It is not for me to say that he did not make mistakes, and that he was not weak in some branches of historical knowledge. I cannot deny that in his translations also there are mistakes, arising from haste rather than from ignorance. But who has ever examined any translation from any language, without finding signs of what seems carelessness or ignorance? Four eyes see more than two. We have translations of Plato and Aristotle in Latin and in almost every language of Europe. The text has been critically examined for hundreds of years, and every difficult passage has been explained again and again. But is there any one translation which could be called immaculate? Was not even the last translation of Plato which is so deservedly popular, characterised by the late Rector of Lincoln, in the well-known words of a French writer, as _très belle, mais peu fidèle_? Now, while the true scholar, when examining a new translation, rejoices over every new happy rendering, the ill-natured critic, particularly if he wants to display his own superior knowledge, can easily pick out a number of passages where a mistake has been made, or where he thinks that a mistake has been made, and then proceed to show that the very best Greek scholar of the day does not know “what every schoolboy ought to know,” etc. There are many passages in Greek and other authors that admit of more than one translation. If the translator adopts one and rejects another, the game of the critic is easy enough: he has only to adopt the rejected rendering, and his triumph is secured. If that is so in Greek, how much more is it the case in translating passages from faded documents written in antiquated Spanish, nay, even letters of Erasmus written in his peculiar Latin, or statutes in Norman-French.