e more or less powerful
credentials. There remain to be added Books of Reference, as we have
pointed out, curiosities, and this or that person's specialisms.

From a strictly practical point of view, the language and sense of any
great writer, ancient or modern, may be as well, nay, better,
appreciated in a volume bought for a trifle than in a rare and
luxurious edition, where the place and time of origin, the type, the
paper, and the binding are adventitious accessories--almost
_impedimenta_--and the book itself a work of art like a picture or a
coin. But with either of the latter it is different, for there the
canvas or the metal is an integral portion of the object. For
instance, take the better parts of Tennyson. Is it not sufficient to
read them in a modest foolscap octavo? Do we require external aids?
The poet is his own best illustrator, and if we purchase a pictorial
edition, we are apt to find that the author and the artist are at
variance in their interpretations.

Translations are always to be carefully avoided by all who can more or
less confidently read the author in the original language. We have yet
to meet with a version, whether of an ancient or of a modern classic,
which is thoroughly appreciative and satisfactory. The majority are
utterly disappointing and deceptive. It is in the transfer of the
idiom and costume that the difficulty and consequent failure lie. No
one who merely knows at second hand Homer, Herodotus, Plautus,
Terence, Horace, Virgil, Montaigne, Le Sage (a metonym for _Gil
Blas_), Cervantes, La Fontaine, Dumas, Maupassant, Balzac, can have
had an opportunity of forming an adequate and just estimate of those
authors. You might nearly as soon expect a Frenchman to relish Butler
or Dickens in their Parisian habiliments.

Such a fact--for a fact it undoubtedly is--opens to our consideration
a very large and a very grave problem, since the very limited extent
to which the English public is conversant with Greek and Latin, and
with even the Latin family of modern languages, makes the admission
that so many works of the highest importance and interest are only
properly and truly readable in their own tongues tantamount to one
that they are not properly and truly readable at all.

Of all forms of translation, the paraphrase is perhaps the worst, so
far as an interpretation of the original sense goes, but not the most
dangerous if we know it to be what it is, and do not look for more
than a