anguage which transforms Milton's line into [Greek: e
shalpigx ohy proshephe ton hoplismhenon hochlon.][C] But be this as it
may, these phenomena are surely too rare and too arbitrary to be
adequately represented by any regularly recurring rhyme: and the
question remains, what is there in the unrhymed original to which rhyme
answers?

To me its effect is to divide the verse into couplets, triplets, or (if
the word may include them all) _stanzas_ of some kind. Without rhyme we
have no apparent means of conveying the effect of stanzas. There are of
course devices such as repeating a line or part of a line at stated
intervals, as is done in 'Tears, idle tears' and elsewhere: but clearly
none of these would be available to a translator. Where therefore he has
to express stanzas, it is easy to see that rhyme may be admissible and
even necessary. Pope's couplet may (or may not) stand for elegiacs, and
the _In Memoriam_ stanza for some one of Horace's metres. Where the
heroes of Virgil's Eclogues sing alternately four lines each, Gray's
quatrain seems to suggest itself: and where a similar case occurs in
these Idylls (as for instance in the ninth) I thought it might be met by
taking whatever received English stanza was nearest the required length.
Pope's couplet again may possibly best convey the pomposity of some
Idylls and the point of others. And there may be divers considerations
of this kind. But, speaking generally, where the translator has not to
intimate stanzas--where he has on the contrary to intimate that there
are none--rhyme seems at first sight an intrusion and a _suggestio
falsi_.

No doubt (as has been observed) what 'Pastorals' we have are mostly
written in what is called the heroic measure. But the reason is, I
suppose, not far to seek. Dryden and Pope wrote 'heroics,' not from any
sense of their fitness for bucolic poetry, but from a sense of their
universal fitness: and their followers copied them. But probably no
scholar would affirm that any poem, original or translated, by Pope or
Dryden or any of their school, really resembles in any degree the
bucolic poetry of the Greeks. Mr. Morris, whose poems appear to me to
resemble it more almost than anything I have ever seen, of course writes
what is technically Pope's metre, and equally of course is not of Pope's
school. Whether or no Pope and Dryden _intended_ to resemble the old
bucolic poets in style is, to say the least, immaterial. If they did
not, ther