Latin is nothing if it is not idiomatic, and the English in
consequence, if it is to be anything, must be idiomatic also.

There is yet something more to be said on the question of style. The
exact mode of representing Horace's persiflage is, as I have
intimated already, not an easy thing to determine. The translators
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the most part made
their author either vulgar or flat, sometimes both. Probably no
better rule can be laid down for the translator of the present day,
than that he should try to follow the ordinary language of good
society, wavering and uncertain as that standard is. I do not mean
so much the language of the better sort of light literature as the
language of conversation and of familiar letter-writing. Even some
of the idiomatic blemishes of conversation may perhaps, in such a
work, be venial, if not laudable. I have not always sought to be a
minute purist even on points of grammar. Cowper, rather singularly,
appears from his practice to proscribe colloquial abbreviations in
poetry, though they were, I suppose, at least as usual in his time
as in ours, and are used by Pope in his lighter works with little
scruple. I have adopted them freely through nearly the whole of my
version, though of course there are some passages where they could
not be properly employed. Gifford says in the Essay on the Roman
Satirists prefixed to his Juvenal that the general character of his
translation will be found to be plainness: and if I do not
misunderstand what he means by the term, it exactly represents the
quality which I have endeavoured to attain myself. As a general
rule, where a rendering presented itself to me which in dealing with
another author I should welcome as poetical, I hare deliberately
rejected it, and cast about instead for something which, without
being feeble or slipshod, should have an idiomatic prosaic ring.