Virgil

“ Had I borrow’d more from him, this Translation, perhaps, had been so much the better. Far be it from me, therefore, to think I am able to do Virgil justice, or to improve on Mr. Dryden’s Translation; the utmost Merit I pretend to, is to have avoided those low and vulgar Expressions, and technical Terms, and Deviations from the Original, which he is guilty of too frequently; if I may be allow’d to deliver my Opinion of Mr. Dryden’s Performance, after so great a Judge as Mr. Pope, it should be in the Words of Sir John Denham.
Great are its Faults, but glorious is its Flame. ”

“ Pope, in his Translation of the Catalogue of the Ships, where, for some hundred Lines together, he is engag'd in a Heap of proper Names; yet that great Master, by his exquisite Skill in Sounds and Numbers, has set them to Music, and deriv'd from them the finest Harmony the World. But we ought to pass by these, and a great many other low and vulgar Expressions in Mr. Dryden, if we consider that his Necessities oblig'd him to translate all the Works of Virgil in three Years. ”

“ I shall close these few Remarks with a Word or two concerning this Translation. I have endeavour’d, thro’ the Whole, to practise my Lord Roscommon’s Rule,
Your Author always will the best advise;
Fall as he falls, and as he rises, rise.
but with what Success, is with all Deference submitted to the Reader; I have us’d a few of Mr. Dryden’s Rhimes and Expressions, where he adheres closely to the Sense of Virgil, or I must have wander’d from the Original myself ”