PREFACE.

OUR lot is not fallen upon a time that is readily pleased with any attempts in poetical translation; not indeed because they are judged, in the minds of the generality, by too high or too refined a standard, but because there exists for them no standard positive or satisfactory enough to control the passing humours of the ingenious reader, who is naturally, in such a state of ignorance, rendered more inclinable to censoriousness than to sympathetic lenity. This has become the state of public feeling, because our old standards of translation have fallen into disrepute, and our established methods become obsolete, while those that must succeed them are but vaguely or negatively intimated by the critic, not realized as yet, nor illustrated, beyond a very few brilliant instances, by the actual labours of the artist; whence it has been said by a late reviewer, that we have

rather learnt what translation should not, than what it should, be. We have learnt what translation should not be from that general revolution in English poetry, which separates our modern schools from the imitators of Pope and Dryden, and which has influenced not less the sentiments, than the style and versification of the most successful writers, introducing a pretty general distaste for our old models, which is more strongly felt, and that for a just reason, with regard to translated works than original. For in the latter kind we cannot absolutely condemn any canons of style that are suited to the calibre of a man's sentiments, the régime of his spiritual life, or the decorum which is approved among his public; but when he characters the sentiments of an alien author, we are offended if his forms of writing be too narrow, stiff, or crooked, to afford free passage to the currents of such sentiments; and of such a cast have been notoriously the forms adopted in most translations of the eighteenth century, which saw Hoole's Tasso supersede that of Fairfax. Or as Goethe complains, that the poets of his