Page:Essay on the Principles of Translation - Tytler (1791, 1st ed).djvu/257

 quate to the representation of humour, but can convey no idea of wit. Of this singular poem, Voltaire has attempted to give a specimen to his countrymen by a translation; but in this experiment he says he has found it necessary to concentrate the first four hundred lines into little more than eighty of the translation. The truth is, that, either insensible of that part of the merit of the original, or conscious of his own inability to give a just idea of it, he has left out all that constitutes the humour of the painting, and attached himself solely to the wit of the composition. In the ori-