avail itself; I only say that I have not surrendered myself to the
temptation habitually and without a struggle. As a general rule, while
not unfrequently compelled to vary the precise image Horace has chosen,
I have substituted one which he has used elsewhere; where he has talked
of triumphs, meaning no more than victories, I have talked of bays;
where he gives the picture of the luxuriant harvests of Sardinia, I
have spoken of the wheat on the threshing-floors. On the whole I have
tried, so far as my powers would allow me, to give my translation
something of the colour of our eighteenth-century poetry, believing the
poetry of that time to be the nearest analogue of the poetry of
Augustus' court that England has produced, and feeling quite sure that
a writer will bear traces enough of the language and manner of his own
time to redeem him from the charge of having forgotten what is after
all his native tongue. As one instance out of many, I may mention the
use of compound epithets as a temptation to which the translator of
Horace is sure to be exposed, and which, in my judgment, he ought in
general to resist. Their power of condensation naturally recommends
them to a writer who has to deal with inconvenient clauses, threatening
to swallow up the greater part of a line; but there is no doubt that in
the Augustan poets, as compared with the poets of the republic, they
are chiefly conspicuous for their absence, and it is equally certain, I
think, that a translator of an Augustan poet ought not to suffer them
to be a prominent feature of his style. I have, perhaps, indulged in
them too often myself to note them as a defect in others; but it seems
to me that they contribute, along with the Tennysonian metre, to
diminish the pleasure with which we read such a version as that of
which I have already spoken by "C. S. C." of "Justum et tenacem." I may
add, too, that I have occasionally allowed the desire of brevity to
lead me into an omission of the definite article, which, though perhaps
in keeping with the style of Milton, is certainly out of keeping with