This alarmed the poetasters and
fiddlers of the town, who were used to deal in a more ordinary kind
of ware; and therefore laid down an established rule, which is
received as such to this day, "That nothing is capable of being well
set to music that is not nonsense."
This maxim was no sooner received, but we immediately fell to
translating the Italian operas; and as there was no great danger of
hurting the sense of those extraordinary pieces, our authors would
often make words of their own which were entirely foreign to the
meaning of the passages they pretended to translate; their chief
care being to make the numbers of the English verse answer to those
of the Italian, that both of them might go to the same tune. Thus
the famous swig in Camilla:
"Barbara sit' intendo," &c.
"Barbarous woman, yes, I know your meaning,"
which expresses the resentments of an angry lover, was translated
into that English lamentation,
"Frail are a lover's hopes," &c.
And it was pleasant enough to see the most refined persons of the
British nation dying away and languishing to notes that were filled
with a spirit of rage and indignation. It happened also very
frequently, where the sense was rightly translated, the necessary
transposition of words, which were drawn out of the phrase of one
tongue into that of another, made the music appear very absurd in
one tongue that was very natural in the other.
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