"This is indeed the language of a poet; it is better than the original." The great majority of your readers will without doubt, consider this compliment to Dryden well and justly bestowed, and his version, besides having the merit of classical expression, to be at once concise and poetical. And pity it is that one who could form so true an estimate of the excellences of other writers, and whose own powers, it will be acknowledged, were of a very high order, should so often have given us reason to regret his puerilities and absurdities. This language, perhaps, will sound like treason to many; but permit me to give an instance in which the late poet-laureate seems to have admitted (which he did not often do) that he was wrong. In the first edition of the poem of Peter Bell (the genuine, and not the pseudo-Peter), London, 8vo. 1819, that personage sets to work to bang the poor ass, the result of which is this, p. 36.: "Among the rocks and winding crags-- Among the mountains far away-- Once more the ass did lengthen out More ruefully an endless shout, The long dry see-saw of his horrible bray."{146} After remarks on Peter's strange state of mind when saluted by this horrible music, and describing him as preparing to seize the ass by the neck, we are told his purpose was interrupted by something he just then saw in the water, which afterwards proves to be a corpse. The reader is, however, first excited and disposed to expect something horrible by the following startling conjectures:-- "Is it the moon's distorted face? The ghost-like image of a cloud? Is it a gallows these pourtrayed? Is Peter of himself afraid? Is it a coffin--or a shroud? "A grisly idol hewn in stone? Or imp from witch's lap let fall? Or a gay ring of shining fairies, Such as pursue their brisk vagaries In sylvan bower or haunted hall? "Is it a fiend that to a stake Of fire his desperate self is tethering? Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell In solitary ward or cell, Ten thousand miles from all his brethren." "Is it a party in a parlour? Cramm'd just as they on earth revere cramm'd-- Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, But, as you by their faces see, All silent and all damn'd! "A throbbing pulse the gazer hath," &c. Part i., pp. 33, 39. This last stanza was omitted in subsequent editions. Indeed, it is not very easy to imagine what it could possibly mean, or how any stretch of imagination could connect it with the appearance presented by a body in the water. To return, however, from this digression to the subject of translations. In the passage already quoted, the reader has been presented with a proof how well Dryden could compress the words, without losing the sense, of his author. In the following, he has done precisely the reverse. "Lectus erat Codro Procula minor."--_Juv. Sat._ iii. 203. "Codrus had but one bed, so short to boot, That his short wife's short legs hung dangling out!"