ing, especially in the former, a spirit and vigour in which some of those who came before and after them lamentably failed. The translations by Vicars and Ogilby, about the middle of the seventeenth century, have little claim to be remembered except as the first presentations of the whole Æneid in an English poetical dress. In dull mediocrity they are about equal.
In 1697, Dryden, at the age of sixty-six, finished and published his translation; written, as he pathetically says, "in his declining years, struggling with want, and oppressed with sickness;" yet, whatever be its shortcomings, a confessedly great work, and showing few traces of these unfavourable circumstances. His great renown, and the unquestionable vigour and ability of the versification, insured its popularity at once; and it was considered, by the critics of his own and some succeeding generations, as pre-eminently the English Virgil. Dr Johnson said of it that "it satisfied his friends and silenced his enemies." It may still be read with pleasure, but it has grave faults. Independently of its general looseness and diffuseness, in many passages amounting to the vaguest paraphrase, there are too many instances in which, not content with making his author say a good many things which he never did say, he palpably misinterprets him. There are many passages of much vigour and beauty; but even of these it has been said, and not unfairly, by a later translator, Dr Trapp, that "where you most admire Dryden, you see the least of Virgil." Dryden had the advantage of consulting in manuscript a translation by the Earl of Lauderdale
