"Pulverulenta putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum."


Here is the difference of no less than seven syllables in a line
betwixt the English and the Latin. Now the medium of these is about
fourteen syllables, because the dactyl is a more frequent foot in
hexameters than the spondee. But Holyday (without considering that
he writ with the disadvantage of four syllables less in every verse)
endeavours to make one of his lines to comprehend the sense of one
of Juvenal's. According to the falsity of the proposition was the
success. He was forced to crowd his verse with ill-sounding
monosyllables (of which our barbarous language affords him a wild
plenty), and by that means he arrived at his pedantic end, which was
to make a literal translation. His verses have nothing of verse in
them, but only the worst part of it--the rhyme; and that, into the
bargain, is far from good. But, which is more intolerable, by
cramming his ill-chosen and worse-sounding monosyllables so close
together, the very sense which he endeavours to explain is become
more obscure than that of his author; so that Holyday himself cannot
be understood without as large a commentary as that which he makes
on his two authors. For my own part, I can make a shift to find the
meaning of Juvenal without his notes, but his translation is more
difficult than his author. And I find beauties in the Latin to
recompense my pains; but in Holyday and Stapleton my ears, in the
first place, are mortally offended, and then their sense is so
perplexed that I return to the original as the more pleasing task as
well as the more easy.

This must be said for our translation--that if we give not the whole