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books of those ages came forth; but now, as we see in this and in other eminent instances, statesmen whose political career has been cut short or suspended by revolutionary changes betake themselves to the production of laborious books-one brilliant orator among them even choosing monastic history for his theme -and, without the shelter of a cloister, do what the monastic students did in earlier days for the enrichment of literature. So, if the monks were the fighting men of the Church in the middle ages-if it was they alone who ventured to oppose the despotism of the East or of the West, when bishops and even popes were too ready to submit (xxxiii.-vi., xl.-i.)—would M. de Montalembert wish, even in the absence of a parliamentary opposition, to see the present government of France controlled by a mob of roaring monks besieging the Tuileries, rather than by a press which even its liability to official warnings cannot wholly subdue, an Academy with its significant reception-speeches, and a literature filled with its war of allusions?'

M. de Montalembert is full of indignations and antipathies. It is not only Napoleon III. that he dislikes, nor M. Dupin ‘in 1844, as now, Attorney-General at the Court of Cassation' (cxix.), nor the Emperor of Russia, nor Victor Emmanuel; but his foes are they of his own household, and among them the especially clerical and high-church party is marked by his particular dislike. This feeling is strongly shown in a chapter' On the True and the False Middle Ages,' and in one which is somewhat shocking to our English ideas of an author's self-respect, 'On the Fortunes of this Book.' The book, he says, will not make such a sensation as the Life of St. Elizabeth did; for things have changed for the worse in the meanwhile. Then all Catholics fought side by side; now there is a new pseudo-Catholic school, narrow, ignorant, and bitterly intolerant, which proscribes all who will not fall down and worship it; and at the hands of this school M. de Montalembert expects that his own book will fare no better than the excellent work of M. Albert de Broglie, on 'The Church and the Empire in the Fourth Century,' has done (lxxv., cclxxxii.-iii.). Moreover, the Life of St. Elizabeth was a novelty, whereas it has since found many imitators who have made such hagiology rather vulgar, and by their wrongheaded extravagances have given a fresh impulse to the enemies of the Church (ccxxxvii.). And thus, where a panegyrist of ancient monachism might have hoped to find his surest supporters, M. de Montalembert is obliged to expect, instead of a friendly welcome, the attacks of a set of ill-conditioned scribblers, who will try to denounce him as a liberal, a rationalist, and 'above all a naturalist' (cclxxxiii., cclxxxix.). These writers, he says, altogether misrepresent the

middle ages; knowing neither what really was there, nor what they ought to look for there, their grand mistake is that of identifying the middle ages with that so-called 'old régime,' which really killed the middle ages—which swallowed up all the liberties of the middle ages in despotism (ccxxxi.). For the middle ages, he holds, were full of liberty-liberty of thought, of speculation, of action-they bristled with liberties' (ccliii.). They were not times when everything was subject to the Church, but the Church had to struggle at every point with princes, while, as Father Lacordaire has said, it was itself prevented by civil liberty from degenerating into a dominant theocracy. The glory of the Mediaval Church was not that it was absolute (surely M. de Montalembert would not deny that Gregory VII. and his followers designed it to be so), but that it was free (ccxlix., ccl.). If the middle ages are to be admired, it is precisely for what their modern admirers would reprobate (ccliii.).

'There is nothing more false or more childish than that strange pretension which certain late recruits of the Catholic revival make, to present the Middle Ages to us as a period in which the Church was always victorious, always protected: as a land of promise, flowing with milk and honey, governed by kings and nobles piously kneeling at the feet of priests, and peopled* by a crowd, happy, silent, and docile, stretched out in tranquillity under their pastor's crook, under the shade of the double and inviolably respected authority of the throne and the altar. Far from it! never was there more of passions, more of disorders, more of wars, more of revolts; but also never was there more of virtues, more of generous efforts in the service of good. All was war, danger, tempest, alike in Church and in State; but also all was strong, robust, vivacious; everything bore the stamp of life and of struggle.'-ccli.

In modern times, according to M. de Montalembert, the true appreciation of the middle ages began, not with the clerical party which claims them for its own, but with Protestants such as Guizot, Maitland, Voigt, Leo, and Raumer,† by whose lessons the priestly party has been too dull to profit (xvi.); and among Roman Catholics it has been continued, not by the clergy, but by laymen such as Digby, Ozanam, and M. de Montalembert himself.

In most of what is here said we fully agree, although we may think it rather hard, that when some of our weaker brethren and

*The authorised' translator has made something very like nonsense here, by entirely overlooking the word peuplées.

In repeating these names, we must guard against the possibility of being supposed to place them on a level. Professor Leo, for instance-a mere spinner of affected paradoxes, although not without ingenuity or learning-is a person of very different mark from M. Guizot.

sisters

sisters have been won to Romanism by the ideal picture of the middle ages, we should now hear from a learned and very zealous Romanist that that picture is as false as we had ourselves believed it to be. But, taking M. de Montalembert's view of the middle ages as the true one, we may say that there were two ways of issue from their struggles :—the one, that some one of the contending parties should overpower the rest, and should rule without control; the other, that, gathering up all the results of the contest, men should establish a system of mutual checks and counterpoises, by which each power should be prevented from encroaching on the other, and we should be able to enjoy the benefits of the mediaval struggle, without being under the necessity of renewing it for ourselves at every step. And, however careless we in England may be as to theories and ideals, we have yet in practice so far secured the advantages of this second way, that we trust we can look dispassionately on the middle ages, can understand them fairly, and can criticise their eulogist with greater justice than he expects either from those among his countrymen who may be regarded as his natural opponents, or from those worse enemies who might have been supposed to be his natural allies.

When the work is completed we may perhaps return to it. In the meanwhile we trust that, although we have been obliged to express much difference of opinion from M. de Montalembert, we have said nothing inconsistent with the respect which is justly due to his high character and his great abilities, or with the gratitude which we owe to him for his very interesting volumes.*

* Our article was already in type when we received the translation which is named in the heading of it. If this version had reached us earlier, it might have saved us some trouble, as, on a comparison of our own extracts with the corresponding passages, we have found it to be in general both faithful and spirited, so that we should have been glad, for the most part, to make use of the translator's words instead of doing his work for ourselves. We must not, however, suppress a suspicion that, while well acquainted both with the author's language and with his own, he is not altogether at home in the subject of the book. 'St. Thomas d'Aquinas' (i. 442), for instance, is a form wholly new to us; The Abbot of Feuillans' (i. 146) is an odd way of rendering 'l'Abbé des Feuillans;' and we are startled at finding that, in two consecutive pages of an English book, a Greek monk of the sixth century is spoken of as Jean Moschus,' and a German volume of miscellaneous writings is cited under the title of Mélanges' (i. 304-5).

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ART.

1

ART. III.—1. The Works of Virgil. Translated by the Rev. Rann Kennedy and Charles Rann Kennedy. 2 Vols. 1849. 2. My Book. By James Henry. 1853.

3. The Works of Virgil: closely rendered into English Rhythm. By the Rev. Robert Corbet Singleton. Vol. I. 1855.

4. Virgil: literally translated into English Prose. By Henry Owgan, LL.D. 1857.

NoT

*

TOT long ago we invited the attention of the public to Horace and his translators. From Horace to Virgil is a natural and easy transition, and we are now accordingly going to offer some remarks on the English translators of Virgil, though we cannot plead the excuse of the appearance of any recent versions by eminent hands, by noble lords or accomplished statesmen. Our intention is to furnish some answer to two distinct though connected questions: How has Virgil been translated? and how may he be translated?

To attempt an exhaustive account of all the translations of the whole or parts of Virgil which have been made in English is a task which would exceed our own opportunities, as it probably would the wishes of our readers. Many of these productions are doubtless unknown to us: with others we are acquainted by name or by character, but they do not happen to be within our reach. It is obvious too that there must be a considerable number which do not deserve even the slender honour of a passing commemoration. Here, as elsewhere, something will depend on the date and consequent rarity of the book. A worthless translation

of the nineteenth century calls for no mention at all; the work can be procured without difficulty, or the reader, if he pleases, can himself produce something of the same character. A worthless translation of the sixteenth century has an adventitious value: it is probably rare, and at any rate the power of producing anything similar is gone for ever. While, therefore, we do not cater for professed antiquaries, we may perhaps hope to interest those who care to see how Virgil has fared at the hands of writers, great and small, belonging to the various schools of English poetry-who for the sake of a few instances of beauty and ingenuity will pardon a good deal of quaintness and even some dullness, and are not too severe to smile at occasional passages of rampant extravagance and undisguised absurdity.

A very few words are all that need be spent on the first translation of Virgil into English by Caxton. The title, or rather tail-piece, runs as follows: 'Here fynyssheth the boke of Eneydos,

*No. ccviii. Art. 2.

compyled

compyled by Vyrgyle, whiche hathe be translated oute of latyne in to frenshe, And oute of frenshe reduced in to Englysshe by me Wyllm Caxton the xxii. daye of Iuyn, the yeare of our lorde m.iiii clxxxx. The fythe yeare of the Regne of Kynge Henry the seuenth.' Some account of the original work (by Guillaume de Roy) may be found in Warton's 'History of English Poetry," Section xxiv. It seems, in fact, to be a romance made out of the Æneid by numerous excisions and some additions, the bulk of the whole being comparatively small. We have only glanced at the translation, the printing as well as the language of which is calculated to repel all but black-letter students; but its chief characteristic seems to be excessive amplification of the Latin. This is apparently the version of Virgil's two lines (Æn. IV. 9, 10):

'Anna soror, quæ me suspensam insomnia terrent !
Quis novus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes !

'Anne my suster and frende I am in ryghte gret thoughte strongely troubled and incyted, by dremes admonested whiche excyte my courage tenquire the maners & lygnage of this man thus valyaunt, strong, & puyssaunt, whiche deliteth hym strongely to speke, in deuysing the hie fayttes of armes and perillys daungerous whiche he sayth to haue passed, neweli hither comyn to soiourne in our countreys. I am so persuaded of grete admonestments that all my entendement is obfusked, endullyd and rauysshed.'

It was not long before Caxton was to meet with one who proved himself both a severe critic and a successful rival. This

was

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'the Reverend Father in God, Mayster Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkel, and unkil to the Erle of Angus,' whose xiii Bukes of Eneados of the famose Poete Virgill translatet out of Latyne verses into Scottish metir,' though not published till 1553, was written forty years earlier. In the poetical preface to this work-a composition of some five hundred lines-there is a long paragraph, entitled in the margin 'Caxtoun's faultes,' which passes in review the various delinquencies of the father of printing his omission of the greater part of the thre first bukis,' his assertion that the storm in Book I. was sent forth by Æolus and Neptune, the 'prolixt and tedious fassyoun' in which he deals with the story of Dido, his total suppression of the fifth Book, his ridiculous rejection of the descent into the shades as fabulous, his confusion of the Tiber with the Tover, his substitution of Crispina for Deiphobe as the name of the Sibyl, the whole being summed up by the assurance that

'His buk is na mare like Virgil, dar I lay,
Than the nyght oule resemblis the papingay.'

The

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