“ No doubt it is the part of a great artist to do as Virgil has done, and draw out all varieties of expression from one and the same instrument: but to most of those who engage in the work of translation it cannot but be an advantage to employ a measure which is really several measures in one. ”

“ Scott too is rapid after his fashion: but it is the rapidity of one who loves motion for its own sake, and to whom time is of no particular value: after a gallop of a few miles he is glad to pull up and descant on anything that he may be passing on the road side. ”

“ My chief reason for adopting the metre which Scott has made popular was that it seemed to give me my best chance of imparting to my work that rapidity of movement which is indispensably necessary to a long narrative poem. An ode of Horace is something to dwell on, to scrutinize minutely: a poem like the Æneid is something to read rapidly and continuously. A metre which gives the translator the hope of making his work interesting as a story is so far successful: a metre which does not give this hope fails. ”

“ Each age will naturally think that it understands an author whom it studies better than the ages which have gone before it: and it is natural that this increased appreciation should take the concrete form of a new translation. ”

“ Pope, writing according to his own genius, has produced something so utterly different, in all its circumstantial features, from the product of Homeric genius, that an artist of confessedly inferior powers need not be discouraged from attempting the task again: but there was no such radical difference between the poet of Augustan Home and the poet of Caroline England as to render it impossible that the masterpiece of the one should be adequately represented by the work which crowned the literary labours of the other. ”

“ It is obvious that the experiment is one to perform which would require the utmost nicety: everything would depend on the exact poetical equivalence of the various turns of phrase, either severally or as presented in combination: and a shade more or less in each case might produce not beauty but deformity. ”

“ The translation, if in any degree successful, will contribute in its turn to extend and deepen the appreciation. It is not merely that different passages will be better understood as criticism advances, though that is something: it is that the work itself is better comprehended as a literary work; that the poet’s art is more fully realized, as shown in the thousand minutiæ which make the poem what it is. ”

“ The publication of a new translation of Virgil's Æneid is a thing which may not unreasonably be thought to require a few prefatory words of excuse. It is true that the ground has not been pre-occupied of late years by any version which has attained any great degree of popularity. ”