24 EARLY LIFE. 



Notwithstanding any vices in my translation, I cer- 

 tainly had acquired no habit of inaccurate version, no 

 contempt of strict closeness, or such faults must have 

 been cured by subsequent experience and reflection, as 

 well as the incorrect taste disclosed in the letter ; for 

 whatever I have since attempted in prose, and still 

 more the only efforts in verse, which the entire want 

 of poetical faculty has confined to translation, have 

 nothing to distinguish them but the rigorous close- 

 ness, the whole poetical merit clearly belonging to the 

 original. Of this an example may be given in the 

 commotion among my Eton friends caused by my 

 quoting from Horace in the House of Commons, when 

 repelling some most absurd slander of the grossest 

 description. Instead of the Latin 



" Falsus honor juvat et mendax infamia terret 

 Quern nisi mendosum et medicandum 1 " * 



I gave 



False honour charms, and lying slander scares, 

 Whom but the false and faulty 1 



Next day, in Westminster Hall, I was mobbed by 

 Eton friends at the bar, Jonathan Eaine at their 

 head, calling on me to say by what right I had used 

 words which they could not find either in Francis 

 or elsewhere, and requiring me to declare where 

 I had found them, but I would only answer, " No- 

 where." 



No doubt the merit of extreme closeness depends 

 much on the frame of the original, and it may be 



* Hor. Ep., I. xvi. 



