thought simply of the requirements of the Ode in question, not of those
of the rest of its class. Indeed, I may say that it was the thought of
the metre which led me to try if I could translate the Ode. Having
accomplished my attempt, I turned to another Ode of the same class, the
scarcely less celebrated "Quem tu, Melpomene." For this I took a
different metre, which happens to be identical with that of a solitary
Ode in the Second Book, "Non ebur neque aureum," being guided still by
my feeling about the individual Ode, not by any more general
considerations. I did not attempt a third until I had proceeded
sufficiently far in my undertaking to see that I should probably
continue to the end. Then I had to consider the question of a uniform
metre to answer to the Latin. Both of those which I had already tried
were rendered impracticable by a double rhyme, which, however
manageable in one or two Odes, is unmanageable, as I have before
intimated, in the case of a large number. The former of the two
measures, divested of the double rhyme, would, I think, lose most of
its attractiveness; the latter suffers much less from the privation:
the latter accordingly I chose. The trochaic character of the first
line seems to me to give it an advantage over any metre composed of
pure iambics, if it were only that it discriminates it from those
alternate ten-syllable and eight-syllable iambics into which it would
be natural to render many of the Epodes. At the same time, it did not
appear worth while to rewrite the two Odes already translated, merely
for the sake of uniformity, as the principle of correspondence to the
Latin, the alternation of longer and shorter lines, is really the same
in all three cases. Nay, so tentative has been my treatment of the
whole matter, that I have even translated one Ode, the third of Book I,
into successive rather than into alternate rhymes, so that readers may
judge of the comparative effect of the two varieties. After this
confession of irregularity, I need scarcely mention that on coming to