time put a deal of water into the ink*, so these translators copiously treated the good classical sepia ink with the cold waters of paraphrase, the color-quelling vinegar of abstraction, and the sands of etiquette, till they had taken all semblance of antiquity from its "pale and ineffectual" tinge.

To these writers have succeeded various experimental schools, wherein are men of enough wit and boldness, but hardly having that industry and "thorough-goingness" which is requisite to establish new principles. Among them is one that may be called the chemical school, who occupy themselves upon the matter without any regard to the form of their original; a few of whom analyze words by a curious etymological process that has rather the effect of alchemy; others retain punctiliously one trait of form, by adhering to the construction of each sentence, which is often a thing of the slightest consequence, as we see by "examples of Inversion" in Lindley Murray. All this school are of course little liable to * Maximen und Reflectionen.

afflict the spirit of their orginal by constraining it under predetermined special forms; but they much rather endanger its æsthetic vitality by destroying all animal form that seems connatural to it. Thus their translations, whether without metre or in verse exceeding blank, have an effect essentially prosaic, which renders them less inviting to the lovers of art than to the historian, the philologist, or other scientific men. In another and far higher kind of works, we see diligent attention paid to both form and matter; nevertheless, there may be even here much wanting, if they do not evince sufficient regard to the idiom in which they shall be written. For the force and beauty of an expression depend mainly on its congruity with such forms and processes of thinking, as the reader is accustomed, if not constrained, to cultivate by the structure of his native language; which thing makes his mind as it were an element for that expression to work upon, by direct and indirect impulse, so that if he be not conformed and adapted thereto, we may liken it to a misplaced limb, which presents to us a material beauty only, and not

the beauty of life, or even of mechanism. Only the adaptation of a fine expression to another language must not involve too great a modification of its moulding; for as the limbs of the higher animals can be brought to act upon two or even three elements, so the finer forms of speaking can be transferred, if we allow them as it were the proper change of attitude, to all languages of articulating men. To attain this object in single terms or apophthegms is often looked on as a singular piece of good luck; but to attain it perpetually and uniformly would be the characteristic of the most perfect translator; whose principles only, not his acquired mastery, may, we hope, find some new illustration from the present effort.

Amid a public state of apathy and uncertainty on the canons and the value of translation, it will be rightly thought inexcusable if we have reattempted, without graver reasons, the oft-repeated task of doing Dante into English; and these reasons must of course be sought among the defects attributable to our chief predecessors; not defects, I must subjoin, in their

mere execution, which it would be invidious or arrogant to compare with our own, but in such general principles as have been distinguished in the above heads. These defects we may be entitled and required to censure frankly and calmly, as we have inwardly and without special incitement observed them long ago. But we must first acknowledge that those whom we really think the best translators from Dante have left their works unfinished; and that if Merivale or Dayman had rendered the whole poem as they have rendered some cantos, or the entire lay (Cantica) of Hell, they would, candidly speaking, "give us pause" in the present undertaking. But since we hope without slackness to proceed to the remaining Lays of Purgatory and Paradise, we have thought it most advisable to begin on our own foundations. And let it be my excuse for not saying more of Dayman's Inferno, that to avoid all copying from a version of like principles with my own I have abstained from reading above a few pages.

However, the translations most before the public

are not these, but the complete works of Cary and of Wright, besides versions of single passages, added to collections of original poems, which are often done by masterly hands, but are too brief and scattered to diffuse a fair notion of the Divine Comedy. Among such masterly fragments, we can scarcely comprise those of one author, from whose talents much might have been expected; for Leigh Hunt* evidently translates Dante with a peculiar reluctance and disrelish, which has grown no doubt from the mean idea he entertains of the moral greatness and wisdom in him: for a utilitarian philanthropist must always have a mean idea of the Singer of God's righteousness, "Cantor della Rettitudine," who proclaims a principle of retribution to overrule the "greatest happiness of the greatest number." This is an obliquity in Leigh Hunt's ethical view, which singularity limits his sensibility, and vitiates his taste for the poetical excelence of the "Comedy," and makes, we might almost

*See Stories from Italian poets.