This has brought me to say a word or two about translation in general; in which no nation might more excel than the English, though, as matters are now managed, we come so far short of the French. There may indeed be a reason assigned, which bears a very great probability; and that is, that here the booksellers are the undertakers of works of this nature, and they are persons more devoted to their own gain than the public honour. They are very parsimonious in rewarding the wretched scribblers they employ; and care not how the business is done, so that it be but done. They live by selling titles, not books; and if that carry off one impression, they have their ends, and value not the curses they and their authors meet with from the bubbled chapmen. While translations are thus at the disposal of the booksellers, and have no better judges or rewarders of the performance, it is impossible that we should make any progress in an art so very useful to an enquiring people, and for the improvement and spreading of knowledge, which is none of the worst preservatives against slavery. It must be confessed, that when the bookseller has interest with gentlemen of genius and quality, above the mercenary prospects of little writers, as in that of Plutarch’s Lives,[54] and this of Lucian, the reader may satisfy himself that he shall have the author’s spirit and soul in the traduction. These gentlemen know very well, that they are not to creep after the words of their author, in so servile a manner as some have done; for that must infallibly throw them on a necessity of introducing a new mode of diction and phraseology with which we are not at all acquainted, and would incur that censure which my Lord Dorset made formerly on those of Mr Spence, viz. that he was so cunning a translator, that a man must consult the original, to understand the version. For every language has a propriety and idiom peculiar to itself, which cannot be conveyed to another without perpetual absurdities. The qualification of a translator, worth reading, must be, a mastery of the language he translates out of, and that he translates into; but if a deficience be to be allowed in either, it is in the original; since if he be but master enough of the tongue of his author, as to be master of his sense, it is possible for him to express that sense with eloquence in his own, if he have a thorough command of that. But without the latter, he can never arrive at the useful and the delightful; without which reading is a penance and fatigue.