r prey intent.

DRYDEN.

This heedless pursuit after these glittering trifles, the poet, by a nice
concealed moral, represents to have been the destruction of his female
hero.

THE ITALIAN OPERA.

--_Equitis quoque jam migravit ab aure voluptas_
_Omnis ad incertos oculos_, _et gaudia vana_.

HOR., _Ep._ ii. 1, 187.

But now our nobles too are fops and vain,
Neglect the sense, but love the painted scene.

CREECH.

It is my design in this paper to deliver down to posterity a faithful
account of the Italian opera, and of the gradual progress which it has
made upon the English stage; for there is no question but our
great-grandchildren will be very curious to know the reason why their
forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their
own country, and to hear whole plays acted before them in a tongue which
they did not understand.

_Arsinoe_ was the first opera that gave us a taste of Italian music. The
great success this opera met with produced some attempts of forming
pieces upon Italian plans, which should give a more natural and
reasonable entertainment than what can be met with in the elaborate
trifles of that nation. This alarmed the poetasters and fiddlers of the
town, who were used to deal in a more ordinary kind of ware; and
therefore laid down an established rule, which is received as such to
this day, "That nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not
nonsense."

This maxim was no sooner received, but we immediately fell to translating
the Italian operas; and as there was no great danger of hurting the sense
of those extraordinary pieces, our authors would often make words of
their own which were entirely foreign to the meaning of the passages they
pretended to translate; their chief care being to make the numbers of the
English verse answer to those of the Italian, that both of them might go
to the same tune. Thus the famous swig in Camilla:

"_Barbara si t' intendo_," &c.

"Barbarous woman, yes, I know your meaning,"

which expresses the resentments of an angry lover, was translated into
that English lamentation,

"Frail are a lover's hopes," &c.

And it was pleasant enough to see the most refined persons of the British
nation dying away and languishing to notes that were filled with a spirit
of rage and indignation. It happened also very frequently, where the
sense was rightly translated, the necessary transpositi