the person who figures in Hogarth’s picture, as the Enraged Musician.
But, whatever other accomplishments he may have possessed, he had certainly no feeling of poetry, and seems to have taken it up as Vernon did rebellion; “because it lay in his way.” At least I know no better reason for his translation of Ariosto than his having made a journey to Italy.
The title-page of his book (in two vols. quarto) bears the date of 1757, and was printed for Rivington in Paternoster-row, and John Cook, a bookseller of Farnham, whose shop I remember frequenting in the days of my boyhood. It is printed with the English and Italian confronted, executed in the same stanza as Harrington’s version, and translated line for line. Though there are to be found in it some very strange mistakes of Ariosto’s meaning, it is, generally speaking, faithful, and as such, has, primâ facie, strong claims upon attention. But a species of fidelity is hardly to be coveted, which, at the best, does not accomplish the only end which should be proposed by it. For the translator often
