Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/356

344 conception of the ancient tone of mind." And the justification of Mr. Newman's present experiment in novel metrical forms, lies in his persuasion, that hitherto our poetical translators have failed in general, not so much from want of talent or learning, hut from aiming to produce poems in modem style, through an excessive fear that a modern reader will endure nothing else. How far a modeen reader will relish the old classical, or quasi-classical form here adopted—the Englished counterpart of ancient Alcaics, Sapphics, Iambic Archilochics, Heroic Hexameters, &c., is a question which is adhuc sub judice.

Why did Mr. Newman seLect Horace? Not, he explicitly avers, because he appreciates him as a genius of the first rank—thinking him, indeed, weaker in his own line than his immediate predecessor Catullus, "a man whose disgusting impurity has marred half his poems, and who probably did not live to attain his own full perfection." But Horace is selected, as the Latin poet of next note to Virgil—the poet of whom it next concerns an English reader to know something—whose writings bring one into immediate contact with the Augustan age, when Roman taste ripened to perish—and who is so compact in magnitude, and so various in metre and in subject, as to give the best chance of succeeding somewhere in an attempt so novel. Nor does Mr. Newman seek to undervalue Horace, from whose poetry he (somewhat maliciously) remarks, that in past generations the sermons of half our divines might seem to have been borrowed. The gay woridling's sins against the dulce et decorum, he indeed earnestly reproves, rightly alleging that the butterfly bard would not have less wit, or less brilliancy, or less pure taste, or less charity, if he had learned to reverence women as well as admire them. Had he been husband as well as lover, "who shall say what a vast elevation of character would have accrued to him from it? From what degradation of soul it would have saved him—from what pollutions in his writings it would have saved us!" The ugly obscenities of some of his odes are stigmatised with severity, as leaving an ineffaceable stain upon his youth; and that when the season of youth was past he could deliberately publish them, "and not fall in general estimation," is justly called a "foul blot on the whole Augustan age." But there is claimed an "increasing religiousness" for Horace's riper years, as testified by the tone of Odes 22–27 of Book III.; the Ode on his escape from being crushed by a falling tree (II., 13),