PREFACE. O' F the following Translations, those into Latin O were were done for pupils at College, and a few; both of them and of the English ones, have been in print before. As they were mixed up with verses of a lighter kind, and probably did not come under the notice of most of those who will read the present volume, they have been reprinted here. On one (Horace, Book I. Ode 11) a reviewer observed that the last line was a reminiscence of the Princess," as of course it was. To anticipate any similar criticisms it may be worth while to say a few words. b I have nowhere adopted a phrase or word of any previous translator. I had translated the first Iliad before Lord Derby's or Mr Wright's Homer appeared, and the second before I had seen their versions. The same remark applies, mutatis mutandis, to Professor Conington's Horace. I did not know till I had finished the Eclogues that any translation of them existed, for Dryden's, I suppose, scarcely counts as a translation. Since then I have met with Mr Kennedy's Virgil, and availed myself of it to correct my rendering of line 79 of Eclogue III. On the other hand, I have taken without scruple any expression of an original writer which seemed to me to be the equivalent of the Latin or Greek with which I had to deal. And as I happen to have borrowed in all cases from wellknown writers, and passages which must be familiar to every one who reads at all, I have not thought it necessary to call attention to the fact each time, by quotation commas or otherwise. Quotation com mas for this purpose are, I think, open to more objections than one: and surely it would be superfluous to specify in a note that e.g. such a phrase as "catch the blossom of to-day" was caught from Tennyson. C. S. C. |