Note 396 — IV FROM COWLEY TO POPE

Dedication of Examen Poeticum, Essays, v. 2, p. 10. Johnson, writing of the latter part of the seventeenth century, says, "The authority of Jonson, Sandys, and Holiday had fixed the judgment of the nation" (The Idler, 69), and Tytler, in his Essay on the Principles of Translation, 1791, says, "In poetical translation the English writers of the sixteenth, and the greatest part of the seventeenth century, seem to have had no other care than (in Denham's phrase) to translate language into language, and to have placed their whole merit in presenting a literal and servile transcript of their original."