May's own preface says nothing of his theories. Sandys says of his Ovid, "To the translation I have given what perfection my pen could bestow, by polishing, altering, or restoring the harsh, improper, or mistaken with a nicer exactness than perhaps is required in so long a labor,"[398] a comment open to various interpretations. His metrical version of the Psalms is described as "paraphrastically translated," and it is worthy of note that Cowley, in his attack on the practice of too literal translation, should have chosen this part of Sandys' work as illustrative of the methods which he condemns. For the translators of the new school, though professedly the foes of the word for word method, carried their hostility to existing theories of translation much farther. Cowley begins, reasonably enough, by pointing out the absurdity of translating a poet literally. "If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one madman had translated another; as may appear when a person who understands not the original reads the verbal traduction of him into Latin prose, than which nothing seems more raving.... And I would gladly know what applause our best pieces of English poesy could expect from a Frenchman or Italian, if converted faithfully and word for word into French or Italian prose."[399] But, ignoring the possibility of a reasonable regard for both the original and the English, such as had been advocated by Chapman or by minor translators like W. L. and Vicars, Cowley suggests a more radical method. Since of necessity much of the beauty of a poem is lost in translation, the translator must supply new beauties. "For men resolving in no case to shoot beyond the mark," he says, "it is a thousand to one if they shoot not short of it." "We must needs confess that after all these losses sustained by Pindar, all we can add to him by our wit or invention (not deserting still his subject) is not likely to make him a richer man than he was in his own country." Finally comes a definite statement of Cowley's method: "Upon this ground I have in these two Odes of Pindar taken, left out and added what I please; nor make it so much my aim to let the reader know precisely what he spoke as what was his way and manner of speaking, which has not been yet (that I know of) introduced into English, though it be the noblest and highest kind of writing in verse." Denham, in his lines on Fanshaw's translation of Guarini, had already approved of a similar method: A new and nobler way thou dost pursue To make translations and translators too. They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame, True to his sense, but truer to his fame. Feeding his current, where thou find'st it low Let'st in thine own to make it rise and flow; Wisely restoring whatsoever grace Is lost by change of times, or tongues, or place.