lators to their adoption of rhyme. The best of 'em had not doft their Gothic shackles when they dared to the race the most rapid of the poets: how then should they save their distance?' Here is this unshackled runner's own start:

'M. You, Tityro, lolling 'neath the spreading beech,
Muse on your slender straw the sylvan song.
We leave our country, our sweet meadows quit,
Our country fly. You, Tityro, soft imbowered,
Prompt fair Amarilla to the echoing woods.
T. A God, Meliboe! gave us these calm hours.'

This singular fashion of manipulating proper names runs through the book, and is indeed one of its chief characteristics. Thus we have Daphny, Alexy, Mopsy, Philly, Lycid (a name which may perhaps show that Mr. Andrews conceived himself only to be taking a Miltonic liberty), Thyrse, Menalca, Paleme, Cloanth, Helnor and Lyke (for Helenor and Lycus), Mezente, and Jutna (for Juturna).

In 1767 was published 'The Æneid of Virgil, translated into Blank Verse by Alexander Strahan, Esq.,' who had already twice before attempted portions of the poem. He professes to have 'kept as close to his author as the late Dr. Trapp in respect of his sense, but to have taken a little more compass for the sake of harmony.' The experiment issues in lines like these (Quæ te tam læta tulerunt,' n. I. 605) :—

'What happy ages gave you to the world?

What parents such perfection could produce?

While to their mother sea the rivers flow,

While mountains cast their spreading shadows round,

While Æther feeds the stars, your sacred name,

Your bright idea shall for ever last,

Where'er my fate may bear me o'er the globe.'

The Tenth and Twelfth Books were contributed by Dobson, the same who gave a Latin dress to the 'Paradise Lost.'

More than thirty years remained to the end of the century; but it was not till 1794 that another blank verse translator of Virgil showed himself. This was the Rev. James Beresford, Fellow of Merton College, otherwise known as the author of a popular jeu d'esprit called the 'Miseries of Human Life,' and of a less successful polemic against Calvinism. Cowper's Homer had recently appeared, and had been recognised to be, what it certainly is, a work of real merit; and it was tempting to try whether the same process could not after all be made to answer with Virgil. But Cowper's success, whatever it may have been, was due, not

to

to the theories of his preface, but to his practice as an original poet: it established a case for blank verse as wielded by Cowper, not as wielded by Mr. Beresford. As usual, we give a specimen of his translation (‘Tempus erat, quo prima,' Æn. II. 268):— ''Twas at the hour when first oblivious rest

To care-sick mortals comes, and, gift of gods,
Of all their gifts best welcome, steals unfelt,
When, as I slept, before my eyes, behold,
Hector, all woe-begone, appeared to come
In present sight, and pour down copious tears,
As dragged erewhile fast by the chariot wheels
Sordid with bloody dust, his big-swoln feet

With thongs transpierced. Ah me! what seemed he then!
How from that Hector changed, who late returned
Clad in the glorious spoils of Peleus' son,

Or fresh from hurling on the barks of Greece
His Phrygian fires! Now-squalid was his beard,
His locks blood-knotted, and those gashes too
Were seen, which round his parent country's walls,
In fights of yore, he, numberless, had borne.
Melting in tears, I seemed to accost the shade
Spontaneous, and these mournful words draw forth.'

Dr. Symmons-who speaks of blank verse rather happily,* as only a laborious and doubtful struggle to escape from the fangs of prose,' adding that 'if it ever ventures to relax into simple and natural phraseology, it instantly becomes tame, and the prey of its pursuer,'-has passed a censure which, inapplicable to Cowper, for whom it was intended, is not more than a just description of what has been accomplished by Cowper's Virgilian follower.

The rhyming translators of Virgil during the eighteenth century were fewer, but they were men of more mark. Some portion of their success is doubtless due to the vehicle which they chose. The heroic couplet, as managed by Dryden, is far more open to imitation than the blank verse of the 'Paradise Lost;' the sources of the pleasure which it creates lie nearer to the surface, and are more accessible to an ordinary writer. And if Dryden is more imitable than Milton, Pope is more imitable than Dryden. Dryden was essentially capricious: sometimes vigorous and splendid, at others flat and slovenly. He was a critic, but his canons of criticism are constantly varying, and the astonishing effects which he at times produces are due to ear and natural instinct rather than to deliberate judgment. With Pope, on the other hand, all was conscious art; he took his measure, such as

* Preface to Æneid, p. 22 (2nd edition).

it

it was, of the capabilities of the heroic couplet, and with steady and unwearied patience set himself to realize them in his practice; and his successors, after admiring the marvellous result, might reasonably hope, by the exertion of moderate powers of analysis, to attain to some notion of the process. In or before 1724, after the completion of the English Iliad, Benson, celebrated by Pope as the admirer of Milton and Johnston's Psalms, being dissatisfied with the way in which Dryden had dealt with the poetry and the agriculture of Virgil, published 'Virgil's Husbandry; or an Essay on the Georgics; a version of the Second Book, with explanatory notes, following it up next year with a similar Essay' on the First. The subjoined extract, if it has no other interest, will show, at any rate, that Pope's influence was already beginning to tell ('Nec requies quin aut pomis,' Georg. II., 516) :—

'Nor rests the year, but still with fruit abounds
Or vast increase of herds, or loads the grounds
With piles unnumbered of promiscuous grain,
Subdues the barns, and triumphs on the plain.
A storm descends: Sicyonian berries feel
The nimble poundings of the clattering steel:
The falling acorns rustle in the wood,

And swine run homeward cheerful with their food:
The copse her wildings gives from shattered bowers,
And teeming autumn lays down all her stores,
Whilst high on sunny rocks the clustered vine

Boils into juice and reddens into wine.'

A much more memorable attempt to beat Dryden with Pope's weapons was made by Pitt, who, after dallying for some time with a new version of the Æneid, completed it at last, and published it in 1740. Pitt was intimate with Spence, the friend of Pope; and the great poet, in words which seem not to have been preserved, signified his approval of an experiment which but for him would scarcely have been possible. After the author's death, Joseph Warton, a brother Wykehamist, completed the translation by the addition of the Eclogues and Georgics, and republished it with a dedication to the first Lord Lyttelton, in which he finds fault with Dryden, and asserts Pitt's superiority: a judgment, the merits of which, as well as those of Warton's own translation, we hope shortly to consider. Sotheby's version of the Georgics, the first edition of which (1800) is just included in the eighteenth century, will come in for its share of notice most appropriately at the same time. All three were conspicuously inferior to Dryden, but they were in some sense foemen worthy of his steel, and it is well that they should have an opportunity of exhibiting themselves along with him. We have been

in some doubt whether to reserve our judgment of Beattie's Eclogues; but a comparison of his translation with Dryden's and Warton's, by a favourable though not undiscriminating judge, is included in his Life by Sir William Forbes, and may be consulted there. The translation seems not to have been greatly valued by the author, who apparently did not reprint it, nor is it to be found in all collections of his poems. In his original compositions Beattie is pleasing rather than vigorous, and this is very much the character, both positively and negatively, of his translation, which is freely executed, and contains at least as much of the author as of his Latin model. The following lines will exhibit at once his better and his worse qualities (Muscosi fontes,' &c. Ecl. VII. 45):—

'Corydon. Ye mossy fountains, warbling as ye flow,

And, softer than the slumbers ye bestow,

Ye grassy banks! ye trees with verdure crowned,
Whose leaves a glimmering shade diffuse around!
Grant to my weary flocks a cool retreat,
And screen them from the summer's raging heat!
For now the year in brightest glory shines,
Now reddening clusters deck the bending vines.
Thyrsis. Here's wood for fuel: here the fire displays
To all around its animating blaze;

Black with continual smoke our posts appear,
Nor dread we more the rigour of the year
Than the fell wolf the fearful lambkins dreads
When he the helpless fold by night invades,
Or swelling torrents, headlong as they roll,
The weak resistance of the shattered mole.'

The one other translator of the eighteenth century whose work has fallen in our way, is a Mr. John Theobald, whose Second Book of Virgil's Eneid, in Four Cantos, with Notes '-a handsome quarto-bears no date, but has the appearance of having been published some time after the middle of the century. His lines are such as Surrey or Phaer would doubtless have envied for their smoothness and finish; but a reader of the present day will hardly regret that the four cantos were not extended to forty-eight.

The course of Virgilian translation in the nineteenth century is as illustrative of the general literary history of the period as the corresponding phase in the eighteenth. In the first thirty years several translations appeared, marked more or less by the characteristics of the preceding century: since that time, the old notion of translation-that which aims at substituting a pleasing English poem for an admired original-has been well-nigh abandoned,

abandoned, and experiments as multiform as those practised by the Elizabethan scholars and poets have become the order of the day. We are reminded, not of Dryden or Warton, but of Webbe, Fleming, and Stanyhurst. These revolutionary aspects constitute a new division of our subject, and call, in fact, for a separate discussion. Of the translations that remain, by far the most considerable is the 'Eneis' of Dr. Symmons, which appeared in 1816, and was reprinted in 1820. It is worth reserving for further notice, and we reserve it accordingly.

The only other attempt we need mention is the version of the Eclogues made about 1830 by Archdeacon Wrangham, an accomplished scholar and versifier, whose name has not yet died out of remembrance. His lines are elegant, but artificial and involved; they show the man of taste, not the genuine poet or the master of vigorous English. Take the end of the Pollio" (Aggredere O magnos,' Ecl. IV. 48):

"These honours thou-'tis now the time-approve,
Child of the skies, great progeny of Jove!
Beneath the solid orb's vast convex bent,
See on the coming year the world intent:
See earth and sea and highest heaven rejoice:
All but articulate their grateful voice.

O reach so far my long life's closing strain!
My breath so long to hymn thy deeds remain!
Orpheus nor Linus should my verse excel,
Though even Calliope her Orpheus' shell
Should string, and (anxious for the son the sire)
His Linus' numbers Phoebus should inspire!
Should Pan himself before his Arcady
Contend, he'd own his song surpassed by me.

Know then, dear Boy, thy mother by her smile:
Enough ten months have given of pain and toil.

Know her, dear Boy,-who ne'er such smile has known,
Nor board nor bed divine 'tis his to own.'

Thus far we have seen what has been accomplished by the different translators of Virgil, down to a few years from the time at 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