It is by no means the thin and conventional sprinkling of classical erudition which makes these poems of the Goliardi pagan, and reminds the student of Renaissance art. Conversely, the scholastic plays on words which they contain do not stamp them out as medieval. Both of these qualities are _rococo_ and superficial rather than essential and distinctive in their style. After making due allowances for either element of oddity, a true connoisseur will gratefully appreciate the spontaneous note of enjoyment, the disengagement from ties and duties imposed by temporal respectability, the frank animalism, which connects these vivid hymns to Bacchus and Venus with past Aristophanes and future Rabelais. They celebrate the eternal presence of mirth-making powers in hearts of men, apart from time and place and varying dogmas which do not concern deities of Nature. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 24: _Carm. Bur._, p. 133.] [Footnote 25: Ibid., p. 251.] [Footnote 26: _Carm. Bur._, p. 238.] [Footnote 27: Ibid., p. 240.] [Footnote 28: Wright's _Walter Mapes_, p. xlv.; _Carm. Bur._, p. 69.] XII. The time has now come for me to introduce my reader to the versions I have made from the songs of Wandering Students. I must remind him that, while the majority of these translations aim at literal exactness and close imitation of the originals in rhyme and structure, others are more paraphrastic. It has always been my creed that a good translation should resemble a plaster-cast; the English being _plaquè_ upon the original, so as to reproduce its exact form, although it cannot convey the effects of bronze or marble, which belong to the material of the work of art. But this method has not always seemed to me the most desirable for rendering poems, an eminent quality of which is facility and spontaneity. In order to obtain that quality in our language, the form has occasionally to be sacrificed.