ABSTRACT
We have never seen any attempt made to account for the fact that while, for some time past, every two or three years' interval has seen a new translation of the Iliad or the Odyssey, there should have been published, so far as we know, within anything like recent times, only two translations of the A3neid. Of these, that by Mr. Rickards was the praiseworthy effort of a man occupied in other business to find a 'humane' employment for his leisure hours, and probably gained but few readers beyond the circle of the author's friends, if: indeed, it ever reached any other than a private circulation; it was, if we remember right, in ten-syllable couplets. The second, on the other hand, as the work ofa scholar by profession, and one who had given much attention to Vergil in particular, was looked for with some interest, all the more so as the author, after balancing the claims of various metres to represent the Vergilian hexameter, and deciding, perhaps with reason, that the heroic couplet challenged too close a comparison with the sonorous verse of Dryden, while blank verse was an instrument only to be wielded by a consummate poet, selected the metre rendered familiar by Scott as giving 'the best chance of imparting to his work that rapidity of utterance which is indispensably necessary to a long narrative poem.' The experiment can hardly be said to have succeeded, and Prof Conington's translation is, we fear, by this time almost forgotten, except by those whom his eminence as a scholar induced at the time to possess themselves ofthe book. In reading his Preface, however,
one thing strikes us as remarkable, namely, that among the metres which he discusses that one should be entirely omitted which has the oldest claim of all to represent the epic hexameter. It is more strange, too, that it should not have suggested itself to him in the course of his work. When we read such a passage as the following-
King Anius, king and priest in one, With bay-crowned tresseshoar,
Hastes to accost us, and is known Anchises' friend of yore.
