The Translations of Dryden form a distinguished part of his poetical labours.  No author, excepting Pope, has done so much to endenizen the eminent poets of antiquity.  In this sphere, also, it was the fate of Dryden to become a leading example to future poets, and to abrogate laws which had been generally received although they imposed such trammels on translation as to render it hardly intelligible.  Before his distinguished success showed that the object of the translator should be to transfuse the spirit, not to copy servilely the very words of his original, it had been required, that line should be rendered for line, and, almost, word for word.  It may easily be imagined, that, by the constraint and inversion which this cramping statute required, a poem was barely rendered not Latin, instead of being made English, and that, to the mere native reader, as the connoisseur complains in “The Critic”, the interpreter was sometimes “the harder to be understood of the two.”  Those who seek examples, may find them in the jaw-breaking translations of Ben Jonson and Holyday.  Cowley and Denham had indeed rebelled against this mode of translation, which conveys pretty much the same idea of an original, as an imitator would do of the gait of another, by studiously stepping after him into every trace which his feet had left upon the sand.  But they assumed a licence equally faulty, and claimed the privilege of writing what might be more properly termed imitations, than versions of the classics.  It was reserved to Dryden manfully to claim and vindicate the freedom of a just translation; more limited than paraphrase, but free from the metaphrastic severity exacted from his predecessors.

With these free yet unlicentious principles, Dryden brought to the task of translation a competent knowledge of the language of the originals, with an unbounded command of his own.  The latter is, however, by far the most marked characteristic of his Translations.  Dryden was not indeed deficient in Greek and Roman learning; but he paused not to weigh and sift those difficult and obscure passages, at which the most learned will doubt and hesitate for the correct meaning.  The same rapidity, which marked his own poetry, seems to have attended his study of the classics.  He seldom waited to analyse the sentence he was about to render, far less scrupulously to weigh the precise purport and value of every word it contained.  If he caught the general spirit and meaning of the author, and could express it with equal force in English verse, he cared not if minute elegancies were lost, or the beauties of accurate proportion destroyed, or a dubious interpretation hastily adopted on the credit of a scholium.  He used abundantly the licence he has claimed for a translator, to be deficient rather in the language out of which he renders, than of that into which he translates.  If such be but master of the sense of his author, Dryden argues, he may express that sense with eloquence in his own