As I hear when I come.
She greets me testily:
'I lie a-bed alone:
Do you thus shamelessly
Carouse till midnight's gone?'"
The same kind of paraphrastic dilution runs through the volume; nor is Mr. Muirhead wholly to blame. The original is idiomatic and terse, and he could not find exact equivalents in numerous cases. Ab uno disce omnes. But what a privilege it becomes to be able to dispense with interpreters! My admiration of these festive chansons arises from my appreciation of them in their native costume and diction. The Knight of La Mancha was of my opinion herein, for he likened a translation to a piece of Flemish tapestry seen on the wrong side.
A corollary which naturally suggests itself to my mind is that if a familiarity—say, even with Latin and French alone—is expedient on no other account, it is eminently so on this one; and the mastery of the inner sense of a great and famous writer constitutes an ample reward for any expenditure of labour and time in acquiring the language in which he wrote, in making yourself as nearly his countryman as you can. I remember a saying, which may have been a wicked epigram, that the only book in Bohn's Classical Library worthy of purchase or perusal was a version of one of Aristotle's works which a gentleman had executed con amore and presented to the publisher.
A voluminous and not very well known body of literary material consists of foreign translations of contemporary English pamphlets of a historical or religious character, from the time of Henry VIII. to the Revolution of 1688, covering the entire Stuart period. They cannot be said to be of primary consequence beyond the proof which they furnish of the interest felt abroad in passing transactions in this country, even in such incidents of minor moment as the trial of Elizabeth Cellier in 1680 for an obscure political libel, and the occasional value which they have acquired through the apparent loss of the English originals. We have, for example, a French account of a London ferryman, who, under pretence of conveying passengers across the river, strangled them (1586); a second, of the misdoings of a minister at Malden in Essex (1588); and a third, of the execution of two priests and two laymen at Oxford in 1590, the last existing also in Italian, but none of them known in English.
