John Ogilby - Literary Reputation

Literary Reputation

In the years that followed, Ogilby's reputation as a translator was to suffer from the attacks made on him by John Dryden in his satirical MacFlecknoe, and by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad. Whatever the justice of these, it should be borne in mind that Dryden had himself translated the work of Virgil, as Pope had of Homer, so it was in their interest to encourage a preference for their own products. Following their lead, the Scottish philosopher David Hume used Ogilby's work to illustrate the idea that common sense frequently appeals to a "standard of taste" in aesthetic matters: 'Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean.' (Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste", originally published in his Four Dissertations (1757).)

Such judgments stuck and it is only recently that Ogilby's work has again been given scholarly attention, particularly his versions of Aesop's Fables. These, according to the short life of him published by Theophilus Cibber, were 'generally confessed to have exceeded whatever hath been done before in that kind'. They renewed interest in the fable as a literary medium and led the way in suggesting their adaptation to the troubled politics of the time. Both Dryden and Pope were as indebted to him in this as Dryden was for certain lines in his own translation of the Aeneid.