Godolphin makes such short work of Dido's death, that we are compelled to begin our extract from him some lines earlier :Then Juno, looking with a pitying eye

Upon so sad and lasting misery,

Since deepest wounds can no free passage give
To self-destroyers who refuse to live,

Sent Iris down to cut the fatal hair;

Which done, her whole life vanished into air.'

Waller's work merely embraces about a hundred lines, which were not translated by Godolphin. The following lines will show that it is well for him that his reputation as an English poet does not rest on his translation. Tu lacrimis evicta meis' (v. 548):'Ah sister! vanquished with my passion, thou Betrayedst me first, dispensing with my vow. Had I been constant to Sychæus still

And single-lived,* I had not known this ill.

Such thoughts torment the Queen's enraged breast,
While the Dardanian does securely rest

In his tall ship, for sudden flight prepared:

To whom once more the son of Jove appeared.'

6

More remarkable than any of these experiments on Dido's story is An Essay upon Two of Virgil's Eclogues, and Two Books of his Æneis (if this be not enough) towards the Translation of the whole. By James Harrington, 1658.' The author, Sir James Harrington, better known by his Oceana,' is compared to Vicars by Butler, who, disliking his politics, chose to sneer at his poetry; but those who have seen his Essay' will feel that the sneer falls pointless. Unequal, and occasionally grotesque, he yet shows undeniable signs of vigour and ability, reminding us of Cowley both in his better and his worse manner. His felicities are not indeed Virgilian, as when he translates 'Oscula libavit nata'

Jove, with the smiles that clear the weather, dips

His coral in the nectar of her lips,'

or speaks of Æneas among the paintings at Carthage as 'wandering through a world the pencil struck

As out of Chaos with stupendous luck :'

but they are felicities nevertheless: nor need we deny him the praise of ingenuity when he tells us that Dido

* Single-lived' is the spelling of the copy before us (1658); but it may be doubted whether the writer aid not intend 'lived' for a verb. In that case the compound adjective would be rather a felicitous blunder.

'brings

'brings the Trojan to her court,
And sends a royal present to the port,
A hundred ewes and lambs, a hundred sows;
And Bacchus rides upon a drove of cows.'

The first simile in the Æneid is rendered thus

'As when some mighty city bursteth out
Into sedition, the ignoble rout

Assault the palaces, usurp the street

With stones, or brands, or anything they meet
(For Fury's armoury is everywhere):
But, if a man of gravity appear

Whose worth they own, whose piety they know,
Are mute, are planted in the place, and grow
Unto his lips, that smooth, that melt their souls:
So hush the waves where Neptune's chariot rolls.'

As might be expected, the number of holiday-authors increased formidably after the Restoration-so formidably that it would be impossible within our present limits to give any adequate account of their several performances. Not one of the six volumes of Tonson's 'Miscellany' is without some pieces of Virgilian translation: one of them, the first, contains a complete translation of the Eclogues by various hands; a collection which Dryden enriched by two of his own versions, and from which he afterwards did not disdain to borrow.* Of these studies by far the most noteworthy is 'The Last Eclogue, translated, or rather imitated, in the year 1666, by Sir William Temple, Bart.,' a remarkably flowing and vigorous paraphrase, some lines of which might challenge comparison with Dryden's own. As it appears now to be quite forgotten, we shall not apologise for extracting from it rather copiously :

'One labour more, O Arethusa, yield,

Before I leave the shepherds and the field:
Some verses to my Gallus ere we part,
Such as may one day break Lycoris' heart,
As she did his. Who can refuse a song
To one that loved so well, and died so young?
Begin, and sing Gallus' unhappy fires,
While yonder goat to yonder branch aspires
Out of his reach. We sing not to the deaf:
An answer comes from every trembling leaf.

* Dryden's chief plagiarisms are from the version of Eclogue I., 'by John Caryll, Esqre.,' twenty-four of whose lines he appropriates, with slight changes. But there are cases of obligation in subsequent Eclogues which a future editor of Dryden's Virgil will do well to note.

Under

*

Under a lonely tree he lay and pined,
His flock about him feeding on the wind,
As he on love: such kind and gentle sheep
E'en fair Adonis would be proud to keep.

What shakes the branches? what makes all the trees
Begin to bow their heads, the goats their knees?
Oh! 'tis Silvanus, with his mossy beard

And leafy crown, attended by a herd

Of wood-born satyrs: see! he shakes his spear,
A green young oak, the tallest of the year.

Would it had pleased the Gods I had been born
Just one of you, and taught to wind a horn,
Or wield a hook, or prune a branching vine,
And known no other love but, Phyllis, thine,
Or thine, Amyntas: what though both are brown ?
So are the nuts and berries on the down;
Amongst the vines, the willows, and the springs
Phyllis makes garlands, and Amyntas sings.
No cruel absence calls my love away
Further than bleating sheep can go astray:
Here, my Lycoris, here are shady groves,

Here fountains cool and meadows soft: our loves
And lives may here together wear and end:

O, the true joys of such a fate and friend!'

Meantime, while veteran diplomatists, rising peers, and future secretaries of state were employing themselves with these occasional performances, the whole of Virgil was being undertaken by a patrician author, Richard Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale. Unfortunately for his reputation, his Lordship appears to have hesitated about publishing, and, while he hesitated, the time went by. The version of the first Georgic appeared in the third volume of the Miscellany,' in 1694: the Eneid was communicated to Dryden before he had embarked in his own great undertaking, and suffered to remain in his hands afterwards. At length it was resolved that it should be given to the world, but the design was prevented by the author's death. Two years later Dryden took his place as the translator of Virgil, and the chance was gone for even a temporary occupation of the throne. When the great poet, in the preface to his Æneid, complimented his noble friend's work, acknowledging some of his obligations to it, and concealing others, he spoke as if he did not expect that it would ever see the light. Eventually, however, the entire translation found an editor, who supposed, or affected to suppose, that if it could no longer reign alone, the crown might at any rate be

divided.

6

divided. They who do not place my Lord Lauderdale upon the same foot with Mr. Dryden,' says this friendly critic, must be equally injurious to the one's judgment and to the other's translation; for t' will be easy to find upon the parallel that the poetry of South and North Britain is no more incompatible than the constitution.' But the Union did not extend to translations of Virgil. The North British version seems to have attracted no attention: Trapp praises it, and Martyn and Davidson quote it; but it probably was never read. Any one who will now take the trouble to look at it will see that it is not without merit. But though the noble translator was a better versifier and a greater master of English than Ogilby, he had studied in a school which is on the whole less favourable to a writer of limited powers: instead of copying his original closely, he sometimes transforms and adds to it; and his transformations and additions are hardly, in Denham's language, true to Virgil's fame. The following is an extract from the version of the Georgics, which is more flowing than that of the Æneid (Nocte leves melius stipula," &c. Georg. I., 289):

'Parched meadows and dry stubble mow by night:
Then moisture reigns, which flies Apollo's light.
Some watch, and torches sharp with cleaving knives
Till late by winter fires: their careful wives,
To ease their labour, glad the homely rooms
With cheerful notes, while weaving on their looms,
Or else in kettles boil new wine, and skim

The dregs with leaves, when they o'erflow the brim.
But reap your yellow grain with glowing heat,
And on your floor with scorching Phœbus beat.
When days are clear, then naked till and sow:
In lazy winter labourers lazy grow:

For that 's a jovial time, when jovial swains
Meet, and in feasting waste their summer gains,
As seamen, come to port from stormy seas,

First crown their vessels, then indulge their ease.'

In 1696, as we have already intimated, Dryden's translation was published. Of its surpassing merits we must defer speaking till we have finished our chronological enumeration, as they are not of a nature which will bear dismissing in a few sentences. Standing as it does nearly midway in the history of Virgilian translations, it throws into the shade not only all that preceded, but all that have followed it. If Dryden's successors are less incapable of being put into comparison with him than his predecessors, it is to Dryden himself that the advantage, such as it is, is in some measure due.

Dryden's

Dryden's successors did not, in the first instance, attempt to meet him on his own ground. He had himself expressed an opinion, whether deliberately formed or not, in favour of translations into blank verse; and translations into blank verse soon became as popular among writers, if not among readers, of poetry as translations into rhyme. The illustrious examples of Shakespeare and Milton, long slighted, had at last done their work, the one restoring blank verse in tragedy, the other reinstating it in epic poetry: the new measure was doubtless felt to be easier than the old; and criticism was beginning to find out that a translation which should represent the words as well as the general meaning of an author could hardly be executed in such rhyme as the literary public of the eighteenth century would care to read. Accordingly, when Dr. Brady, Nahum Tate's coadjutor in the New Version of the Psalms, turned to translating the neid (1716-1726), he translated it into blank verse. His attempt is characterised contemptuously enough by Johnson, whose opinion we do not feel inclined to dispute. The next blank verse experiment is better known to ourselves, and probably to our readers also. In the last volume of Tonson's ' Miscellany,' Trapp appeared as a translator of the Tenth Eclogue into rhyme, and of the end of the First Georgic into blank verse: he was afterwards to execute a blank version of the whole of Virgil's three poems, publishing the Æneid in 1717 or 1718, the Bucolics and Georgics about 1731. We may perhaps speak of his work more in detail hereafter; for the present it is sufficient to say, that whether owing to the University reputation of the author, who was the first Oxford Professor of Poetry, or to the more substantial recommendations of a version which, as Johnson says, might serve as the clandestine refuge of schoolboys, and of a commentary containing a good deal of information and not a little prosaic good sense, the book reached the honours of a third edition in 1735.

In 1764 Trapp's example was followed by another ex-Professor of Poetry, Hawkins by name. If we are unable to give any account of his version of the Æneid, we may plead as our excuse that it is not to be found in the library of the University of which the translator was a professor, nor in that of the college (Pembroke) of which he was a fellow, nor again in that of the British Museum. By way of amends, however, we can tell our readers something of the translation which appeared next in order of time, 'The Works of Virgil Englished by Robert Andrews, 1766.' The author, who was fortunate enough to secure Baskerville for his printer, and thus to make his work, externally at any rate, a most attractive one, imputes the shortcomings of former trans

lators