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to please. No doubt this disparity between the ancient and the modern manner would have made itself felt had I chosen a metre less connected by association with the present century. Even Dryden, though his manner is far less distinctively modern than that of Scott, surprises us from time to time with something which we feel he would not have said had he not been translating: even Pope, though he has taken almost unlimited license to omit or recast anything which did not suit his notions of good taste in narrative, makes us occasionally sensible that the story he is telling is not his own. But I have sometimes thought that the style which I had adopted imposed on me difficulties peculiar to itself, from which a more judicious choice might have preserved me. Virgil was a more careful composer than Scott or Byron, not only in the selection of his words, but in the structure of his sentences. He was a great rhetorician, and a master of that terse pointed style of which the Latinity of the silver age is a development and an exaggeration. Sentences occur repeatedly in his writings which require to be rendered as briefly and compactly as those of Horace. Whether the octosyllabic metre is congenial to that mode of writing I will not presume to say: but it has not yet been applied to it, except, it may be, by writers like Gay, whose style is confessedly too low for heroic poetry. Consequently, I have frequently had to write in a manner which I was conscious was not the manner of my model, attempting to impart to the shorter couplet some of that dignified sententiousness which belongs more properly to the longer. If I have failed in this, I can only excuse myself by pleading the necessity of choosing among difficulties which appears to be the inevitable condition of the translator's work.