you three attempts:--

Pulcher et ille labor, pulchros ornare labores.
Pulchrum etiam, pulchros palma donare labores.
Pulchrum etiam, pulchris meritam decernere palmam.

You will easily make better. If we can produce a tolerable line
among us, we may pretend, as Lardner did, that it is in
Haphorstrus or Masenius.--Yours ever, T. B. MACAULAY.

Francis Newman, the cardinal's high-minded and accomplished brother,
writes to Mr. Gladstone (1878) in a strain of exalted recognition of his
services to the nation, and quotes (a little oddly perhaps) the beautiful
lines in Euripides, foretelling the approaching triumph of Dionysus over
his mortal foe.(331)

The poets are not absent. Wordsworth, as we have already seen (i. p. 269
_n._), sends to him at the board of trade his remonstrance and his sonnet
on the railway into Windermere. Tennyson addresses to him for his personal
behoof the sonnet upon the Redistribution bill of 1884--

"Steersman, be not precipitate in thine act
Of steering ..."

and on a sheet of note-paper at a later date when Irish self-government
was the theme, he copies the Greek lines from Pindar, "how easy a thing it
is even for men of light weight to shake a state, how hard to build it up
again."(332) Rogers (1844) insists that, "if one may judge from
experience, perhaps the best vehicle in our language for a translator of
verse is prose. He who doubts it has only to open his Bible.... Who could
wish the stories of Joseph and of Ruth to be otherwise than they are? Or
who but would rejoice if the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ were so translated?
I once asked Porson to attempt it, and he seemed to like the idea, but
said that it would be a labour of ten or twelve years."

(M174) There was one true poet, and not only a poet but a man, as we now
see, with far truer insight into the intellectual needs of his countrymen
than any other writer of the closing quarter of the century, who is
sometimes supposed to have been overlooked by Mr. Gladstone. And here in
the Octagon is Matthew Arnold's letter soliciting his recommendation
(1867) for the strictly prosaic post of librarian of the House of Commons,
which happily he did not obtain. The year before, Arnold had wished to be
made a commissioner under the Endowed Schools Act, but a lawyer was
rightly thought necessary by Lord Russell or his advisers, and there is no
good reason to suppose that Mr. Gladstone meddled eit