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they have shown to be similar to those of the central coast-line of Western France, were among the formations principally studied in the various excursions.-The Reader.

A Correspondent in the Times gives an account of a wonderful engineering feat in Brazil. The railway from the port of Santos to San Paulo has to cross, eight miles from the former place, the mountain range of Sierra do Mar, and to accomplish this an ascent of 2600 feet has to be made in the course of five miles. To effect this Mr. Brunlees, the engineer, has devised a scheme by which the ascent is made in four divisions of a mile and a quarter each, with stationary engines at their summits, the gradient throughout being one in ten. The first division is already in operation, and rapid progress is being made with the third, the most arduous of all. The line has there to cross a gloomy ravine nine hundred feet in breadth, known as the "Bocca do Inferno," and rests on iron columns bedded on stone piers two hundred feet below. The steel wire rope used for drawing up the trains is one and one eighth inches diameter. All this engineering skill has not been exhibited to no purpose, as the line will open up a most important coffee district at present almost inaccessible.-Spectator.

history and writings. The Dramatic Author's Society have good hopes of discovering his Boyer's French Dictionary one of these days. We trust also to hear of the recovery of his Book of Cab-fares, which, as is well known, suggested to him the line in Macbeth, "fare is foul and foul is fare." We fear that his last Bradshaw is destroyed, at least we have no evidence that the poet imitated the one careful man of our own time, who binds his old Bradshaws, but his Euclid, from which he drew the beautiful image in the Winter's Tale, about "the Angle that plucks our son thither," may yet be heard of, and we shall rejoice with unfeigned joy to learn that his Book of Etiquette has reäppeared, from which no doubt he got the idea for the rule he prescribes (in 'Henry VIII.) to gentlemen, who go for a walk with ladies:

"I were unmannerly to take you out,
And not to kiss you."

About Ten Thousand Pieces of Roman Money, principally of the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero, have just been discovered in the bed of the Mayenne, at St. Leonard. Their presence is explained by the fact of a dangerous ford having formerly existed at this spot, and the custom of travellers to throw in the river a piece of money ex voto.

A Celebrated Physician, residing at Metz, has written a treatise on the medicinal qualities of Jasmin, the French Poet, whose death was rewine, in which he states that, considering winecently announced, was a barber of Languedoc, in the point of view of the mineral salts which it and wrote in a patois, being to his people what contains in a large quantity, such as potash, Burns is to the Scotch. The only remarkable soda, lime, magnesia, iron, manganese, chlorides, fact of his history is, that after being caressed sulphates, carbonates, phosphates, the juice of and fêted in Paris, dining with Louis Philippe, the grape constitutes a real natural mineral and receiving a gold medal from the Academy, liquid as active and even more charged with he returned to his native town, Agen, and went mineral principles than many justly esteemed resolutely on with his business, put his decora springs.

VARIETIES.

English Catalogue of Books.-This Catalogue gives the title, size, price, number of volumes, publisher's name, and date of publication of 67,500 distinct works; being the English publications, importations of original American works, and Continental English books, for the twentyeight years from January, 1835, to January, 1863. The latest edition of the London Catalogue-now incorporated with this work (S. Low and Co.)--gave 42,340 works for the twenty-five years from 1831 to 1855; additional researches have added to this number about 5300 titles which had escaped former compilers; from which, however, 1500 must be deducted, omitted by reason of the four years difference of date in commencement. This calculation leaves 21,960 books published during the last eight years, or an average of 2787 per annum, exclusive of reprints.

Shakspeare's Library. Shakspeare's books, says Punch, are being discovered in various directions. His Prayer Book is reported to have turned up somewhere in Wales, and it is probable that he took it with him there in case he might have to go to church while on the journey he took to get up facts about the Welsh lady in Henry IV. He was very particular about going to church, as must be clear to all students of his

tions on the counter, and called one of his collections of poems Curl Papers. In his Familiar Letters from Europe, recently published by Ticknor & Fields, of Boston, the late President Felton gives an interesting account of an interview with Jasmin.

As we

M. Fallex some years ago translated into French verse some of the more translatable passages of Aristophanes. Encouraged by the success of his undertaking, he now gives us a revised and enlarged edition of the work, including a complete version of the Plutus. The reader will be much struck by the à propos with which M. Fallex applies the withering sarcasms of the Greek poet to the vices and follies of modern times. read the description given of Cleon by the Chorus in the Wasps, we are reminded of Marat; the Clouds immediately recall to us Palissot and his caricature of Jean Jacques Rousseau in Les Philo sophes. The translator, whose version deserves commendation both for its fidelity and its elegance, gives us at every step an opportunity of identifying some obscure allusion or illustrating some interesting point of literary history.

The largest churches in Europe will contain the following number of persons: St. Peter's, Rome, 54,000; Cathedral at Milan, 37,000; St. Paul's, at London, 25,000; St. Sophia, at Constantinople, 23,000; Notre Dame de Paris, 21,000; Cathedral of Pisa, 13,000; St. Mark's, of Venice, 7000.

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what larger circle the elegant uses of

LORD DERBY'S TRANSLATION OF THE Lord Derby's leisure hours; and as he

ILIAD.*

THE Chancellor of the University of Oxford not long ago established a peculiar claim to the highest academical dignity of the country by addressing the Heir Apparent in an oration of the purest Latinity; and he has now crowned a career of daring if not successful statesmanship, of splendid eloquence, and of the highest social distinction, by no mean conquest for English literature. So little were Lord Derby's literary powers known till very recently, beyond the circle of his immediate friends, that the world read with surprise, in Lord Ravensworth's translations of Horace, an Ode rendered with remarkable grace and spirit by the head of the Conservative party. Soon afterwards a volume privately printed revealed to a some

The Iliad of Homer. Rendered into English Blank Verse. By EDWARD Earl of DERBY. Lon

don: 1864.

NEW SERIES-VOL. I., No. 4.

has now himself alluded to this collection in the Preface to the work before us, we conceive that we may, without indiscretion, lay before our readers an exquisite version of the Ode of Catullus to the Sirmian promontory, which has certainly nothing to risk if it be transplanted from the parterre of society into the wider domain of criticism.

"Sirmio, fair eye of all the laughing isles And jutting capes that rise from either main, Or crown our inland waters, with glad smiles Of heartfelt joy I greet thee once again, Scarce daring to believe mine eyes that see No more Bithynia's plains, but fondly rest on

thee.

"My own, my chosen Home! oh, what more

blest

Than that sweet pause of troubles, when the mind

Flings off its burden, and when, long oppressed

By cares abroad and foreign toil, we find Our native home again, and rest our head Once more upon our own, long-lost, longwished-for bed!

26

"This, this alone o'erpays my ev'ry pain. Hail! loveliest Sirmio! hail! with joy like

mine

Receive thy happy lord! Thou liquid plain
Of Laria's lake, in sparkling welcome shine!
Put all your beauties forth! laugh out! be
glad!
In universal smiles this day must all be clad."

ble train of overwhelming disasters, is interrupted by a narrative crowded with the successful exploits of chieftains who have lost all remembrance of the great hero of Phthia. There is, indeed, a marvellous climax; but the action of the drama is not uniformly sustained from the beginning to the end. The Father It will not, we trust, be taken as the of gods and men, who had sworn with an disingenuous compliment of a political oath to Thetis that he would straightway opponent if we express the pride and avenge the wrongs of her son, is found pleasure we feel in these productions for a long season weighing down the from a statesman of Lord Derby's emi- balance in favor of his enemies. The nent position. It is honorable to letters, dream, which is sent to strike dismay it is honorable to English education, that into the Achæan leaders, inspires them notwithstanding the incessant calls of a only with more resolute courage: yet great station, a great fortune, and a lofty these chieftains, in the full tide of sucambition, time remains to him to com- cess, shelter themselves on a sudden beplete such a task as the translation of the hind a rampart and a trench, merely, it Iliad; and that (as we have seen in other would seem, because a way must be preinstances) a life of uncommon activity in pared for causeless and inexplicable disthe arena of modern politics may be allied aster. The tale thus pieced together carwith an abiding devotion to the serene ries us through a few scenes only of the grandeur of antiquity. Lord Derby ap- great drama. Hector has fallen, but Ilion pears from his Preface to fear that in this is not taken, and Paris, the seducer, still country the taste for classical studies is lives. The wrongs and the woes of Helen on the decline. Classical studies can have not been avenged, and it remains certainly no longer boast of the monopoly for another poem to tell how Achilles they once enjoyed, when they were the met his early doom in the Western Gates only canon of liberal education. But as by the spear of Paris. If the structure long as the very first men in the country, of the poem is not perfect, its manner is such as the late Sir George C. Lewis, not always faultless. If many a scene is Mr. Gladstone, and Lord Derby are also bathed in a flood of beauty and splendor, reckoned among its first scholars as barren tracts and stony deserts not unlong as their example and success reflect frequently come between them. Long back a light upon the ancient sources catalogues of warriors are tortured into of thought and eloquence, we cannot ad- verse, to meet the necessities of oral tramit that the study of the classics in Eng-dition, and a crowd of the most exquisite land has lost anything of its lustre.

It would be out of place on this occasion to revive the endless controversies which have raged for centuries on the authorship and the structure of the Homeric poems. Even the art of translating Homer is a subject which has been discussed to satiety in endless disquisitions and numerous volumes. The peculiar charm of the two great epics of the Greek heroic age-a "fountain of beauty and delight which no man can ever drain dry" lives on in spite of the critics and their rules. The great poems of Dante, Tasso, Spenser, Milton, exhibit that unity of plan and purpose which the strength of a single mighty mind cannot fail to impart. There is no such coherence in the Iliad. The poem which is to tell us of the wrath of Achilles and its inevita

similes precedes a list of names which
poets in an age of written literature dis-
miss as rapidly as they can.
The poem
may throughout be written, as Mr.
Matthew Arnold phrases it, in the grand
style; but the grand style condescends
to give us in language whose only merit
is its simplicity many a primitive detail
of cooking, bedmaking, and pharmacy.
The critics have exhausted their ingenu-
ity in the endeavor to discover the didac-
tic purpose and ethical doctrines of Ho-
mer-a task in which we trust they never
may succeed, for it would destroy half
our pleasure in him. The attempt to do
so has involved them in a maze of con-
tradictions. In Dr. Arnold's opinion the
unwearied self-sacrifice and true ten-
derness of the Trojan Hector stood out
in overwhelming contrast with the selfisk

and implacable vindictiveness of Achilles. | hastens to bring him armor yet more In Mr. Gladstone's eyes the cause of the brilliant, from that far Eastern land at latter is the cause of truth and righteous- the rising of the sun. The day of the ness, and evil triumphs openly until the great vengeance has come. The old inwrongs of the son of Peleus are fully jury is atoned for and forgotten. Once avenged. Before the tribunal of Colonel more, as he arms himself for the slaughter, Mure, Hector is condemned as a savage a column of light flashes up to the heaven barbarian, while the one object of the and the earth laughs beneath the splenpoet, we are told, is to show that Aga- dor. His shield flashes like the blood-red memnon and Achilles are equally foolish moon; his helmet glitters like a star. A and equally in the wrong. To us, we crowd of dazzling images is lavished by acknowledge, that the beauty and interest the poet on this wonderful scene as from of the Iliad lie neither in the minute an inexhaustible store-house. Each hair analysis of its details, nor in any fanciful in the plume which waves over his head theory of its moral purpose, but in the flames like burnished gold: when the monumental grandeur of a poem embrac- hero makes trial of his armor it bears ing the destinies of gods and men, and him like a bird upon the wing. In the in a perfection of language almost incred- midst of all this splendor the old warnible in the age to which it belongs. ing comes again. When he bids his immortal steeds bear him safely through the battle, the horse Xanthus bows his head and tells him of the coming end. They are still as fleet as ever. The rays of the sun cannot shoot across the sky more swiftly than they will bear his chariot across the plain; but the necessity which orders all things is stronger and swifter still. At length the victory is won: the son of Peleus has trampled on the body of his enemy, as the bloodred sun tramples on the masses of vapors which he scatters at his setting. His wrath is over, and his face wears its old look of genial brightness. But although the dark shadow falls on it again as the aged Priam begs the body of his son, the consciousness of his own approaching death imparts in a moment a touch of exceeding softness to his imperious ve hemence, and his tears are mingled with those of Priam. The poet's task was done. He had woven together a marvellous chaplet from a long line of "lost adventures out of the darkness of the past." His hero had conquered like the sun when he goes forth in his strength; and he was content to leave him in the hour of his triumph, gladdening the hearts of his friends by his kindliness, and winning those of his enemies by his princely generosity.

For-if we may attempt to convey our general conception of the poem and its inspiring theme-there is an indescribable charm in the story of the hero, who, while he fought cheerfully in a quarrel which was not his own, knew well that he was soon to die far away from his father's house. The spell is upon us as soon as we look on that glorious form, armed with the spear which none else can wield, and endued with a might which no enemy can withstand; yet stooping, like the invincible Heracles, before a master weaker and meaner than himself. With the images of fierce and vindictive passion are mingled images of indescribable tenderness and pathos. The shadow of premature death rests on the brightest of these bright heroes. Zeus himself seeks in vain from the inexorable Hera a respite for his son Sarpedon, and his tears fall in rain-drops from the sky when the brave Lycian chieftain is smitten by the spear of Patroclus. But Patroclus too must die, and the tidings of his death waken in the heart of Achilles a thirst for vengeance, and a longing for instant action which no sense of duty, no passionate entreaties, could ever have roused. Once more his glance strikes terror into his enemies: once more his voice rings like the trumpet of doom. There shall be a fearful mourning for his dead friend. But if he still grasps the invincible spear, his armor clothes the body of Hector. What is it to him that his own death must soon follow that of his great enemy? There is but one work for him to do; and at his bidding his mother

We frankly confess that, in our judg ment, the Homeric scholiasts and commentators are the bane of Homer; and that the attempt to convert these noble poems into a subject for archæological dissection is to destroy them. Therefore we place very far above all such analysis,

more complicated hexameters of Virgil; and the sequence of ideas is kept so distinct, that one is commonly dismissed before the next is introduced: but harsh involutions give to Cowper's translation a stiff and stilted character, from which Lord Derby's version is wholly free. It is one of the first duties of a translator to construct his sentences as closely after the manner of the original as the idiom of another language will permit: but the intricate syntax and inverted constructions of Cowper are not suggested by anything in the style of Homer, and Lord Derby has happily retained in his verses that lucidity and simplicity of arrangement which make him so clear and captivating as an orator. He has also eniployed many of those artifices of language which give emphasis to his speeches. Sometimes, indeed, these artifices are not strictly defensible in a translator. Thus, to take the very first words of the Iliad :

"Of Peleus' son, Achilles, sing, O Muse,

however curious and instructive, the | came." The Homeric hexameters have work of a man who gives to the English an independence wholly foreign to the reader some approach to the pleasure which Homer affords to those who are most familiar with his original diction. The merits of Lord Derby's translation may be summed up in one word-it is eminently attractive; it is instinct with life; it may be read with fervent interest; and though it does not rival Pope in the charms of versification, it is immeasurably nearer than Pope to the text of the original. If we ask ourselves whence these qualities are derived, we suspect it is from the living interest and individuality Lord Derby has thrown into his work. Cowper was a more perfect master of English blank verse than Lord Derby, yet his translation of Homer is cold and repulsive; and of the numerous experiments which have been made in our own time, not one could support the ordeal of a second reading. We think that Lord Derby's translation will not only be read, but read over and over again. If that be so, it will endure. We say that Lord Derby has thrown life into his work. It is not a cast, but The vengeance deep and deadly." a copy, and a copy wrought with spirit Every translator before Lord Derby and genius, and whatever is done with had sung of the wrath of Achilles: with true spirit and genius bears in it some- a disposition to give intensity and exthing of the mind it springs from. Thus pression, and a taste for alliteration it is that we are continually reminded, which is not in very good taste, he in reading this translation, of the turns makes the Mñviv ovλouevηy “the venof expression, and even the modulations geance deep and deadly." Prosody of voice, which characterize Lord Derby's would have been satisfied with the word own oratory. It is Homer, but Homer recited by Lord Derby, and in tones ex-Derby, though not certainly identical anger; but the terms chosen by Lord tremely familiar to us. Indeed, we are convinced that Lord Derby's command of the sister arts of eloquence and elocution has, perhaps unconsciously to himself, given to this poetical work its distinguishing merit. Mr. Arnold has with truth remarked that the first quality of Homer is that he is rapid: he flows directly and swiftly onwards, whether it be in simple narrative or in passages of deep emotion. The laborious inversions and the suspended rhythm of English blank verse are not only unknown, but utterly repugnant, to the Greek rhapsodist. This flowing style, as if the poet poured his descant without once drawing breath, is precisely what Lord Derby has caught so happily. Any one who at tempts to read this version aloud will at once perceive how easily "the numbers

with those of the original, have the virture of biting on the English ear. So, too, in numerous passages he has given extreme force and edge to the verse by forms of language more common in our elder dramatists than in our epic poets. Perhaps it is because he writes like an orator that Lord Derby allows no competitor to challenge the claims of the heroic blank verse; and so far as it regards the Iliad, we are not disposed to quarrel with his judgment. But if Mr. Worsley, whose translation of the Odyssey we noticed in a former number,* has failed to reproduce the language of Homer with rigid precision, he has shown how well the Spenserian stanza may serve to imbue the merely English

*Ed. Review, No. 240: April, 1863.

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