Holy Saint Francis! what a change is here! But Shakspeare is seldom wrong in his delineations of human nature; nor has he in the smallest degree done violence to its propensities and conduct in Romeo's sudden transfer of allegiance from a disdainful to a gentle mistress. Though probably nothing more than an accidental coincidence, there is a striking similarity between the passages in this poet and Lucretius, in which, the first cries of infancy are pathetically alluded to, as presages of the miseries to come. Tum porro puer, &c. &c. Vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut æquum est Cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum. We came crying hither: Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air, We wawle and cry. When we are born, we cry, that we are come To this great stage of fools. It has been fashionable of late to decry the poetry of Addison, and perhaps it must be admitted that he was most successful in the department of prose. Nevertheless, his muse is often affecting, always agreeable, and indicative of good taste. Could we, for instance, ask any thing more beautiful and more in the tender spirit of the original, than these lines from his translation of Ovid's fable of Narcissus? What could, fond youth, this hopeless passion move? What kindled in thee, this unpitied love? Thy own warm blush within the water glows; With thee, the coloured shadow comes and goes: Its empty being on thyself relies; Step thou aside, and the frail charmer dies. The oracle of the law, sir Edward Coke, in treating of burglary, says, it may be committed in a church, because a church is the mansion house of God. At this quaint attempt to circumscribe the immensity and ubiquity of the Deity, might one not appropriately exclaim with Cato in Lucan? Est ne dei sedes nisi terra, et pontus, et aer, Et clæum et virtus? Superos quid quærimus ultra? It is remarkable that the customs of the early ancestors of the English, and in general, the privileges granted and duties imposed by the feudal system, have a striking resemblance to what we call children's play. Thus, it was a rule, we are told by Blackstone, that a whale taken on the coasts should be divided between the king and queen, the head only to belong to the king, and the tail &c. to the queen, in order to supply her majesty's wardrobe with whale bone. (Quere, were stays or hoops then in fashion?) From the same authority, we learn, that every lord spiritual and temporal summoned to parliament, and passing through the king's forests, might, both in going and returning, kill one or two of the king's deer without warrant in view of the forester, if he was present; or on blowing a horn, if he was absent, that he might not seem to take the king's venison by stealth. But the logic of the times, was even more ridiculously puerile than the regulations:-for instance, the mode of proving, that no inconvenience would arise from a man being a judge in his own cause, from the alledged circumstance of a certain pope (of whom history, I presume, is silent,) once trying himself, and adjudging that he should be burnt; and the further allegation, that the sentence was actually put in execution. Judico me cremari, says his holiness.-Et combustus fuit--gravely adds the logician. (See Blackstone's Commentaries.) THE latin word, Episcopus, we are told, is the root from whence the French word Eveque, and the English word Bishop, though so different in sound, are both derived. The first is made out of the two first syllables Episc, being originally spelled eve8que; and the other is compounded of the second and third syllables piscop, not very remote from Bishop. But if the rival nations differ in the formation of their words, so do they sometimes in their signification, when they happen to assume the same cha racters and sound. Thus, Egotism from the pronoun Ego, means Vanity with the one, and Selfishness with the other; and hence, the frequent use of the word in France, during the lamentable progress of her short-lived republicanism. HAMMOND. In a handsomely written preface by lord Chesterfield, prefixed to the poems of Hammond, it is stated by his lordship that Tibullus seems to have been the model judiciously preferred to Ovid by his deceased friend who "sincere in his love as in his friendship, wrote to his mistresses as he spoke to his friends, nothing but the true genuine sentiment of his heart;" and "that he sat down to write what he thought, not to think what he should write." Now, if the last observation can be true of a translator, the noble earl may be right; but certainly Mr. Hammond was for the most part, if not wholly, a mere translator of Tibullus, and to a translator, less than to any other species of writer, it would appear, that the remark can apply; since, instead of sitting down to write what he thinks, the thought is already before him, and he sits down emphatically to think what he shall write, in regard at least to the choice of words in their adaptation to the sense of the original, and to the measure and rhyme of the translation. The noble patron then, seems scarcely excusable for this misrepresentation, with all the allowance we can make him, on the score of friendly partiality. Nor can he be acquitted on the presumption of ignorance of the fact, as he was a literary man, of whom it cannot be supposed, that like Sir Hargrave Pollexfen in the novel, he devolved upon his chaplain "a very pretty fellow," the exclusive reading of Tibullus. But it is my business to show, in what degree the Roman poet was a model to the English one.-To begin with the first quatrain of the first elegy of Tibullus, which, by the by, in the elegies of Hammond, is numbered the 13th, an incongruity, which almost always occurs in the beginning, and often in the body of the elegies as relates to the order of the stanzas and appears to be designed, to prevent a too easy comparison of the copy with the original. Divitias alius fulvo sibi congerat auro, Let others boast their heaps of shining gold, And trumpets break their slumbers never sound. The translator here proceeds regularly for a while, with close attention to the original; but passing these examples, lest I should swell my note to a volume, I turn to a stanza near the conclusion of the elegy. It is, Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem, Et dominam tenero continuisse sinu: Aut gelidas hibernas aquas quum fuderit Auster, What joy to hear the tempest howl in vain As the first elegy of Tibullus answers to the 13th of Hammond, so does the 1st of the latter, beginning-" Farewell that liberty our fathers gave," to the 4th, in the second book of the former. But as it would be tedious and unnecessary to cite every instance of translation, in a work in which the greater part if not the whole is so, only two or three more will be adduced. Thus the first stanza of Hammond's 5th elegy With wine, more wine deceive thy master's care Let not a whisper stir the silent air If hapless love awhile consent to rest, is taken from the beginning of the 2d elegy of Tibullus: VOL. I. Adde merum, vinoque novos compesce dolores, Neu quisquam multo perfusum tempora Baccho I The 6th elegy of Hammond begins Thousands would seek the lasting peace of death, and is a translation of these two lines, which begin the 7th elegy of the second book of Tibullus. Finirent multi letho mala: sed credula vitam Spes fovet, et melius cras foret semper ait. The beginning of the 11th elegy of Hammond, The man who sharpen'd first the warlike steel, answers to the beginning of the 11th elegy of Tibullus. Quis fuit horrendos primus qui protulit enses? Tunc cædes hominum generi, tunc prælia nata; The translation in this place goes on pretty regularly; and it was certainly no unlucky circumstance that the noble earl should believe, if indeed he did believe, that the following quatrain flowed in a genuine strain from the breast of the English poet, instead of being but a copy of one of Tibullus, with the substitution of the name of Stanhope for that of Massala as must evidently appear on placing them together. Stanhope shall come and grace his rural friend, Hac veniet Messala meus, cui dulcia poma Et tantum venerata virum, hance sedula curet; |