is obscure and subject to the misinterpretation and emendation of a later
generation. 

A translation worthy of the name is as much the product of a literary
epoch as it is of the brain and labor of a scholar; and Melmouth's
version of the letters of Pliny the Younger, made, as it was, at a
period when the art of English letter writing had attained its highest
excellence, may well be the despair of our twentieth century apostles of
specialization.  Who, today, could imbue a translation of the Golden Ass
with the exquisite flavor of William Adlington's unscholarly version of
that masterpiece? Who could rival Arthur Golding's rendering of the
Metamorphoses of Ovid, or Francis Hicke's masterly rendering of Lucian's
True History? But eternal life means endless change and in nothing is
this truth more strikingly manifest than in the growth and decadence of
living languages and in the translation of dead tongues into the ever
changing tissue of the living.  Were it not for this, no translation
worthy of the name would ever stand in need of revision, except in
instances where the discovery and collation of fresh manuscripts had
improved the text.  In the case of an author whose characters speak in
the argot proper to their surroundings, the necessity for revision is