the multitudinous: and when he gets out of his dogmas, we follow his guesses into the other world with something approaching to reverence. In general we seem not to be hearing a mere man talking to us, but a spirit condemned to a state of doubt, or the soul of a saturnine Spaniard, or a Sybil not well awake; and are sometimes inclined to say to him as Falstaff did to his mistress," Pr'ythee don't talk to me like a death's-head."-Sir Thomas made amends afterwards for his heterodox coyness about the ladies, by taking courage and a wife. Let us hope (not however with any fears for him, if he did not) that he made amends for his bilious theology, by not taking the Supreme Being for a Dæmon,which is the sum and substance of all these swarthy bigotries.

The Translations in the present work are in the same spirit as the original poems;-that is to say, they were written from the same love of nature, and in the same cause of cheerful

ness. I should except those from Homer, which are rather an experiment, how far I could give the intelligent reader, who is no scholar, a stronger sense of the natural energy of the original, than has yet been furnished him. This may be done, certainly, without arrogating the praise of coming up to it; and our Teutonic language, I fear, though it is rich and powerful, and it's genius has more in common with the Greek perhaps than any other, is of too monosyllabical a cast ever to pretend to re-echo the long organic music of Homer. Yet Chapman, whose translation contains more of his spirit than any other, seems to have purposely roughened it, in despair of being strong enough;-Cowper's poetical vigour, on the other hand, in this as in his other works, was spoiled by the over timidity of his constitution (which bigotry frightened into madness); and Pope, in that elegant mistake of his in two volumes octavo, called Homer's

Iliad, turns the Dodonæan oak of his original into such smooth little toys as these ;

Rise, son of Peleus! rise divinely brave;

Assist the combat, and Patroclus save!

I pretend to be no great scholar myself; but what I do read, I read closely and with a due sense of what the poet demands; and it is impossible for any studier of Homer's words, and their infinite varieties of meaning, not to be struck with the gratuitous and vague talking which prevails in translations like these.

Of the other pieces I am more confident; yet I doubt whether the general reader will like them so well, at least those in blank verse; and the Anacreontics, I fear, are worth little, except a few lines at intervals ;-it is so difficult to transplant those delicate Greek flowers into rhyme, without rendering them either languid and diffuse, or too much cramping them up. The pieces from the pastoral poets however,

of whose real genius and character the public have hitherto had no idea whatsoever given them by the translators, I resolved, at all events, to write in blank verse, as their great charm is sentiment, and a perfectly unshackled simplicity; and I think I may venture to say, that the reader who does not feel something pathetic in the Cyclops, something sunny and exuberant in the Rural Journey, and even some of the gentler Greek music in the Elegy on the Death of Bion, would not be very likely to feel the finer part of it in the originals. All however that I answer for is, that I have felt them myself, like the summer atmosphere which they resemble.

I need not apologize to such readers as I address, for the plain-speaking in the translation of Atys. I think that voluptuousness, in the proper sense, is rather an ill-used personage; but grossness I abominate; there is neither in this poem; and he would be guilty of the real grossness, the essence of which is

inapplicability and degradation, who should not see that all other associations in it are overcome by its gravity and awefulness. It comes among the other pieces indeed, like a spectre at noon-day; yet it is not unsuited to the general disposition of the work; still less is it a mere tale of horror, easy to imagine, or with excitement only for exhausted or callous nerves. It is one of the most striking lessons ever thrown out against a gloomy and ascetic enthusiasm, whatever fantastic sacrifice it may think fit to make, or whatever may be it's notion of a tyrannical deity.-The refreshing Nuptial Song of Julia and Manlius follows, and closes the door.

It is reasonably supposed by the commentators, that this poem of Atys was a translation from the Greek. It has internal evidence to that effect, in the genius of the composition as well as the subject. Catullus was one of the very few Romans that appear to me to have had an original talent for poetry; and even he de