Page:Essay on the Principles of Translation - Tytler (1791, 1st ed).djvu/180

 niteat; "that is, How the deuce should such a nose fail?" Tristram Shandy, vol. 3. ch. 7. Miles peregrini in faciem suspexit. Dî boni, nova forma nasi! "The centinel look'd up into the stranger's face.—Never saw such a nose in his life!" Ibid.

there is nothing which so much conduces both to the ease and spirit of composition, as a happy use of idiomatic phrases, there is nothing which a translator, who has a moderate command of his own language, is so apt to carry to a licentious extreme. Eachard, whose translations of Terence and of Plautus have, upon the whole, much merit, is extremely censurable for his intemperate use of idiomatic phrases. In the first act of the Andria, Davus thus speaks to himself: