of avoiding an accusation of meritorious imitation, but of truth, I must declare (what I am confident his Lordship will be equally ready to do) that my verses were composed, and, what have been printed of them, printed before his. Yet he was as totally unaware of their existence when he wrote; as I was of that of Mr. Haley's version, until informed of it by the Preface to the PROPHECY OF DANTE. Before seeing this, I was ruminating an apology for a novel metre. This necessity is now removed: and after such an example as Lord Byron, terza rima may be pronounced a measure as germain to us as any other. I, at best, could only have attempted to naturalize it; he has made it lineally our own. It is a metre, in which I tried some original compositions years ago; and the versification not appearing to displease those to whom I read them, I was emboldened to begin my translation of Dante in the same. But those compositions never left my port-foglio, nor shall. I have to apologize for the points in which my metre varies a little from that of Lord Byron's. The naked truth is best. About six years since, I turned five Cantos of Dante into precisely the same measure which is in the PROPHECY OF DANTE: but afterwards found it so heavy that I renounced it. The fault was possibly entirely my own; but also I could not remedy it. Without troubling others, I meditated on the matter; and the consequence was, that I at last determined to allow myself the liberty of varying my lines from eight to ten syllables, instead of giving them all the fine heroic complement; as well as of using double rhymes at pleasure. Even his Lordship uses these. Dryden introduces a somewhat similar variety into his heroics by the free use of triplets and Alexandrines; which give a rich variety to his versification, that, at least to my ear, is more grateful than the regularity of Mr. Pope's couplets. With me, a full heroic line answers to the Alexandrine this being a length which I never permit myself. Nor do I think the liberty I have thus assumed is equal to that which the Italian furnished to Dante perior is it to English in copiousness of rhyme and phrase and freedom of syntax. Yet were it otherwise, neither my Author's, nor his Lordship's genius is a rule for others. They might have been able to modulate a continuous English terza rima of ten syllables with all the varieties of the Divine Comedy. I certainly could not: and the same reasons which made me leave off attempting it before I saw the PROPHECY OF DANTE, still subsist in full vigour. So su Had no extracts from my version been inserted into my printed comments, I should not here have said any thing about it. But that was already irremediable when I took the resolution to suppress my translation - at least the only remedy would have been the burning of two hundred pages of this edition of the Comment, which, I confess, I had no inclination to do. Those extracts however occur to small amount, save in the comments on the two first Cantos. As for the letters at the beginning of the Articles, they are at worst only a superfluity: should any one else ever translate the Divine Comedy, they may be a convenient reference; should my own translation one day see the light, a necessary one. Ere I had taken the resolution of suppressing it, my intention was to confine my critical observations in my comment to the French specimens of M. Ginguené, and the original Italian; deeming that English readers, having my translation in their hands, would follow what I consider the true interpretation. But now that it is determined otherwise, I must refer more particularly to the version which my readers, who are not sufficiently masters of Italian, will probably employ that of Mr. Cary. He is, I believe, - a fair antagonist; and I will meet him fairly. d. After protesting (as I hereby inost solemnly do) against his metre, its want of harmony, his paraphrases, and, in fine, all that appertains to style, as totally inadequate to convey the remotest resemblance to the poetry of his original — after doing this justice to my author once for all, I circumscribe my future observations on Mr. Cary to his literal pretensions; and here, it must be allowed, he is entitled to much encomium. Not that he always is so: or that there is a Cantò in which there are not some inaccuracies. From the third Canto onward, these shall be noticed in my comments: but for the reason above alledged, they are not in the two first; so, to remedy such deficiency, let them be recapitulated here. In the first: I cannot but object to the very title, Vision, instead of that chosen by the author; and the more so, because Italians enumerate among the many reasons which induced him to call his book Comedy, the desire to avoid precisely such low common-place, as Journey, Vision, or the like' non volendo chiamare la sua opera Cammino, o Visione, o con altro simile nome basso (Gelli, sopra lo Inferno di Dante, vol. 1. p. 50.). In Mr. Cary's translation of verse xx of the original, he gives "recesses instead of lake of the heart;' and thus not - only impairs the imagery of the passage, but removes what was intended to be a scientific position. Yet even the lines quoted from Redi might have emboldened one to be more literal. — v. xxx, Mr. Cary falls into the usual error of explaining it by, "in ascending the weight of the body rests on the hinder foot.' — V. XLIII, he makes a difficulty where there is really none. He in part remedies this by translating right; but his note (notwithstanding his encomiast ) taxes his original with an obscurity, which it does not merit. - v. XLV, he falls into the common abuse of being strained, if not quite unintelligible, by interpreting the three beasts, Ambition, Luxury, Avarice. This, to be sure, is rather to be attributed to the commentators than to him; as his not giving any explanation of the allegorical forest, the sun-clad mountain, the pass that never left. any one alive,' is rather a deficiency than defect: and if he gave no notes at all, such a deficiency would not deserve animadversion; and one might suppose that he fully comprehended the whole, though it was not in his plan to explain it to his readers. But as it is, I cannot conceive how he could clearly understand his original; and who without clearly understanding can translate clearly? The ci |