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Canon 93Reviewers also faulted Nott’s translation for lacking fluency. TheMonthly Review remarked that “we would praise this translator for hisgeneral correctness with respect to the English version, yet hisinattention to rhime is too gross and too frequent not to incur censure”(Monthly Review 1797:278). The British Critic complained of “greatirregularities both with regard to the spirit, correctness, and harmony”(British Critic 1798:671–672). Lamb’s prosody was apparently notspirited enough for several reviewers—his versions of the “minorpieces” get described as “languid,” or devoid of “poetical ease andbeauty”—but at least one magazine, the Monthly Review, found that he“preserved no small portion of the spirit and dignity of the original,”singling out Lamb’s rendering of Carmen V for special praise as “thebest which we have seen, with the exception only of Ben Jonson’s,”recognizing Lamb’s Catullus as a peculiarly English phenomenon,indicative of the dominance of fluency in poetry translation (MonthlyReview 1822:11, 9).We can more fully understand the translators’ different motives andmethods by considering their translations in the context of their otherwork, their lives, and their different historical moments. A practicingphysician who was constantly engaged in literary projects, Nott (1751–1825) published a number of books that drew impressively on thetradition of the love lyric in classical, European, and Orientallanguages (Gentleman’s Magazine 1825:565–566; DNB). Late in hiscareer, he wrote a prose romance entitled Sappho (1803), made aselection from Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1810), and edited amiscellany of sixteenth-century English poetry beginning with SirThomas Wyatt (1812). The bulk of his work, however, was translation,and over a thirty-year period he produced book-length translations ofJohannes Secundus Nicolaius (1775), Petrarch (1777), Propertius (1782),Hafiz (1787), Bonefonius (1797), Lucretius (1799), and Horace (1803).The Catullus translation (1795) was an obvious choice for a translatorwith Nott’s interests and energies.He was so prolific because he felt that more was at stake intranslating than literary appreciation, even though aesthetic valuesalways guided his choices as well. The mimetic concept of translationthat made him choose a foreignizing method to preserve the differenceof the foreign text also made him think of his work as an act of culturalrestoration. This was the rationale he often gave in his prefatorystatements. His “Attempt to transfer unblemished into the Englishlanguage the numberless Beauties with which the Basia of Secundusabound” was intended to draw “a deserving Author from that