Horace is scarcely less remarkable for his terseness than for his ease:  the tendency of the octosyllabic metre in its colloquial form is to become slipshod, interminable, in a word unclassical.  Again, few of those who use it apply it consistently to all Horace’s hexameter poems:  most make a distinction, applying it to some and not to others.  In point of fact, however, it does not seem that any such distinction can be made.  Horace’s lightest Satires or Epistles have generally something grave about them:  his gravest have more than one light passage.  To draw a metrical line in the English where none is drawn in the Latin appears to me objectionable ipso facto where it can reasonably be avoided.  That it can be avoided in the present case does not really admit of a doubt.  The English heroic couplet, managed as Cowper has managed it, is surely quite equal to representing all the various changes of mood and temper which find their embodiment successively in the Horatian hexameter.  Cowper’s more serious poems contain more of deep and sustained gravity than is to be found in any similar production of Horace:  while on the other hand there are few things in Horace so easy and sprightly as the Epistle to Joseph Hill, nothing perhaps so absolutely prosaic as the Colubriad and the verses to Mrs. Newton.  There is also an advantage in rendering the Satires of Horace in the metre which may be called the recognized metre of English satire, and as such has always been employed (with one very partial and grotesque exception) by the translators of Juvenal.  Lastly, I may be allowed to say that, while very distrustful of my powers of managing the graver heroic, where so many great masters have gone before me, I felt less diffidence in attempting the lower and more colloquial form of the measure, as not requiring the same command of rhythm, and not exposing a writer to the same amount of invidious comparison with his predecessors.

In what I have said I have implied that Cowper is the right model for the English heroic as applied to a translation of Horace:  and this on the whole I believe to be the case.  Horace’s characteristics, as I remarked just now, are ease and terseness, and both these Cowper possesses, ease in metre, and ease and terseness in style.  Pope, on the other hand, who in some respects would seem the better representative of Horace, is less easy both in style and metre, while his terseness is what Horace’s terseness is not, trimness and antithetical smartness.  Still, while making Cowper my pattern as a general rule, I have attempted from time to time to borrow a grace from Pope, even, when the original gave me no warrant for the appropriation.  If Cowper’s verse could be written by Cowper, it would probably leave nothing to be desired in a translation of this kind:  handled by an inferior workman, it is in danger of becoming flat, pointless, and insipid:  and Horace has many passages which, if not flat, pointless, or insipid in themselves, are painfully liable to become