still remains that it represents, with much truth to nature, the motley suit of the Arabo-Egyptian.  And it certainly serves one purpose, too often neglected by writers and unnoticed by reviewers.  The fluent and transparent styles of Buckle and Darwin (the modern Aristotle who has transformed the face of Biological Science) are instruments admirably fitted for their purpose:  crystal-clear, they never divert even a bittock of the reader’s brain from the all-important sense underlying the sound-symbols.  But in works of imagination mar. wants a treatment totally different, a style which, by all or any means, little mattering what they be, can avoid the imminent deadly risk of languor and monotony and which adds to fluency the allurement of variety, of surprise and even of disappointment, when a musical discord is demanded.

Again, my estimate of a translator’s office has never been of the low level generally assigned to it even in the days when Englishmen were in the habit of englishing every important or interesting work published on the continent of Europe.  We cannot expect at this period of our literature overmuch from a man who, as Messieurs Vizetelly assure their clientele, must produce a version for a poor œ20.  But at his best the traducteur, while perfectly reproducing the matter and the manner of his original, works upon two lines.  His prime and primary object is an honest and faithful copy, adding naught to the sense nor abating aught of its peculiar cachet whilst he labours his best to please and edify his readers.  He has, however, or should have, another aim wherein is displayed the acme of hermeneutic art.  Every language can profitably lend something to and borrow somewhat from its neighbours, near or far, an epithet, a metaphor, a turn of phrase, a naive idiom and the translator of original mind will not neglect the frequent opportunities of enriching his mother tongue with alien and novel ornaments, which will justly be accounted barbarisms until formally adopted and naturalised.  Such are the “peoples” of Kossuth and the useful “lengthy,” an American revival of a good old English term.  Nor will my modern versionist relegate to a foot-note, as is the malpractice of his banal brotherhood the interesting and often startling phases of his foreign author’s phraseology and dull the text with its commonplace English equivalent—­thus doing the clean reverse of what he should do.  It is needless to quote instances concerning this phase of “Bathos:”  they abound in every occidental translation of every Oriental work, especially the French, such as Baron de Slane’s honest and conscientious “Ibn Khaldun.”  It was this grand ideal of a translator’s duty that made Eustache Deschamps, a contemporary poet, write of his English brother bard.—­

         “Grand Translateur, Noble Geoffroy Chaucier.”

Here,

“The firste finder of our faire language”

is styled a “Socrates in philosophy, a Seneca in morals, an Angel in conduct and a great Translator,” which apparent anti-climax has scandalised not a little inditers of “Lives” and “Memoirs.”  The title is given simply because Chaucer translated (using the best and highest sense of the term) into his English tongue and its linguistic peculiarities, the thoughts and ideas of his foreign models—­the very letter and spirit of Petrarch and Boccacao.