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Rh to the line, employing occasional archaisms of word or rhythm not alien, I hope, to a metre which has for us associations of simple living and unsophisticated modes of thought.

In the prose parts of my translation of the pastorals I have adopted an archaic style partly because the shepherd in modern literature does not talk the only modern dialect I know, that of the upper middle-class, and partly in an endeavour to create in them an atmosphere similar to that of the songs. I have extended archaism to two of the three non-pastoral mimes for kindred reasons, to the Love-Poems because they are so Elizabethan in spirit, to the Epic poems because the Epic is necessarily, under modern conditions, archaic, and to the rest because it is the fashion of the clay. The Women at the Adonis Festival is on a separate footing. It is so entirely modern in spirit, and the chief characters so closely resemble the average educated Englishwoman, that the only thing to do is to disregard the few anachronisms of name and custom and render it into Colloquial Suburban. xxvi