Deep frauds, before, and open force behind;
The Furies' iron beds, and strife that shakes
Her hissing tresses, and unfolds her snakes.'

But though the heroic couplet may have conveyed to Dryden's age
something of the effect of the Virgilian hexameter, it does nothing
of the kind to us. Probably we are prejudiced in the matter by Pope's
Homer.

Professor Conington's translation certainly has spirit and energy,
but he was decidedly unfortunate in his choice of metre. To attempt
to render 'the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man'
by fluent octosyllabics was bound to result in incongruity, as in
the following passage, where the sombre warning of the Sibyl to
Aeneas becomes merely a sprightly reminder that--

'The journey down to the abyss
Is prosperous and light,
The palace gates of gloomy Dis
Stand open day and night;
But upward to retrace the way
And pass into the light of day,
There comes the stress of labour; this
May task a hero's might.'

The various attempts that have been made to translate the poem in
the metre of the original have all been sad failures. And from Richard
Stanyhurst, whom Thomas Nash described as treading 'a foul,
lumbering, boistrous, wallowing measure, in his translation of
Virgil,' down to our own time, no one has succeeded in avoiding faults