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8 but a scanty measure of justice to the Translator. It would be difficult to imagine any task, whether in sacred or in profane literature, which involves so many and so peculiar difficulties. It is not alone that the hymns in themselves present almost every possible shade of variety;—the accumulated growth of every age, from the days of Constantine to our own: the work of an endless variety of authors, from St. Ambrose and St. Jerome to the Roman academicians of the seventeenth century; embodying every variety of subject—history, biography, doctrine, piety, asceticism, spirituality, theology, and even dogmatism; embracing every variety of metre, from the classic measures of the Horatian epoch to the jingling rhyme of the middle age—and every shade of latinity, from the studied purity of Prudentius to the rude though expressive scholasticisms of St. Thomas. The necessity of accommodating himself to the variety which all this supposes, forms but one of the embarrassments of a poetical translator of the Breviary. The real difficulty of the task lies in the nature of a large proportion of the hymns themselves, many of which differ in almost every particular from the ordinary standard of poetical composition. Many of the hymns, it is true, are highly poetical, even in the