the name according to the current
pronunciation of the day. It has been the most freely used and the most
freely abused of all the translations. It has seen far more editions than
any other, it is admitted on all hands to be by far the most faithful,
and yet nobody seems to have a good word to say for it or for its author.
Jervas no doubt prejudiced readers against himself in his preface, where
among many true words about Shelton, Stevens, and Motteux, he rashly and
unjustly charges Shelton with having translated not from the Spanish, but
from the Italian version of Franciosini, which did not appear until ten
years after Shelton's first volume. A suspicion of incompetence, too,
seems to have attached to him because he was by profession a painter and
a mediocre one (though he has given us the best portrait we have of
Swift), and this may have been strengthened by Pope's remark that he
"translated 'Don Quixote' without understanding Spanish." He has been
also charged with borrowing from Shelton, whom he disparaged. It is true
that in a few difficult or obscure passages he has followed Shelton, and
gone astray with him; but for one case of this sort, there are fifty
where he is right and Shelton wrong. As for Pope's dictum, anyone who
examines Jervas's version carefully, side by side with the original, will
see that he was a sound Spanish scholar, incomparably a better one than
Shelton, except perhaps in mere colloquial Spanish. He was, in fact, an
honest, faithful, and painstaking translator, and he has left a version
which, whatever its shortcomings may be, is singularly free from errors
and mistranslations.

The charge against it is that it is stiff, dry--"wooden" in a word,-and
no one can deny that there is a foundation for it. But it may be pleaded
for Jervas that a good deal of this rigidity is due to his abhorrence of
the light, flippant, jocose style of his predecessors. He was one of the
few, very few, translators that have shown any apprehension of the
unsmiling gravity which is the essence of Quixotic humour; it seemed to
him a crime to bring Cervantes forward smirking and grinning at his own
good things, and to this may be attributed in a great measure the ascetic
abstinence from everything savouring of liveliness which is the
characteristic of his translation. In most modern editions, it should be
observed, his style has been smoothed and smartened, but without any
reference to the original Spanish, so that if