Of Error. For by Reason’s rule what is’t
We fear or wish? What is’t we e’er begun
With foot so right, but we dislik’d it done?
Whole houses th’ easie gods have overthrown
At their fond prayers that did the houses own.
Holiday’s Juvenal.
There were, however, even in that age, some writers who manifested a better taste in poetical translation. May, in his translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, and Sandys, in his Metamorphoses of Ovid, while they strictly adhered to the sense of their authors, and generally rendered line for line, have given to their versions both an ease of expression and a harmony of numbers, which approach them very near to original composition. The reason is, they have disdained to confine themselves to a literal interpretation, but have everywhere adapted their expression to the idiom of the language in which they wrote.
The following passage will give no unfavourable idea of the style and manner of May. In the ninth book of the Pharsalia, Cæsar, when in Asia, is led from curiosity to visit the plain of Troy:
Here fruitless trees, old oaks with putrefy’d
And sapless roots, the Trojan houses hide,