obvious and words which shall be above the level of received
conventionality. Accepting these as descriptions, however imperfect, of
two different types of literature, we can have no doubt to which
division to refer the literary remains of Augustan Rome. The Odes of
Horace, in particular, will, I think, strike a reader who comes back to
them after reading other books, as distinguished by a simplicity,
monotony, and almost poverty of sentiment, and as depending for the
charm of their external form not so much on novel and ingenious images
as on musical words aptly chosen and aptly combined. We are always
hearing of wine-jars and Thracian convivialities, of parsley wreaths
and Syrian nard; the graver topics, which it is the poet's wisdom to
forget, are constantly typified by the terrors of quivered Medes and
painted Gelonians; there is the perpetual antithesis between youth and
age, there is the ever-recurring image of green and withered trees, and
it is only the attractiveness of the Latin, half real, half perhaps
arising from association and the romance of a language not one's own,
that makes us feel this "lyrical commonplace" more supportable than
common-place is usually found to be. It is this, indeed, which
constitutes the grand difficulty of the translator, who may well despair
when he undertakes to reproduce beauties depending on expression by a
process in which expression is sure to be sacrificed. But it would, I
think, be a mistake to attempt to get rid of this monotony by calling
in the aid of that variety of images and forms of language which modern
poetry presents. Here, as in the case of metres, it seems to me that to
exceed the bounds of what may be called classical parsimony would be to
abandon the one chance, faint as it may be, of producing on the
reader's mind something like the impression produced by Horace. I do
not say that I have always been as abstinent as I think a translator
ought to be; here, as in all matters connected with this most difficult
work, weakness may claim a licence of which strength would disdain to