precepts of their owne spaune. Truth & Worth haue no faces to enamour the Lycentious, but vaineglory and humor: the same body, the same beauty, a thousand men seeing, onely the man whose bloud is fitted, hath that which he calls his soule enamoured."

ELLIOT. Yet I dare say he had not half as much reason for his anger as Ben Jonson, when in the apologetical dialogue" subjoined to his "Poetaster," in a rage almost sublime, he exclaims,

"Oh, this would make a learn'd & liberal soul To rive his stained quill up to the back, And damn his long-watch'd labours to the fire!"

But I did not intend to interrupt you in what you were reading from the pamphlet you brought with you.

MORTON. In the address" to the Reader," Chapman vindicates what he supposes some will consider liberties taken with, and enlargements of, his original, observing that it is "a most asinine error" to suppose that translations to be good must be "in as few words and in like order" as the original author employed, and upon one passage in particular he remarks with some apparent arrogance, "but the sense I might wish my betters could render no worse." BOURNE. Arrogance! surely self-confidence would have been a much more applicable word.

ELLIOT. Either, I think, would there be inapplicable, for Chapman is not talking of his own capa

bility as a poet, but merely of "the sense," as a faithful renderer of the work on which he was engaged: he claims to himself no more merit than we might give to a schoolboy.

MORTON. On reading it again I find I did him injustice. The Funerall Oration" is in fact a prose satire, or burlesque, upon treating trifles as matters of serious importance, and it contains, in my opinion, nothing very well worth reading: the translation from Juvenal, I fear, is not much better.

BOURNE. We must have a quotation from that, although it is merely a translation, and not precisely within our limits, and although it may not be a first rate performance of the kind.

MORTON. I think the following lines some of the

best.

"First take it for a Rule, that if my Lord

Shall once be pleas'd to grace thee with his bord,
The whole reuenues that thy hopes inherit,
Rising from seruices of ancient merit,
In this requital amply paid will prooue.
O'tis the fruit of a transcendent loue

To giue one victuals! That thy Table-King
Layes in thy dish, though nere so thinne a thing,
Yet that reproch still in thine eares shall ring.
If therefore after two moneths due neglect
He deignes his poore dependent to respect,
And lest the third bench faile to fill the ranck
He shall take the vp to supply the blanck:

Lets sit together Trebius (saies my Lord)

See all thy wishes sum'd vp in a word!
What canst thou aske at Ioues hand after this?
This grace to Trebius enough ample is,

To make him start from sleepe before the Larke
Poasting abroad vntrus'd, & in the darke,
Perplext with feare, lest all the seruile-rout
Of his saluters haue the round run out
Before he come, whiles yet the fixed Starre
Shewes his ambiguous head, & heauens cold Car
The slow Bootes wheeles about the Beare.
And yet, for all this, what may be the cheare?
To such vile wine thy throat is made the sinck
As greasie woll would not endure to drink;
And we must shortly looke to see our guest
Transform'd into a Berecynthian Priest."

ELLIOT. The principal fault of that translation is, that it seems to be, if any thing, too literal: the writer cramps himself miserably in some of the lines on this account.

BOURNE. Yet a few of them flow with sufficient ease, and the quotation just read opens very well.

MORTON. The whole is pointed, and more vigorous in some of the expressions than might be expected from the age of the author.

BOURNE. Then here we close for to-day. Tomorrow we will enter upon an examination of a variety of pieces of a miscellaneous kind.

THE

POETICAL DECAMERON.

THE SEVENTH CONVERSATION.

VOL. II.

F