ity
For lofty phrase and perspicuity.[407]

J. A. addresses Lucretius in lines prefixed to Creech's translation,

But Lord, how much you're changed, how much improv'd!
Your native roughness all is left behind,
But still the same good man tho' more refin'd,[408]

and Otway says to the translator:

For when the rich original we peruse,
And by it try the metal you produce,
Though there indeed the purest ore we find,
Yet still by you it something is refined;
Thus when the great Lucretius gives a loose
And lashes to her speed his fiery Muse,
Still with him you maintain an equal pace,
And bear full stretch upon him all the race;
But when in rugged way we find him rein
His verse, and not so smooth a stroke maintain,
There the advantage he receives is found,
By you taught temper, and to choose his ground.[409]

So authoritative a critic as Roscommon, however, seems to oppose
attempts at improvement when he writes,

Your author always will the best advise,
Fall when he falls, and when he rises, rise,

a precept which Tytler, writing at the end of the next century,
considers the one doubtful rule in _The Essay on Translated Verse_. "Far
from adopting the former part of this maxim," he declares, "I consider
it to be the duty of a poetical translator, never to suffer his original
to fall. He must maintain with him a perpetual contest of genius; he
must attend him in his highest flights, and soar, if he can, beyond him:
and when he perceives, at any time a diminution of his powers, when he
sees a drooping wing, he must raise him on his own pinions."[410]

The influence of Denham and Cowley is also seen in what is perhaps the
most significant element in the seventeenth-century theory of
translation. These men advocated freedom in translation, not because
such freedom would give the translator a greater opportunity to display
his own powers, but because it would enable him to reproduce more truly
the spirit of the original. A good translator must, first of all, know
his author intimately. Where Denham's expressions are fuller than
Virgil's, they are, he says, "but the impressions which the often
reading of him hath left upon my thoughts." Possessing this intimate
acquaintance, the English writer must try to think and write as if he
were identified with his author. Dryden, who, in spite of his general
principles, sometimes practised something uncommonl