תמונות בעמוד
PDF
ePub

alluded to the attorney), through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed !”? (Mr. Pelham)-however, he finished with earnest declarations of not having, designed to abuse the chancellor, and with affirming that it was scandalous to pass the bill-but it was passed by 125 votes to 56, (Vol. i. p. 301.)

Our author's way of discussing the subject shows how qualified he was to found upon it the abuse with which he covered one of the ablest men whom the country has produced.

It was amazing, in a country where liberty gives choice, where trade and money confer equality, and where facility of marriage had always been supposed to produce populousness, it was amazing to see a law promulged, that cramped inclination, that discountenanced matrimony, and that seemed to annex as sacred privileges to birth, as could be devized in the proudest, poorest little Italian principality; and as if the artificer had been a Teutonic margrave, not a little lawyer, who had raised himself by his industry from the very lees of the people; and who had matched his own blood with the great house of Kent ! (Vol. i. p. 294.)

What were the arguments used by Mr. Henry Fox with so much ability upon this occasion, we do not learn from the author; but they were probably of the same tenour with those which were adopted by his son Charles James Fox in his celebrated speech on the bill for the repeal of the Marriage Act, one of the earliest of his great displays, and the most remarkable specimen, perhaps, in the whole compass of recorded eloquence, of splendid and mischievous sophistry. The argument from beginning to end was in substance nothing more than this:That nature had determined the period when the liberty of intercourse between the sexes might be exercised, and man had no right to limit her operations. It was passion and not reason that was best capable of providing for happiness in wedlock.

Of his own politics and morality, Lord Orford has in these Memoirs, as we have made it appear, favoured us with some occasional disclosures. With respect to the tone and temper of his religious sentiments he uses no reserve, though the subject seems to be held by him in so little respect as seldom to draw his attention to it. He speaks with profane contempt of all religious observances and sacred seasons. We have made some remarks upon this characteristic of the noble author in an earlier part of this article; we shall, therefore, now only animadvert upon the unjustifiable manner in which he attempts, to fix the imputation of bigot upon the young Prince of Wales, afterterwards George the Third, of cherished memory! from the bare fact of his being religiously educated by his mother. (Vol. ii. 396.) Of all the weak and whiffling observations which occur in this work, those which we find in page 231 of the

second volume are the most egregiously absurd; not to mention their irreverence and ill-nature. He remarks that

"The Court at Leicester House was very differently employed during these serious transactions. Hanover was lost; in North Ame rica our affairs went ill; England itself was in no flourishing condi tion. How did the Princess occupy the heir of these domains? She was not spartan enough to buckle on his armour with her own hands, and send him to save or re-conquer what he was to govern. The light of the Gospel has emancipated mothers from such robust sensations, The Prince was instructed to commit the care of the temporal concerns of his subjects to Providence; and therefore, instead of sending men, arms, and ammunition, to the invaded frontiers of our colonies; with more patriarchial vigilance his Royal Highness sent them an hundred pounds' worth of Leland's polemical writings against the deists."

On this drivelling nonsense the editor observes in a note at the bottom of the page, that the "sarcasm was most unmerited and absurd. The Prince had no means of sending men, arms, and ammunition, nor was it any part of his duty so to do. Even if it had, a regard for religion and literature, and some liberality in rewarding genius, are surely not incompatible with a due attention to public affairs."

The note of the editor on the above offensive passage of his author is just; but more merciful than just. It adds infinitely to its culpability, that although the writer lived long enough to see the whole character developed that gave these early prognostics, though he lived to see how royally devotion sits upon the princely character,-how it sparkles above the gems of the diadem, and sheds light and lustre upon all the duties of sovereignty, he left his silly sarcasm in its place, in these Memoirs, for posterity to hurl it back with indignation upon his own memory. He lived to witness the return of a people whose extreme profligacy of manners, during the period he records, he himself has not forgotten to stigmatise, to a much higher and happier state of moral felicity, under the fostering example of a Prince, who, born in the purple, amidst prevailing profligacy, and surrounded by ten thousand allurements, stepped, in blooming youth, upon the throne of his ancestors at once a determined Christian, a virtuous husband, and the decorous model of a high bred English gentleman; and this character, he dedicated to the nation at the commencement of his auspicious reign, as the first fruits of that religious education which was the scorn of this misjudging writer. We have seen the termination of his long and chequered rule, melancholy indeed! but yet how blessed by the still lingering efficacy of his early impressions! We have seen our late Sovereign in the lowest stage of mortal depression, but still sustained by the habitudes of his christian discipline and

domestic culture. Sequestered from his family and his people, but still happy in his holy and serene abstractions; and though an alien to all else, never wholly an alien from his God. We have seen his honour still green and flourishing upon his drooping head; we have seen his sceptre still budding with the promise of unfading glory in his trembling grasp; and we have seen the people still living under the awe and impression of that example, which was wont, in its better days, to invigorate their virtue, and to draw down upon them the favour of heaven.

With respect to the style and diction of this work, it is not worthy of criticism. It is in general vulgar, ill modulated, and replete with solecisms, all which delinquencies might be more easily pardoned had it been free from egotism and affectation. The author's use of words is often quite peculiar to himself: we shall give only three or four out of a multitude of instances. The verb to connect" he constantly adopts as a neuter verb, as, nobody so ready to connect with them, vol. i. 123. With Newcastle he determined never to connect,' vol. ii. 335.” With the same arbitrariness of language he sometimes makes a neuter verb transitory, as "whatever tends to approach it" to the other." We find other rules of grammar under the same neglect. In the passage wherein he gives us his own character, and in which he evidently intends to dazzle us with fine writing, he gives an entire new property to fire; "Maturity of reason, and sparks of virtue extinguished this culpable ardour."~"!

[ocr errors]

6

[ocr errors]

6

[ocr errors]

The editor informs us that he exercised the same independence upon rules and usage in the spelling of words, but that he had thought proper to vary from the MS. in this particular: he has, however, left not a few anomalies of this kind in the work, possibly by way of specimen. Here follow a few of them. Memoires,' literature, sufferred,' reperations, inseperable,' sollicitor,' 'prcheminence,' councilled,' extoll,' strugle,' 'jugle,' inflammeable.' Could this be any thing but affectation? and if affectation, could any affectation be more ridiculous? The work is interspersed with emblematical vignettes, of which it will be enough to say, that they agree in spirit and character with the performance in general. They are silly, quaint, and affected in the extreme. But our readers, if they are as tired as ourselves, must be, by this time, impatient to be set free. We will, therefore, at length take leave of this noble author, happy to have our shoulders eased of the burthen of these two enormous quartos.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors][ocr errors]

ART. XII.-The Poems of Caius Valerius Catullus, translated, with a Preface and Notes, by the Hon. George Lamb. In 2 vols. 12mo. Murray, 1821.

It is not without reason that translators from ancient authors have complained of the difficulties that have beset them. The idioms of the respective languages appear sometimes, as if by an effort, to keep at a distance from each other, so that no artifice or contrivance can bring them cordially together. It is to little purpose that rules are laid down for the guidance of those who hazard their reputation in so fearful an enterprise. Even those who legislate most upon this subject are not unfrequently the first to violate their own enactments. For this reason, in no department of letters have there been so many adventures, and so many miscarriages. They who have best succeeded in this narrow and circumscribed path of exertion, have merely danced with less awkwardness in their fetters. Fetters they still are; and so rarely are the graceful attitudes of unrestrained nature,— the flow, the ease, the happy negligence of the original, achieved in a translation, that we habitually suffer the perplexities of the task to affix limits to our wishes, and are content to lower our standard of excellence from that which we conceive or wish for, to that which is more attainable.

Hence a sort of despair, the refuge of indolence on the one hand, or the excuse for frustrated attempts on the other, has obtained for the translator a vague sort of toleration, under cover of which he ventures often to change places with his author, and to deal in expressions and sentiments born and bred in his own brain. Johnson himself,* too strongly, perhaps, impressed with the perplexities of the translator's duty, has laid down a principle, which authorizes every addition capable of being engrafted on the original writer, provided" nothing is taken away" thus throwing open the folding-doors to every licence and innovation, however wild and extravagant.

It by no means follows, however, that the merely verbal translator is at all nearer to his original. It is the spirit and genius of a writer that addresses us in his compositions. His dry words, rendered by a proportionate number of English equivalents, can impart to us no adequate notion of either. Strict verbal

fidelity will be an imitation as heavy and as lifeless as casts taken from a dead countenance. Here, then, is the difficulty of the translator: he occupies a narrow space between two opposite dangers; he must neither confine himself within the precincts

Life of Pope.

1

of merely verbal meaning, nor wander into the wilderness of imitation and paraphrase. But this is not all. The manner of an ancient author is often so peculiarly his own, and is so identified with the language in which he writes, as to elude the grasp of the most skilful translator.

It is obvious, also, that it is the sentiment, and the sentiment alone of an ancient author, which is capable of transfusion into a living tongue: but it not unfrequently happens that the sentiment has no separate and independent existence; that is, it is represented to the mind by the original word, and by that word alone. Its very existence is incorporated into it; and no dexterity of management can persuade it to migrate, as it were, from its residence. This is a peculiarity which has been seldom observed, and it is principally from an inattention to this unyielding and obstinate quality in the ancient dialects, that so many translators have failed, whether they have been of that daring class who have leaped beyond, or of the timid race who have crept behind their ori ginals.

We will not attempt in this place to adjust the controversies that have arisen as to the power of words over the affections. The prevailing notion seems to be, that it is derived from a corre spondent and simultaneous representation of the ideas for which they stand; yet this is far from being universally true. There are many general words which convey no real essences to the mind; those, for instance, which belong to moral qualities. These are sometimes used with very vigorous effect, without bringing before us the particular course of action which they imply; but their power over the affections is not on this account the less. An indistinct sentiment of love or abhorrence is excited the instant the words are presented to us: it is plain, therefore, that the mind is influenced by some law wholly independent of a precise picture on the imagination. The readiest solution, perhaps, of the problem, is that principle of association which, developing itself with the first efforts of our understandings, conjoins with certain words, not exact images, but corresponding sensations. Indeed, so little do poetry and eloquence owe their effect to the power of raising exact images, that it not unfre quently happens that no small part of their charm arises from the indistinctness of their impressions. There is also a mysterious fascination in many words, either singly, or in combina tion with others, and which are, for that reason, called poetical, which, upon a slight reflection, we must pronounce to be independent of all picturesque effect whatever. They excite sentiments, not as pictures of sensible, nor as symbols of intellectual objects, but as words, and as words only. There is a sympathy which vibrates upon the feelings occasioned by mere sounds or

« הקודםהמשך »