There is yet something more to be said on the question of style.  The exact mode of representing Horace’s persiflage is, as I have intimated already, not an easy thing to determine.  The translators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the most part made their author either vulgar or flat, sometimes both.  Probably no better rule can be laid down for the translator of the present day, than that he should try to follow the ordinary language of good society, wavering and uncertain as that standard is.  I do not mean so much the language of the better sort of light literature as the language of conversation and of familiar letter-writing.  Even some of the idiomatic blemishes of conversation may perhaps, in such a work, be venial, if not laudable.  I have not always sought to be a minute purist even on points of grammar.  Cowper, rather singularly, appears from his practice to proscribe colloquial abbreviations in poetry, though they were, I suppose, at least as usual in his time as in ours, and are used by Pope in his lighter works with little scruple.  I have adopted them freely through nearly the whole of my version, though of course there are some passages where they could not be properly employed.  Gifford says in the Essay on the Roman Satirists prefixed to his Juvenal that the general character of his translation will be found to be plainness:  and if I do not misunderstand what he means by the term, it exactly represents the quality which I have endeavoured to attain myself.  As a general rule, where a rendering presented itself to me which in dealing with another author I should welcome as poetical, I hare deliberately rejected it, and cast about instead for something which, without being feeble or slipshod, should have an idiomatic prosaic ring.  Where Horace evidently means to rise, I have attempted to rise too:  but through the greater part of this work I have been anxious, to use his own expression, to creep along the ground.  No doubt there is danger in all this, the danger of triviality, pertness, and occasional vulgarity.  Gifford’s own work was attacked on its first appearance by a reviewer of the day precisely on those grounds:  and though he seems to have made a vehement reply to his assailant, the changes which he made in his second edition showed that the censure was not without its effect.  Still, where it is almost impossible to walk quite straight, the walker will reconcile himself to incidental deviations, and will even consider, where a slip is inevitable, on which side of the line it is better that the slip should take place.

A patent difficulty of course is to know what to do with local and temporary customs, allusions, proverbs, &c., which enter, I need not say, far more largely into satire or comedy than into any other form of writing.  Here it is that the imitator has the advantage of the translator:  a certain parallelism between his own time and the time of the author he imitates is postulated in the fact of his imitating