Translations
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The following Translations were selected from many others done by the author in his youth; for the most part indeed but a sort of exercises, while he was improving himself in the languages, and carried by his early bent to poetry to perform them rather in verse than prose. Mr. Dryden’s Fables came out about that time,1 which occasioned the translations from Chaucer. They were first separately printed in Miscellanies by J. Tonson and B. Lintot, and afterwards collected in the quarto edition of 1717. The Imitations of English Authors, which are added at the end, were done as early; some of them at fourteen or fifteen years old; but having also got into Miscellanies, we have put them here together to complete this juvenile volume.2
Footnotes
1 In the year 1700. They were the most popular of Dryden’s works, and were in the hands of every reader when Pope was learning his art.
[2] This advertisement was first prefixed by Pope to vol. iii. of his works, 8vo, 1736. The contents of the “juvenile volume” were The Temple of Fame, Sappho to Phaon, Vertumnus and Pomona, The Fable of Dryope, The first book of Statius’s Thebais, January and May, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, and the Imitations of English Poets. Pope apologises for printing the Imitations by saying that they had got into Miscellanies, which is an insinuation that the pieces had found their way to the press without his consent. It was he himself who published them. They are inserted in the present edition among the minor poems.