While Dryden had many admirers, he also had his share of critics, Mark Van Doren among them. Doren complained that in translating Vergil's Aeneid, Dryden had added "a fund of phrases with which he could expand any passage that seemed to him curt". Dryden did not feel such expansion was a fault, arguing that as Latin is a naturally concise language it cannot be duly represented by a comparable number of words in English. "He...recognized that Vergil 'had the advantage of a language wherein much may be comprehended in a little space' (5:329–30). The 'way to please the best Judges...is not to Translate a Poet literally; and Virgil least of any other' (5:329)" [26]
For example, take lines 789–795 of Book 2 when Aeneas sees and receives a message from the ghost of his wife, Creusa.