The Press. — London, England, 1854-03-04 00:00:00

;08 I will the truth tell: thou on earth repeat it. God's angel seized on me, and he of Hell Cried out: ' 0 thou of Heaven, why dost rob me? Thou claimest to bear off his part eternal For one small tear, which rescues him from me. But with the rest I otherwise will deal!' Thou knowest well how in the air collects The humid vapour which in rain returns Soon as it drifts where it is met by cold. He joined the bad will, which bad only seeks, With reason, and he stirred the rack and wind By virtue of the skill his nature gave. Wherefore the valley, when the day was spent, From Pratomagno to the heights he shut In clouds, and over them disposed the sky So that the laden air to water turned. The rainstorm fell, and down the runnels came Such of it as the soil could not drink up ; And, as it happens with important streams, Towards the chief river with such mighty speed Headlong it ran that nothing held it back. My stiffened body at its opening The chafing Archian found, and bore it on To Arno,—loosing on my breast the cross Which I had made when spent in agony. Against its banks it dashed me, and its bed ; Then covered me and girt me with its spoil." " What time thou art unto the world returned, And art recruited from thy journey long."— A third soul to the second followed thus,— " Have me in thy remembrance. lam Pia; Siena bore me, the Maremma slew. Of this he knows who gave me once the ring With his own jewel when he wedded me."• CAYLEY. Here spoke another : " 0 mayst thou conclude The task which draws thee up the lofty mount, As thy good piety shall to mine do good. I am of Montefeltro ; I am Bonconte ; Joanna, or some other, minds not me ; Hence mast I walk by these with downcast front." Said I : " What fate or fortune carried thee By such a wrested course from Campaldino That known thy burial-place could never be ?" " 0," answered he, " at foot of Casentino A river crosseth, called Archiane, That springs above the Wolds from Apennino. Where its appellative becomes inane, There hardly reached I when on foot I fled, Thrust thro' the weasand, crimsoning the plain. There lost I sight, and latest breath I shed In syllabling the name of Mary, when I sank, and left my flesh distenanted. I tell thee truth, which tell to living men: God's angel took me, and the Infernal one Cried, ' 0 thou Heavenly, why dost rob me then ? Thou halt the man's eternal portion won, Which I must for a drop of brine forbear: I'll have the other otherwise undone.' Thou knoweat how there gathers in the air A humid steam that, meeting with some wave Of cold above, returns to water there. This evil will, who doth hut evil crave, Came with his art, and called up reek and wind, As by the puissance which his nature gave. Then all the valley, whilst the day declined, 'Twist Pratomagno and the Pennine chain He clad with cloud, and drew down heaven behind So prone as turned the pregnant air to rain. Adown it gushed. and toward the sluices went That portion which the ground could not retain. There, gathering larger volume, was it sent To join the kingly floods from all around So fast that nothing mought its rush prevent. My stiffened corpse the stalwart Archian found Upon his confluence, where he, shouldering it To Arno, from my breast the cross unbound Which I had made there in the deadly fit. He rolled me on his banks and on his bed, And over me hie rapine wound and knit." " Oh ! when thou (lost again the earth betread, And haat from thy long journeys rested thee," — Thus the third ghost after the second said,— " Remember then la Pia ; I am she. Siena gave me being, and Maremme Was my destruction. That he knows who me Enringed at our espousals with his gem.' " As we have said, Mr. Pollock is a very con scientious translator. He is certainly literal, and generally accurate, but he does not show signs of the finer sense so necessary here. Every now and then he is loose to the extent of incorrectness. To confine ourselves for in stances to the opening cantos of the Hell : In the beginning of the second we find, " The day departed," which means something differ ent from the imerfect tense of the original— "was departing.' At line 11, " Look to my merit e " is no equivalent for " virt—virtue, fortitude. " Whence that," at line 18, substi tuted for "yet, if " (pero, se), spoils the logical sequence of ideas. Lines 88-90 Only it needs to be in dread of things Which have the power to do others ill, But not of such as are not terrible— assert a mere platitude. The last should read — Of others not, for they're not terrible. • This Is a very clumsy phrase. Cayley's is almost a lit era l rendering of the Italian: " Who had before in we,iding ringed me with his gem." THE PRESS. The following (canto 111., lines 37-8) is bad English and worse Italian—the misunderstand ing of "degli angeli" for " some angels" being a comic one : Are mingled with this wretched company Some of the angels who did not rebel. The true meaning is obvious : They with that evil choir are intermixed Of angels who did not indeed rebel. Line 46, All these are they which have no hope of death, spins out Questi non hanno Speranza di morte into something that Dante never said or could have intended ; for not these only, but all the other spirits, whether in hell, in purgatory, or in paradise, had not any such hope. Here we pause, pitching only at random on the last line of canto VI. of the Paradise: — Daily it would have praised him, and would praise. This is downright no-meaning, and can by no possible stratagem be made to square with Assaf lo loda, e pin lo loderebbe : Much it doth praise him, and would praise him more. We may add that the mangling of proper names is systematic. On the other hand, Mr. Pollock is entitled to credit for his selection of notes, as few and brief as practicable ; and his edition may be held to derive some additional attraction from the copies from Flaxmau and other sources which Mr. Scharf contributes. It will be inferred from the preceding re marks that we consider Mr. Pollock's version of the Commedia to be sounder in principle and more reliable in a matter-of-fact way than Cary's, but less ripe and fluent. We believe that the method pursued by Mr. Pollock may yet bear fruit, if more skilfully managed, in a very excellent and very valuable contribution to the knowledge of Dante among English readers; but, however excellent or however valuable such a literal blank-verse translation might be—and we feel conscious that it might be made as literal as Carlyle's prose render ing—we may continue to rate Cayley's the best produced or likely to appear, as being ably conducted and faithful—firstly, in sense often to literality ; and secondly, in the great difficulty and conclusive advantage of the rhymed metre. THE EAS TERN QUESTION. 1. A Year with the Turks ; or, Sketches of Travel in the European and Asiatic Dominions of the Sultan. By Warington W. Smyth, M.A. London :J. W. Parker and Son. 2. The Russo-Turkish Campaigns of 1828 and 1829: with aView of the Present State of Affairs in the East. By Colonel Chesney. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. 3. The Knout and the Russian ; or, the Muscovite Empire, the Czar, and his People. By Ger main de Lagny. London : Bogue. 1. WE look with great suspicion on any work professing to describe either the Turkish or the Russian empires, partly because the popu larity of the subject has brought out a shoal of worthless books, of which the only merit is an attractive titlepage—partly because Turkey has become a party question, and the literal, unexaggerated truth concerning it is harder to come at than ever. Mr. Wariugton Smyth, however, is neither a bookmaker nor a partisan. He has seen much ; his journey was not made in haste, nor did he travel as a great man, two things fatal to the English tourist in general ; he spoke the language of the country, mixed freely with the people, re mained long enough in one place to get acquainted with the interior of their lives and hear their real sentiments ; nor does he affect either to depreciate or extravagantly to pa negyriae the Government of that vast and strangely-constituted empire of which Western Europe has become the champion. There is even an apparent uncertainty in his judgment, arising out of the scrupulous care with which he weighs words and his anxiety to avoid exaggeration. His style is plain, mostly pleas ing, not wholly free from the conventional slang of travel-writers—such as " discussing," or " doing justice to," a meal, and the like— but in this respect rather less faulty than SATURDAY, usual, while his matter is valuable and much of it new. We have our doubts whether a personal memoir or journal of wayfaring— except in the case of exploring expeditions and journeys of discovery, where the perils undergone enhance the merit of success—be the best form in which the results of a tour can be given ; but Mr. Smyth only follows the common practice, and there is no egotism in his narrative. _ _ The quasi-civilisation of Constantinople has not pervaded more remote provinces, as wit ness the following scene on the borders of Koordistan : The kemala, with his vast conical turban of many colours, was always at hand, and, seeing him to be a man of vigour and enterprise, I was led to inquire why it was that his people should not cultivate larger tracts of ground, which would evidently well repay their labours. Beg," said he, " it is true that there is waste land in plenty, and that we might till it, and I might profit greatly by it. But, supposing I were to do as you propose, is not this source of gain too open to all eyes? Nu sooner should I have reaped the crops and stored my granaries than my enemies (for all in authority have such) would step forward to the Pacha of Diarbekir, the musheer, and say, This man has committed such and such an offence, but being a rich man, and having gained so and so much this year by his crops, he can pay a handsome fine ; ' and then the pacha would exclaim, Mashallah! you speak the truth ; I will send for him, and inshallah ! force him to pay well for his misdeeds.' And thus the fruits of the year's labour would be swallowed by the musheer and the informers." _ _ _ Such is the language to be heard on all sides, such the distrust and fear of all higher officials; and as the chief fears the cupidity of the musheer, so the rustic fears that of the petty governor. The hope of honest gain, without which all industry must expire, is thus unable to obtain a footing in the breast of the people, who know that so long as they have barely sufficient to clothe and feed themselves withal, so long only are they safe from grasping avarice. The regeneration of Turkey must remain only an empty sound, until the important point of provincial government is totally remodelled. That the pachas are nominated for an undetermined period, which may be only a few weeks or months, is the first great evil, for it acts as an incitement to commence their career by a system of exaction and pillage, intended, in the shortest possible time, to secure themselves a fortune. _ _ Secondly, the mode of levying the taxes, by which they chiefly enrich themselves, is one which it is only wonder ful does not lead to more frequent disturbances and in surrections. The amount is arbitrary on the part of the Government, and the people never know how much they must expect to pay. Ft gain, the mode of gathering them is so corrupt and unjust, that, whilst every one employed pockets a share of the spoil, the peasant is obliged to pay twice or thrice the sum which is received by Government as the tax. _ _ _ - To see a paths, whose coffers are filled with gold, surrounded by crowds of attendants, who pass their time in utter idleness, and who, not receiving any wages from him, exact all they can from their inferiors, is to look upon a specimen of the mode in which the great bulk of the labouring class is oppressed. Nor is it a marvel that the free Koords, when they see this system still in action, should prefer a vagabond life, and occasional marauding excursions, to the partial civilisation they might acquire bC a settled life in villages. Punishments are still rough. Near Tocat Mr. Smyth saw " a species of gallows, gar " niched on the crossbeam with long iron " spikes, ou which highway robbers are im " paled." To these a wretched Koord, lately caught in the act, had been fixed, " and, " though much lacerated and hanging from " the rusty irons, lingered for three days." As might be expected, the vices of Europe spread faster than its virtues. Drunkenness is on the increase; and Mr. Smyth, pushing in genuity to the verge of paradox, excuses it as being a means of promoting intercourse with Christians, and breaking down fanatical pre judices ! He forgets that the visible debase ment and demoralisation thus caused afford to fanatics the strongest argument against European habits which they can well employ. The old Mahometan character has fine points : the story here told illustrates one : Only one little trait of Turkish honesty may I intro duce, as it happened to fall under my own observation. A friend of mine, wanderingthrough the bazars, wished to buy an embroidered handkerchief of a Turkish shop keeper. He asked the price ; " Seventy-five piastres." " No," said he, aware that it is usual among all the traders, whatever their creed, to ask at first more than the value, " that is too much ; I will give you seventy ; " and as the dealer seemed to nod assent, he counted out the money. But his surprise was great when the bearded Osmanli, gravely pushing back to him twenty piastres, ob served, " This is more than the just price : it is always the custom here to bargain over a thing down to its fair value ; and as fifty piastres is my proper price, those twenty belong to you." Verily, not a few among our professing Christians might take a lesson from the believer in the Koran ! . _ Eastern simplicity of manners still prevails ; and, as community of tastes creates sympathy