ours. His work is wholly remote from the genius of the tongue, in its purity, or in any of its jargons. It is not English, nor Irish, nor even his native Scotch. It is not fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring yours is written with facility and spirit, and you do not often depart from the genuine native idiom of the language. Without attempting, therefore, to modernize terms of art, or to disguise ancient customs under new habits, you have contrived things in such a manner that your readers will find themselves at home. The other translators do not familiarize you with ancient Rome: they carry you into a new world. By their uncouth modes of expression, they prevent you from taking an interest in any of its concerns. In spite of you, they turn your mind from the subject, to attend with disgust to their unskilful manner of treating it: from such authors we can learn nothing. I have always thought the world much obliged to good translators like you. Such are some of the French. They who understand the original are not those who are under the smallest obligations to you; it is a great satisfaction to see the sense of one good author in the language of another. He is thus alias et idem. Seeing your author in a new point of view, you become acquainted with him his thoughts make a new and a deeper impression on the mind. I have always recommended it to young men in their studies, that when they had made themselves thorough masters of a work in the original, then (but not till then) to read it in a translation, if in any modern language a readable translation was to be found. What I say of

your translation is really no more than very cold justice to my sentiments of your great undertaking. I never expected to see so good a translation. I do not pretend that it is wholly free from faults; but at the same time I think it more easy to discover them than to correct them. There is a style which daily gains ground amongst us, which I should be sorry to see farther advanced by the authority of a writer of your just reputation. The tendency of the mode to which I allude is to establish two very different idioms amongst us, and to introduce a marked distinction between the English that is written and the English that is spoken. This practice, if grown a little more general, would confirm this distemper, such I must think it, in our language, and render it incurable.

From this feigned manner of falsetto, as I think the musicians call something of the same sort in singing, no one modern historian, Robertson only excepted, is perfectly free. It is assumed, I know, to give dignity and variety to the style; but whatever success the attempt may sometimes have, it is always obtained at the expense of purity, and of the graces that are natural and appropriate to our language. It is true, that

when the exigence calls for auxiliaries of all sorts, and common language becomes unequal to the demands of extraordinary thoughts, something ought to be conceded to the necessities which make "ambition virtue :" but the allowances to necessities ought not to grow into a practice. Those portents and prodigies ought not to grow too common. If you have here and

there (much more rarely, however, than others of great and not unmerited fame), fallen into an error, which is not that of the dull or careless, you have an author who is himself guilty, in his own tongue, of the same fault, in a very high degree. No author thinks more deeply, or paints inore strongly; but he seldom or ever expresses himself naturally. It is plain that, comparing him with Plautus and Terence, or the beautiful fragments of Publius Syrus, he did not write the language of good conversation. Cicero is much nearer to it. Tacitus and the writers of his time have fallen into that vice, by aiming at a poetical style. It is true, that eloquence in both modes of rhetoric is fundamentally the same; but the manner of handling is totally different, even where words and phrases may be transferred from the one of these departments of writing to the other.

I have accepted the licence you have allowed me, and blotted your book in such a manner that I must call for another for my shelves. I wish you would come hither for a day or two. Twenty coaches come almost to our very door. In an hour's conversation we can do more than in twenty sheets of writing. Do come and make us all happy. My affectionate compliments to our worthy doctor. Pray believe me, with the most sincere respect and regard, my dear sir, your most faithful and obedient humble servant,

EDM. BURKE.

VOL. VI.

Q Q

EDMUND BURKE TO DR. F. LAURENCE.

[Bath, April, 1797.]

MY DEAR SIR, THE very first relaxation of my complaint, which gave me leisure and disposition to attend to what is going on, has filled my mind with many uneasy sensations and many unpleasant reflections. The few of us who have protracted life, to the extreme limits of our short period, have been condemned to see extraordinary things— -new systems of policy--new opinions-new principles-and not only new men, but what might appear a new species of men. I believe that they who lived forty years ago (if the intermediate space of time were expunged from their memory) could hardly credit their senses, when they heard from the highest authority, that an army of two hundred thousand men was kept up in this island: that in the neighbouring island there were at least fourscore thousand more: but, when he should hear of this army, which has not its parallel, what must be his astonishment to hear, that it was kept up for the purpose of an inert and passive defence; that, in its far greater part, it was disabled, by its constitution and very essence, from defending us against an enemy by any one preventive stroke, or any operation of active hostility! What must his reflections be, on hearing that a fleet of five hundred men of war, the best appointed, and to the full as ably commanded, as this country ever had upon the sea, was for the greater part employed in acting upon the same system of unenterprising defence? What must

his sentiments be, who remembers the former energy of England, when he is given to understand that these two islands, with their extensive and every where vulnerable seacoast, should be considered as a garrison sea town? What would he think if the garrison of so strange a fortress should be such as never to make a sally; and that, contrary to all that has been hitherto seen in war, an infinitely inferior army may with safety besiege this garrison, and, without hazarding the life of a man, ruin the garrison and the place, merely by the menaces and false appearances of an attack? What must his surprise be on finding, that with the increases of trade, and balances unknown before, and with less outgoing than at any former time, the public credit should labour, even to the edge of a bankruptcy; and that the confidence of the people in the security of their property should lessen in proportion as all apparent means of their safety are augmented? The last part of this dreadful paradox is to be solved but by one way; and that is by an obscure undefined sense which the people entertain that the apparent means of their safety are not real nor well understood, and that they confide in their government more from their opinion that some sort of government should be supported, than from a conviction that the measures taken by the existing government for the public safety áre rational or well adapted to their end. Had it pleased God to continue to me even the late weak remains of my strength, I purposed to make this the subject of a letter, which I intended to address to a brother member of yours, upon the