PREFACE
getting beyond this feeble reproduction and in really catching the manner of his models, only those acquainted with the models themselves can judge. A word, a phrase, a cadence will bring to one man an echo of the older literature: to another man, whose acquaintance with that literature is more distant, it will have no association, or perhaps strike him as a solecism.
Whatever verdict may be pronounced upon this attempt, it is to be hoped that we shall before long see the final and satisfying translation of the Greek poets into English. The hope seems warranted by the characteristics of our present literary activity. Whether it be great in creation or not, it certainly displays a variety of imitative manner greater than any other age can show. Arising mainly perhaps from that widening and suppling of the historic imagination, which makes it more possible for us to live in thought under all sorts of different conditions than it has been to the people of other times, an unprecedented power of eclectic reproduction belongs to modern literature. Skill in the composition of verse, discrimination in taste, were perhaps never so diffused.
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