Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/194

182 To strength and sweetness: but the voice that brake

The cedars upon Lebanon—none else—

Taught him to rend more stubborn stocks than they,

The obdurate hearts of men.

It is right to add, that the few extracts we have given afford but a narrow glimpse of the merit of a volume of poems which every Lake Schoolman (conventionally, however incorrectly, speaking) will wish to put on his shelf.

We have just grace enough left to confess that our knowledge of the Portuguese language is simply nil; and therefore our incompetency to "tackle" Mr. Quillinan's translation of the "Lusiad" stands out in hideous distinctness. The ergo may be called a non sequitur, according to the practice and precedents of the Art of Criticism; but let that pass. Shortly before his death, Mr. Quillinan was spoken of in the Quarterly Review as "probably the first Portuguese scholar in the kingdom." In undertaking a translation of Camoens, he engaged in a labour of love, uncheered by any confident hope of popularising a minstrel whom foreigners are content to admire at a distance, and whom translators have commonly found it difficult to acclimatise as an exotic—as M. de Souza and others learnt to their cost. Camoens is, as Sismondi says, the sole poet of Portugal, whose celebrity has extended beyond the Peninsula, and who had the honour of writing the earliest epic in any of the modern tongues; yet people are wont to accept the celebrity as a tradition, finding it less convenient in such cases to prove all things than to hold fast that which is, by courtesy, good. So Camoens, like the hero of the drinking-song, is chorused as a "good fellow," whose goodness "nobody can deny"—under penalty of reading his epic. In translations of such a kind, therefore,

but Mr. Quillinan has done more—deserved it/ If spirit, elegance, and finish, can render the "Lusiad" acceptable to an English public, his