Chapter 251

Strawberry Hill, May 10, 1783. (page 322)

Dear Sir, For so you must allow me to call you, after your being so kind as to send me so valuable and agreeable a present as your translation of Horace(490)--I wish compliment had left any term uninvaded, Of which sincerity could make use without suspicion. Those would be precisely what I would employ in commending your poem; and, if they proved too simple to content my gratitude, I would be satisfied with an offering to truth, and wait for a nobler opportunity of sacrificing to the warmer virtue. If I have not lost my memory, your translation is the best I have ever seen of that difficult epistle. Your expression is easy and natural, and when requisite, poetic. In short, it has a prime merit, it has the air of an original.

Your hypothesis in your commentary is very ingenious. I do not know whether it is true, which now cannot be known; but if the scope of the epistle was, as you suppose, to hint in a delicate and friendly manner to the elder of Piso's sons that he had written a bad tragedy, Horace had certainly executed his plan with great address; and, I think, nobody will be able to show that any thing in the poem clashes with your idea. Nay, if he went farther, and meant to disguise his object, by giving his epistle the air of general rules on poetry and tragedy, he achieved both purposes; and while the youth his friend was at once corrected and put to no shame, all other readers were kept in the dark, except you, and diverted to different scents.(491) Excuse my commenting your comment, but I had no other way of proving that I really approve both your version and criticism than by stating the grounds of my applause. If you have wrested the sense of the original to favour your own hypothesis, I have not been able to discover your art; for I do not perceive where it has been employed. If you have given Horace more meaning than he was intitled to, you have conferred a favour on him, for you have made his whole epistle consistent, a beauty all the spectacles of all his commentators could not find out-but, indeed, they proceed on the profound laws of criticism, you by the laws of common sense, which, marching on a plain natural path, is very apt to arrive sooner at the goal, than they who travel on the Appian Way; which was a very costly and durable work, but is very uneasy, and at present does not lead to a quarter of the places to which it was originally directed.

I am, Sir, with great regard, your most obedient and obliged humble servant.

(489) Now first collected.

(490) His translation of Horace's Epistola ad Pisones de Arte Poeticae.-E.

(491) It had been the opinion of Bishop Hurd, that - it was the proper and sole purpose of ,Horace simply to criticise the Roman drama;" but Mr. Colman assumed a contrary ground. "If my partiality to my lamented friend, Mr. Colman," says Dr. Joseph Warton, "does not mislead me, I should think his account of the matter the most judicious of any yet published. He conceives that the elder Piso had written, or meditated, a Poetical work-probably, a tragedy, and had communicated his piece in confidence to Horace; but Horace, either disapproving of the work, or doubting of the poetical faculties of the elder Piso, or both, wished to dissuade him from all thoughts of publication. With this view he wrote his Epistle, addressing it, with a courtliness and delicacy perfectly agreeable to his acknowledged character, indifferently to the whole family, the father and his two sons."-E.