but “your passion for Phyllis, your invectives against Codrus,” “ignes” being used far more becomingly for a man’s love than for a woman’s. So, again, “pro purpureo narcisso” cannot mean what nature never saw, “purple daffodil,” but the white narcissus. In Eclogue VIII. “Sophocleo tua carmina digna cothurno” is turned by what is obviously a _lapsus calami_, “worthy of Sophocles’ sock.” A scholar like Sir Osborne Morgan does not need reminding that the “sock” is a metonymy for Comedy, as Milton anglicizes it in _L’Allegro_, “if Jonson’s learned sock be on.” In the exquisite passage in Eclogue VIII. 41-- “Jam fragiles poteram ab terrâ contingere ramos”-- to translate “fragiles” as “frail” is to miss the whole point of the epithet. What Virgil means is, “I could just reach the branches from the ground and _break them off_”; if it is to be translated by one epithet, it must be “brittle.” Again in the Ninth Eclogue the words “quâ se subducere colles _Incipiunt_, mollique jugum demittere clivo,” do not mean “where the hills with gentle depression steal away into the plain,” but the very opposite: _i.e._ “Where the hills begin to draw themselves up from the plain,” the ascent being contemplated from below. In Eclogue IX., in turning the couplet “Nam neque adhuc Vario videor, nec dicere Cinnâ Digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores,” the translator has no authority for turning the last verse into “a cackling goose in a chorus of cygnets,” for there is no tradition that cygnets sang, and goose should have been printed with a capital letter to preserve the pun, the allusion being to a poetaster named Anser. Unfortunately for the English translator, our literature can boast no counterpart to “Anser” _totidem literis_, but Goose printed with a capital is near enough to preserve, or suggest the sarcasm. There is another slip in Eclogue X.: “Ferulas” is not “wands of willow” but “fennel.” Occasionally a touch is introduced which is neither authorized by the original, nor true to nature. There is nothing, for instance to warrant, in Eclogue I. 56, the epithet “odorous” as applied to the willow, nor does “salictum” mean a “willow” but a “willow-bed or plantation.” To translate “ubi tempus erit” by “when the hour shall have struck” reminds us of Shakespeare’s famous anachronism in _Julius Cæsar_ and is as surprising in the work of a scholar as the lengthening of the penultimate in arbutus, “Sweet is the shower to the blade, To the newly weaned kid the arbutus.” As a rule, the translator turns difficult passages very skilfully, but this is not the case with the couplet which concludes the “Pollio”:-- “Incipe, parve puer: cui non risere parentes Nec deus hunc mensâ, dea nec dignata cubili est”;