the grammarians and criticks have laboured to reduce his verses into regular feet and measures (as they have also those of the Greek and Latin comedies), yet in effect they are little better than prose to our ears. And I would gladly know what applause our best pieces of English poesy could expect from a Frenchman or Italian, if converted faithfully, and word for word, into French or Italian prose. And when we have considered all this, we must needs confess, that after all these losses sustained by Pindar, all we can add to him by our wit or invention (not deserting still his subject) is not like to make him a richer man than he was in his own country. This is in some measure to be applied to all translations; and the not observing of it, is the cause that all which ever I yet saw, are so much inferior to their originals. The like happens too in pictures, from the same root of exact imitation; which, being a vile and unworthy kind of servitude, is incapable of producing any thing good or noble. I have seen originals, both in painting and poesy, much more beautiful than their natural objects; but I never saw a copy better than the original: which indeed cannot be otherwise; for, men resolving in no case to shoot beyond the mark, it is a thousand to one if they shoot not short of it. It does not at all trouble me that the grammarians perhaps will not suffer this libertine way of rendering foreign authors to be called Translation; for I am not so much enamoured of the name Translator,
