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Updated: June 19, 2025
But he had himself, as a young man, followed the fashion, and translated the Phaenomena of Aratus into wonderfully polished and melodious hexameter verse.
And the Homeric hexameter will have six words where the English hexameter has twelve or fourteen. Yet having set himself this utterly hopeless and thankless task, to write English hexameter, Kingsley produced some five hundred lines of Andromeda, which in rhythm, ease, rapidity, and metrical correctness are quite amongst the best in the language.
He makes no attempt, as later poets unsuccessfully did, at reproducing the richness of tone and intricacy of modulation which it had in the hands of Virgil. Ovid's hexameter is a thing of his own. It becomes with him almost a new metre light, brilliant, and rapid, but with some monotony of cadence, and without the deep swell that it had, not in Virgil only, but in his predecessors.
I had listened to the vicar's Homeric lowing for the space of a minute or so what some one has called, the great beast-like, bellow-like, roar and roll of the Iliad hexameter: it stopped like a cut cord.
Of fraudulent imitation the Franciscans of Orleans were accused, and for this crime they were severely punished. We have the Arrest des Commissaires du Conseil d'Etat du Roi, from MS. 7170, A. of the Bibliotheque du Roi. We have also allusions in the Franciscanus, a satire in Latin hexameter by George Buchanan. Finally, we have versions in Lavaterus, and in Wierus, De Curat. Laes.
For reports he wrote verses in modern Greek, and through one of those inadvertences which make tragedy, the Minister of War down in troubled Bulgaria once received between the pages of a report in cipher on the fortifications of the Danube a verse in fervid hexameter that made even that grim official smile. Harmony was quite unconscious.
Paul II was the first to dread and mistrust the culture of his secretaries, and his three successors, Sixtus, Innocent, and Alexander, accepted dedications and allowed themselves to be sung to the hearts' content of the poets there even existed a 'Borgiad, probably in hexameter but were too busy elsewhere, and too occupied in seeking other foundations for their power, to trouble themselves much about the poet-scholars.
'As we were leaving the College, he said, "Here I translated Pope's Messiah. Which do you think is the best line in it? My own favourite is, 'Vallis aromaticas fundit Saronica nubes." I told him, I thought it a very sonorous hexameter. I did not tell him, it was not in the Virgilian style. He much regretted that his FIRST tutor was dead; for whom he seemed to retain the greatest regard.
Instead, he threw himself on the task of moulding the Latin language to the movement of the Greek hexameter; and his success in the enterprise was so conclusive that the question between the two forms was never again raised.
The metres are similarly treated, particularly the very predominant hexameter: if we transpose the words his clever imitator says no man would observe that he had anything else before him than simple prose; in point of effect they can only be compared to our doggerel verses.
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