It is undeniable that he is the best trans lator who can transmute the spirit of one language into that of another. To translate properly is to clothe the ideas of a foreign author with a garment of our native words which shall fit them as well as did their original robe; to give the idiom of one lan guage by its corresponding idiom in another; not simply to change the French word into an English one. It is the spirit and not the letter that is asked for by the reader.