"Quixote!"

They were never, of course, called upon for the second part, and,
whether we consider the merits of the original or of the translation,
the world has but little to regret in the loss. Aristaenetus is one of
those weak, florid sophists, who flourished in the decline and
degradation of ancient literature, and strewed their gaudy flowers of
rhetoric over the dead muse of Greece. He is evidently of a much later
period than Alciphron, to whom he is also very inferior in purity of
diction, variety of subject, and playfulness of irony. But neither of
them ever deserved to be wakened from that sleep, in which the
commentaries of Bergler, De Pauw, and a few more such industrious
scholars have shrouded them.

The translators of Aristaenetus, in rendering his flowery prose into
verse, might have found a precedent and model for their task in Ben
Jonson, whose popular song, "Drink to me only with thine eyes," is, as
Mr. Cumberland first remarked, but a piece of fanciful mosaic, collected
out of the love-letters of the sophist Philostratus. But many of the
narrations in Aristaenetus are incapable of being elevated into poetry;
and, unluckily, these familiar parts seem chiefly to have fallen to the
department of Halhed, who was far less gifted than his coadjutor with
that artist-like touch, which polishes away the mark of vulgarity, and
gives an air of elegance even to poverty. As the volume is not in many
hands, the following extract from one of the Epistles may be acceptable
--as well from the singularity of the scene described, as from the
specimen it affords of the merits of the translation:

"Listen--another pleasure I display,
That help'd delightfully the time away.