A des amis ingrats qui detournent la vue?
La mort serait trop douce en ces extrémités.
Mais le scrupule parle, et nous crie, arrêtez.
Il defend à nos mains cet heureux homicide,
Et d’un héros guerrier, fait un Chrétien timide.[68]
Besides the general fault already noticed, of substituting formal and connected reasoning, to the desultory range of thought and abrupt transitions of the original, Voltaire has in this passage, by the looseness of his paraphrase, allowed some of the most striking beauties, both of the thought and expression, entirely to escape; while he has superadded, with unpardonable licence, several ideas of his own, not only unconnected with the original, but dissonant to the general tenor of the speaker’s thoughts, and foreign to his character. Adopting Voltaire’s own style of criticism on the translations of the Abbé des Fontaines, we may ask him, “Where do we find, in this translation of Hamlet’s soliloquy,
“The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune——
To take arms against a sea of troubles——
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks