this hypercriticism? It is the only criticism that can be tolerated
betwixt two such rivals as Chaucer and Wordsworth. The scales that weigh
poetry should turn with a grain of dust, with the weight of a sunbeam,
for they weigh spirit. Or is it saying that Wordsworth has not done his
work as well as it was possible to be done? Rather it is inferring, from
the failure of the work in his hand, that he and his colleagues have
attempted that which was impossible to be done. We will not here hunt
down line by line. We put before the reader the means of comparing verse
with verse. We have, with 'a thoughtful heart of love,' made the
comparison, and feel throughout that the modern will not, cannot, do
justice to the old English. The quick sensibility which thrills through
the antique strain deserts the most cautious version of it. In short, we
fall back upon the old conviction, that verse is a sacred, and song an
inspired thing; that the feeling, the thought, the word, and the musical
breath spring together out of the soul in one creation; that a
translation is a thing not given in _rerum natura_; consequently that
there is nothing else to be done with a great poet saving to leave him
in his glory.

And our friend John Dryden? Oh, he is safe enough; for the new
translators all agree that his are no translations at all of Chaucer,
but original and excellent poems of his own.

A language that is half Chaucer's, and half that of his renderer, is in
great danger to be the language of nobody. But Chaucer's has its own
energy and vivacity which attaches you, and as soon as you have
undergone the due transformation by sympathy, carries you effectually
with it. In the moderate versions that are best done, you miss this
indispensable force of attraction. But Dryden boldly and freely gives
you himself, and along you sweep, or are swept rejoicingly along. "The
grand charge to which his translations are amenable," says Mr Horne,
"is, that he acted upon an erroneous principle." Be it so. Nevertheless,
they are among the glories of our poetical literature. Mr Horne's,
literal as he supposes them to be, are unreadable. He, too, acts on an
erroneous principle; and his execution betrays throughout the unskilful
hand of a presumptuous apprentice. But he has "every respect for the
genius, and for every thing that belongs to the memory, of Dryden;" and
thus magniloquently eulogizes his most splendid achievement:--"The fact
is, Dryden's version of