ABSTRACT
Thus far, the findings of this exploration of Smart’s Englishing endeavour have been, to a degree, unsurprising. It is not difficult to gauge the motivations behind the poet’s translation of the Psalms and Phaedrus’s fables: even if the finished Englished products display a broader literary endeavour, the attraction of Christian and didactic themes for a poet such as Smart is clear from the outset. Not so in the case of Horace’s verse. What, then, are we to make of Smart’s decision to translate the complete works of this poet, not only once, but twice during his writing career? What motivated his sustained interest in his source text? Why does he choose Horace over other Roman poets?
