obloquy; and I have never courted popular applause. If I have met with any share of it, .66 non recepi sed rapui." No difference of opinion, however, shall hinder me from cultivating your friendship, while you permit me to do so. I have not written this to discuss these matters in a prolonged controversy (I wish we may never say more about them), but to comply with your commands, which ever shall have due weight with me. I am most respectfully and most affectionately yours, EDMUND BURKE. EDMUND BURKE TO ARTHUR MURPHY, ESQ. Duke Street, Sunday, May 6, 1793. MY DEAR SIR, I WAS in the country when your most valuable and most acceptable present was left at my house. Since my return, really and literally an instant of time has not been my own: except the hours in which I have sought in vain for sleep, I have passed almost every hour in Westminster Hall and its purlieus. From nine o'clock yesterday morning until past six in the evening, I did not stir from thence. Let this disagreeable employment be my excuse, for not having till now discharged the pleasing duty of making my acknowledgments to you for the great honour you have been pleased to confer upon me, with a promptitude equal to the warmth and sincerity of my gratitude. To have my name united with yours and that of Tacitus, is a distinction to which I am and ever shall be truly sensible. The value of the gift is to my feelings infinitely enhanced when it comes from a man of talents, virtue, and independent spirit, which seeks for what aspires to be congenial with it, and does not aim to connect itself with greatness, riches, or power. I thank you for the partial light in which you regard my weak endeavours for the conservation of that ancient order of things in which we were born, and in which we have lived neither unhappily nor disgracefully, and (you at least) not unprofitably to your country. As to me, in truth I can claim nothing more than good intention in the part I have to act. Since I am publicly placed (however little suitably so to my abilities or inclination), I have struggled to the best of my power against two great public evils, growing out of the most sacred of all things, liberty and authority. In the writings which you are so indulgent to bear, I have struggled against the tyranny of freedom in this my longest and last struggle, I contend against the licentiousness of power. When I retire from this, successful or defeated, your work will either add to my satisfaction, or furnish me with comfort. Securiorem et uberiorem, materiam senatuti seposui. I quote the original, as I have not yet had time enough to turn to that part of your translation, where the same thought is certainly not less happily expressed. I am, with most sincere respect and affection, my dear sir, your most faithful, obliged, and obedient humble servant, EDM. BURKE, EDMUND BURKE TO ARTHUR MURPHY, ESQ. MY DEAR SIR, Beaconsfield, Dec. 8, 1793. I HAVE not been as early as, to all appearance, I ought to have been, in my acknowledgments for your present. I received it in due time; but my delay was not from a want of a due sense of the value of what you have sent, or of the honour you have done me in sending it. But I have had some visiters to whom I was obliged to attend; and I have had some business to do, which, though it is not worth your while to be troubled with it, occupied almost every hour of the time I could spare from my guests: until yesterday it was not in my power so much as to open your Tacitus. I have read the first book through; besides dipping here and there into other parts. I am extremely delighted with it. You have done what hitherto, I think, has not been done in England: you have given us a translation of a Latin prose writer, which may be read with pleasure. It would be no compliment at all to prefer your translation to the last, which appeared with such a pomp of patronage. Gordon was an author fashionable in his time, but he never wrote any thing worthy of much notice, but that work; by which he has obtained a kind of eminence in bad writing: so that one cannot pass it by with mere neglect. It is clear to me that he did not understand the language from which he ventured to translate; and that he had formed a very whimsical idea of excellence with regard to 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 |