I have thought of essaying a few remarks on the principles of translation, and the practice of translators, that thou be not inordinately surprised, if on comparing my version with the original, thou dost not find in both _all_ the same words, and in the same order--meeting, tooth to tooth. I do so to satisfy the scruples of the well-disposed, and not to blunt the arrows of small-beer wit, or to elude the aim of pop-gun ammunition. “Out! out! brief candle!” says the immortal Shakspeare. “Get out! get out! you short candle!” says the spruce Frenchman. The Frenchman was _literal_; but he had better have understood the _spirit_ of his author, and given that, though it were with a periphrasis. The truth is, you cannot render any passage in a Greek or Latin poem _religiously_ into English--preserving the precise form, attitude, expression and size--if you attempt the absurdity, you present to the eyes of your readers, not a living body, but a lifeless corpse. All, that can be done with works written among nations at so wide a remove from our own in age, character, customs, and religion, is to breathe the spirit and manner of the original into English as elegant, yet close and strong as possible. Their works are full of phrases and allusions, which, with us, are dry and barren, while to them they were instinct with poetry, and eloquent with meaning. To the heart of the Grecian the history of his country was sanctified, and made dear by a long line of traditionary glories. Familiar to them, though lost to us, were a thousand memories of mystic interest, and patriotic pride--tales of the gods and heroes, who had lived and moved in their land, amid the days of its splendor--histories woven from facts, but tinged in the multitudinous colorings of fancy--fables, that stretched far back through the haze of ages, from wonder to doubt, and from doubt to darkness. Here had Jupiter been cradled in the mountains--there gushed a fountain from the foot-print of Neptune’s charger--here, from the sown teeth of the slaughtered dragon, sprang to life and fell in battle a field of steel-clad warriors--and there had Orpheus charmed the stones to life, and made the forests dance in chorus to his lyre. These were so many chords of interest, which the poet had but to touch, and the souls of his readers responded with a thrill. Now all these springs of passion are sealed to us--for, in the first place, the history of another and a buried nation excites but a feeble sympathy, compared with that which ponders and glows above our own--and, secondly, we rarely feel deeply what we do not thoroughly believe, or fully comprehend. Deprived, then, of these advantages, unaided by fancy, and unadorned by language, a translation would be about as _touching_ as a table of _tangents_. And this is what has made English translations so insipid compared with English originals, and has induced in some the belief that even the master-pieces of