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xii exception, that tripping anapæstic movement which deprives the Lay of dignity, and makes Harold the Dauntless read like a burlesque: where I have introduced a redundant syllable into a line, it has generally been in the case of polysyllables, by the use of which I hoped to give the line of eight syllables something of the stateliness of the heroic. Once and once only have I ventured on a double rhyme. These details are sufficiently trifling; and I mention them merely to show that in appropriating a measure of considerable laxity to a heroic subject I have been more anxious to curtail than to extend the freedom I have gained.

It would be vain to deny that during the progress of the translation I have often been made sensible of the profound difference between poetry like Scott's, which, with all its antiquarianism, is still modern, and poetry like Virgil's, which, with all its modern affinities, is still ancient. An ancient narrative is minute where a modern one is brief: it is brief where a modern one is diffuse. Virgil is full of details, but always rapid: the reader is carried past a number of objects in succession, without being allowed, except on very rare occasions, to pause at any. 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. Even the constant recurrence of 'sic ait,' 'talia voce refert,' and the like, after every speech in the Æneid, which of course it would be unjustifiable not to represent in a translation, is enough to remind the translator that the taste of the readers for whom Virgil wrote is different from the taste of those whom he must himself endeavour