"I have of late been urged by a particular circumstance to make various trials of translation into Latin (lyrical, etc.) verse--an exercise I always used to dislike, and have never much practised. I now find my dislike was largely caused by the unsuitable and over-stiff metres which used to be imposed on me when I was under orders.... In English and Greek versification I have long been aware of the essential importance of this; but I have looked on Latin as too inflexible a tongue to be worth the labour, since nearly all the translations I have seen, pall on me as mere flat imitations of the ancients instead of having a smack of the original. I have been inclining to the belief that Terence, Virgil, and Horace have done damage to the Latin language, or at least to our taste; just as Pope was the ruin of English poetry so long as he was allowed to dictate the style and cadences. In Plautus, Lucretius, and Catullus the language has a flexibility and the metres a freedom which (as I think) academicians and schoolmasters have not duly appreciated, and which ought to impart to us (when we _do_ do anything so absurd as to write foreign verses) a freedom at which we have not generally aimed. As to metre, I think it really a _folly_ to insist on Horace's restrictions, which are entirely his own, being neither found in the Greek, which he copied, nor in Catullus; and which made the problem of _translation_ so much harder (and he did not translate), that one has to sacrifice too much. I think we ought to construct our metres by selection from the Greek, just as Catullus or Horace did, not imitate them slavishly. I send you one specimen of my translation, to ask whether so many as seven lines together the same is _too monotonous_. If there were only four or five it would be as one of Catullus's. I dare say you have the original.... "With truest regards to you all, "Your cordial friend, "F. W. Newman." Pulszky, the friend of Kossuth and also of Francis Newman, was a Hungarian author, politician, and patriot. In 1848 he was serving under Esterhazy in some Government post; but when he was suspected of revolutionizing in his native country, he took refuge in England. Pulszky went with Kossuth later to America. In 1852 he was condemned to death by the Austrian Government, but his fourteen years spent in Italy seem to have influenced the Ministers to pardon him in 1867. While in England (I do not know if he suffered from it elsewhere) he became a martyr to _tic douleureux_, that most trying form of facial neuralgia which attacks in such paroxysms of severe pain--attacks which seem brought on by the most trivial reasons, such as a knock at the door or by a sudden shake to the chair on which the patient is sitting, and which, as a rule, give no warning of their approach. "My dear Nicholson,