But hov'ring mists around his brows are spread, No foe, unpunish'd, in the fighting-field Shall dare thee, foot to foot, with sword and shield. When thy sharp spurs shall urge thy foaming horse. Full canisters of fragrant lilies bring, Here is an excellent flow. The sorrow and the pride and the public love which are the life of the original, are all taken to heart by the translator, who succeeds in imparting to you the most touching of poetical eulogies. You find, as usually every where, that the vigorous purpose of the original is maintained, and well rendered, but that certain Virgilian fascinations, which-whether they bewitch your heart or your fancy or your ear, you do not know-are hardly given you back. Thus it might be very hard to say what you have found that you cannot forget again, in such a verse as that which introduces to your eye the subject of the more effusive praise. "Atque hic Æneas, una namque ire videbat Egregium formâ juvenem, et fulgenti bus armis." Yet you do not again forget that second line. Dryden's rendering is equivalent for the meaning, and unblameable. "Eneas here beheld of form divine, A godlike youth in glittering armour shine." The phrase is even heightened; but it does not loiter, like that other, in your memory. The very heightening has injured the image-the shadow that shone brighter in simple words. The shadow then thrown across- "Sed frons læta parum ”— is well given, with a variation, by- The unequalled "Ostendent terris hunc tantum Fata," so fully signifying the magnitude of the gift offered and withdrawn-so sadly the brief promise, and all so concisely, meets with a soft and bright rendering in "The blissful vision of a day." But Dryden's "shown on earth," less positively affirms the loss fallen upon the earth, than the Latin “shall show to the nations." The praise involving the recollec- is given with admirable fervour. Undaunted worth! inviolable truth!" As for those three words that smote, as the tradition goes, the heart of the too deeply concerned auditress, the bereaved mother herself, to swooning "Tu Marcellus eris !"— they are no doubt, in their overwhelming simplicity, untransferable to our uncouth idiom; and our ears may thank Dryden for the skill with which, by a "New Marcellus," and an otherwise explanatory paraphrase, he has kept the Virgilian music. Meantime the passionate vehemence of the breaking away from that prophecy of intolerable grief-the call for the bestrewment of flowers "Manibus date lilia plenis," &c.— must be weakened, if the moment of the transition is to fall, as we see it in Dryden, at the interval between verse and verse, and not, as we have just seen it with Virgil, at the juncture within the verse of hemistich with hemistich. "Tu Marcellus eris.-Manibus date lilia plenis," &c. There is a pause in that line, during which the mother, had she not swooned, might have calmed her heart! It is usual to discover that Virgil wants originality-that he transcribes his battles from Homer. In truth, it was not easy, with fights of the Homeric ages, to do otherwise. However, Virgil has done otherwise, if any one will be at the pains to look. For instance, an incident, not in the battles by the Xanthus, is the following: A powerful Tuscan warrior, infuriated by the ill fighting of his men, distinguishes himself by an extraordinary feat. Clasping round the body, and so unhorsing a lighter antagonist, he rides off with him; snaps the javelin, which his captive still grasps, near the head, and with its point probes and aims for a vulnerable place. The unfortunate Latine, as he lies across the horse's neck, struggles, and will baffle the deathly blow. Landseer could suggest no more vivid comparison, than one which leaps into your own imagination--a snake soused upon by an eagle. "So stoops the yellow eagle from on high, And bears a speckled serpent through the sky, A glorious paraphrase! This is an incident more like a knight of Ariosto's, the terrible Sarazin Rhodomont, or Orlando himself, than Homer's, who did not, indeed, combat on horseback. But speaking of the moderns, we will venture to say, that if Virgil has copied, he is also an original who has been copied. And we will ask, who is the prototype of the ladies, turned knights, who flourish in favour with our poets of romance ?-with Ariosto, with Tasso, with our own Speuser? Who but the heroic virgin ally of the Rutulian prince-who but CAMILLA? We name her, however, neither for her own sake, nor for Virgil's, but for Dryden's, who seems also to have taken her into favour, and to have written, with a peculiar spirit and feeling, the parts of the poem which represent her in action. She leads her Amazons into Italian fields, warring against the fate-driven fugitives of overthrown Troy. Whence were her Amazon followers? Whence is She? Her history her divine patroness, Diana, relates. Her father, the strong-limbed, rude-souled Metabus, a wild and intractable Volscian king, fled from the face and from the pursuit of his people. He bore, in his arms, one dear treasure; a companion of his flight; yet an infant-this daughter. He flies. The Amasenus, in flood, bars his way. More doubtful for his charge than for himself, hastily, with love-prompted art, he swathes the babe in stripped bark-binds her to the shaft of his huge oaken spear-dedicates her with a prayer to the virgin god dess of woods, and of the woodland chase-burls, from a gigantic hand, the weapon across the tempestuous flood-and, ere his pursuers have reached him, plunges in, breasts the waters, and, saving and saved, swims across. In the forest depths, amongst imbosoming hills, the rugged sire fosters the vowed follower of Diana. The nursling of the wild grows up a bold and skilled huntress; and now that war storms in the land, she, with her huntress companions, joins the war. Some unexplained reconciliation, or per haps restoration, has taken effect; for, along with her armed maidens, she leads the troops of the Volscians. In the field she fights like a virago; but her entrance thither was against the desire of the goddess, for it dooms her to die. Her eager following of a gorgeously armed warrior exposes her to a treacherous aim, and she falls. The provident goddess had put her own bow, and an arrow from her own quiver, into the hands of a nymph chosen to execute the vengeance of the impending death, and that arrow flies to its mark. "Nor, after that, in towns which walls enclose, He shunn'd the dire society of men. A shepherd's solitary life he led; His daughter with the milk of mares he fed. He drew, and through her lips the liquor press'd. The little amazon could scarcely go, He loads her with a quiver and a bow; And, that she might her staggering steps command, Her flowing hair no golden fillet bound; Nor swept her trailing robe the dusty ground. Her back and shoulders, fasten'd to her head. The flying dart she first attempts to fling, And round her tender temples toss'd the sling; To pierce aloft in air the soaring swan, And from the clouds to fetch the heron and the crane. To bless their rival sons with such a bride; But she disdains their love, to share with me And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain. This chosen arrow, to avenge her death: Or of the Trojan or Italian train, Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain. What is Virgil's in this fair and romantically cast fiction? What hints did the traditionary fable give him? You are not concerned to make an enquiry which you have no means of satisfying. You must hold Camilla to be as much Virgil's as any thing is Homer's in the Iliad. The painting throughout is to the life, and perfectly graceful. The subject was one likely to attach the imagination of a modern poet, and you feel all along, that pleasure inspirits the happy translation of Dryden. The Destruction of Troy, the Love of Dido, the Descent into Hell, entire Cantos of the poem, take deep and lasting possession of every reader; and, like the first and second books of the Paradise Lost, too much seduce admiration from the remainder of the work. You pick out from the whole Italian war, Lausus, Pallas, Nisus, and Euryalus, and think that you have done with Virgil. We beg to propose a literary experiment. Homer has left us two poems-a War, and a Wandering. Virgil has bequeathed us one, representing those two, and that proportionally; although in the Latin the Odyssey comes first, and the Iliad follows. For the first six Eneids relate the wandering; whilst the latter six display the war. Let us, therefore, fairly cut the great outrolling, unfolding picture in two, and have two poems, distinct, although closely allied; twins, moulded in one womb, nourished from the same blood. We dare to predict that the poem of "Eneas in Italy," now considered with its own independent interests, and after its own art and management, will duly compete with its rival," Æneas Fugitive." How the whole movement, and march, and original conduct of the Italian war will come out! The peaceful entertainment of the Trojans by Latinus, moved with old and new prophecies, and his ready offer of his daughter, Lavinia, to Æneas in marriage the adverse interposition of Juno-her summoning of Alecto from hell-the glad Fury's fine discharge of her part-her maddening of the Queen Amata, who loves Turnus, hates the strangers, and catches in her own madness all the Latian mothersthe INFURIATING of the young, gal lant, ardent, defrauded, princely lover himself-a splendid scene, where the hot warrior's jeers of the fiend in her beldam disguise, sting her Tartarean heart as if it had been a woman's, and for very wrath she reveals her terrible self-then that exquisite incident, won from the new matter of the poet, from the PASTORAL manners with which he is historically obliged to deal in Italy-the Fury's third and last feat-her drawing-on of Ascanius's hounds to hunt the beautiful favourite stag, which the daughter of the King's chief herdsman pettedand, thence, a quarrel, a skirmish, slaughter begun, and the whole population of the plains aroused. And so with bacchanal women, with Rutulians, and with his own rude liegemen in tumult, the old King overborne-shutting himself up in his palace; and war inflamed in Hesperia, to the full heart's-wish of Jove's imperial wife, who has nothing left her to do more than, descending again from the sky, to push open with her own hands the brazen-gated temple of Janus. All this is very poetical-is very different from the Iliad, and is perfectly measured to the scale of a war, moved, not by confederated Greece for the overthrow of an Asiatic empire, but by the tribes of the coast for beating back the crews of a few straggling ships from planting a colony, who have nothing on their side but their valour, their fame, and their fates. Analyze this war; make out for yourself, distinctly, the story, of which in a poem one always too easily loses the sequence, delight and emotion making one less observant; then understand the poetical workings out, in their places and after their bearings; and you will satisfy yourself, that although the cleaving of heads, and the transpiercing of trunks, and the hewing off of limbs, are processes that must always keep up a certain general resemblance to themselves, you have not a campaign imitated from the Iliad; but an original one-proper to person and place. Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work. NEVER was there a juster observation, than that, in ordinary times, in the same state, genius moves in a circle; originality is lost amidst imitation; we breathe thought not less than vital air. This is more especially the case in all those branches of opinion or philosophy which relate to internal economy, or the social concerns of men. There, it is not merely abstract principle, or disinterested reasoning, which have struck their roots into the human mind; interest, prejudice, passion, have moved it yet more deeply, and rendered the change from one set of opinions to another still more difficult. Universally it will be found, that in regard to the social concerns of men, which are so closely interwoven with our habits, interests, and affections, the transition from error to truth can rarely be accomplished by any intellect, how powerful soever, which has not imbibed, in part at least, the maxims of foreign states. New ideas, like lightning, are produced by the blending of two streams of thought, wafted from different ages or parts of the world. The French political revolution was brought about by the meeting of new-born French fervour with long-established English ideas the Anglomania which immediately preceded that convulsion is the proof of it. The English social revo lution has proceeded from the same cause it is the junction of British practical habits with French speculative views which has produced the political economy of modern times: and the whole doctrines of free-trade which Adam Smith matured, and recent times have reduced to practice, are to be found in the Physiocratie of Dupont de Nemours, and the political pamphlets of Turgot. It was in the year 1775 that these doctrines, imported from France, were first broached in this country by the publication of the Wealth of Nations; and it took half a century for them to pass from the solitary meditation of the recluse into the cabinets of statesmen and the hustings of the populace. Now, however, this transformation of thought is general, at least in a considerable part of the mercantile and manufacturing portions of the community. Few in the great cities of the empire think of doubting the doctrines of free-trade fewer still, if they doubt them, venture to give publicity to their opinions. The reason of this general concurrence among commercial men, and of this, in social matters, rapid conversion of general thought, is to be found in the circumstance, that the new opinions fell in with the interests, or at least the immediate interests, of the leaders and influential Etudes des Sciences Sociales. Paris, 1837. VOL. LVII. NO. CCCLV. Par J. C. SIMONDE DE SISMONDI. 2N 3 vols. |