45.  Luther’s Parents:  The Death of Hofer:  (Imaginary Conversations) Andrew Hofer, Count Metternich, and the Emperor Francis; Judge Wolfgang and Henry of Melchthal:  The Coronation.  Tyrannicide (The Last Fruit off an Old Tree):  Walter Tyrrel and William Rufus:  Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn.

46.  Essex and Spenser (Imaginary Conversations):  Essex and Bacon:  Antony and Octavius (Scenes for the Study).

47.  Critical Essays on Theocritus and Catullus.

48, 49.  Heroic Idyls; Homer, Laertes, and Agatha.

‘J’en passe, et des meilleurs.’  But who can enumerate all or half our obligations to the illimitable and inexhaustible genius of the great man whose life and whose labour lasted even from the generation of our fathers’ fathers to our own?  Hardly any reader can feel, I think, so deeply as I feel the inadequacy of my poor praise and too imperfect gratitude to the majestic subject of their attempted expression; but ‘such as I had have I given him.’

GRAND CHORUS OF BIRDS

FROM

ARISTOPHANES

Attempted in English verse after the original metre.

I was allured into the audacity of this experiment by consideration of a fact which hitherto does not seem to have been taken into consideration by any translator of the half divine humourist in whose incomparable genius the highest qualities of Rabelais were fused and harmonized with the supremest gifts of Shelley:  namely, that his marvellous metrical invention of the anapaestic heptameter was almost exactly reproducible in a language to which all variations and combinations of anapaestic, iambic, or trochaic metre are as natural and pliable as all dactylic and spondaic forms of verse are unnatural and abhorrent.  As it happens, this highest central interlude of a most adorable masterpiece is as easy to detach from its dramatic setting, and even from its lyrical context, as it was easy to give line for line of it in English.  In two metrical points only does my version vary from the verbal pattern of the original.  I have of course added rhymes, and double rhymes, as necessary makeweights for the imperfection of an otherwise inadequate language; and equally of course I have not attempted the impossible and undesirable task of reproducing the rare exceptional effect of a line overcharged on purpose with a preponderance of heavy-footed spondees:  and this for the obvious reason that even if such a line—­which I doubt—­could be exactly represented, foot by foot and pause for pause, in English, this English line would no more be a verse in any proper sense of the word than is the line I am writing at this moment.  And my main intention, or at least my main desire, in the undertaking of this brief adventure, was to renew as far as possible for English ears the music of this resonant and triumphant metre, which goes ringing at full gallop as of horses who