less remarkable for his terseness than for his ease: the tendency of
the octosyllabic metre in its colloquial form is to become slipshod,
interminable, in a word unclassical. Again, few of those who use it
apply it consistently to all Horace's hexameter poems: most make a
distinction, applying it to some and not to others. In point of
fact, however, it does not seem that any such distinction can be
made. Horace's lightest Satires or Epistles have generally something
grave about them: his gravest have more than one light passage. To
draw a metrical line in the English where none is drawn in the Latin
appears to me objectionable ipso facto where it can reasonably be
avoided. That it can be avoided in the present case does not really
admit of a doubt. The English heroic couplet, managed as Cowper has
managed it, is surely quite equal to representing all the various
changes of mood and temper which find their embodiment successively
in the Horatian hexameter. Cowper's more serious poems contain more
of deep and sustained gravity than is to be found in any similar
production of Horace: while on the other hand there are few things
in Horace so easy and sprightly as the Epistle to Joseph Hill,
nothing perhaps so absolutely prosaic as the Colubriad and the
verses to Mrs. Newton. There is also an advantage in rendering the
Satires of Horace in the metre which may be called the recognized
metre of English satire, and as such has always been employed (with
one very partial and grotesque exception) by the translators of
Juvenal. Lastly, I may be allowed to say that, while very
distrustful of my powers of managing the graver heroic, where so
many great masters have gone before me, I felt less diffidence in
attempting the lower and more colloquial form of the measure, as not
requiring the same command of rhythm, and not exposing a writer to
the same amount of invidious comparison with his predecessors.