Thus far we have seen what has been ac- | repugnant to the Virgilian ideal, and those complished by the different translators of elements he was at no great pains to conVirgil, down to a few years from the time at ceal. When he chose he could be not only which we are now writing. Their object, in general, has been, as we said just now, to substitute a pleasing English poem for an admired original. This being the case, it was naturally to be expected that the one who happened to be the best English poet should be the best translator. Perhaps it might be necessary to stipulate that there should be some similarity between the genius of the poet translating and that of the poet translated. A Virgil by Shelley would have been un-Virgilian, though scarcely more so than Pope's Homer is un-Homeric; but where any scope is given for the exhibition of native poetical power, a true poet, however careless, is sure to please more than the most fastidiously elegant versifier. And this is just what has happened. Whatever a few critics may have thought and said, Dryden's is the only English Virgil of which the bulk of English readers know any thing. It is doubtless true, as a critical theory, that a translator ought to endeavor not only to say what his author has said, but to say it as he has said it. In the greatest writers, thought and language may possibly be distinguished, but can scarcely be dissociated. Every true poet has a style of his own: a style which probably forms half of what makes him please, and more than half of that which makes him remembered. And if this be true of other writers, it is especially true of Virgil. He has chosen to trust, as scarcely any one else has done, to expression -to the preference not merely of one word to another, but of one arrangement of words to another. He insinuates new thoughts through the medium of apparent tautologies; he calls in old phrases, recasts them, and produces new effects. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that few of the translators of Virgil have trusted to themselves so entirely as Dryden. He worked hurriedly and under pressure; he was hardly likely to be more attentive to his author's language than in his original compositions; nay the very vigor of his genius required that he should abandon himself to his own impulses and express himself in his own way. He was constantly adding to his original, and that in the most wilful and reckless manner. There were elements in his nature peculiarly careless and slovenly, but offensively coarse : "Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine læso, "O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate; "Speak, Muse! the causes of effects so great: What god was wronged? or why, incensed with hate, Should Heaven's high queen with toils on toils The man for piety to heaven renowned, Here, if we make it a question of degrees, there is doubtless much to be urged against Dryden, who has expanded into eight lines what the others have been content to express in six, and a closer pressure, such as Sotheby occasionally practised, might possibly have reduced to four. But if we look closely at the original, we shall see that its peculiar characteristics have really been preserved by none of the three. Which of them gives any conception of the Virgilian rhythm? and yet what would a passage of Virgil be without this? Who has imitated the peculiarity of 66 quo numine læso "that expression which still continues to be the crux of commentators? Or, if it be thought too much to expect that a translator should adumbrate what no annotator has succeeded in fixing, what have we in any of the three to represent that most Virgilian of phrases-half-inverted, half-direct" tot volvere casus?" Dryden has "involved;" Pitt talks of "a weight of woes; Symmons of "confounding with toils on toils; but none of these is what Virgil has said, though any of them will serve to express roughly what he meant. Looking to Virgil's general meaning, we see no reason to doubt that it is fairly conveyed by Dryden's eight lines-eight lines which seem to us the very perfection of clear, unaffected, musical English. It is needless to compare them in detail with those of Pitt and Symmons; they are obviously such as only a master like Dryden could have written : "Hæc miscere nefas: nec cum sis cetera fossor, Tres tantum ad numeros Satyrum moveare Bathylli." The same easy strength is observable throughout Dryden's version of the Georgics. Even where it is evident that he is not putting forth his full power, he will generally be found to distance his competitors. Let us try them in a tolerably simple passage from the Second Book (v. 362): "Ac dum prima novis adolescit frondibus ætas, Ipsi acie nondum falcis tentanda, sed uncis Ante reformidant ferrum: tum denique dura But when in lusty strength the o'ershadowing vine Clings with strong shoots that all the elm entwine, Range with free steel, exert tyrannic sway, Lop the rank bough, and curb the exuberant spray." As usual, Dryden allows himself more license than the rest, and his freedom has led him into a misconception of the meaning of the first sentence, which the other two, owing to their greater fidelity, avoid, or appear to avoid. He confuses the earliest stage, when the leaves are not to be touched at all, with the second, when they are not to be touched by the pruning-hook. But in spite of this, and in spite of the general latitude of his rendering, we are mistaken if our readers fail to perceive his great superiority. Sotheby keeps much closer to Virgil, but it is a closeness by which we set very little store, failing, as it does, to bring out the chief points of his author's language, the "laxis per purum immissus habenis," and even the "tum-tum-tum denique." The military metaphor in Dryden's last lines may seem rather a bold expansion of "dura exerce imperia; " but it is thoroughly in the spirit of the original. Every line of Virgil shows that he regarded the vine-branch as a living thing; that is the key-note of the paragraph, and no one has seen this so clearly or brought it out so vividly as Dry a general mediocrity of expression: a monotonous level which is neither high poetry nor good prose. Dryden's narrative is easy and straightforward; Pitt's indefinite and conventional. He has, as it were, a certain cycle of rhymes which Pope has made classical, and he rarely ventures to deviate from it. We open his translation at random, glance down a page, and find the couplets end as follows: Tyre, fire; round, crowned; joy, Troy; hour, o'er; grace, race; glows, rows; delay, way; designed, mind; come, room; inspire, fire; place, race; rest, addrest; above, Jove; implore, adore; tost, coast; know, woe. Ex pede Herculem, when we see tost and coast, inspire and fire, in a writer of the school of Pope, we know pretty well what the rest of the line is likely to have been. One of Pitt's most enthusiastic admirers observes, not without truth, that he is peculiarly unfortunate in his versions of similes. A simile is one of those things in which weakness of handling is most likely to come out; as managed by Virgil it is commonly a description in itself, and the features in it which are not intended to be made prominent will often escape an inattentive reader. Warton was heavier and more prosaic than Pitt, without being much less conventional. His ear was worse, his command of poetical language more restricted; yet he sighs in his dedication over the necessity of using coarse and common words" in his Our judgment then is, that Pitt and War- translation of the Georgics, viz., plough and ton, Symmons and Sotheby, fail as translat-sow, wheat, dung, ashes, horse, and cow, etc.; ors precisely because they fail as original poets. They cannot help being more or less original, substituting, that is, their own mode of expression for Virgil's; and their originality is comparatively uninteresting. They are not great poets, but simply accomplished versifiers. Each has his own merits; each shows his weakness in his own way. Pitt wrote with the echoes of Pope in his ears, and may remind his readers of the English Homer as long as they have not the English Homer by them. Those who wish to estimate his real relation to his master may compare a translation of his from the Twenty-third Odyssey, printed in Pope's letters, with Pope's own. His chief fault is den. 66 words which he fears "will unconquerably "All hail, Saturnian soil! immortal source Sotheby and Symmons may be contrasted as well as paralleled with Warton and Pitt. When they wrote, the language of English classical poetry had become still more artifi cial, the structure of the heroic couplet still ble power of condensed expression, yet who would care to read page after page of poetry of this sort, apart from the associations of the Latin ? "Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile." Sotheby knew and felt that one of Virgil's greatest charms was his diction; he was doubtless conscious that his own strength more conventional. Sotheby's Georgics run, in fact, to the tune of the "Pleasures of Hope." It would be too much to ascribe any very direct influence to a poem published only a year previously. Still the secret of their weakness could hardly be better described than in the words which Hazlitt lay in elegance of expression; and he may applies to Campbell's poem. "A painful attention is paid to the expression in proportion as there is little to express, and the decomposition of prose is substituted for the composition of poetry.” There are many well-wrought lines; sometimes we may find a whole passage which has been successfully labored; but we miss throughout that pervading vigor which works from within not from without-which expresses itself poetically, because it has first learned to express itself in English. Nowhere is the power of writing English more needed than in translating the Georgics. Even as it is, Virgil's didactics are wellnigh crushed under a load of ornament: there is every thing to tempt a translator not to say a plain thing in a plain way; and the slightest additional bias in favor of the indirect chicaneries of language is sure to be fatal. Here are Sotheby's directions for the construction of beehives (“Ipsa autem, seu corticibus tibi suta cavatis," etc. Georg. IV. 33):"Alike, if hollow cork their fabric form, Or flexile twigs enclose the settled swarm, With narrow entrance guard, lest frosts congeal, Or summer suns the melting cells unseal. And smear the chinks that open to the air, pore, With wax cement and thicken o'er and o'er. Hide in worn stones and hollow trees their not unreasonably have been led to believe that he was well qualified to succeed in a translation of the Georgics. But though his Virgil, the task of his youth, is very superior to his Homer, the labor of his old age, not only from the greater congeniality of the subject, but in itself, as an original poem, few, we apprehend, would be found now to endorse the opinion expressed by several of his contemporaries, that he has contrived to occupy a place which the carelessness and slovenliness of Dryden had left vacant. One cause of the want of interest with which we read his Georgics may be the wearying monotony of their versification. The heroic couplet is there as it passed from Pope to Darwin, and from Darwin to Campbell; but an unbroken series of such couplets is a poor substitute for the interwoven harmonies of Virgil. When a strong or even a rough line is wanted, Sotheby has no objection to introducing it, any more than Pope had before him; but to fuse couplet into couplet, varying the cadences till the entire paragraph becomes a complex rhythmical whole, was a gift which nature denied him, and art did not supply. Symmons is, as we have intimated, a writer of the same school as Sotheby, preferable in he has not as many good lines, but he prosome respects, inferior in others. Probably duces less the effect of sameness: he is not so conventional, but he is more of a pedant. On the whole, however, the family likeness between them is considerable, as will be seen from the following extract from the boat-race in the Fifth Æneid (" Quo diversus abis," etc. v. 166) : Aid thou their toil: with mud their walls o'er-"Why thus, Menotes, still licentious stray? lay, And lightly shade the roof with leafy spray." Every line here gives evidence of taste and refinement: some of them show considera "Lectures on the English Poets," p. 294 (1st edition). Hazlitt censures Rogers-who, as he truly says, is a poet of the same school-in language still more severe, but, with all its exaggeration, not wholly undeserved. Keep to the rock! be frugal of the way! Then, as he there in fearless triumph rides, Menotes to the rock with labor swims, Him in his plunge, and in his dripping plight, The Trojans view, diverted at the sight, This is carefully done, and undoubtedly The moral which we would draw from this part of our criticism is, that no one is likely to attain as a poetical translator the excellence which would be denied to him as an original writer. In prose the case is different, as there the translator has to draw far less on his own powers; though even there it will be true that a man who is best able to express his own thoughts will be best able -we do not say most willing-to express the thoughts of another. But the poetical translator is really an original poet; and the stream cannot rise higher than its source. One great poet there has been who once conceived the thought of disputing Dryden's supremacy as a translator of the Æneid. Wordsworth saw, as many others have seen, that Dryden's genius did not correspond to Virgil's that there is no analogy between the Latin and the English Æneid, the peculiar charm of the one being different from the peculiar charm of the other; and he thought that, by submitting to a more exacting selfcriticism than Dryden's, he might produce something more Virgilian. But he found himself surrounded with difficulties. In his own mind he was convinced that the proper equivalent to the hexameter of Virgil was the blank verse of Milton, which he conceived to have been actually modelled upon it; but he did not venture to adopt it, feeling that a poem so remote in its whole complexion from the sympathies of modern England would not be read with interest without the obvious attractions of rhyme. He found, too, that in spite of the resolution with which he had set out, not to introduce any thing WORDSWORTH. Devoted, strives in vain her vast desires to fill ; |