We need go no farther than the title-page to read the story of his design and, as we incline to hold, his failure. “The _Æneids_ of Virgil _done_ into English verse” is what he offers us, and the affectation of the title runs through the performance and mars it. If from the result we may derive the intent, Mr. Morris set out to produce such a version of the _Æneid_ as might have been written anywhere between the time of Chaucer and Phaer, had any poet then lived who joined to the simplicity and freshness of his own age the culture and self-consciousness of ours. At least, this is the only way we can account for Mr. Morris’ choice of the peculiar style in which he has seen fit to couch, we might almost say to smother, his version—a style which is not, indeed, the style of Chaucer, or of Phaer, or of Chapman (to whom it has been rashly referred by an English critic in the _Saturday Review_), or, for the matter of that, of any other English author we are acquainted with, living or dead; but which is nevertheless plainly inspired by the same effort in the direction of mediævalism and the earlier manner that has borne such pleasant fruit in the author’s former productions. But the effort is here carried, it seems to us, to “a wasteful and ridiculous excess,” and is, besides, quite out of place in a translation where the writer is not free to form his own manner, but is bound to the manner of his original; unless, indeed, Mr. Morris finds in the style of Virgil the same effect of quaintness and antiquity which he has striven but too successfully to give his translation, and that he is too good a scholar to permit us to believe. Virgil’s style was that of his age, and his unfrequent archaisms, such as _faxo_ for _fecero_, _aulai_ for _aulæ_, and the like, can scarcely have produced on the reader of the Augustan era any stronger impression of quaintness than such poetical forms as “spake” and “drave” and “brake” produce on us when we meet them in English poetry today. We must, therefore, assume that Mr. Morris aimed at some such reproduction of the literary manner of a past age as Thackeray gives us in _Esmond_, or Balzac, with still greater ingenuity but much worse art, in the _Contes Drolatiques_. This, and a resolve to use only Saxon words as far as possible—a right idea in the main, perhaps, for translation from the Latin, certainly a most interesting and instructive one—and (a less useful idea) to say nothing in the common way which could at all be said out of the common, seem to have been his controlling influences. To these he has subordinated all else but verbal fidelity, and the result is a queer composite production of a strong mediæval flavor—a romanticized _Æneid_ which one of the seekers after the _Earthly Paradise_ might have told his comrades “Under the lime-trees’ shade By some sweet stream that knows not of the sea,”