In Jonson’s day, however, there was no mean between word-for-word rendering and the loosest paraphrase, until Denham laid down something like the true rule in his verses to Fanshawe on the latter’s translation of Guarini:
“That servile path thou nobly dost decline
Of tracing word for word and line for line....
A new and nobler way thou dost pursue
To make translations, and translators too.
They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame.”
Cowley, who translated largely from Horace, runs to the opposite extreme from Jonson: his versions are as much too free as Jonson’s are too close. Yet some of his single lines are unmatched for felicity and force:
“Hence ye profane, I hate ye all,
Both the great vulgar and the small”