The following Note and Letter contains the determination of a dispute, and probably of a wager, which had been referred to our author by the parties. It concerns a passage in Creech’s “Lucretius,” and probably was written soon after the publication of that translation in 1682, when it was a recent subject of conversation. The full passage in “Lucretius” runs thus:
Præterea quæcunque vetustate amovet ætas,
Si penitus perimit, consumens materiam omnem,
Unde animale genus generatim in lumina vitæ
Redducit Venus?——
Which Creech thus renders:
Besides, if o’er whatever years prevail
Should wholly perish, and its matter fail,
How could the powers of all kind Venus breed
A constant race of animals to succeed?
The translation of Creech is at least complicated and unintelligible; and I am uncertain whether even Dryden’s explanation renders it grammatical. Dryden speaks elsewhere with great applause of Creech’s translation.
The original of this decision (in Dryden’s hand-writing) is in the possession of Mrs White of Bownham-hall, Gloucestershire, and was most obligingly communicated to the editor by that lady, through the medium of Mr Constable of Edinburgh.
The two verses, concerning which the dispute is rais’d, are these:
Besides, if o’re whatever yeares prevaile
Shou’d wholly perish, and its matter faile.
The question arising from them is, whether any true grammatical construction can be made of them? The objection is, that there is no nominative case appearing to the word perish, or that can be understood to belong to it.