the Ode which had suggested the metre in its unmutilated state, I
translated it into the mutilated form, not caring either to encounter
the inconvenience of the double rhymes, or to make confusion worse
confounded by giving it, what it has in the Latin, a separate form of
its own.

The remaining metres may be dismissed in a very few words. As a general
rule, I have avoided couplets of any sort, and chosen some kind of
stanza. As a German critic has pointed out, all the Odes of Horace,
with one doubtful exception, may be reduced to quatrains; and though
this peculiarity does not, so far as we can see, affect the character
of any of the Horatian metres (except, of course, those that are
written in stanzas), or influence the structure of the Latin, it must
be considered as a happy circumstance for those who wish to render
Horace into English. In respect of restraint, indeed, the English
couplet may sometimes be less inconvenient than the quatrain, as it is,
on the whole, easier to run couplet into couplet than to run quatrain
into quatrain; but the couplet seems hardly suitable for an English
lyrical poem of any length, the very notion of lyrical poetry
apparently involving a complexity which can only be represented by
rhymes recurring at intervals. In the case of one of the three poems
written by Horace in the measure called the greater Asclepiad, ("Tu ne
quoesieris,") I have adopted the couplet; in another ("Nullam, Vare,")
the quatrain, the determining reason in the two cases being the length
of the two Odes, the former of which consists but of eight lines, the
latter of sixteen. The metre which I selected for each is the thirteen-
syllable trochaic of "Locksley Hall;" and it is curious to observe the
different effect of the metre according as it is written in two lines
or in four. In the "Locksley Hall" couplet its movement is undoubtedly
trochaic; but when it is expanded into a quatrain, as in Mrs.