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PRINCIPLES OF
Chap. X.
In empty noise and vain expence;
To celebrate with flaunting air
The midnight revels of the fair;
Studious of every praise, but virtue, truth, and sense.
To celebrate with flaunting air
The midnight revels of the fair;
Studious of every praise, but virtue, truth, and sense.
Here the translator has superadded no new images or illustrations; but he has, in two parts of the stanza, given a moral application which is not in the original:
"That ill adorns the form, while it corrupts the heart;" and "Studious of every praise, but virtue, truth, and sense." These moral lines are unquestionably a very high improvement of the original; but they seem to me to transgress, though indeed very slightly, the liberty allowed to a poetical translator.
In that fine translation by Dryden, of the 29th ode of the 3d book of Horace, which upon the whole is paraphrastical,the
