the subject is as dead as hell: a lion does not feed upon carrion." The following criticisms on "Cowpers Homer," and "Roscoe's Lorenzo de' Medici," will give some idea of his powers in this department of literature. COWPER'S HOMER. Translators of poetry may be arranged into two classes those who, without invention, but an ardent ambition for its honours, with powers of embellishment, harmony of diction, and elegance of taste, attempt to graft their own scions on a solid stem; and those who, from real or imagined sympathy with the production of another, unable to perceive excellence through any other medium but that of their idol, renounce all individual consequence, swear to his words, and rank themselves under his banner. The first sacrifice their model to themselves and their age; the second sacrifice both to their darling original. Of both kinds of translation, the muses of this country have produced specimens: Mr. Pope ranks foremost in the former; whether that of Mr. Cowper claims the same eminence in the latter class, we are now to inquire. Though the ultimate end of poetry be to please, and the best include both instruction and pleasure at once, it will easily be perceived that the laws which are to rule two species of translation so different, cannot be the same. The laws which the first imposes, are of its own creation and choice; the laws of the second resemble G VOL. I. somewhat those which a master prescribes to his servant; -they have little to gratify vanity, they are related to resignation, they are fidelity and simplicity, with as much harmony and vivacity as is compatible with both; for the translator of Homer, indeed, the difficulty will not be -how much he shall sacrifice of these two last requisites, but how much he shall be able to obtain, or to pre serve. By fidelity, some will understand the mere substitution of one language for another, with the entire sacrifice of idiom and metre, which belongs only to the literal translation of school-books. Fidelity, as Mr. C. himself has with equal happiness and precision defined it in his preface, is that quality which neither omits nor adds any thing to an author's stock. "I have invented nothing," says he; "I have omitted nothing." When we consider the magnificent end of epic poetry,—to write for all times and all races,-to treat of what will always exist and always be understood, the puny laws of local decorum and fluctuating fashions by which the omission or modficiation of certain habits and customs, natural but obsolete, is prescribed, cannot come into consideration. Such laws may bind the meaner race of writers. He who translates Homer knows, that when Patroclus administers at table, or Achilles slays the sheep himself for Priam, a chief and a prince honour the chieftains and king who visit them, and disdain to leave to meaner hands these pledges of hospitality; and he translates faithfully and minutely, nor fears that any will sneer at such a custom, but those who sneer at the principle that established it. He neither "attempts to soften or refine away" the energy of passages relative to the theology of primitive ages, or fraught with allegoric images of the phenomena of nature, though they might provoke the smile of the effeminate, and of the sophists of his day. This is the first and most essential part of the fidelity prescribed to a translator; and this Mr. C. has so far scrupulously observed, that he must be allowed to have given us more of Homer, and added less of his own, than all his predecessors; and this he has done with that simplicity, that purity of manner, which we consider as the second requisite of translation. By simplicity, we mean, what flows from the heart; and there is no instance of any translator known to us, who has so entirely transfused the primitive spirit of an ancient work into a modern language; whose own individual habits and bent, if we may be allowed the expression, seem to be so totally annihilated, or to have coalesced so imperceptibly with his model. He is so lost in the contemplation of his author's narrative, that, in reading, we no more think of him than we do of Homer, when he hurls us along by the torrent of his plan no quaintness, no antithesis, no epigrammatic flourish, beckons our attention from its track, bids us admire or rather indignantly spurn the intruding dexte-rity of the writer. To have leisure to think of the author when we read, or of the artist when we behold, proves that the work of either is of an inferior class: we have neither time to inquire after Homer's birth-place or rank, when Andromache departs from her husband, nor stoop to look for the inscription of the artist's name, when we stand before the Apollo. : Considering next the harmony of numbers prescribed to the translator of a poet, Mr. C. himself allows that he has many a line with an ugly hitch in its gait;' and perhaps to those he acknowledges as such, and the copious list of others called forth in battle array against him, no trifling file of equally feeble, harsh, or halting ones might be added. Still we do not hesitate to give it as our opinion, founded on a careful perusal of the whole, that the style and the flow of his numbers are in general consonance with the spirit of the poem. In particular lines, he may be inferior to many; we even venture to say, that he has as often adopted or imitated the discords of Milton, as his flow of verse. The English Jupiter perhaps shakes his ambrosial curls not with the full majesty of the Greek; the plaintive tones of Andromache do not perhaps melt, or the reverberated bursts of Hector's voice break, on our ear with their native melody or strength; the stone of modern Sisyphus oppresses not with equal weight, or rebounds with equal rapidity as that of old; the hoarseness of Northern language bound in pebbly monosyllables, and almost always destitute of decided quantities, must frequently baffle the most vigorous attempt, if even no allowance were made for the terror that invests a celebrated passage, and dashes the courage of the translator with anxiety and fear. Still, if Mr. C. be not always equally successful in the detail, his work possesses that harmony which consists in the variety of well-poised periods,―periods that may be pursued without satiety, and dismiss the ear uncloyed by that monotony which attends the roundest and most fortunate rhyme, the rhyme of Dryden himself. The chief trespass of our translator's style,-and it will be found to imply a trespass against his fidelity and simplicity, is no doubt the intemperate use of inversion, ungraceful in itself, contrary to the idiom of his language, and, what is still worse, subversive of perspicuity, than which no quality distinguishes Homer more from all other writers: for Homer, though fraught with every element of wisdom, even in the opinion of a critic* to no heresy more adverse than that of acknowledging faultless merit, whether ancient or modern, - Homer, with all this fund of useful doctrine, remains to this day the most perspicuous of poets, the writer least perplexed with ambiguity of style. His tale is so clearly told, that even now, as of yore, he is or may be the companion of every age, and almost every capacity, at almost every hour. This perspicuity is perhaps not to be attained by the scantiness of modern grammar; it is perhaps not to be fully expected from the inferior powers of the most attentive translator, wearied with labour, and fancying that to be clear to others which is luminous to him: but this we cannot allow to be pleaded every where in excuse of our translator's ambiguities, after the ample testimony he bore in his preface to the perspicuity of his author. Such palliation, indeed, will not be offered by him who tells us, that not one line before us escaped his attention. We decline entering into particulars on this head, partly because Mr. C. cannot be ignorant of the passages alluded to, partly because sufficient, and even exuberant, pains have been taken by others to point them out to the public. But if the translator often deviate from his model in so essential a requisite, he scrupulously adheres to an * Samuel Johnson. |