In empty noise and vain expence;
To celebrate with flaunting air
The midnight revels of the fair;
Studious of every praise, but virtue, truth, and sense.
Here the translator has superadded no new images or illustrations; but he has, in two parts of the stanza, given a moral application which is not in the original: “That ill adorns the form, while it corrupts the heart;” and “Studious of every praise, but virtue, truth, and sense.” These moral lines are unquestionably a very high improvement of the original; but they seem to me to transgress, though indeed very slightly, the liberty allowed to a poetical translator.
In that fine translation by Dryden, of the 29th ode of the third book of Horace, which upon the whole is paraphrastical, the version of the two following stanzas has no more licence than what is justifiable:
Fortuna sævo læto negotio, et
Ludum insolentem ludere pertinax,
Transmutat incertos honores,
Nunc mihi, nunc alii benigna.