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
sense of Juvenal, yet we give the most considerable part of it; we
give it, in general, so clearly that few notes are sufficient to
make us intelligible. We make our author at least appear in a
poetic dress. We have actually made him more sounding and more
elegant than he was before in English, and have endeavoured to make
him speak that kind of English which he would have spoken had he
lived in England and had written to this age. If sometimes any of
us (and it is but seldom) make him express the customs and manners
of our native country rather than of Rome, it is either when there
was some kind of analogy betwixt their customs and ours, or when (to
make him more easy to vulgar understandings) we gave him those
manners which are familiar to us.
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