find a place. Besides we suppose that Mr M. does not mean to publish a Family Aristophanes, or pretend to a more squeamish stomach than Madame Dacier, who has managed to let us have her translations served up whole, an instance of some resolution as well as ingenuity in that remarkable lady. We shall be sincerely sorry to have our favourites the Clouds and the Birds thus mangled; nor is it just in Mr M. towards his author, to stand behind the scenes, like Master Peter in Don Quixote, and bring in his characters with a flourish of the rhetorical trumpet, or keep them off, merely as it suits his convenience. Mr M. must know the old Greek proverb, xavns Qayar ʼn un Qayer, either eat the whole snail, or let it quite alone, and that is the sort of treat his readers will expect of him. Of the Acharnians, a play of about 1200 lines altogether, his version omits nearly 500,-not very far from the half. The 1400 lines of the Knights, are despoiled of upwards of 400. Whether the passages left untranslated be of much consequence or not, we object to the plan in toto. The merely English reader may imagine himself cheated of something valuable,—and think that he does not get all he was promised for his money; while the scholar will certainly grumble to see omitted any opportunity for spirited interpretation or useful remark.

A person with a rage for classification might arrange the remaining plays of Aristophanes under the three heads of Critical, which would comprehend the Frogs,-Philosophical, which would contain the Clouds,-and Political, which might be made to embrace all the rest. But these different qualities are so interwoven in the tissue of each individual piece, that it would be silly to lay much stress upon any such arrangement. The two plays which Mr M. has given us in the present volume, may be considered as two of the most exclusively political,-each having a specific object of policy in view, that is kept sight of throughout. The Acharnians, which stands first, is likewise the earliest of its author's productions, that has come down to us entire. The plot may be told in a very few words.

6

Dicæopolis, a citizen of Athens, is irritated at the continuance of the Peloponnesian war, that calamitous event, which furnished Aristophanes with so many topics of complaint, and which ended in the ruin of his native country. Dicæopolis endeavours to persuade his countrymen to make a peace with Lacedemon,-his efforts fail: irritated at their obstinacy, the worthy rustic resolves to make a separate peace for himself and family, and despatches one Amphitheus to Sparta for the purpose. We are not to look for probability in these Grecian farces: or, rather, it is in an utter contempt for pro bability, and an entire departure from all the ordinary prosaic occur

rences of common life, that the principal * entertainment of these wild sallies of humour consists. This journey of one or two hundred miles is accordingly accomplished in the course of a few minutes. † The rest of the play consists in a succession of panegyrics upon the blessings which this treaty brings to Dicæopolis (among which the additions to his culinary enjoyments are not forgotten, in a country where cookery is ranked by one of its poets among the liberal arts); and a series of satires upon the young statesmen of the day, who were impatient for the continuance of the war, and who, it should seem, had as yet shown nothing but that spirit of foppery, haughtiness, and vain-gloriness, which often precedes the development of powerful and active minds: such were Alcibiades and Lamachus, upon the latter of whom the dramatist's lash falls very heavily.' Thus far Mr Mitchell. Though the Greek argument characterizes this play as iv podga TETOVO exceeding-well concocted; and though there is no piece of Aristophanes more rich in that pregnant, unlooked-for, round-the-corner sort of personal satire he so much excelled in, we cannot regard it, in comparison with his other compositions, as so interesting as any of them. Spite of the chronological propriety of beginning with it, we think a trauslator, conscious of the force of first impressions, might have hesitated as to putting it foremost. The best scenes are the famous interview between Dicæopolis and Euripides, whom Aristophanes is delighted to bring as soon as possible into ridicule,-a scene uncommonly brisk in the original, but rather tame and vapid in Mr M.'s transfusion of it,—and those farcical and broadly-humorous scenes with the Megarensian and his daughters, the Boeotian and the little sycophant, which Mr M. has not translated at all, at least has only given hashed up with his descriptive prose.

Mr M. is not happy in the dialogue of this drama. He has not caught the Aristophanic brevity and roughness. It is altogether too much wire-drawn, and too much inflated, to please us. He says a good deal that Aristophanes does not say, and bestows a meretricious glare and glossiness upon a good deal that he does. He gives us the cold glitter of an icicle, for the hearty though less polished glow of his author's phraseology. We

*Not the principal surely. Mr M. should have added, as far as the plot is concerned.

+ It is much more violent in Shakespeare to whisk his characters from Italy to England and back again, as he has done in Cymbeline or to slide over sixteen years between two acts, as in the Winter's Tale.

would not be thought unreasonable in our demands. We do not want Mr M. to rival the inimitably compressive powers of the Greek tongue. It would be as bad as the attempt of Barten Holiday, in his version of Juvenal, to make every line of his comprehend the sense of one of the original,-forgetting that he wrote under the disadvantage of four syllables less in each verse. But we need not have such a word, for instance, as Vauμoxooroyagyaga (lin. 3.) spun out into whole battalions, In numbers numberless, like Ocean's waves;'-nor such a phrase as wduvnday Tgzyadıxov (lin. 9.) rendered by 't'other trouble, A trouble that might give the tragic Muse Fit theme and matter, 'which, by the by, is by much the least comic meaning that the words can be in any way made to bear. Neither can we see why Mr Mitchell should not have imitated better the colloquial ease, half-coarse, half-dégagé, that runs through the Iambics of Aristophanes. Why should a homely phrase like Toy ¡UTTOμa (lin. 14.), become in his dainty transformation Since first I took to living cleanly, And making my ablutions,' when the Poet meant it for nothing more than a rude expression for the infancy of life? We believe it is Fielding that recommends a play or two of Johnson's, (who was a diligent student though no imitator of Aristophanes), to be taken as a kind of preparative before one commences the perusal of this Author, lest, as he figuratively says, the simplicity of his style, for want of being sweetened with modern quaintness, may, like old wine after sugar-plums, appear insipid, and without any flavour, to palates that have been vitiated with the common theatrical diet. Read not to believe and take for granted,' is one advice of Lord Bacon's. * We fear that Mr Mitchell has given more authority over himself than it deserved to this recommendation of a writer who failed in his own attempted version of a Greek comedy. For perusal he has understood translation, and has devoted too much time to working in the mines of our early dramatists, instead of undergoing the greater trouble it would have cost him to form a style of his own more suited to the exigency. Johnson, and Beaumont and Fletcher, with all their high and undisputed merit in their own line, are the worst possible models for a translation of Aristophanes. Fielding probably meant to do nothing more than round a period; but he has done considerable mischief to Mr M.'s translations of dia

*Dubitare in singulis non est inutile,' says Thomas Langschneiderius to the most scientific Ortuinus Gratius.-Epist. Obscurorum Virorum, p. 1. ed. Franc.

logue. His chorusses are good, almost without exception; for in them he is treading a path of his own, without any blundering finger-posts to mislead him.

At line 79 (of the original) we think Brunck, and Mr M. after him, have fallen into a mistake: οι βαρβαροι γαρ άνδρας ήγενται μονους, τους πλειστα δυναμενους φαγειν τε και πιειν

- For these barbarians,

The rogues allow no manhood but to those
Who show a vigour at their meals, and drink
A hogshead at a draught '—

says the ambassador. Then follows the remark of Dicaopolis,
Εμεις δε, λαικαςας τε και καταπυγονας which Mr M. according to
Brunck's Latin, and in his own amplifying manner, renders
-Say you? we hold

*

Θεο

Thoughts quite diverse, and think such fellows are The stuff that pimps and profligates are made of. ' Dicropolis means to be much more sarcastic. The barbarians think those alone worth naming Men, that can gorge and swill the mightiest quantities,' says the envoy,― And weyour debauchees and profligates, '---observes the citizen: that is surely, those are the persons we think Men, a stroke of satire quite Aristophanic. At line 140 we have another error. us ywTo is translated our frosty bard, Theognis, Was writing for the prize. The meaning is, one of his plays was being acted. At line 174 μUTTATO had better have been rendered salmagundy than sallad. It was a dish precisely answering to Morgan's preparation in the cock-pit. At line 279, do ασπις ἐν τῷ φεψαλῳ κρεμησεται is rendered • What serve shields unless for fuel?'--Dicæopolis only intends to signify among the blessings of peace, that the shield may be now hung up to get smoked in the chimney. But we are tired, as our readers must be, of this minuteness of remark. All we want is to impress upon Mr M. that he had better take more pains, especially with the dialogue. He seems to have imagined that the features of his original could be best copied in a hurry. (Preface, p. i.) But he should recollect, that a light hand is not necessarily a careless one. It is to the patient touches of unwearied art' that we owe the truest copies of nature. Simplicity of style is always the result of labour; and simplicity should never be forgotten in a translation of Aristophanes.

We are glad to get Mr M. to a chorus. He has imitated with great success both the trochaic and anapæstic measures of

*Roderick Random.

the Greek. The first appearance of the Chorus in this play is very spirited.

Scene VII. Full Chorus in pursuit of Dicæopolis, address

each other.

'Double, double toil and trouble, quicken step and change your plan, Inquisition or petition must arrest the shameless man ;—

It concerns her pride and honour that our town his motions know; Who has back'd him, or has track'd him, forward let him come and show.

Semi-Chorus. Toil and search are in vain,

He is gone, fed amain.
Now shame to my age,
And to life's parting stage.
Other tale it had been,

When my years were yet green,
And my youth in her pride
Follow'd fast at the side
Of Phayllus the racer!
A fleet-going pacer,
Though coals a full sack
Press'd hard at my back.
Then had not this maker
Of peace, and a breaker
With his best friends, I ween
Long space put between
His country's undoer

And me his pursuer,

Nor should we thus part

For a leap and a start.

But now my leg with age is heavy, and in vengeance for

my sins,

*Lacratides and all his frost sure winter in these stiffen'd shins.

So the rogue both scapes and flouts me

Semi-Chorus.

Forward, forward, friend, 'twere shame,

Should we, tho' slow, the search forego, and the varlet vict'ry claim.' The scene between Dicæopolis and the Chorus is still better: we wish it had been given entire.

* Lacratides was a former archon of Athens, during whose magistracy there happened a prodigious fall of snow.

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