author:Claudian

“ My recurrence to Claudian for this purpose—as I have in my younger days translated several of his historical poems—may perhaps be accounted for by a passage in my relative Lord Carlisle's "Lecture on the Writings of Gray," where he says, "I believe there to be something instinctive, which leads every one of us, not to what in our unimpassioned judgment we think the best and greatest of its kind, but to what we are sensible is most specially attractive and congenial to ourselves." A translator indeed need wish for nothing better, than to be, mesmerically speaking, "en rapport" with his original ”

“ The Raptus, undisfigured by the spirit of courtly adulation, which was his besetting sin, is perhaps as fair a specimen of his real genius as can be given. There are faults in its construction; such as the omission of the communication which Jupiter ought to make to Pluto, respecting the abduction of Proserpine—the principal event of the poem: and the unartistic way in which that event is related twice over ”