minutiæ which make the poem what it is. A translation, as I have elsewhere remarked, may have as a piece of embodied criticism a value which it would not possess in virtue of its intrinsic merit. Again, there is something in the mere fact of novelty; something in disturbing the cluster of conventional associations which gathers round an author, and compelling the reader to regard what he has hitherto admired traditionally from a new point of view. It is well that we should know how our ancestors of the Revolution period conceived of Virgil: it is well that we should be obliged consciously to realize how we conceive of him ourselves.
Some may think that the metre I have chosen possesses few recommendations beyond the novelty of which I have just spoken. I certainly do not pretend that it is the one true equivalent of the Virgilian hexameter. Probably a better case could be made out for both heroic blank verse and the heroic couplet: the ottava rima of Tasso also, as has been suggested to me, might put in a claim, not of course as giving the effect of particular lines, but as representing the impression made by the whole. But the question is not so much what is absolutely best as what is best for the individual translator. Blank verse really deserving the name I believe with my lamented friend Mr. Worsley to be impossible except to one or two eminent writers in a generation. The heroic couplet would be difficult to wield to any one who was constantly reminded that he was exposing himself thereby to a comparison with Dryden. A regular stanza has trammels which would be more sensibly felt in attempting to deal with Virgil’s elaborately complicated paragraphs, than in endeavouring to reproduce the less highly organised structure of
