only with the words but
with the substance of his source. With regard to his translation of the
_Aeneid_ Phaer represents himself as "Trusting that you, my right
worshipful masters and students of universities and such as be teachers
of children and readers of this author in Latin, will not be too much
offended though every verse answer not to your expectation. For (besides
the diversity between a construction and a translation) you know there
be many mystical secrets in this writer, which uttered in English would
show little pleasure and in my opinion are better to be untouched than
to diminish the grace of the rest with tediousness and darkness. I have
therefore followed the counsel of Horace, touching the duty of a good
interpreter, _Qui quae desperat nitescere posse, relinquit_, by which
occasion somewhat I have in places omitted, somewhat altered, and some
things I have expounded, and all to the ease of inferior readers, for
you that are learned need not to be instructed."[324] Though Jasper
Heywood's version of _Hercules Furens_ is an example of the literal
translation for the use of students, most of the other members of the
group of young men who in 1581 published their translations of Seneca
protest that they have reproduced the meaning, not the words of their
author. Alexander Neville, a precocious youth who translated the fifth
tragedy in "this sixteenth year of mine age," determined "not to be
precise in following the author word for word, but sometimes by
addition, sometimes by subtraction, to use the aptest phrases in giving
the sense that I could invent."[325] Neville's translation is
"oftentimes rudely increased with mine own simple invention";[326] John
Studley has changed the first chorus of the _Medea_, "because in it I
saw nothing but an heap of profane stories and names of profane
idols";[327] Heywood himself, since the existing text of the _Troas_ is
imperfect, admits having "with addition of mine own pen supplied the
want of some things,"[328] and says that he has also replaced the third
chorus, because much of it is "heaped number of far and strange
countries." Most radical of all is the theory according to which Thomas
Drant translated the _Satires_ of Horace. That Drant could be faithful
even to excess is evident from his preface to _The Wailings of Jeremiah_
included in the same volume with his version of Horace. "That thou
mightest have this rueful parcel of Scripture pure and sincere, not
sw