of this kind may have an advantage of its own, even when it is
unsuccessful; it may serve as a piece of embodied criticism, showing
what the experimenter conceived to be the conditions of success, and
may thus, to borrow Horace's own metaphor of the whetstone, impart to
others a quality which it is itself without. Perhaps I may be allowed,
for a few moments, to combine precept with example, and imitate my
distinguished friend and colleague, Professor Arnold, in offering some
counsels to the future translator of Horace's Odes, referring, at the
same time, by way of illustration, to my own attempt.

The first thing at which, as it seems to me, a Horatian translator
ought to aim, is some kind of metrical conformity to his original.
Without this we are in danger of losing not only the metrical, but the
general effect of the Latin; we express ourselves in a different
compass, and the character of the expression is altered accordingly.
For instance, one of Horace's leading features is his occasional
sententiousness. It is this, perhaps more than anything else, that has
made him a storehouse of quotations. He condenses a general truth in a
few words, and thus makes his wisdom portable. "Non, si male nunc, et
olim sic erit;" "Nihil est ab omni parte beatum;" "Omnes eodem
cogimur,"--these and similar expressions remain in the memory when
other features of Horace's style, equally characteristic, but less
obvious, are forgotten. It is almost impossible for a translator to do
justice to this sententious brevity unless the stanza in which he
writes is in some sort analogous to the metre of Horace. If he chooses
a longer and more diffuse measure, he will be apt to spoil the proverb
by expansion; not to mention that much will often depend on the very
position of the sentence in the stanza. Perhaps, in order to preserve
these external peculiarities, it may be necessary to recast the
expression, to substitute, in fact, one form of proverb for another;