'Sit bonus O! sit Avi quo magna superbiat umbra! For which last line some former and probably Jacobite possessor of our copy has marginally substituted: 'Quem sibi præferri noluit ipsa soror.' On the second occasion, however, the Vice-Chancellor wisely deals more in generals than particulars, and hides politics under a cloud of high-flown compliment, identifying the joint sovereigns within a very few verses with Jupiter and Juno, Apollo and Minerva, Pan and Ceres, Phoebus and Cynthia; and what little allusion he makes to political affairs assumes the same allegorical covering: • Vivite felices; vobis tutantibus aras, Sinceram temerent nulla venena fidem. These lines seem to intimate some slight fear on the part of the worthy Vice-Chancellor, lest the draining off of the waters of Tiber should prove to be a letting in of those of Geneva; and in the expression' nec multum,' &c. we understand him to convey a timid hope that the Genevese influx may confine itself to the northern side of Tweed. The glorious campaign of 1704 demands a recording muse; and the groves of Academe ring with the praises of Marlborough and the Whig Ministry. Of the general a poet sings: 'Victrices Anglorum acies, tardumque cruore An orator lauds the government : 'Hactenus vidimus imperatorum et militum præsidia Reginæ patriæque non defuisse; ne illis vicissim Reginæ patriæque desint præsidia, sapientissimi Senatores optimè providerunt, qui cum ad tuendam Principis dignitatem, ad conservandum Reipublicæ et Ecclesiæ statum, tum ad omnia militibus necessaria suppeditanda, voluntate, studio, mente, et voce mirificè consentiunt, &c.' Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.' We are in the year 1713; Harley and St. John, by the grace of Mrs. Masham, have supplanted Godolphin, and Ormond has grasped the bâton of Marlborough; the Peace of Utrecht has closed, with small credit, a glorious and generally successful war; and at the "Comitia in Honorem Annæ Pacificæ,' the young Tory poets and orators are allowed to run riot in the expression of their antipathies and predilections. Thus : Quid si Marlburius cecidit? Felicior Anna repperit Ormondum.'— Viret Harleii corona civica, dum rapacium Imperatorum laurus, heu, nimia profusione sanguinis et nummorum acquisitæ, marcescunt, et caducas demittunt frondes.' 6 And the same orator is permitted to give a pretty broad hint of his party views in regard to the then deeply interesting question of the Succession: Neque sera posteritas ullos nisi PRINCIPES STEWARTIADUM (sic) sempiternæ celebritatis æmulos, Britannico insidentes solio conspiciat.' Within less than one year from this time, Queen Anne's death prostrated in the dust the full-blown hopes of the Jacobite party; and, in 1714, the University of Oxford presented its Pietas et Gratulatio,' adorned with some learned, and many noble, names, to the first British sovereign of the Brunswick line : 'Non iterum audebit sacros corrumpere ritus, Tu sceptro, et sceptrum protegit ara tuum.' So sings the then Regius Professor of Divinity, afterwards Archbishop Potter. We wish we could find room for a graceful and pleasing elegy, contributed on this occasion by Smalridge, Bishop of Bristol and Dean of Christchurch, Almoner to Queen Anne and King George I. But here we must close these extracts. We need hardly say that we have not awakened them from their long sleep for the purpose of casting a slur on that noble university, which, during those troublous times, remained essentially faithful to its well-known Church and Throne' principles; and, while asserting the rights of monarchy, firmly repelled its unlawful and unwise encroachments. We only wish to exhibit the inconvenience and impropriety of making the public and political occurrences of the day the subjects of academic exercises. For, although the custom of printing such collections at our Universities is obsolete, we are sorry to see that public events of fleeting interest are still sometimes announced as subjects of poetical composition: for instance, the Death of his Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester,' some years since at Cambridge. Topics of this kind (always excepting such rare and peculiar occasions as, for example, the death of the Princess Charlotte) strike no chord in the youthful bosom, kindle no enthusiasm, suggest no natural imagery; the ideas will be constrained, the composition cold; and, generally speaking, the competitors for such prizes have their prototype in the Athenian Theognis, whom his lively countrymen nicknamed Snow. We, for our part, give a very decided preference to such genial outpourings of the unconstrained muse as we find in the volumes of Mr. Drury and Mr. Linwood. Of the poems in the Oxford Anthologia more than half are translations, chiefly from English, a few from French and Italian, poetry; the rest original compositions, including twenty-two selections from the Carmina Quadragesimalia,' or Lenten verses, of Christ Church.' Both departments, original and translated, are of high merit: if the original poetry seems to us superior, it is only because our critical taste in translation is more fastidious, and to translate well more difficult than to compose well. A translator must, in the first place, choose a good subject; that is, he must select a passage capable of being classically rendered into Latin or Greek; and he must adopt a suitable rhythm for the purpose. And then, if he means to translate, and not merely to paraphrase, he must so translate as to represent the spirit, the whole spirit, and nothing but the spirit of his original; yet his work, when completed, must be so pure and perspicuous, so classical, in short, that scholars, unacquainted with the passage in its native form, might easily mistake the version for an original. When this ideal is not attained, it is either because the subject is ill chosen, or because the translation is badly executed. Read, for instance, the following translation from Shakspeare, by Mr. W. B. Jones, of Queen's College: : 'Some of our readers may ask for information respecting these Lenten verses of Christ Church. It was the practice, in former times, for the younger members of that great college to write Latin elegiac exercises (of about fourteen to twenty lines), instead of the present weekly themes. A copious collection of these is preserved in the Censor's Box. The best were anciently recited by the determining Bachelors of Arts in the Natural Philosophy School at the time of Lent: whence their name of Carmina Quadragesimalia, or Lenten Verses. Dean Cyril Jackson took great interest in having these exercises well done; but about thirty years ago, the custom fell into disuse. Two selections were published at Oxford, in 8vo, in the year 1723; both are now scarce. Of those which exist in MS. many are by persons of literary and political distinction. Lord Wellesley revised and privately printed his own exercises in a little volume entitled 'Primitiæ et Reliquiæ,' A.D. 1840. Some few of Lord Grenville's in the Christ Church MSS. (as Judæa Captiva, Mors Fatalis, Rubecula, Orestes) were published by him in his Nuga Metricæ.' Many pieces, otherwise excellent, are disfigured by the blemish of the short vowel remaining before words beginning with sc, sp, sq, st, which seems to have been considered allowable prosody during the last century. We have taken some pains to ascertain the authors of the Carmina Quadragesimalia published by Mr. Linwood: and we are enabled to assign Nos, 1, 3, 9, 21, to Mr. Canning; Nos. 5, 11, 22, to Lord Morpeth (probably the present Earl of Carlisle); No. 7, to Lord Dartmouth; Nos. 17, 20, to Mr. Hallam; No. 16, to the late Lord Mansfield; Nos. 10, 15, to the late Lord Holland; No. 14, to the late Lord Lyttelton. The authors of the remaining pieces we have not been able to identify. Here Mr. Jones has chosen his subject and his rhythm judiciously, and in his masterly translation, he has done ample justice to both. We remember that Sir Walter Scott headed many of his chapters with quaint mottoes ascribed to old plays, but really written by himself, in imitation of the elder dramatists. And we venture to say the lines here quoted might appear as a recovered fragment of Terence, without the most acute scholar being able to impeach their genuineness from internal evidence alone. Turn now to Mr. Bode's Latin version of Lewis's well-known and once popular ballad, Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine.' 'Who would mistake this for a classical relic? We say nothing, now, in disparagement of the execution. It is, indeed, translated, for the most part, as a man of Mr. Bode's learning and ability might be expected to translate, and contains many good lines. But Mr. Bode's choice of an original, we must pronounce, in this case, to be bad. We do not much admire Lewis's ballad in itself: its revolting subject, adapted to a public taste which had been depraved by the fictitious horrors of novelists, and still more, it may be, by the real horrors of the French Revolution, is insufficiently compensated by the full and rich flow of a well-chosen and then novel rhythm. But how unfit for translation into an ancient tongue is a mediæval legend of diablerie: how utterly unclassical the conception and carrying out of the story! The daughters of Danaus, those husband-murderesses, toil fruitlessly and endlessly in Tartarus. The dreadful Furies, mythic avengers of domestic blood, haunt and torture the living Orestes. Adulterers suffer in Virgil's hell. But where in ancient mythology do we hear of any woman paying, alive or dead, so dire a penalty for the crime of jilting an earthly lover? Even of Apollo's faithless mistresses the punishment was lighter: Coronis fell by the arrows of Artemis, (Pind. Pyth.) that is, by natural death: Cassandra was punished by the incredulity of those who heard her oracles: Ξυναινέσασα Λοξίαν ἐψευσάμην. Πῶς οὖν ἄνατος ἦσθα δαίμονος κότῳ; Ἔπειθον οὐδέν ̓ οὐδὲν ὡς τάδ' ἠμπλακον.-Esch. Αgam. Imogine in the ballad was guilty, it is true, of perjury; but then we know the classical proverb-perjuria ridet amantum Jupiter.' The ghost is not less unclassical. Clytemnestra's spirit in Eschylus appears only to rouse and instigate the sleeping and lagging Furies. Ghosts, indeed, as appears from Horace's fifth epode, and the Ovidian Ibis, were sometimes supposed to emerge from the shades, and pursue on earth the destroyers of their life or fame. But in these instances-few as they are-the spirit is represented as haunting the vision of the conscious criminal alone: like Duncan's ghost at the banquet of Macbeth, it was seen only by ONE. Now, how would Eschylus or Pindar, Virgil or Horace, have regarded such imagery as we find in this ballad-a gigantic stranger sitting down to supper in sable armour, frightening the dogs, making the lights burn blue,' unclosing his vizor, and exposing to the guests 'a skeleton's head,' on which 'The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out, 6 6 then, after a public address to Imogine, winding his arms around her, and sinking 'with his prey through the wide-yawning ground;' whence they both return to hold a quarterly_dance and ghoule-feast, in company with other 'pale spectres?' Doubtless any master of ancient song would have done what all present' are said to have done, turned with disgust from the scene.' We repeat, then, that, although Mr. Bode might exhibit skill and scholarship in translating this ballad, he could not possibly give us a pleasing representation of such an original, especially as he was obliged to depart from the peculiar rhythm, which we think its only striking merit. Mr. Bode's untoward subject leads him to use such expressions as Virgineum testor numen' (I swear by the Virgin), and spectri inane caput' (a skeleton's head). Yet we think such a phrase as 'hoc cœlum, hunc testor solem,' would have been better in the former place, while, perhaps, the ossea larva' of the Ibis might have suggested a more classical and intelligible version in the latter. A translation ought not to need re-translation in order to be understood. There are some faults in Mr. Bode's poem, independent of the subject; and he will, perhaps, allow us to suggest a few emendations. Why the comparative form mollius, in v. 4, and again 'segnius,' in p. 173? Surely the positives, molliter," 'segniter,' are more proper. In the lines p. 172 1 It is curious enough that, while Christians associate sulphur, as to colour and smell, with the Prince of impure spirits, to the ancients it was an agent and emblem of purification. |