yet the resemblance depends rather on the length of the respective
lines than on any similarity in the cadences. But it is evident that he
chose the iambic movement as the ordinary movement of English poetry;
and it is evident, I think, that in translating Horace we shall be
right in doing the same, as a general rule. Anapaestic and other
rhythms may be beautiful and appropriate in themselves, but they cannot
be manipulated so easily; the stanzas with which they are associated
bear no resemblance, as stanzas, to the stanzas of Horace's Odes. I
have then followed Milton in appropriating the measure in question to
the Latin metre, technically called the fourth Asclepiad, at the same
time that I have substituted rhyme for blank verse, believing rhyme to
be an inferior artist's only chance of giving pleasure. There still
remains a question about the distribution of the rhymes, which here, as
in most other cases, I have chosen to make alternate. Successive rhymes
have their advantages, but they do not give the effect of interlinking,
which is so natural in a stanza; the quatrain is reduced to two
couplets, and its unity is gone. From the fourth to the third Asclepiad
the step is easy. Taking an English iambic line of ten syllables to
represent the longer lines of the Latin, an English iambic line of six
syllables to represent the shorter, we see that the metre of Horace's
"Scriberis Vario" finds its representative in the metre of Mr.
Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women." My experience would lead me to
believe the English metre to be quite capable, in really skilful hands,
of preserving the effect of the Latin, though, as I have said above,
the Latin measure is employed by Horace both for a threnody and for a
love-song.

The Sapphic and the Alcaic involve more difficult questions. Here,
however, as in the Asclepiad, I believe we must be guided, to some
extent, by external similarity. We must choose the iambic movement as