And with the bow to his shoulder faithful
He who with pure dew laveth of Castaly
His flowing locks, who holdeth of Lycia
The oak forest and the wood that bore him,
Delos' and Patara's own Apollo,"--

admirably finished as it is, and highly pleasing as a fragment,
scarcely persuades us that twenty stanzas of the same workmanship would
be read with adequate pleasure, still less that the same satisfaction
would be felt through six-and-thirty Odes. After all, however, a sober
critic will be disposed rather to pass judgment on the past than to
predict the future, knowing, as he must, how easily the "solvitur
ambulando" of an artist like Mr. Tennyson may disturb a whole chain
of ingenious reasoning on the possibilities of things.

The question of the language into which Horace should be translated is
not less important than that of the metre; but it involves far less
discussion of points of detail, and may, in fact, be very soon
dismissed. I believe that the chief danger which a translator has to
avoid is that of subjection to the influences of his own period.
Whether or no Mr. Merivale is right in supposing that an analogy exists
between the literature of the present day and that of post-Augustan
Rome, it will not, I think, be disputed that between our period and the
Augustan period the resemblances are very few, perhaps not more than
must necessarily exist between two periods of high cultivation. It is
the fashion to say that the characteristic of the literature of the
last century was shallow clearness, the expression of obvious thoughts
in obvious, though highly finished language; it is the fashion to
retort upon our own generation that its tendency is to over-thinking
and over-expression, a constant search for thoughts which shall not he