first line; but will simply observe, that the water, on which every thing in Virgil turns, the real cause of the reflection, and, above all, of its unsteady nature, is left out: while in Pitt’s Æneid the water contained in the caldron is called a stream. Such is the character of all our most admired old versions or paraphrases. In illustration of this, I will cite one more specimen of Dryden as a translator, because it is the most splendid as well as shortest and most familiar which occurs to me. He says of Fortune, copying from Horace,
I can enjoy her when she ’s kind;
But when she dances in the wind,
And shakes her wings, and will not stay,
I puff the prostitute away.
Is this what Horace says, or what Horace could, in common decency, have said, speaking of a goddess whose severe divinity was recognised by the Romans? He, on the contrary, speaking in a calm and philosophical tone, says, “I praise her when steady; when she flies from me, resign what she bestowed;” all about puffing the prostitute away being at variance both with the letter and spirit of the original author, and giving an entirely false conception both of his poetry and of the manners of his age.
From such translations, the infidelity of which cannot be redeemed by their beauty, I return to the admirable version of the simile in the Æneid by Ariosto, who seems to play with the thought as an Indian juggler with his ball. It may be remarked, that some words in the original, viz. ‘in partesque rapit,’ seem to have suggested an entirely different thought from that which they convey in Virgil, and I notice this to show to what odd suggestions poets are sometimes indebted. The line I allude to in the Italian forms the beginning of stanza LXXI.
La notte Orlando a le noiose piume
Del veloce pensier fà parte assai.
It may be presumed that Ariosto was little read in Lucretius, or he might have found in him some new hints for this picture.
