of monotony and lack of poetical quality. A short extract from Dr.
Crane's translation will illustrate this very clearly--

'No species of hardships,
Longer, O maiden, arises before me as strange and unlooked for:
All things have I foreknown, and in soul have already endured them.
One special thing I crave, since here, it is said, that the gateway
Stands of the monarch infernal, and refluent Acheron's dark pool:
Let it be mine to go down to the sight and face of my cherished
Father, and teach me the way, and the sacred avenues open.'

Nor is William Morris' attempt to devise a new metre anything but
disappointing. It is surprising that so delightfully endowed a poet
should have so often missed the music of Virgil's verse as he has
done in his translation, and the archaisms with which his work
abounds, though they might be suitable in a translation of Homer,
are only a source of irritation in the case of Virgil.

For the best metre to use we must look in a different direction.
Virgil made use of the dactylic hexameter because it was the literary
tradition of his day that epics should be written in that metre. In
the same way it might be argued, the English tradition points to blank
verse as the correct medium. This may be so, but its use demands that
the translator should be as great a poet as Virgil. Had Tennyson ever
translated the _Aeneid_, it would doubtless have been as nearly
faultless as any translation could be, as is shown by the version
of Sir Theodore Martin, which owes so much of its stately charm to
its close adherence to the manner of Tennyson. A typical passage is
the description of Dido's love for Aeneas--