INTRODUCTION. ILL health having driven me for two or three successive seasons to the Isle of Wight, I amused myself, in that sequestered spot, with a pocket Persius; and, when the progress of recovery admitted of severer application, with turning favourite passages of him, into English verse. In this, I had no farther end than beguiling the sense of pain, and wearing away a few hours innocently and happily. By degrees the work grew on my hands; and I had nearly gone through the whole, before I was conscious to myself of the bulk of my labours. At that time I entertained no thoughts of printing what was thus produced; although the republication of Juvenal presented an opportunity of subjoining it to that work: I continued however to fill up and correct the translation, at leisure; and now, when a third edition of Juvenal is about to appear, I have determined (with the approbation of my friends) to submit it to the publick. It cannot, I think, be affirmed, that a new translation of Persius is much wanted: we are already possessed of several; of various degrees of merit, indeed, but all exhibiting strong claims on the pub lick favour. Brewster is familiar to every scholar. I had not looked into him since I left Exeter College; but the impression he then made on my mind was very powerful, and certainly of the most pleasing kind. I thought him, indeed, paraphrastick, unnecessarily minute in many unimportant passages, somewhat too familiar for his author, and occasionally ungraceful in his repetition of trivial words and phrases; but the general spirit, accuracy, and freedom of his version commanded my highest admiration,-which a recent perusal has not contributed, in any perceptible degree, to diminish. Dryden, of whom I should have spoken first, is beyond my praise. The majestical flow of his verse, the energy and beauty of particular passages, and the admirable purity and simplicity which pervade much of his language, place him above the hope of rivalry, and are better calculated to generate despair than to excite emulation. But Dryden is sometimes negligent and sometimes unfaithful: he wanders with licentious foot, careless alike of his author, and his reader; and seems to make a wanton sacrifice of his own learning. It is impossible to read a page of his translation, without perceiving that he was intimately acquainted with the original; and yet every page betrays a disregard of its sense. By nature Dryden was eminently gifted for a translator of Persius; he had much of his austerity of manner, and his closeness of reasoning yet, by some unaccountable obliquity, he has missed those characteristick qualities so habitual to - him, and made the poet flippant and inconsequential. I scarcely know what to say of Holyday. His contemporaries praise him for the light which he has thrown upon an obscure writer; and in this there is some justice. What appears extraordinary is, that the man who seems, in his Juvenal, to have placed the chief merit of translation in doggedly measuring line for line with the original, should, in his version of Persius, indulge in a diffusion at which Dryden himself would, perhaps, have started. Every thought is dilated, and the text runs perpetually into a laboured commentary. By this, much of vigour is lost, while little or nothing is gained on the score of harmony. Yet he has some pleasing passages, and the readers of his time must have been gratified by his labours; for Persius was then first rendered not only accessible, but, generally speaking, intelligible to them. Much need not be said of Owen's translation. It is sensible and faithful; and this must be the whole of its praise; for it has neither the neatness nor the poetry of his version of Juvenal, and seems, indeed, to be a very hasty performance. I come now to Sir W. Drummond. This is a work of great elegance; spirited and poetical, and polished into a degree of smoothness seldom attained. But Sir William Drummond declares, that his object was "rather to express his author's meaning clearly than to translate his words or to copy his manner servilely. How he wishes these expressions to be understood, he has explained in a subsequent passage, which I shall take the liberty of laying before the reader. "What Dryden judged too rude for imitation, the criticks of the present day will probably think I have been prudent in not copying. I have generally, therefore, followed the outline; but I have seldom ventured to employ the colouring of Persius. When the coarse metaphor, or the extravagant hyperbole debases, or obscures the sense of the original, I have changed, or even omitted it ; and where the idiom of the English language required it, I have thought myself justified in abandoning the literal sense of my author." Pref. p. x. I am somewhat inclined to suspect that Sir W. Drummond's opinion of the "criticks of the present day," is not altogether ill founded. In proportion, therefore, as he has gratified them, I shall be found to displease them; having freely encountered what he so sedulously avoided, and, with one or two exceptions merely, followed the original through all its coarseness and extravagance, and represented with equal fidelity, the outline, and the filling up, of the picture.* But, it will naturally be asked, if a new transla * Two other translations of Persius have appeared; but as they were not published before the present version was finished, they do not come under my judgment. I may add, however, that the last of the two, by Mr. Howes, is a work of singular merit. The other, which I have not been fortunate enough to procure, is said to be a poor performance. 1817. |