before which I have felt myself almost powerless, and I have in
consequence been driven to the natural expedient of weakness,
compromise, sometimes evading it, sometimes coping with it
unsuccessfully. In other respects I may be allowed to say that I have
found the metre pleasanter to handle than any of the others that I have
attempted, except, perhaps, that of "The Dream of Fair Women." The
proportion of syllables in each stanza of English to each stanza of
Latin is not much greater than in the case of the Sapphic, thirty-two
against forty-one; yet, except in a few passages, chiefly those
containing proper names, I have had no disagreeable sense of
confinement. I believe the reason of this to be that the Latin Alcaic
generally contains fewer words in proportion than the Latin Sapphic,
the former being favourable to long words, the latter to short ones, as
may be seen by contrasting such lines as "Dissentientis conditionibus"
with such as "Dona praesentis rape laetus horae ac." This, no doubt,
shows that there is an inconvenience in applying the same English
iambic measure to two metres which differ so greatly in their practical
result; but so far as I can see at present, the evil appears to be one
of those which it is wiser to submit to than to attempt to cure.

The problem of finding English representatives for the other Horatian
metres, if a more difficult, is a less important one. The most pressing
case is that of the metre known as the second Asclepiad, the "Sic te
diva potens Cypri." With this, I fear, I shall be thought to have dealt
rather capriciously, having rendered it by four different measures,
three of them, however, varieties of the same general type. It so
happens that the first Ode which I translated was the celebrated
Amoebean Poem, the dialogue between Horace and Lydia. I had had at that
time not the most distant notion of translating the whole of the Odes,
or even any considerable number of them, so that in choosing a metre I