the most important elements in a rightly constituted mind. The observance of an external law is man's chief virtue, and chief happiness; and the boy who has been rightly trained to it, in translating a dead language, may be easily led on to apply it to other higher duties and objects." And again : "To translate so that the author may speak in another language as he does in his own, so that Eschylus, for instance, in English may be what he is in Greek, is one thing. I possess no such power, and scarcely believe in the practicability of such an attempt. But to translate as an exercise of the mind, forms one of the chief parts of our literary education, and is one of inestimable value as a discipline. The union in it of the strictest accuracy with a rhythmical and poetical character, has hitherto been too generally neglected; and the neglect has been productive of serious mischief. It has been deemed impossible, and our school translations have therefore sunk either into laxity of scholarship, or into a sacrifice of all poetic feeling. But if the choruses of Æschylus can be rendered word for word, and yet into rhyme, the process must be possible in Greek and Latin poetry in general; and to have contributed to its adoption will be no slight satisfaction for one whose immediate duties are placed in classical education." In these passages Mr. Sewell has expressed his opinion on the peculiar art of the translator, in a manner not to be misunderstood. His preface comes to us in the shape of a distinct "protest against the principles on which most of our translations of the Greek drama have been executed:" and we are therefore in no danger of doing him injustice, when we look upon him as a preacher of a new gospel in these matters, and a setter forth of strange gods. His whole manner is that of a literary, or at least an educational reformer, and an apostle: and what his gospel is, he is too decided and thorough-going a man to leave us in doubt for a moment. He preaches (in opposition to Dryden and our old masters) that "Eschylus can be rendered word for word, and yet into rhyme;" and on this foundation, he says that he actually has done what never was done before, presented to the English reader the Agamemnon of Æschylus, translated into English both "literally and rhythmically." Now, if there be any truth in the whole scope of our preceding observations, the reader will be prepared to find that the task which Mr. Sewell has proposed to himself in this trans lation, is a practical impossibility; in other words, that the noble freedom which is the fair characteristic of a good rhythmical translation, is utterly incompatible with the stiffness and severity which the necessity of literal faithfulness enjoins on a translator. Accordingly, Mr. Sewell's own work is the best refutation of his own theory. It is impossible to read thirty lines continuously of his rhymes, without feeling that the real grace of rhythm is not there; as when a man dances a jig with his legs shackled, you recognize the form of the dance, but think, at the same time, it were both wiser for the performer, and more pleasant for the spectator, that, so long as he has his limbs encumbered with these cramping appendages, he should content himself with a simple march. The first twenty-four lines of the choral nápodos (v. 40-65) gives ample proof of this, and of other defects in Mr. Sewell's new-fangled style of poetical version. Here they are:— CHORUS. "The tythed year is with us, lo! And Agamemnon, dower'd By gift of Jove with majesty, High above, their offspring's lair An Apollo, Pan, or Jove, Her who avengeth late Those metics of our state, Erynnis, on the felons bids to fly. And Atreus' children even thus The Xenian Zeus; For a dame oft husbanded, Many and weary a wrestling dread. For the prelude prays, for the Danaan crew There is a general awkwardness, and want of musical flow in these lines, which will be perceptible at once to an ear accustomed to the harmony of natural, and not fictitious poetical rhythm. But there is something more than this. The translator allows himself rhymes which are in fact no rhymes at all, and can be defended by no precedent of our poets; besides that an occasional carelessness of this kind in a great master, compensated, as it generally will be, by a grand flow of swelling ideas, forms no foundation for a rule to regulate the practice of an inferior artist. A translator is always expected to rhyme well, even more nicely than an original composer, because the rhyme is all his part in the matter; and if he bungles it, he bungles all. Now, in the short space of the two hundred lines of the first nápodos and orácuov of this play, Mr. Sewell has given us the following imperfect consonances, which he wishes us to take for rhymes : Majesty, they; pair, car; thus, Zeus; he, they; state, sit; flaming, streaming; dreams, flames; agony, pity; sing, kings; hour, before; Artemis, eyes; unshelled, field; blood, imbued; before him, roaring; steel, keels; done, fawn; lay, unflinchingly; farewell, wail. What can the most indulgent critic say to workmanship of this kind? A man that handles tools, as Lord Byron says of this very matter of rhyme, should surely know how to use them; but in the present case, there is the additional provocation, that a man of genius like Mr. Sewell comes forward with observation, and, after proclaiming a new art of poetical translation, "word for word, and yet into RHYME," forges rhymes in his own private mint, and expects that our facile ears shall take these for the legitimate currency. It is a sort of juvenile juggle, unworthy a man of talent. But the greatest men, when a 1 perverse crotchet seizes them, always make the greatest blunders. The above specimen of Mr. Sewell's workmanship contains likewise some examples of certain other peculiarities very notable in him, and arising, as we think, from an inborn tendency, common in intense minds, to make just principles ludicrous, by pushing them to an extreme. Why, for instance, does he say, the "tythed year." This, we presume, is merely a singularity; but how much more natural, and, at the same time, more poetical is Symmons : "Nine years are past; and now the tenth Why, again, does he retain the Greek word pέtotxos, “these metics of our state," which, in the present passage, can merely have the effect of making the translation unintelligible? In a technical treatise, professedly political, technical words must often be retained by the expositor who uses a foreign tongue; but in poetry, technical words are altogether out of place. Again, in v. 352, he retains the word yayyapos, and talks in grave rhyme of "springing over a giant gangam,” though he confesses in a note that he knows as little what the peculiar force of the word is in Greek, as his reader can know what it means in English. This is the very superstition of philology. But Mr. Sewell is driven to this and similar offences against good taste, by his zeal for that most just principle mentioned above, that a translator ought not to deal in generalities, but rather to bring out as distinctly as may be the prominent features of his characteristic words. We could point out not a few cases in Mr. Linwood's excellent lexicon, where this principle is not sufficiently attended to.-To explain a less common word by a more common word, its synonym, is not to give the full features and colour of the word. A shaggy dog, for instance, is not only a dog, but it is a dog with shaggy hair. Now, it is only a just praise of Mr. Sewell to say, that wherever a word has a mark upon it, he twitches that mark with such an elastic jerk into a person's nose, that unless one be dead asleep, he must become aware of its existence. This procedure, however, always a virtue in a lexicographer, may readily become a vice with an over-zealous translator, and so it has proved with Mr. Sewell. Thus, xaté avov, (v. 189,) he must translate "carding down"—xλayfe, (v. 194,) applied to Calchas: "The prophet seer did trumpet forth This is making too much of a word, as weak translators make too little. This eager desire to squeeze out the characteristic is continually driving him into the most extraordinary conceits. Thus, the difficult and contested line (243) near the conclusion of the opening chorus, he translates: τορὸν γὰρ ἥξει σύνορθρον αὐγαῖς, "There will come to them amain, A mortise and indenture plain, Drilled that the eye shall pierce the twain." A version which, in itself, will only make an unpractised reader stare; and therefore we have the following note: "The exact translation of Topòv ovvop@pov is almost impossible. But the metaphor depending on its literal rendering is so ingenious, that I have ventured to expound it, at the sacrifice of terseness. ovvopOpov implies something that, by a joint or hinge, fits on to, and coincides with, another, as two pieces of wood: Suppose a hole bored through them both, when the two pieces are accurately adjusted, the eye can gaze through both; but if they are not set carefully together, the sight is obstructed in each. Topov bears this sense:-It means something which can be seen through-perspicuous by a hole having been drilled through it. In the same manner, when the fulfilment of a prophecy is adjusted to the prophecy, both become intelligible; separate, they cannot be understood." The ingenuity of this version will amuse all; but even if Æschylus had been by profession a carpenter, as Hans Sachs was a shoemaker, a sound-headed man could scarcely be brought to believe, even with a much less questionable text, that he ever meant to illustrate the second-sight of Calchas by such a very far-fetched kind of original illustration. In the same manner, following up the common application of the word ποδήρης το πέπλος, and xtov, (see Passow,) Mr. Sewell insists, that when that word is applied as a qualifying epithet to otulos (v. 872,) it shall be translated "a column draperied to the foot ;" on which rendering we have the note: |