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November 30/57 My dear Nicholson, . . . . . I have of late been urged by a particular circumstance to make various trials of translation into Latin (lyrical, etc.) verse—an exercise I always used to dislike, and have never much practiced. I now find my dislike was largely caused by the unsuitable and over-stiff metres which used to be imposed on me when I was under orders. . . . In English and Greek versification I have long been aware of the essential importance of this; but I have looked on Latin as too inflexible a tongue to be worth the labour, since nearly all the translations I have seen, pall on me as mere flat imitations of the ancients instead of having a smack of the original. I have been inclining to the belief that Terence, Virgil, and Horace have done damage to the Latin language, or at least to our taste; just as Pope was the ruin of English poetry so long as he was allowed to dictate the style and cadences. In Plautus, Lucretius, and Catullus the language has a flexibility and the metres a freedom which (as I think) academicians and schoolmasters have not duly appreciated, and which ought to impart to us (when we do do anything so absurd as to write foreign verses) a freedom at which we have not generally aimed. As to metre, I think it really a folly to insist on Horace's restrictions, which are entirely his own, being neither found in the Greek, which he copied, nor in Catullus; and which made the problem of translation so much harder (and he did not translate), that one has to sacrifice too much. I think we ought to construct our metres by selection from the Greek, just as Catullus or Horace did, not imitate them slavishly. I send you one specimen of my translation, to ask whether so many as seven lines together the same is too monotonous. If there were only four or five it would be as one of Catullus's. I dare say you have the original. . . . With truest regards to you all, Your cordial friend,
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