ies which was Virgil and which was Ovid. It was objected against a
late noble painter that he drew many graceful pictures, but few of them
were like. And this happened because he always studied himself more than
those who sat to him. In such translators I can easily distinguish the
hand which performed the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from
another."

But critics recognized that study and pains alone could not furnish the
translator for his work. "To be a thorough translator," says Dryden, "he
must be a thorough poet,"[414] or to put it, as does Roscommon, somewhat
more mildly, he must by nature possess the more essential
characteristics of his author. Admitting this, Creech writes with a
slight air of apology, "I cannot choose but smile to think that I, who
have ... too little ill nature (for that is commonly thought a
necessary ingredient) to be a satirist, should venture upon
Horace."[415] Dryden finds by experience that he can more easily
translate a poet akin to himself. His translations of Ovid please him.
"Whether it be the partiality of an old man to his youngest child I know
not; but they appear to me the best of all my endeavors in this kind.
Perhaps this poet is more easy to be translated than some others whom I
have lately attempted; perhaps, too, he was more according to my
genius."[416] He looks forward with pleasure to putting the whole of the
_Iliad_ into English. "And this I dare assure the world beforehand, that
I have found, by trial, Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil, though I
say not the translation will be less laborious; for the Grecian is more
according to my genius than the Latin poet."[417] The insistence on the
necessity for kinship between the author and the translator is the
principal idea in Roscommon's _Essay on Translated Verse_. According to
Roscommon,

Each poet with a different talent writes,
One praises, one instructs, another bites.
Horace could ne'er aspire to epic bays,
Nor lofty Maro stoop to lyric lays.

This, then, is his advice to the would-be translator:

Examine how your humour is inclined,
And which the ruling passion of your mind;
Then, seek a poet who your way does bend,
And choose an author as you choose a friend.
United by this sympathetic bond,
You grow familiar, intimate, and fond;
Your thoughts, your words, your styles, your souls agree,
No longer his interpreter but he.

Though the plea of repr