Page:The Golden Ass of Apuleius.djvu/23

 to avoid slang and to simplify redundancies. And his restraint is the more unexpected when you recall the habit of contemporary translators. Barnaby Rich studded Herodotus thick with colloquialisms and fresh-minted words. Philemon Holland made no attempt to chasten his vocabulary. But Adlington, his opportunity being the higher, fell the more marvellously below it. For the most part, then, you will ransack his version in vain for obsolete words or exotic flowers of speech. And yet not even his love of simplicity has kept his vocabulary entirely pure. Again and again a coined phrase, a strange form shows, like a dash of colour, upon his page. 'The roperipe boy'—thus he renders puer ille peremptor meus by a happy inspiration, which Apuleius himself might envy. Fresh and unhackneyed is 'the gleed of the sun" for jubaris orbe. How exquisitely does 'a swathell of red silke' represent russea fasceola! 'Traffe or baggage' is more pleasantly picturesque than sarcinam vel laciniam, and one's heart rejoices to hear a churl styled 'a rich chuffe.' Again, 'ungles' is far more expressive, if less common, than 'claws'; and who would write 'niggardly' when 'niggish' is ready to his hand? And is not 'a carraine stinke' a high-sounding version of fetore nimio? To encounter so sturdy and wholesome a phrase as 'I smelling his crafty and subtil fetch'—though it be a poor echo of ego perspiciens malum istum verberonem blaterantem et inconcinne causificantem—is to regret the impoverishment of our English tongue. But not often are we rejoiced by the unexpected, and for the most part Adlington is a scrupulous critic of his diction. As he makes no attempt to represent in English his author's vocabulary, so is he wont to shirk the imagery,