In recent years students of Restoration and eighteenth-century satire have learned a new respect for the variety and sophistication of the Augustan imitation. No longer do we praise the modern poet for imitating, say, Horace, closely, or blame him for imitating freely. Nor are we surprised to find him both free and close at different moments in the same poem, or to find that he has imitated only a portion of the parent-poem or that he has, in Dryden's words, written in a manner “not to translate his [the author's] words, or to be confined to his sense, but only to set him as a pattern, and to write, as he supposes that author would have done, had he lived in our age, and in our country.” For Dryden, however, this is a pernicious form, since it violates the translator's demand to show his “author's thoughts” and thus is “the greatest wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of the dead.” Another of Dryden's objections, however, may be taken as a central aspect of the creative power of the imitation – a form that is not a malign species of translation, but a separate, if related, genre which, depending upon the author's intention, uses the parent-poem as an integral part or as a central backdrop for its own purposes.