Down to his temples, wrings with pain and heat, But the outside of his flesh stuck full of darts.1 In the sea-fight between the Cæsareans and Pompeians at Marseilles, the following description by May of the death of one Lycidas is quite successful in rendering Lucan's meaning : An iron hook, thrown to lay violent hold Drowned had he been, but his friends hindered it, On the other hand, beyond this merit of literal exactness—and considering the difficulty of interpreting Lucan, the merit is no small one-May's metrical translation cannot be said to reflect the great qualities of the Pharsalia. He probably did well to select the heroic couplet as his vehicle, but he failed to use it in such a way as to bring out the point, terseness, and brilliancy of Lucan in his best passages. The latter is a most skilful rhetorician he shines in his speeches, a good example of which is to be found in the keen encounter of wits between Cæsar and his mutinous soldiery in the fifth book. For oratory in verse it would be difficult to find anything better than the declamation of the mutineers : Liceat discedere, Cæsar, A rabie scelerum. Quæris terraque marique Pars jacet Hesperia: totoque exercitus orbe 1 Cp. Lucan, Pharsalia, vi. 191-195. 2 Ibid. iii. 635-646. Te vincente perit. Terris fudisse cruorem Scire rogum.1 Liceat morbis finire senectam : The condensed verbal antithesis, mordant irony, and genuine pathos of this are lost in the flat English rendering, literal as it is : Now, Cæsar, let us cease From wicked war: thou seek'st by land and seas Wouldst our too cheap-esteemèd lives bestow : Some of us slain in war in Gallia lie, In Spain lie some, and some in Italy: O'er all the world thy army's slaughtered, While thou o'ercom'st. What boots our blood that's shed 'Gainst Gauls and Germans in the North so far? For all thou pay'st us with a civil war. When Rome we took, and made the Senate flee, What spoils from men or temples gathered we? We go upon, virtuous in poverty Alone: what end is there of war at all? Or what can be enough if Rome too small? See our gray hairs, weak hands, and bloodless arms! Our use of life is gone; in war's alarms Our age consumed. Send us now old at least 1 These lines were perhaps in Gray's mind when he wrote in his Elegy :-On some fond breast the parting soul relies, etc. 2 Pharsalia, v. 261-283. To seek some friends to close our eyes in death; Lucan, again, is often very march of his narrative verse. solemn and sublime in the Who is not affected by the noble movement of the hexameters in the description of Pompey's dream on the eve of Pharsalia? At nox, felicis Magno pars ultima vitæ, Quam currus ornante toga, plaudente Senatu, But, on the other hand, who, that had not read the Latin, would have supposed, from the unmodulated rhythm of the following lines, that there was anything of grandeur in the original?— That night of Pompey's happy life the last, Deceived by flattering sleeps, he dreamed him placed In the Pompeian theatre, among Rome's people flocking in unnumbered throng; Where shouting to the skies he heard them raise His name, each room contending in his praise. Such were the people's looks, such was their praise, When, in his youth and first triumphant days, Pompey, but then a gentleman of Rome, In his pure candid as triumphal gown. In short, while May's translation deserves high praise for its scholarship, very little can be said for its poetry. 1 Pharsalia, vii. 7-19. CHAPTER XII THE LAST DAYS OF POETICAL "WIT" ABRAHAM COWLEY: SAMUEL BUTLER As the period of civil strife drew to its close, the waning life of the Middle Ages brightened into a dying flame in the poetry of two men of exceptional endowments, who, while carried along by the spirit of their time, represented that spirit in very different aspects. Both were champions of the Royalist cause, both scholars of encyclopædic learning, both masters of an original form of poetic expression; but while one of them found in the scholastic and feudal systems an inexhaustible source of erudite allusion, the other used them only for the purposes of ridicule. Abraham Cowley was the posthumous son of Thomas Cowley, a stationer, and was born in London in 1618. When he was about ten years old he was sent to Westminster School, and, while there, read the Faery Queen. "This," says he, "I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, and giants, and monsters, and brave houses which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this) and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as irremediably as a child is made an eunuch." 1 1 Cowley's essay: "Of Myself." As he tells us that his first attempt in verse composition-Pyramus and Thisbe (a kind of adaptation of the story as told in Ovid's Metamorphoses)-was made when he was ten years old, we may conclude that his acquaintance with the Faery Queen began almost immediately after his entrance into Westminster. His second composition, Constantius and Philetus, was, according to his own account, written when he was twelve,2 and several of his other poems, afterwards included in his Sylvia (published 1636), were evidently produced while he was at school.3 He also wrote in his school-days his pastoral comedy, Love's Riddle. Though he had discovered this early genius for poetry, he resembled Wither in his objection to the school routine. He was wont (says Sprat, his biographer) to relate that he had this defect in his memory at that time, that his teachers could never bring it to retain the ordinary rules of grammar. However, he supplied that want by conversing with the books themselves from whence those rules had been drawn. That no doubt was a better way, though much more difficult, and he afterwards found this benefit by it, that, having got the Greek and Roman languages, as he had done his own, not by precept but use, he practised them not as a scholar but a native. He was elected scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, at rather a late age for those times, in 1637, and wrote while there his Latin comedy, Naufragium Joculare, and an English comedy, The Guardian, both of which were acted before the university. The latter was, after the Restoration, transformed into The Cutter of Coleman Street. He took his B.A. degree in 1639, was elected Fellow of Trinity in 1640, and, after becoming M.A. in 1642, was ejected from his Fellowship by the Parliamentary Visitors in 1643. In 1646 he joined the Court of Henrietta Maria at Paris, and, his abilities being recog 3 e.g. A Poetical Revenge; To his Godfather, Mr. A. B.; An Answer to an Invitation to Cambridge. |