hey strove with equal skill and wit.[382]

An opinion characteristic of the latter part of the century is that of
the Earl of Roscommon, who, after praising the work of the earlier
French translators, says,

From hence our generous emulation came,
We undertook, and we performed the same:
But now we show the world another way,
And in translated verse do more than they.[383]

Dryden finds little to praise in the French and Italian renderings of
Virgil. "Segrais ... is wholly destitute of elevation, though his
version is much better than that of the two brothers, or any of the rest
who have attempted Virgil. Hannibal Caro is a great name among the
Italians; yet his translation is most scandalously mean."[384] "What I
have said," he declares somewhat farther on, "though it has the face of
arrogance, yet is intended for the honor of my country; and therefore I
will boldly own that this English translation has more of Virgil's
spirit in it than either the French or Italian."[385]

On translators outside their own period seventeenth-century critics
bestowed even less consideration than on their French or Italian
contemporaries. Earlier writers were forgotten, or remembered only to be
condemned. W. L., Gent., who in 1628 published a translation of Virgil's
_Eclogues_, expresses his surprise that a poet like Virgil "should yet
stand still as a _noli me tangere_, whom no man either durst or would
undertake; only Master Spenser long since translated the _Gnat_ (a
little fragment of Virgil's excellence), giving the world peradventure
to conceive that he would at one time or other have gone through with
the rest of this poet's work."[386] Vicars' translation of the _Aeneid_
is accompanied by a letter in which the author's cousin, Thomas Vicars,
congratulates him on his "great pains in transplanting this worthiest of
Latin poets into a mellow and neat English soil (a thing not done
before)."[387] Denham announces, "There are so few translations which
deserve praise, that I scarce ever saw any which deserved pardon; those
who travail in that kind being for the most part so unhappy as to rob
others without enriching themselves, pulling down the fame of good
authors without raising their own." Brome,[388] writing in 1666,
rejoices in the good fortune of Horace's "good friend Virgil ... who
being plundered of all his ornaments by the old translators, was
restored to others with double lustre by those standard-bearers