It is the remark of a certain old-fashioned writer, “The form of the world passeth away.”  A century or two ago the greatest wits were known to have pathetically lamented, that the writers, of whose merits I have been speaking, were handed down to us in so mutilated a condition.  Now it seems very probable, that, if their works were totally annihilated, it would scarcely call forth a sigh from the refined geniuses of the present age.  It is certainly very possible to carry the passion for antiquity to a ridiculous extreme.  No man can reasonably deny, that it is by us only that the true system of the universe has been ascertained, and that we have made very valuable improvements upon many of the arts.  No man can question that some of our English poets have equalled the ancients in sublimity, and that, to say the least, our neighbours, the French, have emulated the elegance of their composition in a manner, that is very far indeed from contempt.  From these concessions however we are by no means authorised to infer their inutility.

But I shall be told that in the first revival of letters the study of the ancient languages might indeed be very proper; but since that time we have had so many excellent truncations of every thing they contain, that to waste the time, and exhaust the activity of our youth in the learning of Latin and Greek, is to very little purpose indeed.  Translation! what a strange word!  To me I confess it appears the most unaccountable invention, that ever entered into the mind of man.  To distil the glowing conceptions, and to travesty the beautiful language of the ancients, through the medium of a language estranged to all its peculiarities and all its elegancies.  The best thoughts and expressions of an author, those that distinguish one writer from another, are precisely those that are least capable of being translated.  And who are the men we are to employ in this promising business?  Original genius disdains the unmeaning drudgery.  A mind that has one feature resembling the ancients, will scarcely stoop to be their translator.  The persons then, to whom the performance must be committed, are persons of cool elegance.  Endowed with a little barren taste, they must be inanimate enough to tread with laborious imbecility in the footsteps of another.  They must be eternally incapable of imbibing the spirit, and glowing with the fire of their original.  But we shall seldom come off so well as this.  The generality of translators are either on the one hand mere pedants and dealers in words, who, understanding the grammatical construction of a period, never gave themselves the trouble to enquire, whether it conveyed either sentiment or instruction; or on the other hand mere writers for hire, the retainers of a bookseller, men who translate Homer from the French, and Horace out of Creech.