the style which I had adopted imposed on me difficulties peculiar to itself, from which a more judicious choice might have preserved me. Virgil was a more careful composer than Scott or Byron, not only in the selection of his words, but in the structure of his sentences. He was a great rhetorician, and a master of that terse pointed style of which the Latinity of the silver age is a development and an exaggeration. Sentences occur repeatedly in his writings which require to be rendered as briefly and compactly as those of Horace. Whether the octosyllabic metre is congenial to that mode of writing I will not presume to say: but it has not yet been applied to it, except, it may be, by writers like Gay, whose style is confessedly too low for heroic poetry. Consequently I have frequently had to write in a manner which I was conscious was not the manner of my model, attempting to impart to the shorter couplet some of that dignified sententiousness which belongs more properly to the longer. If I have failed in this, I can only excuse myself by pleading the necessity of choosing among difficulties, which appears to be the inevitable condition of the translator’s work.

Perhaps I may be judged to have some advantage over my rhyming predecessors in respect of closeness to the original. It would be discreditable to me if the minute study which it has been my duty and my pleasure to give to every line, I might almost say every word, of my author in the prosecution of my commentary, did not reflect itself to some degree in the translation. It is even possible that a casual reader may overlook many instances of close rendering; that he may suppose various forms of expression to be gratuitous which have been really adopted in order to bring out more fully the force, as I conceive it, of the Latin. The characteristic art of Virgil’s language, I must own, is a thing which I have made no attempt to represent. Whether that peculiar habit which I have mentioned elsewhere as common to him and to Sophocles, the habit of hinting at two or three modes of expression while actually employing one, is capable of being transferred into English, I do not know: certainly none of his translators has effected the transference. It is obvious that the experiment is one to perform which would require the utmost nicety: everything would depend on the exact poetical equivalence of the various turns of phrase, either severally or as presented in combination: and a shade more or less in each case might produce not beauty but deformity. Such felicities, in fact, through well worthy of critical investigation, are hardly to be discovered by critical search: while the translator was seeking them, any spirit that there might be in his verses would be apt to evaporate. It is only one to whom they would suggest themselves naturally, in conformity I mean with his natural genius, who would be able to employ them in translation without injury to the character of his work: and he must be another Virgil or another Sophocles. A translator not so constituted will be better employed in endeavouring to bring about resemblance to his author by applying a principle of compensation, by strengthening his version in any way best suited to his powers, so long as it be not repugnant to the genius of the original, and trusting that the effect of the whole will be seen to have been cared for, though the claims of the parts may appear to have been neglected. Even the simpler peculiarities of Virgil’s style, such as his fondness for saying the same thing twice over in the same line, I have not always been at pains to copy. What is graceful in the Latin will not always be graceful in a translation: and to be graceful is one of the first duties of a translator of the Æneid. It has often happened that by ignoring a repetition I have been able to include the entire sense of a hexameter in a single English line of eight syllables; and in such cases I have been glad to make the sacrifice. Not the least of the evils of the measure I have chosen is a tendency to diffuseness: and in translating one of the least diffuse of poets such a tendency requires a strong remedy. Accordingly, the duty of conciseness has always been present to my mind; and the result is that my translation, with its lines of eight and occasionally six syllables, does not, I hope, exceed by much more than one-half the number of lines in the original, where fifteen syllables on the average go to the hexameter.

A similarity will occasionally be found between my own and other versions. In the few cases where the arises from intentional appropriation, or where I had reason to think that I had unconsciously recollected the words of others, I have made the requisite acknowledgment in the notes. Possibly in other instances also there may have been unconscious recollection, as a comparison of the three rhyming translators, Dryden, Pitt, and Symmons, used to be a favourite occupation of my schoolboy days. My coincidences, I believe, are oftener with Pitt’s version than with either of the others; a fact which I incline to attribute to the more conventional character of his verses, which are seldom so individual that they might not easily occur to two writers independently. My knowledge of the different blank-verse translations is very slight