Heine had a light hand with the branding-iron, and marked his subjects not more neatly than indelibly. And really he alone were capable of dealing adequate vengeance upon his translators. His verse has only violent lovers or violent foes; indifference is impossible. Once read as it deserves, it becomes one of the loveliest of our spiritual acquisitions. We hate to see it tampered with; we are on thorns as the translator approaches, and we resent his operations as an individual hurt, a personal affront. What business has he to be trampling among our borders and crushing our flowers with his stupid hobnails? Why cannot he carry his zeal for topsy-turvy horticulture elsewhere? He comes and lays a brutal hand on our pet growths, snips off their graces, shapes them anew according to his own ridiculous ideal, paints and varnishes them with a villainous compound of his contrivance, and then bids us admire the effect and thank him for its production! Is any name too hard for such a creature? and could any vengeance be too deadly? If he walked into your garden and amused himself so with your cabbages, you could put him in prison. But into your poets he can stump his way at will, and upon them he can do his pleasure. And he does it. How many men have brutalised the elegance, the grace, the winning urbanity of Horace! By how many coarse and stupid fingers has Catullus been smudged and fumbled and mauled! To turn _Faust_ into English (in the original metres) is a fashionable occupation; there are more perversions of the _Commedia_ than one cares to recall; there is scarce a great or even a good work of the human mind but has been thus bedevilled and deformed. _Don Quixote_, _le Pere Goriot_, _The Frogs_, _The Decameron_--the trail of the translator is over them all. Messrs. Payne and Lang and Swinburne have turned poor Villon into a citizen of Bedford Park, Fitzgerald and Florence Macarthy have Englished Calderon, Messrs. Pope, Gladstone and others have done their worst with Homer. If Rossetti had not succeeded with _la Vita Nuova_, if Fitzgerald had not ennobled Omar, if Mr. Lang had not bettered upon Banville and Gerard de Nerval, the word 'translator' would be odious as the word 'occupy.' And 'occupy' on the authority of Mrs. Dorothy Tearsheet is an odious word indeed. The Proof of It.