Sir George Osborne Morgan has served his generation in much more important capacities than those of a scholar and a translator of Virgil, and had this little work, therefore, been less meritorious than it is, no critic with a sense of the becoming would deal harshly with it. But it challenges and deserves serious consideration, not only as an attempt to solve a problem of singular interest to students of classical poetry, but as a somewhat ambitious contribution to the literature of translation. Sir Osborne Morgan is, however, mistaken in supposing that in translating Virgil into his own metre he “has undertaken a task which has never been attempted before.” In 1583 Richard Stanihurst published a translation of the first four books of the _Æneid_ in English hexameters; and, if Sir Osborne will turn to Webbe’s _Discourse of English Poetrie_, published as early as 1586, he will find versions in English hexameters of the First and Second Eclogues, while Abraham Fraunce, in a curious volume, entitled _The Countess of Pembroke’s Ivy Church_, which appeared in 1591, has, among the other hexameters in the collection, given a version of the Second Eclogue in this measure. But Sir Osborne Morgan has been more immediately anticipated in his experiment. In 1838 Dr. James Blundell published anonymously, under the title of _Hexametrical Experiments_, versions in hexameters of the First, Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth Eclogues, and to this translation he prefixed an elaborate preface, vindicating the employment of the hexameter in English, and explaining its mechanism to the unlearned. Indeed, Blundell arrived at the same conclusion as Sir Osborne Morgan, that the proper medium for an English translation of hexametrical poems in Greek and Latin is the English hexameter. We may, however, hasten to add that Sir Osborne has little to fear from a comparison with his predecessors, who have, indeed, done their best to refute by example their own theory. It may be observed, in passing, that the translations of Virgil into rhymed decasyllabic verse are far more numerous than Sir Osborne Morgan seems to suppose. He is, he says, acquainted only with two--the version by Dryden and Joseph Warton--not seeming to be aware that Warton translated only the _Georgics_ and _Eclogues_, printing Pitt’s version of the _Æneid_. The whole of Virgil was translated into this measure by John Ogilvie between 1649-50, and by the Earl of Lauderdale about 1716, while versions of the _Æneid_, the _Georgics_, and the _Eclogues_, in the same metre, have abounded in every era of our literature, from Gawain Douglas’s translation of the _Æneid_ printed in 1553, to Archdeacon Wrangham’s version of the _Eclogues_ in 1830.