With these free yet unlicentious principles, Dryden brought to the task of translation a competent knowledge of the language of the originals, with an unbounded command of his own. The latter is, however, by far the most marked characteristic of his Translations. Dryden was not indeed deficient in Greek and Roman learning; but he paused not to weigh and sift those difficult and obscure passages, at which the most learned will doubt and hesitate for the correct meaning. The same rapidity, which marked his own poetry, seems to have attended his study of the classics. He seldom waited to analyse the sentence he was about to render, far less scrupulously to weigh the precise purport and value of every word it contained. If he caught the general spirit and meaning of the author, and could express it with equal force in English verse, he cared not if minute elegancies were lost, or the beauties of accurate proportion destroyed, or a dubious interpretation hastily adopted on the credit of a _scholium_. He used abundantly the licence he has claimed for a translator, to be deficient rather in the language out of which he renders, than of that into which he translates. If such be but master of the sense of his author, Dryden argues, he may express that sense with eloquence in his own tongue, though he understand not the nice turns of the original. "But without the latter quality he can never arrive at the useful and the delightful, without which reading is a penance and fatigue."[21] With the same spirit of haste, Dryden if often contented to present to the English reader some modern image, which he may at once fully comprehend, instead of rendering precisely a classic expression, which might require explanation or paraphrase. Thus the _pulchra Sicyonia_, or buskins of Sicyon, are rendered, "Diamond-buckles sparkling in their shoes." By a yet more unfortunate adaptation of modern technical phraseology, the simple direction of Helenus, "_Læva tibi tellus, et longo læva pelantur Æquora circuitu: dextrum fage lillus et undas_," is translated, "Tack to the larboard, and stand off to sea, Veer starboard sea and land:"