ABSTRACT
We expected great things from this translation, and we have been bitterly disappointed. In the irritation caused by that disappointment we may have said what we should be sorry for, but we feel keenly that the language which De Quincey used, and by his own admission unfairly, about Keats might not unfairly be applied to Mr. Browning. He has trampled upon his mother-tongue as with the hoofs of a buffalo, and played such fantastic tricks with its syntax, prosody, and idiom that it requires all the noble poems with which he has enriched and adorned the English language ‘to weigh against the deep treason of these unparalleled offences’. If he should ever think of writing more ‘transcriptions’, we hope that before doing so he will read and mark and inwardly digest the warning given by a far more ‘topping critic’ than ourselves:
Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus Interpres; nec desilies imitator in arctum, Unde pedem proferre pudor vetet, aut operis lex.1
