he author, and could express it with equal force in English verse, he
cared not if minute elegancies were lost, or the beauties of accurate
proportion destroyed, or a dubious interpretation hastily adopted on the
credit of a _scholium_. He used abundantly the licence he has claimed
for a translator, to be deficient rather in the language out of which he
renders, than of that into which he translates. If such be but master of
the sense of his author, Dryden argues, he may express that sense with
eloquence in his own tongue, though he understand not the nice turns of
the original. "But without the latter quality he can never arrive at the
useful and the delightful, without which reading is a penance and
fatigue."[21] With the same spirit of haste, Dryden if often contented
to present to the English reader some modern image, which he may at once
fully comprehend, instead of rendering precisely a classic expression,
which might require explanation or paraphrase. Thus the _pulchra
Sicyonia_, or buskins of Sicyon, are rendered,

"Diamond-buckles sparkling in their shoes."

By a yet more unfortunate adaptation of modern technical phraseology,
the simple direction of Helenus,

"_Laeva tibi tellus, et longo laeva pelantur
AEquora circuitu: dextrum fage lillus et undas_,"

is translated,

"Tack to the larboard, and stand off to sea,
Veer starboard sea and land:"

--a counsel which, I shrewdly suspect, would have been unintelligible,
not only to Palinurus, but to the best pilot in the British navy.[22] In
the same tone, but with more intelligibility, if not felicity, Dryden
translates _palatia coeli_ in Ovid, the _Louvre of the sky_; and, in the
version of the first book of Homer, talks of the court of Jupiter in the
phrases used at that of Whitehall. These expressions, proper to modern
manners, often produce an unfortunate confusion between the age in which
the scene is laid, and the date of the translation. No judicious poet is
willing to break the interest of a tale of ancient times, by allusions
peculiar to his own period: but when the translator, instead of
identifying himself as closely as possible with the original author,
pretends to such liberty, he removes us a third step from the time of
action, and so confounds the manners of no less than three distinct
eras,--that in which the scene is laid, that in which the poem was
written, and that, finally, in which the translation was executed. There
are passage