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PITT

And now, great queen, you haply long to know
The fate of Priam in this general woe.
When with sad eyes the venerable sire
Beheld his Ilion sunk in hostile fire;
His palace stormed, the lofty gates laid low,
His rich pavilions crowded with the foe:
In arms long since disused the hoary sage
Loads each stiff languid limb that shook with age;
Girds on an unperforming sword in vain,
And runs on death amid the hostile train.
Within the courts, beneath the naked sky
An altar rose: an aged laurel by:

That o'er the hearth and household gods displayed
A solemn gloom, a deep majestic shade:
Hither like doves that close embodied fly

From some dark tempest blackening in the sky,
The queen for refuge with her daughters ran,
Clung, and embraced their images in vain.
But when in cumbrous arms the king she spied,
"Alas! my poor unhappy lord!" she cried,
"What more than madness, midst these dire alarms,
Moved thee to load thy helpless age with arms?
No aid like these this dreadful hour demands,
But asks far other strength, far other hands.
No! could my own dear Hector arm again,
My own dear Hector now would arm in vain.
Come to these altars, here we all shall have
One common refuge or one common grave."
This said, her aged lord the queen embraced,

And on the sacred seat the monarch placed.

If these versions be compared with those of Surrey and Phaer, it will be found that the older translators adhere strictly to Ben Jonson's principle of literal exactness, while Dryden and Pitt adopt the method of paraphrase. Both the latter expand freely the sense of their original, but Dryden has much more of Virgil's simplicity. Virgil compresses his narrative into twenty lines: Dryden takes twenty-seven to express Virgil's meaning, and the ampler space is occupied with ideas added to those of his author. Thus Virgil writes simply of Priam, "densos fertur moriturus in hostes." Dryden expands this with ideas suggested by Virgil's general description of the old king:

Loaded not armed, he creeps along with pain,
Despairing of success, ambitious to be slain.

In the same way he translates Virgil's "veterrima laurus" a laurel grew

Doddered with age;

meaning that the laurel was so old that it was overrun with creepers. Pitt's rendering, on the contrary, which actually runs to thirty lines, is to thirty lines, is swelled by the mere addition of words. Wishing to give his verse a stately effect, he speaks of the "sad eyes" of the “venerable sire"; of his "rich pavilions"; of "the hoary sage"; of the laurel that

displayed

A solemn gloom, a deep majestic shade :

although no equivalent for these phrases is to be found in the Latin text; and he thinks it a good stroke to render Virgil's simple "non si ipse meus nunc afforet Hector," by

No, could my own dear Hector arm again,
My own dear Hector now would arm in vain.

Pitt's English version of Vida's Ars Poetica is a much more valuable work. Vida was a contemporary of Ariosto, and one of the most enthusiastic pioneers of the Classical Renaissance. His Latin poems well deserve translation on account of the beauty and grace of their style; but they are also interesting, as showing how blinded the Italians of the time were to everything in the Revival of Learning beyond the excellence of Greek and Roman civilisation. He can see nothing in the overthrow of the Roman Empire by the barbarians but the destruction of ancient art; nothing of any worth in the life of the medieval Italian cities before the days of the Medici. Pitt's rendering of his ideas is excellent :—

Hence a vast change of their old manners sprung;

The slaves were forced to speak their master's tongue;
No honours now were paid the sacred Muse,

But all were bent on mercenary views;

Till Latium saw with joy th' Aonian train

By the great Medici restored again ;
Th' illustrious Medici, of Tuscan race,
Were born to cherish learning in disgrace,
New life on every science to bestow,
And lull the cries of Europe in her woe.
With pity they beheld these turns of fate,
And propped the ruins of the Grecian state;
For lest her wit should perish with her fame,
Their cares supported still the Argive name.
They called th' aspiring youths from distant parts
To plant Ausonia with the Grecian arts;
To bask in ease, and science to diffuse,
And to restore the Empire of the Muse;
They sent to ravaged provinces with care,
And cities wasted by the rage of war;

To buy the ancients' works, of deathless fame,
And snatch th' immortal labours from the flame;
To which the foes had doomed each glorious piece,
Who reign and lord it in the realms of Greece.

Hence, while Vida himself invokes the gods of ancient Greece, he seems seriously to believe that Leo X. was animated with the zeal of Peter the Hermit, and (inverting Virgil's Excudent alii) he writes thus of the contemplated Crusade:

Ye Gods of Rome, ye guardian deities,
Who lift our nation's glory to the skies;
And thou, Apollo, the great source of Troy,
Let Rome at least this single palm enjoy,
To shine in arts supreme, as once in power,
And teach the nations she subdued before;
Since discord all Ausonia's kings alarms,
And clouds the ancient glories of her arms.
In our own breasts we sheathe the civil sword,

Our country naked to a foreign lord ;

Which, lately prostrate, started from despair,

Burned with new hopes, and armed her hands for war;
But armed in vain; th' inexorable hate

Of envious Fortune called her to her fate.

Insatiate in her rage, her frowns oppose

The Latin fame, and woes are heaped on woes.
Our dread alarms each foreign monarch took;
Through all their tribes the distant nations shook ;
To Earth's last bounds the fame of Leo runs ;
Nile heard, and Indus trembled for his sons;

Arabia heard the Medicean line,

The first of men, and sprung from race divine.
The Sovereign priest and mitred king appears
With his loved Julius joined, who kindly shares
The reins of Empire and the public cares.
To break their country's chains, the generous pair
Concert their schemes, and meditate the war ;
On Leo Europe's monarchs turn their eyes;
On him alone the Western world relies;
And each bold chief attends his dread alarms,
While the proud Crescent fades before his arms.

I have already said that nothing could be further removed from the spirit of Pindar-the representative lyric poet of Greek city life in the days of its highest freedom-than the spirit of any Italian poet in the age of Humanism; and this truth is exemplified in the tame Pindaric imitations of Chiabrera. In England, on the contrary, poets of different orders and different generations have found something congenial in Pindar's thought, which they have attempted to reproduce in various manners. Cowley, attracted by his discursive method, and (as he thought) the irregular freedom of his metre, imitated him in his own metaphysical vein, and was himself copied by many English disciples. Congreve was the first to point. out that Pindar's Odes were formed upon a regular system; and when the scholarly genius of the Renaissance had pervaded the whole fabric of English education, Collins, who perhaps inherited by nature more of the fire of Pindar than any English poet, showed, in the structure of his own odes, that he was acquainted with the laws of Greek lyric verse. Three years after the appearance of Collins's little volume, Pindar was himself translated for the first time into English, on Dryden's paraphrastic principles, but with due observance of the order of his verse; and the work was hailed with an enthusiastic ode by Joseph Warton, who recognised in it an example of the lyrical spirit which he desired to see introduced into English poetry.

Gilbert West, the author of the translation, was born in 1703. He was the son of Richard West, prebendary

1

of Winchester, who had himself produced an edition of Pindar in 1697. Gilbert was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his B.A. degree in 1725. He afterwards served for a few years in the army, but retired from it in 1729 on his marriage with Catherine Bartlett, with whom he lived in country quiet at his house in West Wickham, Kent. He was a friend of Pope, who seems to have had a special regard for him, as he left him a reversionary legacy of £200 and £5 to buy a memorial ring. Among his other friends were the first William Pitt and George Lyttelton. Both visited, and Lyttelton praised, him in his country retirement;1 and both appear to have been influenced in their religious opinions by West, who was a man of firm convictions, and the author of a book called Observations on the Resurrection, published in 1747. He died in 1756.

West's Translation appeared in 1749. Whether it was suggested by Collins's Odes which were published in 1746, or by the elder West's edition of Pindar, is not known; but it undoubtedly helped to confirm the strong Pindaric tendency in the public taste, and may indirectly have had some influence on Gray's Progress of Poesy, which was not given to the world till 1757. The version, which is made on Dryden's paraphrastic principle, is both accurate and spirited, as may be judged from the following rendering of the famous lines describing the Islands of the Blessed :

STROPHE IV

But in the happy fields of light
Where Phoebus with an equal ray
Illuminates the balmy night

And gilds the cloudless day,

In peaceful unmolested joy

The good their smiling hours employ.
Them no uneasy wants constrain

To vex th' ungrateful soil,

To tempt the dangers of the billowy main
And break their strength with unabating toil,

A frail disastrous being to maintain :

1 For Lyttelton's reference to this see p. 378.

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