d blank verse, made his task easier thereby, he does
not think of abandoning the couplet for any of the verse forms which
earlier translators had tried. He finds Chapman's _Homer_ characterized
by "harsh numbers ... and a monstrous length of verse," and thinks his
own period "a much better age than was the last ... for versification
and the art of numbers."[422] Roscommon, whose version of Horace's _Art
of Poetry_ is in blank verse, says that Jonson's translation lacks
clearness as a result not only of his literalness but of "the constraint
of rhyme,"[423] but makes no further attack on the couplet as the
regular vehicle for translation.

Dryden, however, is peculiarly interested in the general effect of his
verse as compared with that of his originals. "I have attempted," he
says in the _Examen Poeticum_, "to restore Ovid to his native sweetness,
easiness, and smoothness, and to give my poetry a kind of cadence and,
as we call it, a run of verse, as like the original as the English can
come to the Latin."[424] In his study of Virgil previous to translating
the _Aeneid_ he observed "above all, the elegance of his expressions
and the harmony of his numbers."[425] Elsewhere he says of his author,
"His verse is everywhere sounding the very thing in your ears whose
sense it bears, yet the numbers are perpetually varied to increase the
delight of the reader; so that the same sounds are never repeated twice
together."[426] These metrical effects he has tried to reproduce in
English. "The turns of his verse, his breakings, his numbers, and his
gravity, I have as far imitated as the poverty of our language and the
hastiness of my performance would allow," he says in the preface to
_Sylvae_.[427] In his translation of the whole _Aeneid_ he was guided by
the same considerations. "Virgil ... is everywhere elegant, sweet, and
flowing in his hexameters. His words are not only chosen, but the places
in which he ranks them for the sound. He who removes them from the
station wherein their master set them spoils the harmony. What he says
of the Sibyl's prophecies may be as properly applied to every word of
his: they must be read in order as they lie; the least breath
discomposes them and somewhat of their divinity is lost. I cannot boast
that I have been thus exact in my verses; but I have endeavored to
follow the example of my master, and am the first Englishman, perhaps,
who made it his design to copy him in his numbers, his choice of