ional 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 _plaque_
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.

What Coleridge has reported to have said of Southey may be applied to
a translator. He too "is in some sort like an elegant setter of
jewels; the stones are not his own: he gives them all the advantage of
his art, but not their native brilliancy." I feel even more than this
when I attempt translation, and reflect that, unlike the jeweller, it
is my doom to reduce the lustre of the gems I handle, even if I do not
substitute paste and pebbles. Yet I am frequently enticed to repeat
experiments, which afterwards I regard in the light of failures. What
allures me first is the p