'Tis True, Composing Is the Nobler Part
Bur Good Translation Is No Easie Art'
ROSCOMMON, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of.
An Essay on Translated Verse … London, Printed for Jacob Tonson … 1684.
Small 4to, pp. [16], 24, with the medial blank (a)4; cut a bit close shaving the sidenotes on A3 and C3v, else a very good copy with the usual mistakes in the first sheet (A2 mis-signed A on the recto and A2 on the verso, p. [7] mispaginated 23); recent quarter morocco and marbled boards.
First edition of Roscommon’s influential Essay, in heroic couplets, which owes much to Boileau and to the author’s own education in France after the attainder of his kinsman the Earl of Strafford, with an introductory poem by Dryden.
Dryden, an intimate friend and himself the translator of Boileau’s Art of Poetry in the preceding year, contributes a long commendatory poem. Johnson was a later admirer and praised Roscommon as a critic who ‘improved taste’ and was ‘the only correct writer of verse before Addison’.
ESTC R7257; Macdonald 18a; Wing R 1930.