Caballero, si á Francia ides,
Por Gayféros preguntad.
Quoth Melisendra, if perchance,
Sir Traveller, you go for France,
For pity’s sake, ask, when you’re there,
For Gayferos, my husband dear. Motteux.
Sir Knight, if you to France do go,
For Gayferos inquire. Smollet.
How miserably does the new translator sink in the above comparison! Yet Smollet was a good poet, and most of the verse translations interspersed through this work are executed with ability. It is on this head that Motteux has assumed to himself the greatest licence. He has very presumptuously mutilated the poetry of Cervantes, by leaving out many entire stanzas from the larger compositions, and suppressing some of the smaller altogether: Yet the translation of those parts which he has retained, is possessed of much poetical merit; and in particular, those verses which are of a graver cast, are, in my opinion, superior to those of his rival. The song in the first volume, which in the original is intitled Cancion de Grisōstomo, and which Motteux has intitled, The Despairing Lover, is greatly abridged by the suppression of more than one half of the stanzas in the original; but the translation, so far as it goes, is highly poetical. The translation of this song by Smollet, though inferior as a poem, is, perhaps, more valuable on the whole, because more complete. There is, however, only a single passage in which he maintains with Motteux a contest which is nearly equal:
O thou, whose cruelty and hate,