undertaking the latter. Both classes of works are doubtless
explicable as products of the same original genius: but they differ
so widely in many of their characteristics, that success in
rendering the one, though greater than any which I can hope to have
attained, would afford no presumption that the translator would be
found to have the least aptitude for the other. As a matter of fact,
while the Odes still continue to invite translation after
translation, the Satires and Epistles, popular as they were among
translators and imitators a hundred years ago, have scarcely been
attempted at all since that great revolution in literary taste which
was effected during the last ten years of the last century and the
first ten years of the present. Byron's Hints from Horace, Mr.
Howes' forgotten but highly meritorious version of the Satires and
Epistles, to which I hope to return before long, and a few
experiments by Mr. Theodore Martin, published in the notes to his
translation of the Odes and elsewhere, constitute perhaps the whole
recent stock of which a new translator may be expected to take
account. In one sense this is encouraging: in another dispiriting.
The field is not pre-occupied: but the reason is, that general
opinion has pronounced its cultivation unprofitable and hopeless.

No doubt, apart from fluctuations in the taste of the reading
public, there are special reasons why a version of this portion of
Horace's works should be a difficult, perhaps an impracticable
undertaking. It would not be easy to maintain that a Roman satirist
was incapable of adequate representation in English in the face of
such an instance to the contrary as Gifford's Juvenal, probably,
take it all in all, the very best version of a classic in the
language. But though Juvenal has many passages which sufficiently
remind us of Horace, some of them light and playful, others level