With regard to the value of the book as a translation of Epictetus, it is perhaps sufficient to point out that it was, in its own time, a standard commentary, that it passed into a second edition in 1759, and that it is the basis upon which a subsequent translator has been content to build.[325] It has, moreover, renewed its youth in the recent reprints of popular libraries of the classics.[326]
Mrs. Carter has, therefore, transferred to modern times something of her scholarly fame. Yet she was not a pedant, and never gave herself the airs of a femme savante. Johnson (who wrote a Greek epigram in her honour that she might be celebrated in ‘as many different languages as Lewis le Grand’[327]) used to say that she could ‘make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek, and work a handkerchief as well as compose a poem.’[328] He paid her the compliment of receiving two of her essays for the pages of The Rambler,[329] and these, though dull, are not more unreadable than the rest of that periodical.
Of her collected poems there were four editions during her own life. But it must be frankly admitted that her reputation as an independent author, though respectable in her own day,[330] has since suffered total extinction. Yet the student may discover in her poems here and there a point of antiquarian interest. For our purpose the volume is significant as containing lyrics to Mrs. Vesey and Mrs. Montagu. Both poems, though addressed to living ladies, contrive to belong to the Churchyard School and to prolong faint echoes of Gray. Two of the stanzas addressed to Mrs. Vesey are plainly intended to counteract that lady’s rationalism, and may be quoted here as a specimen of Mrs. Carter’s poetic powers:
Not for themselves the toiling Artists build;
Not for himself contrives the studious Sage:
To distant Views by mystic Force compelled,
All give the present to the future age....
Yet check that impious Thought, my gentle Friend,
Which bounds our Prospects by our fleeting Breath,
Which hopeless sees unfinished Life descend,