Where Horace evidently means to rise, I have attempted to rise too:
but through the greater part of this work I have been anxious, to
use his own expression, to creep along the ground. No doubt there is
danger in all this, the danger of triviality, pertness, and
occasional vulgarity. Gifford's own work was attacked on its first
appearance by a reviewer of the day precisely on those grounds: and
though he seems to have made a vehement reply to his assailant, the
changes which he made in his second edition showed that the censure
was not without its effect. Still, where it is almost impossible to
walk quite straight, the walker will reconcile himself to incidental
deviations, and will even consider, where a slip is inevitable, on
which side of the line it is better that the slip should take place.

A patent difficulty of course is to know what to do with local and
temporary customs, allusions, proverbs, &c., which enter, I need not
say, far more largely into satire or comedy than into any other form
of writing. Here it is that the imitator has the advantage of the
translator: a certain parallelism between his own time and the time
of the author he imitates is postulated in the fact of his imitating
at all, and if he is a dexterous writer, like Pope or Johnson, he is
sure to be able to introduce a number of small equivalents, some of
them perhaps actual improvements on the original, while he is at
liberty to throw into the shade those points of which he despairs of
being able to make anything. A translator has three courses open to
him, to translate more or less verbally, so as to run the risk of
being unintelligible to a reader unacquainted with the original, to
generalize what is special, and to borrow something of the
imitator's licence, introducing a modern speciality in place of an
ancient. Here, as I have found on other occasions of the kind, to be
allowed a choice of evils is itself a matter for self-