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Updated: May 28, 2025
Aristaenetus is one of those weak, florid sophists, who flourished in the decline and degradation of ancient literature, and strewed their gaudy flowers of rhetoric over the dead muse of Greece. He is evidently of a much later period than Alciphron, to whom he is also very inferior in purity of diction, variety of subject, and playfulness of irony.
It was vastly more entertaining to translate the impassioned prose of Aristaenetus into impassioned verse, especially in collaboration with a cherished friend, than to yawn over Euclid and to grumble over Cocker. The translation of Aristaenetus, the boyish task of Sheridan and his friend Halhed, still enjoys a sort of existence in the series of classical translations in Bohn's Library.
But by far the most interesting part of the volume is the last Epistle of the book, "From a Lover resigning his Mistress to his Friend," in which Halhed has contrived to extract from the unmeaningness of the original a direct allusion to his own fate; and, forgetting Aristaenetus and his dull personages, thinks only of himself, and Sheridan, and Miss Linley.
But the profits expected from their literary undertakings were the only means to which he looked for the realizing of this dream; and he accordingly implores his friend, with the most comic piteousness, to drive the farce on the stage by main force, and to make Aristaenetus sell whether he will or not.
Aristaenetus the Nicaean said, that he remembered he had read somewhere that sweet things mixed with wine make it less heady, and that some physicians prescribe to one that hath drunk freely, before he goes to bed, a crust of bread dipped in honey. And therefore, if sweet mixtures weaken strong wine, it is reasonable that wine should not be heady till it hath lost its sweetness.
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