It is far from our wish or aim to set Mr. Morris’ work in an unworthy or ridiculous light. Our respect for him is too great, our admiration too sincere, to treat any performance of his lightly. But some such impression as that we have given above is the chief one left on our mind by reading his _Æneids_. We are no longer in Italy but in Norseland, or, if in Italy, an Italy after the Gothic irruption; Æneas and Turnus, Pallas and Lausus, _fortisque Gygas fortisque Cloanthus_, are no longer Trojans or Rutules, but Norse jarls and vikings. They bear their Latin names, but that is all that is Latin about them: the hand is the hand of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob. What associations connect themselves in the mind of the English reader with such words as “garth” and “burg” and “firth”? Are they not as unlike as possible to any that belong to Virgil? Do they not disturb and trouble, even totally obscure, the effect the English reader habitually derives from Virgil—these incongruous words dropped into the clear current of the poet’s manner—as a stone flung into a limpid pool may trouble and obscure it? What is there in common between Morris’ “lads of war in vain beleaguered” and Virgil’s _nequidquam obsessa juventus_?—between Morris’ “very Duke of man” and Virgil’s _ipsis ductoribus_? (v. 249). What impression is the English reader apt to get from phrases like “flitting by in wain”? It is certainly not that of a hero rushing to battle, but, if any—and we are not sure that upon our own mind any very tangible impression is left at all—rather of a bucolic ghost disappearing somewhere in a spectral hay-cart. To say Carthage is to be “Lady of all lands” is surely to produce an utterly different effect from that of _dea gentibus esse_ (i. 17); and they must have shrewder eyes than ours who can find in such lines as “Lo! what was there to heave aloft in fashioning of Rome,” or “Those fed on good hap all things may because they deem they may,” anything more than the shell of Virgil’s “Tantæ molis erat Romanam condere gentem” or, “Hos successus alit; possunt quia posse videntur,” where the pretence of verbal fidelity only makes the verbal affectation more annoyingly weak. These ever-recurring eccentricities of phrase tease the reader and spoil half his enjoyment. In a translator whose daily speech was of “trowing” instead of “trusting,” of “tale” for number or “sort” for company, of “wending” and “wafting,” and “folk” in the singular, and who used “very” rather profusely, and on slight provocation, as an adjective, and “feared” and “learned” as transitive verbs, and agreed with some modern great men in thinking grammar generally a bore, such lines as “O Palinure, that _trowed_ the shies and soft seas overmuch”; “These tidings hard for us to _trow_ unto our ears do win”; “In all thou needest toil herein, from me the deed should _wend_”; “A hundred more, and youths withal of age and _tale_ the same”;