y. But it has some fine passages--notably the one
which relates the death of Dido--

'As she had said, her damsell might perceue
Her with these wordes fal pearced on a sword
The blade embrued and hands besprent with gore.
The clamor rang unto the pallace toppe,
The brute ranne throughout al thastoined towne,
With wailing great, and women's shrill yelling,
The roofs gan roare, the aire resound with plaint,
As though Cartage, or thauncient town of Tyre
With prease of entred enemies swarmed full,
Or when the rage of furious flame doth take
The temples toppes, and mansions eke of men.'

Of the translations into modern English, that of Dryden may still
be said to stand first, in spite of its lack of fidelity. It owes
its place to its sustained vigour, and the fact that the heroic
couplet is in the hands of a master. In its way nothing could be better
than--

'Just in the gate, and in the jaws of hell,
Revengeful cares, and sullen sorrows dwell,
And pale diseases, and repining age--
Want, fear, and famine's unresisted rage,
Here toils and death, and death's half-brother sleep,
Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep.
With anxious pleasures of a guilty mind,
Deep frauds, before, and open force behind;
The Furies' iron beds, and strife that shakes
Her hissing tresses, and unfolds her snakes.'

But though the heroic couplet may have conveyed to Dryden's age
something of the effect of the Virgilian hexameter, it does nothing
of the kind to us. Probably we are prejudiced in the matter by Pope's
Homer.

Professor Conington's translation certainly has spirit and energy,
but he was decidedly unfortunate in his choice of metre. To attempt
to render 'the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man'
by fluent octosyllabics was bound to result in incongruity, as in
the following passage, where the sombre warning of the Sibyl to
Aeneas becomes merely a sprightly reminder that--

'The journey down to the abyss
Is prosperous and light,
The palace gates of gloomy Dis
Stand open day and night;
But upward to retrace the way
And pass into the light of day,
There comes the stress of labour; this
May task a hero's might.'

The various attempts that have been made to translate the poem in
the metre of the original have all been sad failures. And from Richard
Stanyhurst, whom Thomas Nash described as trea