not that the library of Alexandria adopted any thing from a foreign tongue.

ing; the epidemical emulation spread from south to north, and curiosity and translation found their way to Britain.

No. 69.] SATURDAY, AUG. 11, 1759.

HE that reviews the progress of English literature, will find that translation was very early cultivated among us, but that some principles either wholly erroneous or too far extended, hindered our success from being always equal to our diligence.

The Romans confessed themselves the scholars of the Greeks, and do not appear to have expected what has since happened, that the ignorance of succeeding ages would prefer them to their teachers. Every man, who in Rome aspired to the praise of literature, thought it necessary to learn Greek, and had no need of versions when they could study the originals. Translation, however, was not wholly neglected. Dramatic poems could be understood by the people in no language but their own, and the Romans were sometimes entertained with the tragedies of Euripides and the comedies of Menander. Other works were sometimes attempted; in an old scholiast there is mention of a Latin Iliad; and we have not wholly lost Tully's version of the poem of Aratus; but it does not appear that any man grew eminent by interpreting ano-It may be supposed that Chaucer would apply ther, and perhaps it was more frequent to translate for exercise or amusement, than for fame.

The Arabs were the first nation who felt the ardour of translation: when they had subdued the eastern provinces of the Greek empire, they found their captives wiser than themselves, and made haste to relieve their wants by imparted knowledge. They discovered that many might grow wise by the labour of a few, and that improvements might be made with speed, when they had the knowledge of former ages in their own language. They therefore inade haste to lay hold on medicine and philosophy, and turned their chief authors into Arabic. Whether they attempted the poets is not known; their literary zeal was vehement, but it was short, and probably expired before they had time to add the arts of elegance those of necessity.

Chaucer, who is generally considered as the father of our poetry, has left a version of Botius on the Comforts of Philosophy, the book which seems to have been the favourite of the middle ages, which had been translated into Saxon by King Alfred, and illustrated with a copious Comment ascribed to Aquinas.

more than common attention to an author of so much celebrity, yet he has attempted nothing higher than a version strictly literal, and has degraded the poetical parts to prose, that the constraint of versification might not obstruct his zeal for fidelity.

Caxton taught us typography about the year 1474. The first book printed in English was a translation. Caxton was both the translator and printer of the Destruction of Troye, a book which, in that infancy of learning, was con sidered as the best account of the fabulous ages, and which, though now driven out of notice by authors of no greater use or value, still continued to be read in Caxton's English to the beginning of the present century.

Caxton proceeded as he began, and except the poems of Gower and Chaucer, printed nothing but translations from the French, in which the original is so scupulously followed, that they afford us little knowledge of our own language; though the words are English, the phrase is foreign.

age of Elizabeth we began to find that greater liberty was necessary to elegance, and that elegance was necessary to general reception; some essays were then made upon the Italian poets, which deserve the praise and gratitude of posterity.

The study of ancient literature was interrupted in Europe by the irruption of the northern nations, who subverted the Roman empire, and erected new kingdoms with new langua- As learning advanced, new works were ges. It is not strange, that such confusion adopted into our language, but I think with should suspend literary attention; those who little improvement of the art of translation, lost, and those who gained dominion, had im- though foreign nations and other languages mediate difficulties to encounter, and imme-offered us models of a better method; till in the diate miseries to redress, and had little leisure, amidst the violence war, the trepidation of flight the distresses of forced migration, or the tumults of unsettled conquest, to inquire after speculative truth, to enjoy the amusement of imaginary adventures, to know the history of former ages, or study the events of any other lives. But no sooner had this chaos of dominion sunk into order, than learning began again to flourish in the calm of peace. When life and possessions were secure, convenience and enjoyment were soon songht, learning was found the highest gratification. of the mind, and translation became ne of the means by which it was imparted. At last, by a concurrence of many causes, the European world was roused from its lethargy; those arts which had been long obscurely studied in the gloom of monasteries became the general favourites of mankind; every nation vied with its neighbour for the prize of learn

Put the old practice was not suddenly forsaken; Holland filled the nation with literal translation; and what is yet more strange, the same exactness was obstinately practised in the versions of the poets. This absurd labour of construing into rhyme was countenanced by Jonson in his version of Horace; and whether it be that more men have learning than genius, or that the endeavours of that time were more directed towards knowledge than delight, the accuracy of Jonson found more imitators than the elegance of Fairfax; and May, Sandys, and Holiday, confined themselves to the toil of rendering line for line, not indeed with equal

fers the utmost severity of censure, or the more afflictive severity of neglect.

felicity, for May and Sandys were poets, and | ing which he possesses himself, and wishes to Holiday only a scholar and a critic. be admired rather than understood, he counFeltham appears to consider it as the esta-teracts the first end of writing and justly sufblished law of poetical tranlation, that the lines should be neither more nor fewer than those of the original; and so long had this prejudice prevailed, that Denham praises Fanshaw's version of Guarini as the example of a "new and noble way," as the first attempt to break the boundaries of custom, and assert the natural freedom of the Muse.

But words are only hard to those who do not understand them; and the critic ought always to inquire, whether he is incommoded by the fault of the writer, or by his own.

Every author does not write for every reader; many questions are such as the illiterate part of mankind can have neither interest nor pleasure to discussing, and which therefore it would be a useless endeavour to level with common minds, by tiresome circumlocutions or laborious explanations; and many subjects of general use may be treated in a different. manner, as the book is intended for the learn ed or the ignorant. Diffusion and explication are necessary to the instruction of those who, being neither able nor accustomed to think for themselves, can learn only what is express

In the general emulation of wit and genius which the festivity of the Restoration produced, the poets shook of their constraint, and considered translation as no longer confined to servile closeness. But reformation is seldom the work of pure virtue, or unassisted reason. Translation was improved more by accident than conviction. The writers of the foregoing age had at least learning equal to their genius, and being often more able to explain the sentiments or illustrate the allusions of the ancients, than to exhibit their graces and trans-ly taught; but they who can form parallels, fuse their spirit, were perhaps willing sometimes to conceal their want of poetry by profusion of literature, and therefore translated literally, that their fidelity might shelter their insipidity or harshness. The wits of Charles' time had seldom more than slight and superficial views; and their care was, to hide their want of learning behind the colours of a gay imagination: they therefore translated always with freedom, sometimes with licentiousness, and perhaps expected that their readers should accept sprightliness for knowledge, and consider ignorance and mistake as impatience and negligence of a mind too rapid to stop at difficulties, and too elevated to descend to mi

nuteness.

Thus was translation made more easy to the writer, and more delightful to the reader; and there is no wonder if ease and pleasure have found their advocates. The paraphrastic liberties have been almost universally admitted; and Sherbourn, whose learning was eminent, and who had no need of any excuse to pass slightly over obscurities, is the only writer who in later times has attempted to justify or revive the ancient severity.

discover consequences, and multiply conclusions, are best pleased with involution of argument and compression of thought; they desire only to receive the seeds of knowledge which they may branch out by their own power to have the way to truth pointed out, which they can follow without a guide.

The Guardian directs one of his pupils "to think with the wise, but speak with the vulgar." This is a precept specious enough, but not always practicable. Difference of thoughts will produce difference of language. He that thinks with more extent than another will want words of larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtility will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies ?

Yet vanity inclines us to find faults any where rather than in ourselves. He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency; but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood?

Among the hards words which are no longer There is undoubtedly a mean to be observed. to be used, it has been long the custom to Dryden saw very early that closeness best pre- number terms of art. "Every man," says Swift, served an author's sense, and that freedom" is more able to explain the subject of an art best exhibited his spirit; he therefore will de- than it professors; a farmer will tell you in serve the highest praise, who can give a repre- two words, that he has broken his leg; but a sentation at once faithful and pleasing, who surgeon, after a long discourse, shall leave can convey the same thoughts with the same you as ignorant as you were before." This graces, and who, when he translates, chan- could only have been said by such an exact ges nothing but the language. observer of life, in gratification of malignity, or in ostentation of acuteness. Every hour produces instances of the necessity of terms of art. Mankind could never conspire in uniform affectation; it is not but by necessity that every science and every tradé has its peculiar language. They that content themselves with general ideas may rest in general terms; but those whose studies or employments force them upon closer inspection, must have names for particular parts, and words by which they may express various modes of combination,

No. 70.]

SATURDAY, AUG. 18, 1759.

Few faults of style whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers than the use of hard words.

If an author be supposed to involve his thoughts in voluntary obscurity, and to obstruct, by unnecessary difficulties, a mind eager in pursuit of truth; if he writes not to make others learned, but to boast the learn

such as none but themselves have occasion to | timents, about a state too high for contempt consider. and too low for envy, about homely quiet, and blameless simplicity, pastoral delights, and rural innocence.

Artists are indeed sometimes ready to suppose that none can be strangers to words to which themselves are familiar, talk to an incidental inquirer as they talk to one another, and make their knowledge ridiculous by injudicious obtrusion. An art cannot be taught but by its proper terms, but it is not always necessary to teach the art.

His friends who had estates in the country, often invited him to pass the summer among them, but something or other had always hin dered him; and he considered that to reside in the house of another man was to incur a kind of dependence inconsistent with that laxity of life which he had imagined as the chief good.

That the vulgar express their thoughts clearly is far from true; and what perspicuity can be found among them proceeds not from the This summer he resolved to be happy, and easiness of their language, but the shallow-procured a lodging to be taken for him at a soliness of their thoughts. He that sees a build-tary house, situated about thirty miles from ing as a common spectator, contents himself London on the banks of a small river, with with relating that it is great or little, mean or corn-fields before it and a hill on each side cosplendid, lofty or low; all these words are vered with wood. He concealed the place of intelligible and common, but they convey no his retirement, that none might violate his obdistinct or limited ideas; if he attempts, scurity, and promised himself many a happy without the terms of architecture, to delinate day when he should hide himself among the the parts, or enumerate the ornaments, his trees, and contemplate the tumults and vexanarration at once becomes uninteiligible. The tions of the town. terms, indeed, generally displease, because He stepped into the post-chaise with his they are understood by few; but they are little heart beating and his eyes sparkling, was understood only because few that look upon an conveyed through many varieties of delightedifice, examine its parts, or analyse its co-ful prospects, saw hills and meadows, cornlumns into their members.

The state of every other art is the same; as it is cursorily surveyed or accurately examined, different forms of expression become proper. In morality it is one thing to discuss the niceties of the casuist, and another to direct the practice of common life. In agriculture, he that instructs the farmer to plough and sow, may convey his notions without the words which he would find necessary in explaining to philosophers the process of vegetation; and if he who has nothing to do but to be honest by the shortest way, will perplex his mind with subtile speculations; or if he, whose task is to reap and thresh, will not be contented without examining the evolution of the seed, and circulation of the sap, the writers whom either shall consult are very little to be blamed, though it should sometimes happen that they are read in vain.

No. 71.] SATURDAY, AUG. 25, 1759.

fields and pasture, succeed each other, and for four hours charged none of his poets with fiction or exaggeration. He was now within six miles of happiness, when, having never felt so much agitation before, he began to wish his journey at an end, and the last hour was passed in changing his posture and quarrelling with his driver.

An hour may be tedious but cannot be long. He at length alighted at his new dwelling, and was received as he expected; he looked round upon the hills and rivulets, but his joints were stiff and his muscles sore, and his first request was to see his bed-chamber.

He rested well, and ascribed the soundness of his sleep to the stillness of the country. He expected from that time nothing but nights of quiet and days of rapture, and, as soon as he had risen wrote an account of his new state to one of his friends in the Temple.

"Dear Frank.

"I never pitied thee before. I am now as I could wish every man of wisdom and virtue to DICK SHIFTER was born in Cheapside, and be, in the regions of calm content and placid having passed reputably through all the class-meditation; with all the beauties of nature soes of St. Paul's school, has been for some years a student in the Temple. He is of opinion, that intense application dulls the faculties, and thinks it necessary to temper the severity of the law by books that engage the mind, but do not fatigue it. He has therefore made a copious collection of plays, poems, and romances, to which he has recourse when he fancies himself tired with statutes and reports; and he seldom inquires very nicely whether he is weary or idle.

liciting my notice, and all the diversities of pleasure courting my acceptance; the birds are chirping in the hedges, and the flowers blooming in the mead; the breeze is whistling in the wood, and the sun dancing on the water. I can now say with truth, that a man, capable of enjoying the purity of happiness, is never more busy than in his hours of leisure, nor ever less solitary than in a place of solitude.

"I am, dear Frank, &c."

Dick has received from his favourite authors When he had sent away his letter, he walked very strong impressions of a country life; and into the wood, with some inconvenience, from though his furthest excursions have been to the furze that pricked his legs, and the briers Greenwich on one side, and Chelsea on the that scratched his face. He at last sat down other, he has talked for several years with under a tree, and heard with great delight a great pomp of language and elevation of sen- I shower, by which he was not wet, rattling

who told him, that, unless he made farmer Dobson satisfaction for trampling his grass, he had orders to indict him. Shifter was offended but not terrified; and, telling the attorney that he was himself a lawyer, talked so volubly of pettifoggers and barraters, that he drove hini away.

This walk had given him no great pleasure; but he hoped to find other rustics less coarse of manners, and less mischievous of disposition. Next morning he was accosted by an attorney,

regret how much might have been learned, aside from one object but by passing to anor how much might have been invented by a other. The gloomy and the resentful are alrational and vigorous application of time, use- ways found among those who have nothing to lessly or painfully passed in the revocation of do, or who do nothing. We must be busy events which have left neither good nor evil about good or evil, and he to whom the present behind them, in grief for misfortunes either re-offers nothing will often be looking backward paired or irreparable, in resentment of injuries on the past. known only to ourselves, of which death has put the authors beyond our power.

Philosophy has accumulated precept upon precept, to warn us against the anticipation of future calamities. All useless misery is certainly folly, and he that feels evils before they come may be deservedly censured; yet surely to dread the future is more reasonable than to lament the past. The business of life is to go forwards: he who sees evil in prospect meets it in his way; but he who catches it by retrospection turns back to find it. That which is feared may sometimes be avoided, but that which is regretted to-day, may be regretted again to

morrow.

No. 73.] SATURDAY, SEPT. 8, 1759.

THAT every man would be rich if a wish could obtain riches, is a position which I believe few will contest, at least in a nation like ours, in which commerce has kindled a universal emulation of wealth, and in which money receives all the honours which are the proper right of knowledge and of virtue.

Yet though we are all labouring for gold, as for the chief good, and, by the natural effort of unwearied diligence, have found many expeditious methods of obtaining it, we have not been able to improve the art of using it, or to make it produce more happiness than it afforded in former times, when every declaimer expatiated on its mischiefs, and every philosopher taught his followers to despise it.

Regret is indeed useful and virtuous, and not only allowable but necessary, when it tends to the amendment of life, or to admonition of error which we may be again in danger of committing. But a very small part of the moments spent in meditation on the past, pro- Many of the dangers imputed of old to exduce any reasonable caution or salutary sor-orbitant wealth are now at an end. The rich row. Most of the mortification that we have are neither way-laid by robbers nor watched suffered, arose from the concurrence of local by informers; there is nothing to be dreaded and temporary circumstances, which can never from proscriptions, or seizures. The necesmeet again; and most of our disappointments sity of concealing treasure has long ceased; have succeeded those expectations, which life no man now needs counterfeit mediocrity, and allows not be formed a second time. condemn his plate and jewels to caverns and darkness, or feast his mind with the consciousness of clouded splendour, of finery which is useless till it is shown, and which he dares not show.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, if that pain which never can end in pleasure could be driven totally away, that the In our time the poor are strongly tempted to mind might perform its functions without in- assume the appearance of wealth, but the cumbrance, and the past might no longer en-wealthy very rarely desire to be thought poor; croach upon the present.

for we are at full liberty to display riches by Little can be done well to which the whole every mode of ostentation. We fill our houses mind is not applied; the business of every day with useless ornaments, only to show that we calls for the day to which it is assigned; and can buy them; we cover our coaches with gold, he will have no leisure to regret yesterday's and employ artists in the discovery of new fashvexations who resolves not to have a new sub-ions of expense; and yet it cannot be found that ject of regret to-morrow. riches produce happiness.

But to forget or to remember at pleasure, Of riches, as of every thing else, the hope are equally beyond the power of man. Yet as memory may be assisted by method, and the decays of knowledge repaired by stated times of recollection, so the power of forgetting is capable of improvement. Reason will, by a resolute contest, prevail over imagination, and the power may be obtained of transferring the attention as judgment shall direct.

The incursions of troublesome thoughts are often violent and importunate; and it is not easy to a mind accustomed to their inroads to expel them immediately by putting better images into motion; but this enemy of quiet is above all others weakened by every defeat; the reflection which has been once overpowered and ejected, seldom returns with any formidable vehemence.

is more than the enjoyment; while we consider them as the means to be used, at some future time, for the attainment of felicity, we press on our pursuit ardently and vigorously, and that ardour secures us from weariness of ourselves; but no sooner do we sit down to enjoy our acquisitions, than we find than in sufficient to fill up the vacuities of life.

One cause which is not always observed of the insufficiency of riches is, that they very seldom make their owner rich. To be rich is to have more than is desired, and more then is wanted; to have something which may be spent without reluctance, and scattered without care, with which the sudden demands of desire may be gratified, the casual freaks of fancy indulged, or the unexpected opportunities of benevolence

Employment is the great instrument of intel-improved. lectual dominion. The mind cannot retire Avarice is always poor, but poor by her own from its enemy into total vacancy, or turn fault. There is another poverty to which the