Translation is a difficult art, and scholars, particularly those who know the language from which, or the language into which, they translate as well as their own, consider a good translation almost impossible. I have had some experience in translating, and I know something of the treatment which translators may expect from conceited critics. The Sacred Books of the East, translated by myself and a number of friends, the best scholars I could find, have not escaped that kind of pedantic criticism. Impartial and honest critics have recognised the difficulties under which scholars labour in translating, often for the first time, ancient texts, whether Greek or Sanskrit. It is easy enough to translate a text, after it has once been translated; it is easy even to improve in a few places on the translations of the first pioneers. But to translate for the first time an ancient text, badly edited or not yet edited at all, is a totally different thing, and those who undertake it have a right not only to the indulgence, but to the gratitude of all who come after them. No one in our sphere of studies would call himself a scholar who has not edited a text never edited before, or at least translated a text that never was translated before. There are some critics who think they have done their duty if they can discover a few flaws in a translation, though they cannot even appreciate the labours and the brilliant though silent discoveries of a first translator. The work that has to be done by a first translator of an ancient text is often the work of a real decipherer. He has to grope his way through Egyptian darkness like the first interpreter of an Egyptian or Babylonian inscription. He cannot help making mistakes. But though we know now how often even a Champollion (died 1832) was mistaken, do we not feel ashamed if we read what another most eminent Egyptologist and Coptic scholar, Amadeo Peyron (died 1870), the head of the Egyptian Museum at Turin, said of Champollion? “I have known Champollion,” he said, “the so-called decipherer of hieroglyphics, very well, from his first visits to our Museum. I took him for an ordinary swindler, and his publications have afterwards confirmed me in my views. His philological labours have remained to me unsolved riddles.”[7] I have lately had another experience. I had to revise my translation of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” and I was surprised to see how many passages there were which I had to alter, not because I did not know either German or English, but because in many places a translation can only be approximately faithful; and it is only a happy thought that enables us now and then to approach nearer to the German original, though in that case often at the expense of the English idiom.