CHAP. IV-] ESCAPE PREVENTED,

" never for the future traduce * and injure any of those poor 1753.
" ancients who never injured him, by thus pestering the JEUJG
" world with such translations as even his own schoolboys
" ought to be whipped for." f Nor with less just severity
was the last of these unhappy gentlemen rebuked. With
very lively power Goldsmith dissected the absurdities of Mr.
Barrett's version of poor ill-treated Ovid's Epistles; a classic
to all appearance doomed, he humorously interposed, "to
" successive Metamorphoses: being sometimes transposed by
" schoolmasters unacquainted with English, and sometimes
" transversed by ladies who knew no Latin: thus he has
" alternately worn the dress of a pedant or a rake; either
" crawling in humble prose or having his hints explained
" into unbashful meaning." He showed that Mr. Barrett
was a bad critic, and no poet; and he passed from lofty
to low in his illustrations with amusing effect. Giving
two or three instances of the translator's skill in "paren-
" thetically clapping one sentence within another," this,
pursued Goldsmith, " contributes not a little to obscurity;
" and obscurity, we all know, is nearly allied to admiration.
" Thus, when the reader begins a sentence which he finds
" pregnant with another, which still teems with a third, and
" so on, he feels the same surprise which a countryman doe& .,
" at Bartholomew fair. Hocus shows a bag, in appearance
" empty; slap, and out come a cloven new laid eggs; slap
" again, and the number is doubled; but what is his aniaze-
" nient, when it swells with the hen that laid them !" The
poetry and criticism disposed of, the scholarship shared their
fate. Mr. Barrett being master of the thriving grammar-

* Goldsmith's remark may remind us of the French lady, -who, being compli-
mented on her English, and asked in what manner she had contriTed to speak it
so well, replied, " I began "by traducing."

°t Critical Review, iv. 409, November 1757.h in my circumstances, as I am already in my