In the same year appeared Mr. Gladstone’s Horace. It was on the whole a failure. A critic writes: ‘The uncouth diction, obscurity of expression of the rendering, are patent evidences of the translator’s being ill at ease under the restraint of narrow bounds of rhyme and metre.’ The same writer observes: ‘Mr. Gladstone’s translation of the Odes of Horace will escape oblivion. Historians will remember it as they remember the hexameters of Cicero, the verses with which Frederick the Great pestered Voltaire, and the daily poems Warren Hastings used to read at his breakfast-table.’ An ingenious contributor to _Blackwood_, on the publication of the book, contributed a letter from ‘Horace in the Shades,’ intimating that he had nothing to do with the matter. It is to be questioned whether worse verses were ever written than the following in the ‘Horace’: ‘No; me the feast the war employs Of maids (their nails well clipt) with boys, Me fancy free; or something warm, My playful use does no one harm.’ Again, ‘Then shalt thou with flagrant passion Like the beasts be torn, And with fire of cankered entrails Thou shalt grieve forlorn.’ Or, ‘The Furies grant in war no scant; Devouring seas o’er sailors roll; Young funerals hold their place with old; Proserpine spares no breathing soul.’ Thus is the death of Cleopatra recorded: ‘Bold to survey with eye serene, The void that had her palace been; She lodged the vipers in her skin Where best to drink the poison in.’ When ‘Ecce Homo’ appeared—a book which dear Lord Shaftesbury, Exeter Hall applauding, described as the worst book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell—Mr. Gladstone, in an article in _Good Words_, gave in his adherence to the book. He described the author as at once passing into the presence of Jesus of Nazareth, and then, without any foregone conclusion, either of submission or dissent, giving that heed to the acts and words of the unfriended teacher which the truest Jews did when those words were spoken and those acts done.