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Rh character of his work: and he must be another Virgil or another Sophocles. A translator not so constituted will be better employed in endeavouring to bring about resemblance to his author by applying a principle of compensation, by strengthening his version in any way best suited to his powers, so long as it be not repugnant to the genius of the original, and trusting that the effect of the whole will be seen to have been cared for, though the claims of the parts may appear to have been neglected. Even the simpler peculiarities of Virgil's style, such as his fondness for saying the same thing twice over in the same line, I have not always been at pains to copy. What is graceful in the Latin will not always be graceful in a translation: and to be graceful is one of the first duties of a translator of the Æneid. It has often happened that by ignoring a repetition I have been able to include the entire sense of a hexameter in a single English line of eight syllables; and in such cases I have been glad to make the sacrifice. Not the least of the evils of the measure I have chosen is a tendency to diffuseness: and in translating one of the least diffuse of poets such a tendency requires a strong remedy. Accordingly, the duty of conciseness has always been present to my mind; and the result is that my translation, with its lines of eight and occasionally six syllables, does not, I hope, exceed by much more than one half the number of lines in the original, where fifteen syllables on the average go to the hexameter.

A similarity will occasionally be found between my own and other versions. In the few cases where this arises from intentional appropriation, or where I had reason to think that I had unconsciously recollected the words of others, I have made the requisite