Classics." Latinless readers of course must read him in English
or not at all. No translation can quite convey the cryptic charm of
any original, whether poetry or prose. "Only a bishop," said Lord
Chesterfield, "is improved by translation." But prose is far easier to
render faithfully than verse; and I have said that either Conington's
or Dean Wickham's version of the Satires and Epistles, which are both
virtually in prose, will tell them what Horace said, and sometimes
very nearly how he said it. On the Odes a host of English writers have
experimented. Milton tried his hand on one, with a result reflecting
neither Milton nor Horace. Dryden has shown what he could have done but
would not do in his tantalising fragment of the Ode to Fortune. Pope
transformed the later Ode to Venus into a purely English poem, with a
gracefully artificial mechanism quite unlike the natural flow of the
original. Marvell's noble "Horatian Ode," with its superb stanzas on
the death of Charles I, shows what he might have achieved, but did
not attempt. Francis' rendering of 1765 is generally respectable,
and in default of a better was universally read and quoted by his
contemporaries: once, in the Ode to Pyrrhus (III, xx) he attains
singular grace of phrase and metre. Cowper translated two Odes and
imitated two more, not without happy touches, but with insertions
and omissions that lower poetry into commonplace. Of Calverley's few
attempts three are notably good; a resounding line in his "Leuconoe"
(I, xi):

Which flings now the flagging sea-wave on the obstinate sandstone reef,

is at once Horatian and Tennysonian; and his "Oh! where is all thy
loveliness?" in the later Ode to Lyce has caught marvellously the minor
key of tender memory which relieves the brutality of that ruthless
flagellation. Mr. Goldwin Smith's more numerous "Bay Leaves" are
fashioned all in goodly measure; and his "Blest man who far from care
and strife" well transfers to English the breathlessness of Horace's
sham pastoral ecstasy. Of more ambitious translators Bulwer Lytton
catches now and then the careless rapture of his original; Sir Theodore
Martin is always musical and flowing, sometimes miraculously fortunate
in his metres, but intentionally unliteral and free. Conington is
rigidly faithful, oftentimes tersely forcible; but misses lyrical
sweetness. Perhaps, if Marvell, Herrick, Cowley, Prior, the now
forgotten William Spencer, Tom Moore, Thackeray, could be