(a phrase which has passed into a proverb) for Odi profanum vulgus et arceo; “The poor rich man’s emphatically poor” for Magnas inter opes inops; “From his toucht mouth the wanton torment slips” for Fugientia captat Flumina; and, best of all, perhaps, “He loves of homely littleness the ease” for Martial’s Sordidaque in parvis otia rebus amet—which shows how a deft translator can, without leaving his original, breathe into it, so to speak, a beauty it scarcely had—such lines as these make us regret either that Cowley did not translate more or that he was unable to transfer to his own poetry more of the same simple elegance of thought and word.
All of Cowley’s contemporaries were not so happy, however, as he in their attempts to better Horace, though many tried it. One of them, Sir Edward Sherburne, claps a periwig on Mt. Soracte:[[131]]
“Seest thou not how Soracte’s head
(For all his height) stands covered
With a white periwig of snow,
While the laboring woods below
Are hardly able to sustain
The weight of winter’s feathered rain?”
He had evidently been reading and, with Dryden, admiring Sylvester’s Du Bartas:
“And when the winter’s keener breath began