University of Virginia Library

The Noble Translator had, at first, laid the scene of these imagined dangers of his Man of Conscience among the Papists of Spain, and had translated the words “quæ loca fabulosus lambit Hydaspes” thus—“The fabling Spaniard licks the French;” but, recollecting that it is our interest just now to be respectful to Spanish Catholics (though there is certainly no earthly reason for our being even commonly civil to Irish ones), he altered the passage as it stands at present.

I cannot help calling the reader's attention to the peculiar ingenuity with which these lines are paraphrased. Not to mention the happy conversion of the Wolf into a Papist, (seeing that Romulus was suckled by a wolf, that Rome was founded by Romulus, and that the Pope has always reigned at Rome,) there is something particularly neat in supposing “ultra terminum” to mean vacation-time; and then the modest consciousness with which the Noble and Learned Translator has avoided touching upon the words “curis expeditis,” (or, as it has been otherwise read, “causis expeditis,”) and the felicitous idea of his being “inermis” when “without his wig,” are altogether the most delectable specimens of paraphrase in our language.

I must here remark, that the said Dick M*rt*n being a very good fellow, it was not at all fair to make a “malus Jupiter” of him.

There cannot be imagined a more happy illustration of the inseparability of Church and State, and their (what is called) “standing and falling together,” than this ancient apologue of Jack and Jill. Jack, of course, represents the State in this ingenious little Allegory.