but English readers are not so easily satisfied. To quote myself,
you will find, in comparing the Jackdaw with the original, that I
was obliged to sharpen a point which, though smart enough in the
Latin, would in English have appeared as plain and as blunt as the
tag of a lace." --Letter to Unwin, May 23, 1781 (Southey's Cowper,
ed. 1836, vol. iv. p. 97).] All translation, as has been pointed out
over and over again, must proceed more or less on the principle of
compensation; a translator who is conscious of having lost ground in
one place is not to blame if he tries to recover it in another, so
that he does not consciously depart from what he believes to be the
spirit of the original: the question he has to ask himself is not so
much whether he has conformed to the requirements of this or that
line, most important as such conformity is where it can be realized
without a sacrifice of higher things, as whether he has conformed to
the requirements of the whole sentence, or even of the whole
paragraph; whether the general effect produced by all the combined
elements in the English lines answers in any degree to that produced
by the Latin. Often and often, while engaged on this translation, I
have been reminded of Johnson's words in his Life of Dryden: "It is
not by comparing line with line that the merit of works is to be
estimated, but by their general effects and ultimate result. It is
easy to note a weak line and write one more vigorous in its place,
to find a happiness of expression in the original and transplant it
by force into the version; but what is given to the parts may be
subducted from the whole, and the reader may be weary, though the
critic may commend. That book is good in vain which the reader
throws away." [Footnote: Compare his parallel between Pitt's and
Dryden's Aeneid in his Life of Pitt.] I will only add that if these
remarks are true of translation in general, they apply with special
force to the translation of an original like the present, where the