plying an introduction of no great value. The introduction, in fact, is little more than a summary of the Homeric poems and three or four selected tragedies. It is not noticeably critical, and lapses into the style sophomoric. We may remark incidentally that "deeper than ever plummet sounded" is not a quotation from any author known to us. Mr. Appleton's volume is intended as an aid to the "classical course in English " of which overmuch is nowadays heard from university extension lecturers. The idea of such courses is an excellent one, provided only they fall into the right hands, but the attempts thus far made to give them seem to have been unfortunate. Mr. Appleton's selections include copious extracts from Homer and the four dramatists, and many short passages from the lyric and elegiac poets and the Anthology. We are aware that in any work of this sort much allowance should be made for the tastes of the compiler, and that no collector of elegant extracts (not even Mr. Palgrave) ever quite satisfied all his readers. But Mr. Appleton has missed so many of the things that ought to have gone into his book that we must venture a word of unfavorable comment. His fear "that some one of his readers may miss the very thing that he hopes to find" is only too well warranted, for is it possible that any reader should not have hoped and confidently expected to find, in the Homeric section, Lord Tennyson's "Achilles over the French"? "Language as divine almost as Homer's own," Mr. Theodore Watts calls it, and whatever else was omitted, surely that ought not to have been. Another omission as conspicuous is that of Mr. Swinburne's translation of the chorus from the "Birds." Compared with that, all other translations from Aristophanes (even Mr. Lang's version of the 'Clouds' chorus ) are simply nowhere. When we add that neither the "Agamemnon" of Browning or of Fitz Gerald is represented, and that Calverley's "Theocritus" is wholly ignored, we feel justified in asserting that Mr. Appleton's work is not done as well as it should have been.
The late John Osborne Sargent, lawyer and journalist, was a life-long lover of Horace, and a man singularly fitted by temperament to sympathize with the Horatian point of view. During the last ten years of his life, he devoted his leisure hours to the translation of his favorite poet, and the work, which includes all but a dozen or so of the odes, is now published by his daughter, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes contributing an introduction. The volume must be reckoned among the best of the many attempts to perform the alluring but difficult task of Horatian translation. Mr. Sargent commands a variety of metrical forms, and his most satisfactory work is done in the grave iambic measures chosen for the more serious of the odes. We may take as an example the "Exegi monumentum ære perennius":
"A monument more durable than brass
Of height no regal pyramids surpass,
I have achieved a work that will outlast
The waste of waters or the northern blast.
I shall not wholly die, but much of me,
My better part shall reach posterity.
No flight of seasons shall obscure my name,
But serial ages shall increase my fame.
While to the Capitol, to Time's last day,
Pontiff and vestal tread the sacred way,
It shall be told of one of humble birth,
Now potent with the magnates of the earth—
Bred where he heard Ofanto's torrent roar,
When Daunus' subjects ploughed its arid shore—
That he first wed—to him that praise belongs—
Æolian measures to Italian songs.
With guerdon crown desert, Melpomene,
And give the Delphic laurel wreath to me."
If Mr. Sargent's versions are often inadequate, they are at least never undignified or lacking in either taste or feeling. He has fairly escaped the besetting sin of many Horatian translators—that of vulgarizing their original.
Mr. James Rhoades, whose version of books I.–VI. of the "Æneid" has just appeared, apologizes for adding another to the already numerous translations of Virgil ("Vergil" he styles the poet), and says: "It has seemed to me that, if one could produce a version of the 'Æneid' that should be in itself an English poem, and at the same time a faithful reflection of the original, neither adding to the text nor diminishing from it, such an achievement would be worth the time and labor required for the task." This is, indeed, the whole problem, and we are bound to say that Mr. Rhoades has been one of the most successful of those who have endeavored to solve it. We make a brief extract from the prophecy of the sixth book.
"Here is Cæsar, here
The whole line of Iulus, that thall pass
One day beneath the mighty pole of heaven.
This, this the man so oft foretold to thee,
Cæsar Augustus, a god's son, who shall
The golden age rebuild through Latian fields
Once ruled by Saturn, and push far his sway
O'er Garamantians and the tribes of Ind,
A land that lies beyond the stars, beyond
The year's path and the sun's, where, prop of heaven,
Atlas upon his shoulders turns the pole,
Studded with burning constellations."
This is excellent verse, and the elevation is fairly sustained throughout the translation.
Of the new edition of Coleridge, which we must dismiss with a word, the principal things to be said are that it offers a critical edition of the text altogether superior to any previously in existence, a compact and fairly exhaustive body of notes, and an introductory biography that must at once supersede all others, and remain for an indefinite period the standard authority for the life of the poet. It is difficult to accord to Mr. Campbell's labors the praise that they deserve; no previous editor of Coleridge has approached him either in knowledge or in painstaking industry. The memoir, we understand, is to be republished by itself, a compliment of which it is entirely worthy.
