oducing the spirit of the original was sometimes
made a pretext for undue latitude, it is evident that there was here an
important contribution to the theory of translation. In another respect,
also, the consideration of metrical effects, the seventeenth century
shows some advance,--an advance, however, which must be laid chiefly to
the credit of Dryden. Apparently there was no tendency towards
innovation and experiment in the matter of verse forms.
Seventeenth-century translators, satisfied with the couplet and kindred
measures, did not consider, as the Elizabethans had done, the
possibility of introducing classical metres. Creech says of Horace,
"'Tis certain our language is not capable of the numbers of the
poet,"[418] and leaves the matter there. Holiday says of his translation
of the same poet: "But many, no doubt, will say Horace is by me
forsaken, his lyric softness and emphatical Muse maimed; that there is a
general defection from his genuine harmony. Those I must tell, I have in
this translation rather sought his spirit than numbers; yet the music of
verse not neglected neither, since the English ear better heareth the
distich, and findeth that sweetness and air which the Latin affecteth
and (questionless) attaineth in sapphics or iambic measures."[419]
Dryden frequently complains of the difficulty of translation into
English metre, especially when the poet to be translated is Virgil. The
use of rhyme causes trouble. It "is certainly a constraint even to the
best poets, and those who make it with most ease.... What it adds to
sweetness, it takes away from sense; and he who loses the least by it
may be called a gainer. It often makes us swerve from an author's
meaning; as, if a mark be set up for an archer at a great distance, let
him aim as exactly as he can, the least wind will take his arrow, and
divert it from the white."[420] The line of the heroic couplet is not
long enough to reproduce the hexameter, and Virgil is especially
succinct. "To make him copious is to alter his character; and to
translate him line for line is impossible, because the Latin is
naturally a more succinct language than either the Italian, Spanish,
French, or even than the English, which, by reason of its monosyllables,
is far the most compendious of them. Virgil is much the closest of any
Roman poet, and the Latin hexameter has more feet than the English
heroic."[421] Yet though Dryden admits that Caro, the Italian
translator, who use