PREFACE
complexion. And, that being so, surely a translator should be allowed to use the speech of the Bible and Shakespeare in all its richness. If modernisms be forbidden him, how is he to enrich and invigorate his language except by opening freely its original springs, and letting into it even words and forms of speech, which have been dropped by the current poetical tradition?
But perhaps the objection will rather be that, with all this talk of archaism, the language of the present translation differs little from the ordinary language of poetry. Certainly the language most used in modern poetry is itself archaic. Tennyson especially restored to currency a great deal of Elizabethan English, and Swinburne has shown what power lies in the forms of speech and manner of the Bible. Naturally, such examples have made an archaistic language of a kind an ordinary dialect of serious verse. And it must be admitted that it is often of watery enough quality. We all know the sort of thing—it would be invidious to single out examples among the crowd of ephemerals. Whether any one who aims at writing the English of the Elizabethan and Miltonic age succeeds in
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