ions of Dryden form a distinguished part of his poetical
labours. No author, excepting Pope, has done so much to endenizen the
eminent poets of antiquity. In this sphere, also, it was the fate of
Dryden to become a leading example to future poets, and to abrogate laws
which had been generally received although they imposed such trammels on
translation as to render it hardly intelligible. Before his
distinguished success showed that the object of the translator should be
to transfuse the spirit, not to copy servilely the very words of his
original, it had been required, that line should be rendered for line,
and, almost, word for word. It may easily be imagined, that, by the
constraint and inversion which this cramping statute required, a poem
was barely rendered _not Latin_, instead of being made English, and
that, to the mere native reader, as the connoisseur complains in "The
Critic", the interpreter was sometimes "the harder to be understood of
the two." Those who seek examples, may find them in the jaw-breaking
translations of Ben Jonson and Holyday. Cowley and Denham had indeed
rebelled against this mode of translation, which conveys pretty much the
same idea of an original, as an imitator would do of the gait of
another, by studiously stepping after him into every trace which his
feet had left upon the sand. But they assumed a licence equally faulty,
and claimed the privilege of writing what might be more properly termed
imitations, than versions of the classics. It was reserved to Dryden
manfully to claim and vindicate the freedom of a just translation; more
limited than paraphrase, but free from the metaphrastic severity exacted
from his predecessors.

With these free yet unlicentious principles, Dryden brought to the task
of translation a competent knowledge of the language of the originals,
with an unbounded command of his own. The latter is, however, by far the
most marked characteristic of his Translations. Dryden was not indeed
deficient in Greek and Roman learning; but he paused not to weigh and
sift those difficult and obscure passages, at which the most learned
will doubt and hesitate for the correct meaning. The same rapidity,
which marked his own poetry, seems to have attended his study of the
classics. He seldom waited to analyse the sentence he was about to
render, far less scrupulously to weigh the precise purport and value of
every word it contained. If he caught the general spirit and meaning of
t