Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/357

Rh though written in tragi-comic style, is argued to imply a deeper seriousness in Horace's feelings than perhaps he as yet fully knew. "There is nothing in his moralisings very profound or very original; but they mark a general change of character by no means small." The thoroughly stoical doctrine of the Ode (IV., 9) to Lollius: "Ne forte credas interitura, quæ, &c.," is also noted; although Horace's Epistles do not allow us to suppose that he permanently maintained this elevation. With regard to the plague-spots which so plentifully deface his odes, we have to add, that Professor Newman has, on the one hand, avoided the pruning-knife as much as possible, abruptly cutting away the difficulty in a few cases only, "where the immorality is too ugly to be instructive;" while, on the other hand, he pointedly asserts that he has "striven to make this book admissible to the cabinet of the purest-minded English lady, and could never consent to add adornment to a single line of corrupting tendency." Considering his relation, as professor to the Ladies' College, his book is likely to find admission to more than one or two such cabinets; and perhaps to give occasion, when admitted, to more than one or two cabinet councils, between the fair secretary of the home department and the first lord of the treasury, and to make his lordship rub up his Latin a bit.

Rhyme is here discarded, because Professor Newman is convinced, by the attempts of the ablest versifiers, that it is impossible to translate a classical poet into English rhymed metre, without a great sacrifice of the poet himself, and a most undesirable intrusion of that which is not the poet's. His own attempt has been, not to imitate the original metres, but to adopt stanzas of similar tone and feeling, and proportionate compass to those of the original. For he regards it as a fundamental mistake to wish to obtain in general such an imitation as those German translators of Greek and Latin poetry affect, when they profess to reproduce the very metre of the ancients, out, in fact, invent a totally new and accentual system, which is often found to be light, tripping, or humorous, where the original is grave and stately. He justly observes, that Horace's jocosity being, at the broadest, "subtle and subdued, never funny or boisterous," the use of our (accentual) Anapœsts or Dactyls in translating him has a perverted effect—since such a metre is liable to degenerate into doggrel, unless the subject is grand and vehement. He adopts the principle, that each Latin metre should have one, and only one English representative, being convinced, that to work under the pressure of immovable conditions, if they be not unreasonable ones, produces in the long run the chastest result. In carrying out this role, Mr. Newman is frequently hard pushed, and finds it difficult to "beat his music out." For instance, his substitute for the Alcaic measure has the following form (the first, second, and fourth lines of the stanzas being Trochaic with four