addition of rhyme would only make it rhymed prose, and we should be as
far as ever from "verse really deserving the name."[E] Unless (which I
can hardly imagine) the mere incident of 'terminal consonance' can
constitute that verse which would not be verse independently, this
argument is equally good against attempting verse of any kind: we should
still be writing disguised, and had better write undisguised, prose.
Prose translations are of course tenable, and are (I am told) advocated
by another very eminent critic. These considerations against them occur
to one: that, among the characteristics of his original which the
translator is bound to preserve, one is that he wrote metrically; and
that the prattle which passes muster, and sounds perhaps rather pretty
than otherwise, in metre, would in plain prose be insufferable. Very
likely some exceptional sort of prose may be meant, which would dispose
of all such difficulties: but this would be harder for an ordinary
writer to evolve out of his own brain, than to construct any species of
verse for which he has at least a model and a precedent.

These remarks are made to shew that my metres were not selected, as it
might appear, at hap-hazard. Metre is not so unimportant as to justify
that. For the rest, I have used Briggs's edition[F] (_Poetæ Bucolici
Græci_), and have never, that I am aware of, taken refuge in any various
reading where I could make any sense at all of the text as given by him.
Sometimes I have been content to put down what I felt was a wrong
rendering rather than omit; but only in cases where the original was
plainly corrupt, and all suggested emendations seemed to me hopelessly
wide of the mark. What, for instance, may be the true meaning of
[Greek: bolbhost tist kochlhiast] in the fourteenth Idyll I have no
idea. It is not very important. And no doubt the sense of the last two
lines of the "_Death of Adonis_" is very unlikely to be what I have made
it. But no suggestion that I met with seemed to me satisfactory or even