Page:The Golden Ass of Apuleius.djvu/22

 loyalty to speech, his eager search after the strange—and living—word, his love of an art which knows no concealment—these qualities proclaim the Decadent. And that Symbolist is wayward indeed who finds not matter for his fancy in the countless stories, which a perverse ingenuity has twisted a hundred times into allegory.

Such the author and his book. And when William Adlington, in the untried youth of English prose, undertook the translation of The Golden Asse, you would have thought no apter enterprise possible. Primitive and Decadent approach artin the same temper. Each is of necessity inclined to Euphuism. In the sixteenth century the slang, the proverb, the gutter phrase, which Apuleius brought back to the Latin tongue were not yet sifted from English by the pedantry of scholars. But William Adlington, though an Elizabethan, was something of a purist. To be sure, he was unable to purge his diction of colour and variety, and his manner was far better suited to the rendering of Apuleius than the prose of to-day, which has passed through the sieve of the eighteenth century. But with an excellent modesty he pleads acceptance for his simple translation. Though he applauds the ' franke and flourishing stile' of his author, 'as he seems to have the Muses at his will to feed and maintaine his pen,' he uses of deliberation ' more common and familiar words'—the phrase proves the essential recognition of his own style—' fearing lest the book should appear very obscure and darke, and thereby consequently loathsome to the reader." Indeed, he elected to translate the one book of the world which demanded the free employment of strange terms, and set himself incontinent