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PRINCIPLES OF
Chap. III.
is omitted; no less than that very circumstance upon which the omen turned, viz. that the entrails of the victim were double.
Analogous to this liberty of adding to or retrenching from the ideas of the original, is the liberty which a translator may take of correcting what appears to him a careless or inaccurate expression of the original, where that inaccuracy seems materially to affect the sense. Tacitus says, when Tiberius was entreated to take upon him the government of the empire, Ille variè disserebat, de magnitudine imperii, suâ modestiâ. An. l. 1. Here the word modestia is improperly applied. The author could not mean to say, that Tiberius discoursed to the people about his own modesty. He wished that hisdiscourse
