XII.] I have no doubt that opes is intended to conjure up the image of piled-up wares and waggon-loads choking up the thoroughfares, and would unhesitatingly have translated it by glut were it not that that word could only be carried off by a change of form in the verse and translating beatae as glittering, which, although partially justified by Orelli's paraphrase opulenta ac splendida, I felt would be flying off too wide from the text, to venture on. Smoky, busy, noisy Rome is evidently what is intended: the very identical epithets that I lately saw applied to London in some penny newspaper.

12.] The common rendering of opes and beatae makes beatae redundant and reduces opes to the position of a tame elephant between two wild ones. It must be, I think, clear to any unprejudiced mind that beatae is simply ironical or sub-ironical, and 'fumum et opes strepitumque' a phrase of collective disparagement.

15.] For sound and poetical effect, I should of course prefer 'the' to their wrinkled brow of care,' but it seems imperative to preserve the distinct antithesis between divitibus and pauperum, which disappears in Conington's and other of the current renderings.

18.] The reciter will please pronounce the c hard like k, for the sake of supporting the final sound of back in the 4th line. Notice too in 1. 5, ante, how the initial word of this line, besides touching up the colour in off in the same line, lends a very sensible support to the final word in the line following.

23.] I believe horridus in English public schools is usually translated prickly, which appears rather unmeaning. I suspect that in some way or another it must refer to the particular state of the woods at the time of year in question. In my state of ignorance as to its exact signification I have deemed it permissible to translate the word according to sound and blind association (not disdainful even of that suggested by the prickly hoar-frost) instead of sense.

XXIII.] Dryden, in his admirable free version, which he says (tolerably well preserved, I think, in the translation) corresponded to the sense of cloying and satedness engendered by the closely-packed and luscious contents of the spacious walls of the pasty. Those who please may read palling plenty, palling luxury, or cloying plenty, or dull repletion, in lieu of loathed profusion. But finally I have made up my mind since the above was set up in print that it is better to accept a personification of copia (for which there is no lack of precedent) and to substitute gorged for loathed as having idealistic, quantitative, chromatic, and syzygetic reasons in its favour which collectively far outweigh a trifling inferiority to loathed in point of anastomosis.

he has taken some pains to make his masterpiece in English,' and which we are told Mr. Fox declared to be superior to the original (vide Lowell's Six Essays), takes a strange liberty with the word Silvani, and upon the strength of it invents the lineThe Sylvans to their shades retire.'

Who were these Sylvans, one would like to know. Oddly enough, Francis, following suit, gives—

While rustic Sylvans seek the glade'

as the equivalent for horridi dumeta Silvani. This Dryden's selfacknowledged masterpiece is not included in the plan of Mr. Christie's very clever edition of Dryden. In Scott's edition (the second is the one I have seen) the editor has been careless enough to refer persistently to the ode as the 29th of the FIRST book. It is certainly a pity that so magnificent and Rubens-like a canvas should be spoiled by occasional instances of bad taste (which might so easily have been avoided or corrected), such as the daub of the Sylvans just adverted to, and 'The new Lord Mayor'! corresponding to Tu civitatem quis deceat status, in the 7th stanza of the original. Imagine Milton committing such a barbarism! The higher civilization of England must for a time have been submerged after the restoration of the hateful Stuarts. Mr. Lowell (if I remember aright) expresses surprise that Dryden should feel so strongly and so repeatedly give vent to his sense of freedom and unshackledness when having ten syllables in a line to deal with instead of eight. I am more surprised that Mr. Lowell, who is said to write excellent poetry himself, should be surprised by anything of the kind. To me the difference between the two seems like that between bathing in a pond or inland creek as compared with a plunge in the open sea: the very embarras de choix, the sense of infinite variety of combination and unlimited room for disporting the imagination at will has deterred me from more than timidly venturing upon this form of verse, as a miniature-painter would naturally shrink from trying his pencil on a historical canvas. Between octosyllabic and dekasyllabic verse, the interval is as wide as between playing at marbles and bowls, or as between bagatelle and billiards. If we calculate on an average two syllables to a word (and as the true average is less, this is much understating my own argument), we have five words in a line in one case against four in the other, which by the theory of permutations gives a

facility as 120 to 24, i.e. as 5 to 1. Or, again, let us look to the variety of form (so strangely neglected by all writers on versification), but so very important an element of the general effect, which depends on the manner in which syllables are combined into words or into word-groups, i.e. groups which read like single words. According to the theory of partitions (this being a case of partition whose permutations count as distinct), the number of forms of groupings for a syllables is 2; accordingly, the advantage in dealing with 10 as compared with 8 syllables is as 1,024 to 256, i.e. as 4 to 1. Hence we see that the magnified facility of dekasyllabic over octosyllabic verse is not, as at a superficial glance one might suppose, as 5 to 4, but as at the very least 5 or 4 to 1. Writers like Conington or Newman have noticed the extreme case of monosyllabic lines, but no one seems to have drawn especial attention to the distinct character and aspect attaching to every different form of syllable groupings in a line. The working out of this theory belongs to the subject of rests, there being an incalculably small but still perfectly sensible interruption of breathing between every two groups of syllables; the doctrine of caesura and of line-stops is the very self-same theory extended to the case of compound groups. I may notice as the result of a careful and tolerably extensive induction that an octosyllabic quatrain (which might, arithmetically speaking, consist of 32 simple groups), if it contain more than 24 will, in general, be found defective in tension: 21 or 22 may be reckoned as high concert pitch. As another useful piece of statistical information I may mention here, that for the purpose of easy but not diffuse rendering from Latin into English, the number of English should be to the number of Latin syllables, in a ratio intermediate to and. I of course suppose that the number of lines is maintained the same in the original and translation, i.e. that the rendering is line for line, although not necessarily line into line.

24.] The comma in this line is inserted to indicate that a slight pause should be introduced to give effect to the word hush. The fact is one wants a double system of punctuation in verse-one to indicate the grammatical construction, and another the emissions of breath; and in default of this, it becomes necessary to lean, sometimes to one principle and sometimes to the other, in following the actual system.*

A friend informs me that an edition of the New Testament (very hard to procure) has been printed with rhetorical pauses, and I have lately seen

28.] Notice the tr and tn of the first and third words collected in inverted order in the word rent. Contrast the effect of rent with its equivalent in sense torn, where the system of sounds is left unclosed. So, too, I have taken a slight liberty with the text in substituting 'Bactria' for 'Bactra,' for the sake of the opposition of the ia in the former to ai in 'Tanaïs,' as well as to avoid the necessity of a musical rest after the first word of the line.

XXXII.] The entire Ode is constructed (consciously, I believe, by the Poet) on a dualistic, or, to speak more precisely, a perdualistic principle. The catena in the text is purposely inserted by Horace to ease off the transition between the superincumbent and subjacent main divisions-the body of the coach and the carriage proper, so to say-(8 stanzas to each); and is bound to be maintained by a translator true to his author at any and every cost. There are five principal species of catenae, or rivets, as they might be termed the simple, the duplex, the prolate, the oblate, and the agglutinate, of each of which there are instances in this Ode. By perdualistic I mean that the 16 stanzas subdivide into two natural ideological groups of 8 each, each of these octads into two of 4 each, and so on until we arrive at single stanzas. It has been pointed out to me by a lady of high culture that in the Vita Nuova' Dante explains the distribution of each sonnet (according to the Ideas) into a definite number of component parts; but what is especially noticeable in this Ode is the continued dichotomy or bifurcation, springing from one fundamental root-idea, carried out (consistently with the poet's passion for exactness) upon a principle of strict arithmetical precision. A paradigm of the deduction is given at page 1.

34.] The word Etruscum in the third line demonstrates that the Poet, poet-like, had a particular river in his mind's eye. My friend Dr. Ingleby suggests the Tiber, in which I have no doubt he is right; and to him I am indebted for the introduction of the capital R in River. In Bunsen's Life,' by his widow, I think I remember reading of a Miss Bathurst who was drowned when riding by the banks of the Tiber, in consequence of a sudden rise in the river. I remember too, many years ago, advertised Charles Kemble's readings from Shakspear on a somewhat similar plan. Blank spaces left between words might be used to indicate the relative durations of pauses (or in some cases mere slowness of articulation), desiderated by the composer.

travelling by diligence on the coast road between Valencia (of the Cid) and Barcelona, and passing, not very far from the latter city, a spot as dry and seemingly as little liable to inundation as the Ladies' Mile in the Park, where only a week before, the diligence, by the sudden descent of a mountain torrent, had been swept into the sea. I was told that the passengers (including two young Englishmen out on a vacation tour) were all drowned with the exception of a Civil Guard, one of two who had got up into the diligence just before the catastrophe occurred.

29.] Orelli's authority, and Anthon's (who, I suppose, is good enough as a sounding-board for collecting and reverberating opinions), justify me, I trust, in associating the idea of fate with the words ultra fas, although I believe such interpretation runs counter to the current English public school tradition. Mortalis, presume, is intended, or at least serves in the original to suggest the notion of the brevity of life, which I indicate by 'brief hour.' Trepidat, Professor Key tells me, is connected with the word Tрéπw, and with the notion of turning one's head up and down, round and about, in a state of nervous anxiety. Professor Newman translates it strains his nerves' (!). The English school-boy or competitive-examination word funk seems to me to come nearest to it in meaning, and, like trepidat, is used generally in an intransitive, but occasionally in an active, sense.

6

XXXIV.] It seems to me certain, on phonetic grounds, that alveo, and not aequore, is the true reading. 1st. Having regard to the jingle of acquus with aequore. 2nd. On the score of the pernicious interruption of the beautiful 7 syzygy if the latter reading be adopted. Since the above was in print, I am happy to find this opinion sanctioned, on quite distinct grounds, by the transcendent authority of my friend Professor Key: 'The story is so improbable that it must be true, for no one would have thought of inventing it.' This is the sole sort of argument brought forward in defence of the 'aequore' reading, which Orelli does not seem to have shown his usual good judgment in retaining.

XLI.] Evidently amnes are the rills feeding the flumen. I have seen somewhere a reference to the former word used in conjunction with lebetis. The two stanzas (9th and 10th) lie doublelocked and, as it were, screwed together between rivets fore and aft, and are manifestly intended to be welded into a unity of the closest kind.

XLIV.] Pater=Diespiter=Sky Jove=High Jove; pater is precisely the right word to employ in connexion with skyey