Page:Essay on the Principles of Translation - Tytler (1791, 1st ed).djvu/238

 author intended, that the composition should be quite characteristic of its author, a ludicrous compound of gravity and absurdity. In the translation of Motteux there is perhaps too much gravity; but Smollet has rendered the composition altogether burlesque. The same remark is applicable to the song of Antonio, beginning Yo sé, Olalla, que me adoras, and to many of the other poems.

the whole, I am inclined to think, that the version of Motteux is by far the best we have yet seen of the Novel of Cervantes; and that if corrected in its licentious abbreviations and enlargements, and in some other particulars which I have noticed in the course of this comparison, we should have nothing to desire superior to it in the way of translation.