowledge than delight, the accuracy of Jonson found more imitators than
the elegance of Fairfax; and May, Sandys and Holiday, confined
themselves to the toil of rendering line for line, not