has been imitated.  In the reign of King Charles II., which was that of politeness, and the Golden Age of the liberal arts; Otway, in his Venice Preserved, introduces Antonio the senator, and Naki, his courtesan, in the midst of the horrors of the Marquis of Bedemar’s conspiracy.  Antonio, the superannuated senator plays, in his mistress’s presence, all the apish tricks of a lewd, impotent debauchee, who is quite frantic and out of his senses.  He mimics a bull and a dog, and bites his mistress’s legs, who kicks and whips him.  However, the players have struck these buffooneries (which indeed were calculated merely for the dregs of the people) out of Otway’s tragedy; but they have still left in Shakspeare’s Julius Caesar the jokes of the Roman shoemakers and cobblers, who are introduced in the same scene with Brutus and Cassius.  You will undoubtedly complain, that those who have hitherto discoursed with you on the English stage, and especially on the celebrated Shakspeare, have taken notice only of his errors; and that no one has translated any of those strong, those forcible passages which atone for all his faults.  But to this I will answer, that nothing is easier than to exhibit in prose all the silly impertinences which a poet may have thrown out; but that it is a very difficult task to translate his fine verses.  All your junior academical sophs, who set up for censors of the eminent writers, compile whole volumes; but methinks two pages which display some of the beauties of great geniuses, are of infinitely more value than all the idle rhapsodies of those commentators; and I will join in opinion with all persons of good taste in declaring, that greater advantage may be reaped from a dozen verses of Homer of Virgil, than from all the critiques put together which have been made on those two great poets.

I have ventured to translate some passages of the most celebrated English poets, and shall now give you one from Shakspeare.  Pardon the blemishes of the translation for the sake of the original; and remember always that when you see a version, you see merely a faint print of a beautiful picture.  I have made choice of part of the celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, which you may remember is as follows:—­

   “To be, or not to be? that is the question! 
   Whether ’t is nobler in the mind to suffer
   The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
   Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
   And by opposing, end them?  To die! to sleep! 
   No more! and by a sleep to say we end
   The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
   That flesh is heir to!  ’Tis a consummation
   Devoutly to be wished.  To die! to sleep! 
   To sleep; perchance to dream!  O, there’s the rub;
   For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come
   When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
   Must give us pause.  There’s the respect
   That makes calamity of so long life: