Page:Essay on the Principles of Translation - Tytler (1791, 1st ed).djvu/237

diciously given to Hope in this place; for a languid or a languishing hope was already dying, and needed not so powerful a host of murderers to slay it, as Absence, Jealousy, and Disdain.—In short, the latter translation appears to me to be on the whole of much inferior merit to the former. I have remarked, that Motteux excels his rival chiefly in the translation of those poems that are of a graver cast. But perhaps he is censurable for having thrown too much gravity into the poems that are interspersed in this work, as Smollet is blameable on the opposite account, of having given them too much the air of burlesque. In the song which Don Quixote composed while he was doing penance in the Sierra-Morena, beginning Arboles, Yerbas y Plantas, every stanza of which ends with Del Toboso, theauthor