that the majesty of Virgil could be rendered in the jingling
manner of Marmion, and though there is certainly far more of the mediaeval
knight than of the moss-trooper about AEneas, even Mr. Morris's version
is not by any means perfect. Compared with professor Conington's bad
ballad it is, of course, as gold to brass; considered simply as a poem it
has noble and enduring qualities of beauty, music and strength; but it
hardly conveys to us the sense that the AEneid is the literary epic of a
literary age. There is more of Homer in it than of Virgil, and the
ordinary reader would hardly realise from the flow and spirit of its
swinging lines that Virgil was a self-conscious artist, the Laureate of a
cultured Court. The AEneid bears almost the same relation to the Iliad
that the Idylls of the King do to the old Celtic romances of Arthur. Like
them it is full of felicitous modernisms, of exquisite literary echoes
and of delicate and delightful pictures; as Lord Tennyson loves England
so did Virgil love Rome; the pageants of history and the purple of empire
are equally dear to both poets; but neither of them has the grand
simplicity or the large humanity of the early singers, and, as a hero,
AEneas is no less a failure than Arthur. Sir Charles Bowen's version
hardly gives us this peculiar literary quality of Virgil's verse, and,
now and then, it reminds us, by some awkward inversion, of the fact that
it is a translation; still, on the whole, it is extremely pleasant to
read, and, if it does not absolutely mirror Virgil, it at least brings us
many charming memories of him.

The metre Sir Charles Bowen has selected is a form of English hexameter,
with the final dissyllable shortened into a foot of a single syllable
only. It is, of course, accentual not quantitative, and though it misses
that element of sustained strength which is given by the dissyllabic
ending of the Latin verse, and has consequently a tendency to fall into
couplets, the increased facility of rhyming gained by the change is of no
small value. To any English metre that aims at swiftness of movement
rhyme seems to be an absolute essential, and there are not enough double
rhymes in our language to admit of the retention of this final
dissyllabic foot.

As an example of Sir Charles Bowen's method we would take his rendering
of the famous passage in the fifth Eclogue on the death of Daphnis:

All of the nymphs went weeping for Daphnis cruelly slain: