Nor let the critic, if he find the meaning of Camoens in some instances altered, imagine that he has found a blunder in the Translator.... It was not to gratify the dull few, whose greatest pleasure in reading a translation is to see what the author exactly says; it was to give a poem that might live in the English language which was the ambition of the Translator.... And the original is in the hands of the world.

The Lusiad; Or, The Discovery of India: an Epic Poem (1776), Introduction, p. cli.