And while the persons mov’d my scorn,
I rose to scorn the things.
In this translation, which has the merit of faithfully transfusing the sense of the original, with a great portion of its simplicity of expression, the following couplet is a very faulty deviation from that character of the style.
My errors cherish’d hope to smile
On newly born desire.
[66] The attempt, however, has been made. In a little volume, intitled Prolusiones Poeticæ, by the Reverend T. Bancroft, printed at Chester 1788, is a version of the Fidicinis et Philomelæ certamen, which will please every reader of taste who forbears to compare it with the original; and in the Poems of Pattison, the ingenious author of the Epistle of Abelard to Eloisa, is a fable, intitled, the Nightingale and Shepherd, imitated from Strada. But both these performances serve only to convince us, that a just translation of that composition is a thing almost impossible.
[67] The occasional blemishes, however, of a good writer, are a fair subject of castigation; and a travesty or burlesque parody of them will please, from the justness of the satire: As the following ludicrous version of a passage in the 5th Æneid, which is among the few examples of false taste in the chastest of the Latin Poets:
——Oculos telumque tetendit.
——He cock’d his eye and gun.