Ozell taught himself several contemporary languages and had a good grounding in
Latin and
Greek from school. He began to act as a translator in addition to his work in accounting. Ozell's translations were not very strict, but they were of a better quality than those of his contemporaries. In 1705, Jonathan Swift's
Battle of the Books had appeared as a preface to
A Tale of a Tub. The
Battle of the Books was part of a general quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, where the question was between ancient authors (
Homer,
Virgil,
Horace, and
Aristotle) and contemporary ones and whether contemporary philosophy and science had surpassed what could be gathered from the classics. Swift's version of the Battle has all contemporary authors, and he names several of them, swept away by the ancient authors that they glossed. The
Battle was based on
Le Lutrin by
Boileau, and Ozell performed his own translation of
Le Lutrin in 1708. In his version, the contemporaries being blasted away were
Tory authors, and, in particular,
William Wycherley. Boileau was a great favorite of the "ancients" camp and the
Scriblerus Club in particular. In 1711 through 1713, Ozell published
The Works of Monsieur Boileau. He thus took the French
neoclassicist for the Whig side. This infuriated the Tory defenders of Wycherley, and both Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope struck back at Ozell. In 1708, Pope wrote ''Epigram, Occasion'd by Ozell's Translation of Bioleau's Lutrin'' and said, "those were slander'd most whom Ozell praised." Swift satirized Ozell in the
Introduction to Polite Conversation, and Pope mentioned Ozell again in
The Dunciad. In that poem, Dulness shows her champion her powers of conception and :"How, with less reading than makes felons 'scape, :Less human genius than God gives an ape, :Small thanks to France and none to Rome or Greece, :A past, vamp'd, future, old, reviv'd, new piece, :'Twixt
Plautus,
Fletcher,
Congreve, and
Corneille, :Can make a
Cibber,
Johnson, or
Ozell." (I. 235-40) In 1712, he translated
Anne Dacier's French retelling of the
Iliad into
blank verse. He was also at pains to express his anti-Catholicism with a translation of the life of
Veronica of Milan, whom he termed a saint, in 1716 (just after a
Jacobite uprising), and he took a political stance by translating
Paul de Rapin's
Dissertation sur les Whig et les Torys with a pro-Whig slant. In 1728, the
Dunciad Variorum appeared, and, the same year,
Richard Bundy published a translation of
Histoire romaine, depuis la fondation de Rome, a work Ozell was planning to translate. Ozell wrote a long treatise enumerating Bundy's mistakes and Pope's villainy, and he took out an ad to attack his enemies. In 1738, Ozell translated ''L'Embarras des richesses
(The Embarrassment of Riches'') by
Léonor Jean Christine Soulas d'Allainval, in so doing popularising the English phrase 'an embarrassment of riches'. ==References==