tracts it to an amatory trifle in which his heart has little share; passing on meanwhile to a somewhat early death, through friendship, and poetry, and simple rural pleasures, and a moderate joviality. If there be not much to revere in such a character, there is at least something to. like.

And if we are called upon to excuse the absence of a stern patriotism, and indeed of most of the higher civic and social virtues, in the character which we have sketched, it should be remembered that Horace was made what he was by the age in which he lived. He was born B.c. 65, two years before the troubled consulship of Cicero and the defeated conspiracy of Catiline. While he was yet a child, Cæsar struggled with Pompey and Crassus for the dictatorship, and the very forms of republican liberty almost followed the reality. He was hardly twenty when Cæsar's triumph was ensured by the battle of Pharsalia; and his own first entry into public life was six years afterwards, as military tribune at the battle of Philippi. When his earliest poems were being written, the second Triumvirate were pursuing their sanguinary course; and his Epodes-his first lyrical publication--were probably given to the world in the year of the battle of Actium. Is it therefore to be wondered at that he hailed with joy the public tranquillity which followed on the usurped authority of Augustus ? The civil dissensions thus allayed were not new; he had never known any other condition of public affairs, and the contests of Marius and Sulla dated from even his father's childhood. Peace was desirable though bought at whatever price, and despotism better than civil war. Nor is this acquies

cence in the new settlement of affairs characteristic of Horace alone. It is to be remarked in the writings of all the Augustan poets. They could recollect the republic, and identified the name with assassination, and proscription, and confiscation, and war, civil and urban. When Tacitus wrote, the republic was distant enough to assume the fallacious outline of a golden age; and patriotism, with no outlet in action, expended itself in comparisons between Rome past and present-often more striking than just.

To return to the subject more immediately in hand.

It was to be expected that Horace should be at least as frequently translated as any of the Roman poets. And yet he is one of the most untranslateable. The metres alone-so impossible to transfer and so difficult to parallel in another language, varying with peculiar fitness according to every variation in the subject—would seem to present an insuperable obstacle. But there is another even yet more serious. A characteristic difference between the ancient and modern poetry of Europe may be compared to that between statuary and painting. The first is far more dependent for its effect upon its form than the last. Whether its effects be greater or less, they are accomplished by simpler means. And thus the distinction between prose and poetry in classical antiquity was more marked than now without venturing to say that there existed no prosy poetry, it would at least be difficult to find what is now called poetical prose. And as this effect is heightened by the superior conciseness of the Greek and Latin languages, it becomes a translator's most serious difficulty to preserve the statuesque form of the original, and, in the version, be neither bald, nor prosaic, nor obscure. This peculiarity is especially noticeable in the lyric poets-in Pindar and in Horace. The poetry often lies less in the thought than in the manner of expression. Homer will bear the ordeal of a literal prose translation, and come out of the furnace with his singeing robes still about him: a prose Horace is prose indeed.

Mr. Francis W. Newman-the evidences of whose superabounding literary energy are always welcome-has boldly set himself to the performance of this difficult, and in some respects thankless task; and, whatever be the opinion entertained as to his success, must at least be credited with the merit of having come to his work on definite principles, and with a view to a definite result. He has expressed his intentions in the subjoined extract from his Preface, the perusal of which ought materially to affect any after-criticism on his labours.

"More than three centuries ago, the Greek and Latin classics began to be studied with great zeal, for the sake of their literature, which was then the most valuable in the world, and the only medium for attaining the highest cultivation of the day. That stage of progress is past, never to return. Modern European literature has now

eclipsed the ancient; and among those who still study Greek and Latin as languages for grammatical objects, fewer and fewer can afford the time and effort of studying the literature. When commercial England attains a higher mental culture, it will not be that of Oxford and Cambridge, but that of Germany and America combined.

“Already Greek is as impossible an attainment as Sanscrit to numbers of educated men; Latin is acquired perhaps at school, but imperfectly mastered, so that even Latin literature is unstudied in later life. I do not say this as blaming or deploring the result: on the contrary, when it arises out of the pre-occupation of the mind with deeper truths and purer beauty than was given to the ancients to attain, I cannot but rejoice. At the same time I conceive that every educated man who feels it inexpedient to encounter the effort of learning two difficult dead languages and exploring their literature, must desire to know whatever may be known in English concerning those master minds of the Ancients, who have so affected the European intellect; and this gives a great value to select translations. Undoubtedly a great poet can never be fully translated from a more powerful into a less powerful language; it is as impossible as to execute in soft wood the copy of a marble statue.

"Yet some approximation may be attained, which gives to the reader not only a knowledge of the substance, but a feeling of the form of thought, and a right conception of the ancient tone of mind. Hitherto our poetical translators have failed in general, not so much from want of talent or learning, but from aiming to produce poems in modern style, through an excessive fear that a modern reader will endure nothing else. I have been assured, that it is impossible to induce Englishmen to read poems in new metres. It may be so. But if so, I think it is equally impossible to induce them to read ancient poetry at all,-in any metres,—or in prose translations. Dickens and Thackeray are, I suppose, more amusing than Tennyson or Wordsworth, and leave to many men of business no time to read Milton, or Thomson, or Virgil, or Eschylus. I avow myself to despair of finding readers among those who seek solely for amusement. I bespeak for myself a thoughtful and serious reader, anxious for instruction. I assume in him no knowledge whatever of ancient languages or literature, except to have read Homer in a translation, and I endeavour to afford whatever is subsidiary to full intelligence,-whatever will aid him to that close insight into men and times, which nothing but contemporary literature can ever give.”—Pp. ii.-v.

We will not call in question Mr. Newman's statements as to the prospects of classical literature in England, CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 60.

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though disposed to think even less hopefully than himself, of the prospects of classical translations. We cannot do better than express at this point our conviction, that this is the best translation of Horace into our language—and indeed the only translation of any classic poet, which gives the reader an adequate idea of the form and manner of the original. Acting on a principle to which we shall immediately have occasion to allude, Mr. Newman has invented an English metre to take the place of each of the Horatian measures. He translates verse for verse, almost line for line, and word for word. It is a great achievement to have given us a version at all, and not a paraphrase; and this version is close and clear enough to furnish unlawful help to many a school-boy. We may compare the Latin and the English Horace, and feel that they are substantially and almost verbally identical. Whether the odes thus presented be attractive reading to the student of English poetry only, one who is familiarly acquainted with the original can hardly judge. But if they fail to please, it is impossible that they should not teach. For the first time, an unlearned reader is brought face to face with a Latin poet, and sees the Roman Muse in something like her ancestral attire.

We turn to the more particular consideration of Mr. Newman's method. He needs no arguments either of his own or ours, to justify him in having discarded the use of rhyme. It is absolutely incompatible with faithfulness of translation. With versifiers, if not always with poets, the rhyme is the keynote of the couplet or stanza, and instead of expressing usually suggests the idea. And indeed we have somewhere read, that for this very reason Boileau was in the habit of writing the second line of his nervous couplets before the first. Rhyme, an essential ornament of many species of original verse, and an useful though burdensome clog to the poet, becomes to the translator a chain, the weight of which absolutely prevents motion.

A more important question relates to the possibility of transferring to modern languages some of the simpler metres of Greece and Rome. We grant the fundamental distinction between classical and modern metre. The former is regulated by quantity, the latter by accent alone. The former, at least originally, is written to be sung, the

latter to be read. It must be allowed that it is impossible to compose a series of English or German hexameters, which should be scanned, like those of Virgil, according to the quantity of the words. But is it not possible to naturalize and use in translations an accentual hexameterthat is, in which the recurrence of accented and unaccented syllables shall resemble that of long and short syllables in a Latin line? We believe that the question must be answered by a negative, which forms the justification of Mr. Newman's metrical innovations. And for the following reasons.

It is in the first place difficult, if not impossible, for the English ear to form an idea of what the classical hexameter (to keep to a single instance) really was. We may analyse it, but we cannot hear it. The characteristic part of the line to our apprehension is contained in the two last feet, and this simply from the fact, that in this case the accent, as we read the verse, usually coincides with the quantity—that is, as may be tested by an application to Virgil, we accentuate in a vast majority of cases the second and fifth syllables from the end. For instance in the line Æn. v. 826,

Nesace, Spioque, Thaliaque, Cymodoceque,”

we lose the twang which characterises the line to us, because we find it difficult to put the accent anywhere except on the second syllable of the concluding polysyllable-a position in which it is at variance with the quantity. And again it may be remarked that, while our ear rejects the variety of form allowed in the first part of the verse, it is incapable of appreciating even the last two feet as usually written. The spondee is always in reading converted into a trochee. The last syllable is left entirely unaccented. We know nothing of the Latin accent. We are incapable of reading a Latin hexameter according to its quantity only. So we read it in obedience to English laws of accentuation applied arbitrarily to Latin words, and then think we have attained the characteristic rhythm of the verse. The absurdity of such a proceeding is at once seen, when we turn to a Greek hexameter, where the accents are laid down for us. If we read it accordingly, as is done at the German Universities, all that we fancied