l'attention de celui qui lit.... Aussi le plus souvent sa phraséologie
est-elle fort complexe, et pour suivre le fil de l'idée première,
faut-il apporter une attention soutenue. Ce qui est déjà une
difficulté de lecture dans le texte italien, devient un obstacle
très sérieux quand on a à traduire ces interminables phrases en
français moderne, prototype de précision, de clarté, de logique
grammaticale.... Je sais bien qu'il y a un moyen commode de
l'éluder...: c'est de couper les phrases et d'en faire, d'une seule,
deux, trois, quatre, autant qu'il est besoin. Mais à ce jeu on change
notablement la physionomie de l'original, et c'est ce que je ne puis
admettre."

As is Boccaccio to Cicero, so is Cassius Dio, _mutatis mutandis_, to
Thukydides; and of course the imitator improves upon the model.
Imagine a man who out-Paters Pater when Pater shall be but a memory,
and you begin to secure a vision of the style of this Roman senator,
who accentuates every peculiarity of the tragic historian's packed
periods; and whereas his great predecessor made sentences so long as
to cause mediæval scholars heartily to wish him in the Barathron,
books and all, comes forward six hundred years later marshaling phrase
upon phrase, clause upon clause, till a modern is forced to exclaim:
"What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?" Now I have
dealt with these complexes in different ways; and sometimes I have
cleft and hacked and wrenched them out of all semblance of their
original shape, and sometimes I have hauled them almost entire, like a
cable, tangled with particles, out of the sea-bed of departed days.

This principle of inconsistency which I have pursued in varying the
rendering of long sentences, periodic or loose, according to external
modifying conditions, may be observed also in certain other features