Chapter XLIX: Part II (7)

If that system, as it now exists here, answer to the purposes for which it was intended, it is high time for that fact to appear. Yet the gentlemen who have charge of the board, from the president down, seem strangely to disagree on most important matters. Without committing ourselves to one side or the other in the discussion, we take a few instances. The grammar schools surely form a very important branch of the system. Here is how the president treats of them in the report: “Our primary-school teachers have a lower rate of pay than our grammar-school teachers, and the primary schools have been used as training places for the better-paid positions in the grammar schools. The plan for uniformity in salaries in these two departments has received serious consideration by a committee of the board, and deserves to be carried out. The majority of our pupils receive all the education they have in the primary, _and never enter the grammar schools_. This majority deserves the first consideration. Instruction and discipline are no more difficult in one than in the other, and in neither department is the range of knowledge required to be mastered extensive.”

The president asserts that the common-school system only succeeds in furnishing primary instruction to a majority of pupils, and he would seem to imply that the enormous sum of four million dollars should be spent on the primary schools, reserving, of course, a sufficient sum for the Normal College.

Lest his opinions as to the range of knowledge required in a teacher should dishearten those who are toiling through Normal College, he inserts a few lines for their benefit: “An erroneous idea seems to prevail that a primary teacher can dispense with the higher studies. The truth is that this class of teachers more than any other class needs trained faculties and sound judgment, and these are only obtained by the discipline of hard and close study. Normal study and normal practice, to be effective, must be based on the broad foundation of a liberal education.”

Compulsory education the city superintendent pronounces a complete failure, while those who are paid to enforce it consider it successful. In the discussion some interesting facts are brought to light. The city superintendent states: “Many parents, finding that our schools are unable to govern their wilful and unruly children, send them to the parochial schools. In connection with this, it is proper to call the attention of the board to the fact that, while the average attendance of pupils in the schools immediately under its care has, during the past year, increased less than two and a half per cent., in the corporate schools it has increased more than five per cent. It is also of interest to observe that, at the close of 1875, the number of pupils enrolled in the Catholic parochial schools was 30,732, while in 1867 it was only 16,342, showing an increase, in less than ten years, of nearly 90 per cent.; while the increase in the attendance of the pupils in the public schools has, during the same time, been only about 13 per cent. The increase in attendance at the corporate schools, during the same period, has been more than 57 per cent.... The question, therefore, very properly suggests itself, why should a system for compelling pupils to attend the schools be sustained at great expense to the city while there is no effective means of controlling and educating those children after they have been brought into the schools?”

These are but a few of the spots uncovered in this interesting report. Never was the want of harmony in the system more manifest. The iniquity of taxing a people for what it cannot use, and turning over the amount collected to the keeping of gentlemen who care more for pet schemes than for the real object for which the tax was levied, becomes more and more apparent. Higher education, technical education, and compulsory education are battling vigorously for larger shares of the funds; and the battle seems likely to end when the funds are made large enough to satisfy all demands. In the meantime the common-school system is slowly dying out. The primary schools are becoming departments for the employment of normal school graduates, and the grammar schools feeders for the colleges.

A QUESTION OF HONOR: A NOVEL. By Christian Reid, author of _A
Daughter of Bohemia_, _Valerie Aylmer_, _Morton House_, etc. New
York: D. Appleton & Co. 1876.

A well-written novel, thoroughly American in its tone, its incidents, and its characters, and yet availing itself of none of the peculiar “isms” which form the chief stock in trade of our native novelists—shunning alike the “woman question” and the shallow metaphysics of “free thought,” depending for no share of its interest upon suggested immorality or social license, and vivacious in its dialogues without any reliance upon the slang which generally does duty in place of wit—was something for which some sad experience in recent fiction had forbidden us to hope. That Christian Reid is already well known to the novel-reading public is evident from the title-page of _A Question of Honor_, but that is the only one of her stories which we have read. We find in it everything to praise and nothing to condemn. It is thoroughly well written, to begin with, its descriptions of scenery being particularly artistic and well done. The author attempts nothing ambitious in the way of character-drawing, but her men and women live and have a true individuality. Their souls are not dissected after the manner with which the New England school of fiction has made us too familiar for our comfort, but their manner of life and speech and thought is indicated with a firm, graceful, and un-provincial touch which is extremely pleasant. Altogether, the book belongs to the best class of light literature. There is nothing in it to shock taste or to jar prejudice, and everything in the way of grace of style and purity of thought to recommend it. So much being said by way of praise, we may add that the author, who is evidently a Catholic, has drawn a picture of social life which is, no doubt, true to a reality of a better kind than the ordinary novel of the day aims at, but which is nevertheless un-Christian. Her characters are neither underbred nor vicious; with two exceptions, they are simply a rather pleasing variety of pagans. We do not quarrel with that, considered as a faithful transcript of reality. But we shall find it a cause for real regret if a writer so graceful and possessing so much genuine ability does not some day give us something better than a mere transcript of lives that might have been lived and ideals that might have been attained had the Creator never stooped to the level of his creatures in order to show them the one way in which he would lift them to himself.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. By the graduating class of St. Joseph’s
Academy, Flushing, L. I. (Translated from the French of Mme. Foa.)
New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

Translation from the French is a literary exercise which cannot be too highly commended to young students. The publication in book-form of such students’ translations can scarcely be too severely condemned. Young ladies and young men “graduate,” as it is called, at an age ranging from seventeen to twenty or twenty-one. They are then popularly supposed to have “finished” their education, whereas not much more has been done than to set them on the right road of learning and appreciating what real education is. Indeed, if so much has been accomplished, both the pupils and their teachers may be congratulated.

To set these young persons straightway at book-making is a grave mistake—how grave may be gathered from the following specimens of translation which half a glance at the volume before us reveals.

The cover informs us that these are “Gems of Biography.” The first gem is entitled “Michael Angelo Buonarotti.” The opening page introduces us to “an old domestic” and “a young _man_ of fifteen or sixteen” “at the _door_ of the Castle of Caprese.” In page 2 the “young man” of fifteen is a “young _interlocutor_.” In the same page “to intercept the passage” is used in the sense of to block up the passage. In page 3, “to cover his curiosity” is used in the sense of to hide or conceal his curiosity. In page 4 we have this elegant sentence: “I don’t think that either of you does anything wrong in the place you go.” In page 5 the young man of fifteen, who was an Italian of four centuries back, indulges in this peculiar bit of slang: “One is not perfect at it _right away_.” A little lower on the same page he says of Michael Angelo: “He is even quicker than I _in piecing_ his man.” “_Mr._ Francis Graciana” and “_Mr._ Michael Angelo Buonarotti” occur quite frequently. “Canosse” is always made to do duty for Canossa, “Politien” for Politian or Poliziano, etc. Such phrases as “You are not _de trop_, Signor Graciana,” constantly occur; but we have no patience to examine further.

Expressions such as these—and they characterize the book, with the exception of “The Mulatto of Murillo,” which runs fairly enough—should not have been allowed to pass in a written composition; but to embalm them in a printed volume is simply an act of cruelty. The sketches in themselves are good for nothing and were not worth the trouble of translating, inasmuch as they have been far better given in English over and over again. “Flushing Series” is the threatening legend on the cover. If this volume be a specimen of what is to come, we trust sincerely that we have seen the last of the “Series.” Catholic education is too serious a subject for trifling.

THE WONDERS OF PRAYER: A remarkable record of well authenticated
answers to prayer. By Henry T. Williams. New York: Henry T.
Williams, Publisher.

It is not often that an author is his own publisher. In the present case this may have been a matter of necessity; but it should not have been so, for the volume is interesting enough. It is a collection of anecdotes, the authenticity of which Mr. Williams personally vouches for, showing that God answers in an immediate and direct manner the requests of those who in faith ask him for temporal blessings. “They demonstrate,” says the author, “to a wonderful degree the immediate practical ways of the Lord with his children in this world; that he is far nearer and more intimate with their plans and pursuits than it is possible for them to realize.” We have no disposition to scoff at the stories related by Mr. Williams, although the style in which they are told often provokes one to mirth. There is but one true faith in the world, but there are many people who hold more or less of this faith without knowing it. “_Souffrons toutes les religions, puisque Dieu les souffre_,” said Fénelon; and our Holy Father, the Pope, has not unfrequently expressed his affection as well as his pity for good Protestants. No doubt many of the people who are spoken of in this book were very good Protestants. And we are glad to observe in it this passage: “The present is the age of miracles as well as the past. Fully as wonderful things have been and are constantly being done this day by our unseen Lord as in the days of old when he walked in the sight of his disciples.”

THE LITTLE PEARLS; OR, GEMS OF VIRTUE. Translated by Mrs. Kate E.
Hughes. New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

Will be found very entertaining and instructive reading for our young folks, and we recommend it as suitable for a present at the distribution of school prizes. We think, however, that the name of the writer whose work is translated should have appeared on the title-page.

BESIDE THE WESTERN SEA: A Collection of Poems. By Harriet M.
Skidmore (“Marie”). New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

This gifted lady has done well to collect her scattered poems into a volume. They are chiefly of a devotional character, and, though unequal, none of them are without merit, some of a very marked kind. She has the gift of song, and she sings easily and gracefully on almost any subject. The following, though one of the shortest and least ambitious of the collection, strikes us as a very sweet poem, and affords a fair idea of the author’s powers. Its title is “The Mist”:

“I watched the folding of a soft white wing
Above the city’s heart;
I saw the mist its silent shadows fling
O’er thronged and busy mart.
Softly it glided through the Golden Gate
And up the shining bay,
Calmly it lingered on the hills, to wait
The dying of the day.
Like the white ashes of the sunset fire,
It lay within the West,
Then onward crept above the lofty spire,
In nimbus-wreaths to rest.
It spread anon—its fleecy clouds unrolled,
And floated gently down;
And thus I saw that silent wing enfold
The Babel-throated town.
A spell was laid on restless life and din,
That bade its tumult cease;
A veil was flung o’er squalor, woe, and sin,
Of purity and peace.
And dreaming hearts, so hallowed by the mist,
So freed from grosser leaven,
In the soft chime of vesper bells could list
Sweet, echoed tones of heaven;
Could see, enraptured, when the starlight came,
With lustre soft and pale,
A sacred city crowned with 'ring of flame,’
Beneath her misty veil.”

ROMAN LEGENDS: A Collection of the Fables and Folk-lore of Rome. By
R. H. Busk, author of _Sagas from the Far East_, etc. Boston: Estes
& Lauriat. 1877.

These are very graceful and interesting legends. They furnish glimpses that could not otherwise be well obtained of the peculiar constitution, habits of mind and thought, of the common people in and about Rome. For the most part they are such as have not hitherto found their way into literature, being taken as they fell from the lips of narrators to whom they had been household words, handed down from one generation to another. The task of eliciting them seems to have been no easy one, but its results are pleasant enough to earn honest gratitude for the years of labor which have been spent in gaining them. The tales themselves range under four categories, concerning which the author notes that the Romans are rigidly exact in adhering to, never by any chance giving a fairy-tale if asked for a legend, or a fairy-tale if inquired of concerning ghosts. They comprise legends; ghost-stories and local and family traditions; fairy tales and _ciarpe_, or gossip. The book is particularly rich in stories of St. Philip Neri.

PHILIP NOLAN’S FRIENDS: A story of the change of Western Empire. By
Edward E. Hale. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1877.

This volume traces the course of a journey into the heart of the great South-west at the beginning of the present century. This tract was still the border-land of the Aztec kings. Throughout its vast extent Spanish heroes had wasted their lives in _ignis-fatuus_ searches. Rich discoveries of gold did not reward their diligence, and they resigned so inhospitable a region to a new order of pioneers. Even to this day the names of places bear token that the zeal of the Spanish missionaries was in no way inferior to that of the sons of Loyola along the St. Lawrence. Such was their indomitable perseverance that twenty-seven missions had been established in this region previous to 1626, and a century later the missionary spirit carried the Gospel among the Apaches, Moquis, and Navajoes.

The heroine’s escort through this _terra incognita_ to Americans is ample, the weather delightful, and we do not care to question the adequacy of the motive for the expedition. Nor does it matter that we are led to believe that Philip Nolan possesses a sterling character, though what he says or does, or what apparent influence he has over the course of events, would hardly justify this conclusion.

The novel is readable, but not by any means artistic. The author lacks the power to create a character that can think and act like a human being. He wishes us to believe his heroine possesses beauty, sensibility, and vivacity; but he lacks the subtle power to invent actions and conversations which impress individuality, and we gather our notions of the lady more from his suggestions than from the movement of the story. This seems to be the author’s weakness: his figures act and he suggests the motives and impulses.

His male characters miss no opportunity to abuse the missionaries. They regard the “black-gowns” as the cause of Indian rascality and Spanish treachery. Ill-luck is always traced to them, and the torrents of abuse poured on the servants of God lend the only touches of nature that may be found in the author’s passive figures. Of course these outbursts of hatred reveal the true character of the adventurers. They are border ruffians.

The book is partly historical. It treats of a transition period. The allegiance of the inhabitants had suffered a violent dissolution. A border element existed, mainly recruited from the United States. This element was of service in manufacturing public opinion, and, in this way, might have hastened the transfer of the Louisiana tract to its natural owner, the United States. We are inclined to the opinion that Southern interests would have brought about the transfer without the assistance of European complications or scenes of border treachery.

REPLY TO THE HON. R. W. THOMPSON, SECRETARY OF THE NAVY, ADDRESSED
TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. By F. X. Weninger, D.D., of the Society of
Jesus. New York: P. O’Shea. 1877.

In this pamphlet of eighty-six pages Father Weninger has undertaken the almost unnecessary task of replying to Mr. Thompson’s book, _The Papacy and the Civil Power_. If there is anything in that book to refute, it refutes itself. Mr. Thompson, however, over and above the rashness of attempting such a book at all, was rash enough to quote Father Weninger. The natural result is the present pamphlet. The pamphlet is addressed to “the American people.” If the American people take it up, they will be rewarded by some lively reading. The reverend author says at the conclusion: “We have handled our adversary throughout the whole discourse without gloves.” No reader of the pamphlet will be inclined to dispute that statement.

THE PEARL AMONG THE VIRTUES; OR, WORDS OF ADVICE TO CHRISTIAN YOUTH.
By P. A. De Doss, S.J. Translated from the original German by a
Catholic priest. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. 1877.

This work, written by one of the Jesuit Fathers banished from Germany, is an excellent treatise on the angelic virtue, which he considers from almost every point of view in a solid, instructive, and highly interesting manner. No more useful book could be placed in the hands of the youth of either sex.

GOD THE TEACHER OF MANKIND: A PLAIN, COMPREHENSIVE EXPLANATION OF
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. By Michael Müller, C.SS.R. New York, Cincinnati,
and St. Louis: Benziger Brothers. 1877.

We have received advance sheets of this new and most interesting work by the indefatigable Redemptorist father to whom Catholics in this country are so much indebted for works that are really useful as well as popular. The book is too important in itself and on too important a subject to be dismissed with a hasty notice. We shall return to it later.

EDMONDO: A Sketch of Roman Manners and Customs. By Rev. Fr. Antonio
Bresciani, S.J., author of _The Jew of Verona_, etc., etc.
Translated from the Italian. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1877.

This is a powerfully-written story that cannot but excite the liveliest interest on account of its faithful and beautiful description of Roman scenery and vivid delineation of Roman life and customs.

The translation is well rendered, but we do not approve of the omission of two chapters from the writings of such an author as the learned Bresciani. Such men do not write anything that can be cast aside without loss to their readers and admirers.

DORA. By Julia Kavanagh.

BESSIE:

SILVIA. By the same author. D. & J. Sadlier & Co.

We have not read any one of these three stories, and can only acknowledge their receipt. From others that we have read by the same author we think it safe to recommend these to persons who are fond of novels. Julia Kavanagh is, to our thinking, one of the purest, most graceful, and most interesting story-writers of the day.

THE CATHOLIC KEEPSAKE. A gift-book for all seasons. Baltimore: John
Murphy & Co. 1877.

The best encomium we can bestow on this collection is to say that it is worthy of its name. The numerous sketches and stories are short, entertaining, and very agreeably written, even though a little ancient.

BESSY; OR, THE FATAL CONSEQUENCE OF TELLING LIES. By the author of
_The Rat-Pond; or, The Effects of Disobedience_. Baltimore: Kelly,
Piet & Co. 1877.

A plain, simple story for children, and, as the title designates, with a moral attached.

THE STORY OF FELICE. By Esmeralda Boyle. London: Trübner & Co. 1873.

SONGS OF THE LAND AND SEA. By Esmeralda Boyle. New York: E. J. Hale
& Son. 1875.

In these poems Miss Boyle displays much true poetic feeling and a gift of melodious utterance.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXV., No. 150.—SEPTEMBER, 1877.

AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.
VIRGIL AND HORACE.

The number of versified translations of Greek and Latin poets which the English presses continually put forth must be a never-ending surprise to the practical American mind—if, that is to say, the practical mind ever thinks of so manifestly useless and absurd a thing at all. Authors are supposed to write and publishers to print for the purpose of making money; that either should work to any other end is a proposition which to the practical mind is simply bewildering. Yet one would think there can be but little money in laboriously turning into English a quantity of school-books which no one reads except at school, and whose only value is in their being in a foreign tongue. Original poetry is bad enough; the verdict of the practical mind on that point is pretty apt to be one with the view taken by Heine’s rich uncle, to whom the poet, at the height of his fame, was but a _Dummkopf_ (may not the uncle, alas! have been right?); but poetry at second hand, the “old clo’” of the Muses, Apollo’s second table, the cold victual of Parnassus, a disaerated Helicon—the practical mind can only gasp at the notion (which, by the way, strikes it in quite another shape than the poetical one we have chosen to give it, but just as effectively) and seek to renew its faith in human nature over the credit column of its ledger.

Another class of minds, too, not quite so practical—a class that has been at college, we will say, that knows Virgil and Horace by name, or even by certain quotations (_arma virumque_, _pallida mors pulsat_, _atra cura_, etc.), and can read Greek letters at sight, but on the whole thinks Huxley a greater force in the world to-day than Homer—the cultured class, in short, about which some of our newspapers make so much to-do—can understand why the great classic poets should be turned into English verse (for the benefit of those who have not been at college), but not at all why such versions should be multiplied. If you want Virgil in an English dress, there’s your Dryden; or Homer, there’s Pope—say our person of culture is from an extreme northern latitude, geographically or mentally, he will perhaps put Chapman here, and pooh-pooh Pope with a reference to Bentley. Do you desire Horace in the vulgar, there’s good old Francis—pray, what better do you ask? What better, indeed, can you expect to get? Just look at your _Cyclopædia Septentrionalis_ and see what it tells you! So what is the use or the meaning, what is the reason of being, of your Theodore Martins and your Coningtons, your Morrises and Cranches? What is there to be had of them all but vanity and vexation of spirit, and time and money mislaid?

Somewhat in that way, we take it, a good many folks, even of the book-buying, nay, of the book-reading, sort, must feel over every fresh announcement of a translation of one or other of the favorite classic poets. And as the supply of such things is in the long run, by a beneficent law of nature, tempered to the demand, and the mind of the book-buying many reacts upon, and often rules, the ardor of the book-making few—“book” in Lamb’s sense, be it understood—it is not surprising that the list of American translators should be of the scantiest. Mr. Cranch’s bold venture of last year—a blank-verse rendering of the _Æneid_—had few precursors or precedents. There is Mumford’s blank-verse Homer, which Professor Felton praised, and Professor Arnold, strange to say, seems not to have seen; and Mr. Bryant’s blank-verse Homer, which everybody praised and a smaller number read. Then, some years since, a Philadelphian gentleman put forth still another version of the _Iliad_ in what he said was English verse, although the precise metre of such lines as

“For Agamemnon insulted Chryses”;
“But Agamemnon was much displeased”;
“Wounded is Diomed, Tydeus’ son,
Ulysses, also, and Agamemnon.”

unless it be hexameter—everything you cannot scan in English verse is hexameter, just as everything you cannot parse in Greek is second aorist—we have been unable to determine. We have heard, also, of a version of Horace by a professor in some Southern university, but this we have not seen. Are there any others? Mr. E. C. Stedman ten years ago printed specimens of a projected translation of Theocritus, in English hexameters, of considerable merit; but his reception does not seem to have encouraged him to go on. And that is all, a little Spartan band of four or five to oppose to the great host of British translators from Phaer to Morris. The practical mind may feel reassured of its country.

It is true that these English versions are often reprinted here; but it is only the chiefs of the army—those who shine pre-eminent among their fellows,

“sicut inter ignes
Luna minores,”

or who are already known to fame for triumphs in other fields. Prof. Conington made something of a critical furor by the bold breaking away from rule and precedent in his choice of a metre, though Dr. Maginn, in his Homeric ballads, had given him the hint. In like manner our booksellers have reprinted and our book-buyers bought Mr. Morris’ _Æneid_ (we beg his pardon—_Æneids_), not because it was a new translation of Virgil, but because it was a new work of the latest popular poet; just as they printed and bought Mr. Bryant’s Homer because it was the latest work of our oldest living poet, as they printed and bought Lord Derby’s _Iliad_ because it was the work of a nobleman, and not only that, but of a leading European statesman, and therefore, in both aspects, a very surprising and desirable thing for our people, who have never been used to connect that sort of accomplishment with the idea they had formed of a nobleman, still less with their notion of a statesman. But we did not reprint or buy Mr. Worsley’s, or Prof. Newman’s, or Prof. Blackie’s, or Mr. Wright’s Homer; and even if we printed, it is to be feared we did not extensively buy, Mr. Cranch’s _Æneid_, although in the way of buying English _Æneids_ we might have done worse. Why? Not, certainly, because any of the versions named lacked merit, but because they appealed to us on their merits simply, without any outside helps to popularity, and we would none of them. The fact is, we do not care in the least for Homer or Virgil, and we care a great deal for Morris and Bryant—that is to say, while they are topics of talk; and it is one of the social duties, which persons of culture would die almost sooner than fail in, to have something, or even nothing, to say about the ordained subjects of fashionable gossip.

But in England it is otherwise. There is in that country a large class always to be counted on to buy any translation of a favorite classic which has successfully run the gauntlet of the reviews. This class is made up of diverse elements. First, the translators themselves, who in England form no inconsiderable percentage of the literary public; for every other graduate of either university who has not been a stroke-oar—that is honor enough to win or give—seems to feel within him a sacred void unfilled, a mysterious yearning unsatisfied, a clamorous duty unperformed, until he has translated some classic author in whole or in part. Every translator, of course, buys the publications of every other translator to chuckle over his failures or—let us do them justice—to applaud heartily and generously the happy dexterity which conquers a difficult passage. Then, too, even scholars who have Homer and Horace at their fingers’ ends, who think in Latin and dream in Greek, who dare to take liberties with the digamma and speak disrespectfully of the second aorist—even they to whom the best translation of a classic is as corked claret? or skim-milk—may still buy Prof. Conington’s _Æneid_ or Lord Lytton’s Horace for a better reason than the pleasure of finding fault with it. They know, none better, that, as the former puts it, a translation by a competent hand is itself an “embodied criticism” and commentary; and even scholars, after twenty centuries or so of criticism and commentary, and even of mutual vituperation, have not yet quite made up their minds as to the meaning, or at least the shades of meaning, straight through of any poet of antiquity. This is not to say that we have not here, too, scholars who might buy a translation for the same reason; but in neither country, perhaps, are there so many as to be much of a stand-by in themselves.

But the mainstay of the English translator is that sort of fashionable sentiment in favor of classical learning necessarily fostered in a country where the university is a working element and influence in political, social, and literary life. This sentiment is not so powerful or wide-spread as it once was; as it was, let us say, when a couplet made Mr. Addison a secretary of state, or a burlesque made Mr. Montague a minister and Mr. Prior an ambassador—an improvement still on the age when Sir Christopher Hatton danced himself into the chancellorship. But it is still powerful; and the university is still such a force in English life as it never has been, as it probably never will be, here. The Oxford and Cambridge debating clubs used to be regularly looked to, and are still, perhaps, now and again beaten up, by experienced huntsmen for embryo statesmen, much as the metropolitan manager will scour the provincial stage for an undiscovered star. University men edit the leading organs of public opinion; university men fill the desks in Downing Street and the Parliamentary benches in Westminster Hall; university men yawn day after day in the club-windows of Pall Mall, and night after night in the dancing and supper rooms of Belgravia—no, not the supper-rooms; that is, perhaps, the one spot of the fashionable world where young England forgets to yawn. Like enough, the learning of many of these sages is no deeper than the lore of our own pundits from Yale and Harvard; and not a few of them, no doubt, would be far more at home criticising the boat-race in the Fifth Æneid (the contestants in which they would probably characterize, in their delightful idiom, as “duffers”) than construing the Latin it is told in. Such is the proud result of modern university education in a free and enlightened Anglo-Saxon community. Nevertheless, though the university may not actually give learning, it creates a sentiment in favor of learning; it develops almost unconsciously a taste for it. One may say that it is next to impossible for any man to go through college without taking in some sense of classical culture—through the pores, as it were—which shall ever after give him a feeling of companionship, a kind of Freemasonry, with authors he could never read. To have lived among books, in an atmosphere of books, is itself in some sort an education.

Now, with this feeling for learning diffused throughout a great nation, showing itself in its chief organs of public opinion, in its selection of public officers, and even to some extent in its popular elections, and centring above all in a great city, the headquarters of all the social, political, and literary activity of the nation—its book-making, book-branding, book-buying centre—we come to see why translations from the classics should have more vogue across the water than with us. If a cabinet minister choose to beguile his leisure by turning Aristophanes into English, it is but fit that society, before having him in to dinner, should know something about it, if only to avoid such a slip as is told of Catalani. The _prima donna_ was seated, as a great compliment, next to Goethe at a state dinner, but not knowing the divine Wolfgang—or, indeed, much of anything but some operatic scores—gave her mind to the potage rather than to the poet. A friend nudged her: “Why do you not talk to M. Goethe?” “I don’t know him, and he’s stupid.” “What! not know M. Goethe, the celebrated author of the _Sorrows of Werther_?” “The _Sorrows of Werther_! Ah! M. Goethe,” cried the _diva_ with _empressement_, turning to the great man, “how can I ever thank you enough for your charming _Sorrows of Werther_! I never laughed so much at anything in my life.” She had seen a parody of that immortal work in a farce at Paris. Here, when our cabinet minister lets loose his intellectual surplus on exposures of Popery, society runs no great risk. Everybody can talk a little Popery—an easier subject, on the whole, to talk or write about than Aristophanes; and one knows pretty well what our cabinet minister’s book is about without the fatigue of failing to read it.

Of the feeling we have mentioned the taste for quotation in Parliamentary debate is a good test. An apt illustration from Horace or Virgil had at one time almost the force of an argument. “Pitt,” says the late Lord Lytton, in the excellent preface to his unrhymed version of Horace’s _Odes_, “is said never to have more carried away the applause of the House of Commons than when, likening England—then engaged in a war tasking all her resources—to that image of Rome which Horace has placed in the mouth of Hannibal, he exclaimed:

“'Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus
Nigræ feraci frondis in Algido,
Per damna, per cœdes, ab ipso
Ducit opes animumque ferro.’”[121]

Footnote 121:

“Even as the ilex, lopped by axes rude
Where, rich with dusky boughs, soars Algidus,
Through loss, through wounds receives
New gain, new life—yea, from the very steel.”

—Horat. _Carm._ iv. 4, Lord Lytton’s Trans.

Pitt, indeed, is famous for such felicities. In his speech on resigning the chancellorship in 1782, after claiming “to have used his best endeavors to fulfil with integrity every official engagement,” he continued: “And with this consolation, the loss of power, sir, and the loss of fortune, though I affect not to despise, I trust I shall soon be able to forget.”

“Laudo manentem: si celeres quatit
Pennas, resigno quæ dedit ...
... probamque
Pauperiem sine dote quæro.”[122]

Footnote 122:

“Constant I praise her, but resign
With equal mind her gifts.
When, swift deserting me and mine,
Her ready wing she lifts,
And, _wrapped up in my virtue_, wait
Fair Poverty’s undower’d estate.”

—Horat. _Carm._ iii. 29.

The original of the line italicized Pitt modestly omitted.

Sir Robert Walpole had worse luck in attempting a like feat on his retirement, made not so gracefully in the shadow of a threatened impeachment.

“Nil conscire sibi, nulli pallescere culpæ,”[123]

Footnote 123:

“Conscious of no wrong done, no crime to pale at remembered.”

—Horat. _Ep._ 1. i.

he quoted, and was at once taken up by his rival, Pulteney, who offered to bet him a guinea that the line read _Nulla pallescere culpa_. Walpole lost, and, tossing the coin to Pulteney, the latter, before pocketing it, held it up to the House with the grim remark: “It is the first money I have received from the treasury for many years, and it shall be the last.”

It may well be that there is less of this sort of thing nowadays, when Parliamentary illustrations, among the younger members at least, seem to be drawn more extensively from natural history than from ancient poetry. Yet it is but a few years since Mr. Gladstone, on going out of office, created a sensation in his turn by his application of Virgil’s fine line,

“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.”[124]

Footnote 124:

“Rise from our ashes thou unknown, the predestined avenger.”

We cannot very well imagine a leading Congressman summoning Horace to enforce his argument, say, on the vital necessity to the nation of repealing the Seventh Commandment until such time as his constituents at Podunk can get enough of their neighbors’ currency to make resumption and patriotism convertible terms. Not only would he be doubtful of being understood, but he would be awed by that practical-minded public opinion at home which severely discourages in its chosen representatives such frivolities as unknown tongues. He would see behind the Speaker’s desk the grim phantom of the honest Granger transfixing him with a spectral finger, and asking him in hollow tones if he was sent to Congress to talk gibberish or to get that little appropriation; he would see the still more appalling phantom of the local editor grimly sharpening his quill and squaring himself for another of those savagely sarcastic articles about our erudite Congressman, who spends his time—the time we pay for, etc.—muddling his brains—the few brains, etc.—over obsolete rubbish in the Congressional Library, while he neglects his constituents’ interests and allows that little bill, etc., etc. He sees all this, and, instead of Horace, he quotes Josh Billings, and everybody is satisfied.

Now, this is not meant to the dispraise of either the Congressman or his constituents, but only to show that here political is divided from literary life in a way quite unknown in England. The scholar in politics is a fond illusion of youthful enthusiasm. Our politicians do not write; our literary folks do not go to Congress. A stray editor, to be sure, now and then gets in, tumbling over, as it were, from the Reporters’ Gallery, or a flourish is made of sending Mr. Motley or Prof. Lowell minister to some foreign court; but these are spasmodic exceptions, and usually result in a way to confirm the rule. We have no counterparts to Disraeli, or Gladstone, or Mr. Lowe, or Sir George Cornewall Lewis, or the Duke of Argyle. Perhaps, however, a new era is dawning with the present Secretary of the Navy, who spells his literature with a “P.”

We have said enough—the reader may think more than enough—to show why translations from the classics should flourish better in England than here, and also, by implication at least, why of all classic authors, with the one exception of Homer, Horace and Virgil should most have taken the translators’ attention. From one or other of these are all the Parliamentary quotations we have given; and it is indeed, we believe, considered what our English friends call “bad form” to quote in debate any other Latin or Greek. The cause of this popularity it is easy to see. Horace and Virgil, in the usual college curriculum, are put into the student’s hands just as he has got over his initial struggles with the language, and his mind is a little freed to feel some of the beauties as well as the difficulties of the author—to know that the rose has fragrance as well as thorns. Homer, on the contrary, from his comparative ease, comes much earlier in the Greek course, and becomes so much the more distasteful to the learner as Greek is harder than Latin; its very letters are aliens to his eyes, its alphabet is a place of briers and brambles. It is hard to get over these early dislikes. St. Augustine confesses a hatred for Homer thus implanted in his school-days which he could never overcome, while he declares Virgil to be the greatest and most glorious of poets—a censure echoed by Voltaire, who pronounced the _Æneid, le plus beau monument qui nous reste de toute l’antiquité_, and asserts that if Homer produced Virgil, it was his finest work.

Both in Virgil and Horace there is much to captivate a youthful mind and everything to keep the affections won. The story of the _Æneid_ is not only full of life and color and motion, with plenty of fighting, which all boys love of course, but, despite its later-discovered want of a reasonable hero or heroine, its episodes—the Trojan horse and the sharp street-fight in fallen Ilium, the mysterious journey through the shades under a spectral moon, the races in the Fifth Book, the midnight scout of Nisus and Euryalus, the plucky young Iulus fleshing his maiden shafts at the siege in Book Ninth, the gallant onset and tragic fate of the young champions Lausus and Pallas—all are apt to take the boyish imagination; and in older years the haunting melody of the verse, the pensive grace that suffuses the telling of the story, renew and rivet the early charm.

Horace, too, is full of matter that even boyhood can taste and manhood never tires of. The lovely bits of rural landscape scattered like so many cabinet pictures through the odes—the sweltering cattle standing knee-deep under the oak-boughs in the pool of Bandusia, the bickering, pine-arched rivulet by whose side Dellius takes his nooning; the sunny slopes of Lucretilis dotted with sheep; the romantic beauty of the Happy Isles—do we not all recall the delight we felt when these enchanting little sketches first smiled on us from the weary drudgery of Tacitus and Thucydides like vistas of fresh meadow and woodland and cascade caught by the wayfarer from the hot and dusty highway? We did not so well relish then, in that out-door time of life, the warm little interiors that contrast and set off these: the glowing fire-side piled high with logs, made merry with old Falernian, and laugh and joke and friendly talk, while the rain beats upon the roof and the snow whirls about Soracte, and, drawing closer to the cheery blaze, we hug ourselves in the “tumultuous privacy of storm”; the jolly dinner-parties, where we help to quiz Quinctius for his gravity or chaff that harebrain Telephus out of his affectation of wisdom; the more sober feasts with Mæcenas or Virgil at the little Sabine Farm—but these, too, we soon get to know, and linger over them with fond familiarity. Then, too, we win to the secret of that genial though pagan philosophy which comes home to the “business and bosoms” of all of us, and whose precepts are so pithily expressed we cannot forget them if we would: that there is a time when folly is the truest wisdom; that he alone is happy who is content with little; that a wise man takes care of the present and lets the future take care of itself, because, as Cowley puts it,

“When to future years thou extend’st thy cares,
Thou dealest in other men’s affairs”;

that we must pluck the blossom of to-day, or we may never have a chance at the morrow’s.

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying,”

says Herrick, a later Horace. As we grow older and graver his sympathetic companionship keeps pace with us still, and in his deeper tones there are hints which even Christian civilization need not disdain to add to its scheme of a lofty and noble life.

So it is that England for three centuries back—indeed, ever since she began to have a literature to house them in—has been trying to naturalize and domesticate these Roman poets. In this, however, Virgil had nearly a century the start of Horace, owing, no doubt, to the nature of his great work, which appealed to the romantic impulses of that early time. Indeed, long before either the _Æneid_ or the _Iliad_ was generally known in Europe, the stories of both had been made over into the form of romances: the former by Guillaume de Roy in French, the latter by Guido de Colonna in Spanish. De Roy’s _Livre d’Eneidos_, translated into English and printed by Caxton, “no more resembles Virgil,” cries the good Bishop of Dunkeld wrathfully, “than the devil does St. Austin.” It was probably to clear the fair fame of his beloved poet that the bishop brought out his own quaint and spirited Scotch version in 1513. The first complete English translation came out in 1558; but in the previous year appeared the Second and Fourth Books, done into blank verse by the Earl of Surrey, notable as the first-known blank verse in the language, unless we are to take as such the unrhymed, alliterative metre used by Longland in _The Vision of Piers Ploughman_. It is thought to have been Surrey’s design, had he lived, to translate the remaining books. Had he done so, he would have added an ornament to our literature.

As it is, the distinction of giving the first full translation of the _Æneid_ to the language rests with a Welshman—Dr. Thomas Phaer. He himself, however, did only the first nine books and part of the Tenth; when dying, the work was taken in hand and finished, with the Thirteenth or supplementary book of Maffeo Veggio, by another physician, Dr. Thomas Twynne. English doctors then and afterwards seem to have had a propension towards the Muse. Dr. Borde, Dr. Thomas Campion (“Sweet Master Campion”), and Dr. Thomas Lodge—they seem to have had a propensity to be named Thomas also—were only the first of a long line of tuneful leeches, ending with our own Drs. Holmes and Joyce. Is there any occult connection between physic and Parnassus, between rhyme and rhubarb, between poetry and pills? and is Castaly a medicinal spring? Phaer’s version, which is printed in black-letter, is in rhymed fourteen-syllable verse, or “long Alexandrines”—a metre which Chapman afterwards took for his Homer, and to which Mr. Morris, the latest translator of the _Æneid_, has reverted.

The long Alexandrine has perhaps as much right as any to be called the English national metre in the sense in which we call the Saturnian verse the national metre of the Latins. Chaucer took his heroic couplet from the Italian or French, and Surrey, no doubt, had from the same source, or perhaps the Spanish, the hint for his blank verse. A curious parallel might be drawn between Surrey and Ennius, who, like him, introduced a new or “strange metre—the Greek hexameter—and, like him, by doing so revolutionized the versification of his country. Another point in common is that each has been reproached for his action. Ascham impliedly finds fault with Surrey because he did not choose hexameters or unrhymed Alexandrines instead of his unrhymed verse of ten or eleven syllables; and certain of those dreadful German scholars, who know everything and a few things besides, assure us that Ennius dealt a fatal blow to Latin poetry when he foisted on it a metre unsuited to its genius. One can hardly help speculating on the result had Virgil had to content himself with the _horridus numerus Saturnius_ as the vehicle of his tenderness and elegance, or if Hamlet had had to soliloquize in the metre of Sternhold and Hopkins. Would the rude instrument have cramped the player, or would the genius of the player have elevated the instrument? As Macaulay points out, the old nursery line,

“The queen is in her parlor eating bread and honey,”

is a perfect Saturnian verse on Terence’s model:

“Dăbūnt mălūm Mĕtēllī Nævĭō pŏētæ.”

How would Mr. Gladstone’s menace,

“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,”

have sounded in that shape? Should we recognize, do you think, those

“Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty,”

done up in long Alexandrines or in such hexameters as those of Master Abraham Fraunce, which moved Ben Jonson to dub him a fool:

“Now had fiery Phlegon his dayes revolution ended,
And his snoring snout with salt waves all to be-washed,”

or even in Sidney’s or Spenser’s, which were, in truth, little better? No doubt Virgil and Shakspere, being great poets, would have subdued what they worked in to their own artistic uses. Yet all the same let us be thankful to the humbler artisans who furnished to their hands pipes fit for them to play on, and to make such music as the world shall never tire of hearing. It should be added that the likeness between the English and the Latin reformer does not extend to the degree of refinement attained by each. In this respect Surrey is much the more advanced. Ennius never got over the barbarism of excessive alliteration which seems to mark the early metrical efforts of all peoples.

“Sicut si quando vincleis venatica velox”;
“Sicut fortis equus spatio qui forte supremo”;
“Quai neque Dardaneis campeis potuere perire
Nec cum capta capei, nec cum combusta cremari.”

The last passage Virgil copied, as he did many others, and it is instructive to see how his more polished taste tones down his predecessor’s jingle:

¸ “Num Sigæis occumbere campis,
Num capti potuere capi? num incensa cremavit
Troja viros?”[125]

Footnote 125:

“Was there no dead man’s place for you on that Sigeian plain?
Had ye no might to wend as slaves? Gave Troy so poor a flame
To burn her men...?”

—_Æneid_, vii. 294 seq., Morris’ Trans. p. 175.

Surrey’s blank verse has the quaintness of his age, but not its defects of taste. Martial, writing about two centuries after Ennius, sneers at him, much as Ennius had sneered at his predecessor, Nævius—he who lamented that Latin poetry was to die with him!

“Ennius est lectus, salvo tibi Roma Marone.”[126]

Footnote 126:

“And Rome reads Ennius while Virgil lives!”

Pope, writing nearly the same length of time after Surrey, has only praise for him: “Surrey, the Grenville of a former age“—at least, Pope meant it for praise.”

To return to Phaer. It may be of interest to the reader to contrast the manner of the earliest and latest English translators of the _Æneid_. Venus’ admonition to Æneas (ii. 607) is thus given by the Welsh doctor:

“Then to thy parent’s hest take heede, dread not, my mind obey:
In yonder place where stones from stones and bildings huge to sway
Thou seest, and mixt with dust and smoke thicke stremes of reekings
rise,
Himselfe the god Neptune that side doth furne in wonders wise:
With forke three tinde the wall vproots, foundations allto shakes;
And qvite from vnder soile the towne, with ground-works all uprakes.
On yonder side with Furies most, dame Juno fiercely stands,
The gates she keeps, and from the ships the Greekes, her friendly
bands,
In armour girt she calles.
Lo! there againe where Pallas sits, on fortes and castle-towres,
With Gorgon’s eyes, in lightning cloudes enclosed, grim she lowres,
The father-god himself to Greekes their mightes and courage steres,
Himselfe against the Troyan blood both gods and armour reres.
Betake thee to thy flight, my sonne, thy labours’ ende procure,
I will thee never faile, but thee to resting-place assure.
She said, and through the darke night shade herselfe she drew from
sight;
Appeare the grisly faces then, Troyes en’mies vgly dight.”

Mr. Morris gives it thus:

“And look to it no more afeard to be
Of what I bid, nor evermore thy mother’s word disown.
There where thou seest the great walls cleft and stone turn off from
stone,
And seest the waves of smoke go by with mingled dust-cloud rolled,
There Neptune shakes the walls and stirs the foundings from their
hold
With mighty trident, tumbling down the city from its base.
There by the Scæan gates again hath bitter Juno place
The first of all, and wild and mad, herself begirt with steel,
Calls up her fellows from the ships.
Look back! Tritonian Pallas broods o’er topmost burg on high,
All flashing bright with Gorgon grim from out her stormy sky;
The very Father hearteneth on, and stays with happy might
The Danaans, crying on the gods against the Dardan fight.
Snatch flight, O son, whiles yet thou mayst, and let thy toil be
o’er;
I by thy side will bring thee safe unto thy father’s door.

“She spake, and hid herself away where thickest darkness poured.
Then dreadful images show forth, great godheads are abroad,
The very haters of our Troy.”