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xvi in the notes. Possibly in other instances also there may have been unconscious recollection, as a comparison of the three rhyming translators, Dryden, Pitt, and Symmons, used to be a favourite occupation of my schoolboy days. My coincidences, I believe, are oftener with Pitt's version than with either of the others; a fact which I incline to attribute to the more conventional character of his verses, which are seldom so individual that they might not easily occur to two writers independently. My knowledge of the different blank verse translations is very slight and occasional. I have not thought it necessary to say anything in the notes of the renderings that I have adopted, as what I have to urge in their favour will be found elsewhere. In one or two instances I have ruled a disputed question in one way as a commentator, in another way as a translator, but only of course where a case could fairly be made out for either view.