Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

ever read Fresnoy to admire, or even criticise his versification, but either to be instructed by him as a Painter, or improved as a Virtuoso.

It was this latter motive only, I confess, that led me to attempt the following translation; which was begun in very early youth, with a double view of implanting in my own memory the principles of a favourite art, and of acquiring a habit of versification, for which purpose the close and condensed style of the original seemed peculiarly calculated, especially when considered as a sort of school exercise. However, the task proved so difficult, that when I had gone through a part of it I remitted of my diligence, and proceeded at such separate intervals, that I had passed many posterior productions through the press before this was brought to any conclusion in manuscript; and after it was so, it lay long neglected, and would certainly have never been made public, had not Sir Joshua Reynolds requested a sight of it, and made an obliging offer of illustrating it by a series of his own notes. This prompted me to revise it with all possible accuracy; and as I had preserved the strictures which my late excellent friend Mr. Gray had made many years before on the version, as it then. stood, I attended to each of them in their order with that deference which every criticism of his must demand. Besides this, as much more time was now elapsed since I had perused the copy, my own eye was become more

open to its defects. I found the rule which my had given to his painter full as useful to a writer :

(Ast ubi consilium deerit sapientis amici

author

Id tempus dabit, atque mora intermissa labori.) And I may say, with truth, that having become from this circumstance, as impartial, if not as fastidious, to my own work, as any other critic could possibly have been, I hardly left a single line in it without giving it, what I thought an emendation. It is not, therefore, as a juvenile work that I now present it to the public, but as one which I have improved to the utmost of my mature abilities, in order to make it more worthy of its Annotator.

In the preceding Epistle I have obviated, I hope, every suspicion of arrogance, in attempting this work after Mr. Dryden. The single consideration that his version was in prose, were in itself sufficient; because, as Mr. Pope has justly observed, verse and even rhyme is the best mode of conveying preceptive truths, " as in this

66

way they are more shortly expressed, and more easily "retained."* Still less need I make an apology for undertaking it after Mr. Wills, who in the year 1754, published a translation of it in metre without rhyme.†

* See his Advertisement before his Essay on Man.

+ I call it so rather than blank verse, because it was devoid of all harmony of numbers. The beginning, which I shall here insert, is a sufficient proof of the truth of this assertion:

This gentleman, a painter by profession, assumed for his motto,

Tractant fabrilia fabri;

but however adroit he might be in handling the tools of his own art, candour must own that the tools of a poet and a translator were beyond his management: attempting also a task absolutely impossible, that of expressing the sense of his author in an equal number of lines, he produced a version, which (if it was ever read through by any person except myself) is now totally forgotten. Nevertheless I must do him the justice to own, that he understood the original text; that he detected some errors in Mr. Dryden's translation, which had escaped Mr. Jervas (assisted, as it is said, by his friend Mr. Pope) in that corrected edition which Mr. Graham inscribed to the Earl of Burlington; and that I have myself sometimes profited by his labours. It is also from his edition that I reprint the following Life of the Author, which was drawn up from Felibien and other biographers by the late Dr. Birch, who, with his usual industry, has collected all they have said on Fresnoy's subject.

As Painting, Poesy, so similar
To Poesy be Painting: emulous

Alike, each to her sister doth refer,

Alternate change the office and the name;

Mute verse is this, that speaking picture call'd.

From this little specimen, the reader will easily form a judgment of the whole.

1

THE

LIFE

OF

MONS. DU FRESNOY.

CHARLES ALPHONSE DU FRESNOy was born at Paris in the year 1611. His father, who was an eminent apothecary in that city, intending him for the profession of physic, gave him as good an education as possible. During the first year, which he spent at the college, he made a very considerable progress in his studies: but as soon as he was raised to the higher classes, and began to contract a taste of poetry, his genius for it opened itself, and he carried all the prizes in it, which were proposed to excite the emulation of his fellow-students. His inclination for it was heightened by exercise; and his earliest performances showed, that he was capable of becoming one of the greatest poets of his age, if his love of painting, which equally possessed him, had not divided his time and application. At last, he laid aside all thoughts of the study of physic, and declared absolutely for that of painting, notwithstanding the opposition of

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »