but which, except for fidelity to its meaning, seems to us hardly nearer being Virgil’s _Æneid_ than Pope’s _Iliad_ was to being Homer’s. Close it certainly is; we may say marvellously close. Indeed, so far as we have been able to collate, it surpasses in this respect all previous rhymed versions, even Conington’s, and falls but little below any of those in blank-verse. Not only does it render the Latin line for line—no trifling task, even for the Alexandrine, with its unvarying fourteen syllables against the average fifteen of the hexameter—but not seldom word for word. Moreover, notwithstanding its exactness, it reads as smoothly and as spiritedly as an original poem; it is everywhere set off with those verbal graces of which Mr. Morris is a master, and the metre, which has many merits for the purpose, is throughout handled with admirable skill. Wherein and how, then, does it fail of giving us Virgil? Because, we answer, not only is Virgil’s tone—his coloring, his local atmosphere-conspicuously absent from Mr. Morris’ translation, not only is the tone of the latter as unlike the tone of the _Æneid_ as can well be, but it is even carefully, studiously, nay, laboriously, removed from it. It may be taken as a rule in translation that any word is out of place which violently disturbs the associations that belong to the original, the train of ideas raised by the original in the reader’s mind. For instance, when Mr. Theodore Martin makes use of the word “madrigal” in his translation of the _Carmen Amœbæum_ of Horace, we somehow feel that he has struck a false note; we are sensible of a discord. The word to the English reader brings up associations wholly foreign to Horace and his time, turns the thoughts of the English reader into a widely different track, and dispels the Horatian effect. Mr. Morris not only does this in single words, but his very design is based on doing it as often as he can; his entire vocabulary is carefully selected with a view to doing it uniformly throughout his work. From the stately towers of Ilium, city of the gods, the _arces Pergameæ and incluta bello mœnia Dardanidum_; from the splendid temples of Carthage; from the fertile plains of Hesperia, the royal city of Laurentum, and the mighty hundred-pillared palace of Picus; from the Ausonian battle-fields, ringing with the clatter of chariots, the clang of sword on helm and spear on buckler, the shouts and shocks of the contending heroes—from all the scenes and characters so familiar to us in the Virgilian story, Mr. Morris ushers us into a strange, remote, wild Westland, where all the famous doings we thought we knew so well are transformed in the most grotesque fashion. It is a land of “steads” and “firths,” of “meres” and “leas” and “fells,” he takes us into, inhabited not by a people but by “a folk,” who are not named but “hight”; who dwell in “garths” and “burgs” and worship “very godheads” in “fanes”;