Taken altogether, this translation will be found less close to the original than those with which I have formerly troubled the public.  The considerations pointed out in the last paragraph will to a great extent account for this:  generally too I may say that where the main characteristic of the original is perfect ease, the translator, if he is to be easy also, will be obliged to take considerable latitude.  I trust however that I shall be found in most cases not to have translated irrespectively of the Latin, but to have borne it in mind even while departing from it most widely.  I have studied the various commentators with some care, and hope that my version may not be without its use in turn as a sort of free commentary.  I have omitted two entire satires and several passages from others.  Some of them no one would wish to see translated:  some, though capable of being rendered without offence a hundred or even fifty years ago, could hardly be so rendered now.  Where I have not translated I have not in general cared to paraphrase, but have been silent altogether.  I have in short given so much of my author as a well-judging reader would wish to dwell on in reading the original, and no more.

I have made acquaintance with such of the previous translations as I did not already know, though it seemed best to avoid consulting them in any passage till I had translated it myself.  The few places in which I have been consciously indebted to others have been mentioned in the notes.  Besides these, there are many other coincidences in expression and rhyme which might be detected by any one sharing my taste for that kind of reading, probably one or two in each poem:  but as I believe them to be mere coincidences, I have not been at pains either to avoid them or to call attention to them.  The only one of my predecessors in translating all the poems contained in this volume whom I need mention particularly is Mr. Howes.  His book was published posthumously in 1845; but though it is stated in the preface to want the author’s last corrections, a good deal of it must have been written long before, as the translation of the Satires is announced as nearly half finished in the introduction to a translation of Persius by the same author published in 1809, and some specimens given in the notes to that volume correspond almost exactly with the passages as they finally appear.  The translation of Persius is a work of decided ability, but, in common I am inclined to think with all the other translations, fails to give an adequate notion of the characteristics of that very peculiar writer.  The translation of the Horatian poems, on the other hand, seems to me on the whole undoubtedly successful, though, for whatever reason, its merits do not appear to have been recognized by the public.  It is unequal, and it is too prolix:  but when it is good, which is not seldom, it is very good, unforced, idiomatic, and felicitous.  In one of its features, the habit of supplying connecting links to Horace’s