for the sake of indolence in the translator, or ease to the unlettered reader; and perhaps they will be more pleased that a favourite bard should move with less ease and spirit in his new habiliments, than that his garments should be cut upon the model of the country to which the stranger is introduced.  In the former case, they will readily make allowance for the imperfection of modern language; in the latter, they will hardly pardon the sophistication of ancient manners.  But the mere English reader, who finds rigid adherence to antique costume rather embarrassing than pleasing, who is prepared to make no sacrifices in order to preserve the true manners of antiquity, shocking perhaps to his feelings and prejudices, is satisfied that the Iliad and AEneid shall lose their antiquarian merit, provided they retain that vital spirit and energy, which is the soul of poetry in all languages, and countries, and ages whatsoever.  He who sits down to Dryden’s translation of Virgil, with the original text spread before him, will be at no loss to point out many passages that are faulty, many indifferently understood, many imperfectly translated, some in which dignity is lost, others in which bombast is substituted in its stead.  But the unabated vigour and spirit of the version more than overbalances these and all its other deficiencies.  A sedulous scholar might often approach more nearly to the dead letter of Virgil, and give an exact, distinct, sober-minded idea of the meaning and scope of particular passages.  Trapp, Pitt, and others have done so.  But the essential spirit of poetry is so volatile, that it escapes during such an operation, like the life of the poor criminal, whom the ancient anatomist is said to have dissected alive, in order to ascertain the seat of the soul.  The carcase indeed is presented to the English reader, but the animating vigour is no more.  It is in this art, of communicating the ancient poet’s ideas with force and energy equal to his own, that Dryden has so completely exceeded all who have gone before, and all who have succeeded him.  The beautiful and unequalled version of the Tale of Myrrha in the “Metamorphoses,” the whole of the Sixth AEneid, and many other parts of Dryden’s translations, are sufficient, had he never written one line of original poetry, to vindicate the well-known panegyric of Churchill:—­

  “Here let me bend, great Dryden, at thy shrine,
  Thou dearest name to all the tuneful Nine! 
  What if some dull lines in cold order creep,
  And with his theme the poet seems to sleep? 
  Still, when his subject rises proud to view,
  With equal strength the poet rises too: 
  With strong invention, noblest vigour fraught,
  Thought still springs up, and rises out of thought;
  Numbers ennobling numbers in their course,
  In varied sweetness flow, in varied force;
  The powers of genius and of judgment join,
  And the whole art of poetry is thine.”