it is yet the only effect we are ever likely to get until the day of judgment; and what are you going to do about it? Of course it is hopeless to try to imitate Homer’s sonorous harmonies—the καλὰ τὰ Ὁμήρον ἔπη, as Maximus Tyrius calls them, the lovely Homeric words—the πολυφλοίς βοιο θαλάσσης and ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο. It is not in ours or any other tongue but Homer’s own to do it. But Mr. Arnold has shown that we can imitate afar off his rhythm and metrical effect, and why should we not do that? If anybody can give us hexameters that please the English ear and make it fancy, without being conscious of too much elongation, that it is listening to the faintest echo of Homer’s mighty lyre or Virgil’s silver string, why, let us have them, prithee, and a fico for the grammarians.
In this desultory review of Virgilian translators we mean to confine ourselves to the Æneid; but we may say in passing that the Eclogues were, about 1587, put into unrhymed Alexandrines by Abraham Fleming, who thus nearly anticipated the metre Prof. Newman, after much experimenting, hit on as the proper one to render Homer, and which, as Prof. Marsh says, has the disadvantage (or the merit?) to American ears of suggesting our own epic strain of Yankee Doodle. Fleming, however, as will be seen from the following quotation, taken from the beginning of his Fourth Eclogue, only dropped into our national music occasionally:
“O Muses of Sicilian ile, let’s greater matters singe!
Shrubs, groves, and bushes lowe delight and please not every man.
If we do singe of woods, the woods be worthy of a consul.”
While Virgil was thus engrossing the attention of Elizabethan scholars Horace lay comparatively neglected, although it was an era of translation, as transitional periods in the literature of a country are apt to be. Nearly all the Latin poets then extant were done into English before the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the Greek series began sonorously with Chapman’s Homer soon after. Even that most perfect of all actual or possible poets, as her courtiers called her—Queen Elizabeth—tried her hand at it in a translation of part of the Hercules Œteus of Seneca. But no complete version of Horace seems to have appeared prior to Creech’s towards the end of the seventeenth century. In 1567, however, Thomas Drant published Horace, his Arte of Poetrie, Pistles, and Satyres Englished. In his preface is one quaint remark, to the truth of which all Horatians will bear witness: “Neyther any man which can judge can judge it one and the like laboure to translate Horace and to make and translate a love booke, a shril tragedie, or a smooth and platleuyled poesye. Thys I can truly say, of myne owne experyence, that I can sooner translate twelve verses out of the Greeke Homer than sixe out of Horace.”
The first version of the Odes was that of Sir Thomas Hawkins, about 1630. This, though it seems to have been popular enough to go through several editions, was far from complete, the lighter odes being omitted as being “too wanton and loose.” Our own edition, which is the fourth, dated 1638, contains about two-thirds of the odes and epodes. Here and there we find a tolerably good verse:
“What man, what hero [Clio] wilt thou raise
With shrillest pipe or Lyra’s softer lays?
What god whose name in sportive straine