The Sun.
London, England, 1863-10-27 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Poems and Translations. By Edward Vaughan
Kenealy, LL.D. One Vol., pp. 460. Reeves

and Turner.

As Judge Blackstone'wrote his Farewell to the
Muses in a poetical outburst, so far like the song
of the nightingale that it was at the least " most
musical, most melancholy," so, like wise, has written
Dr, Edward Kenealy. With this difference, how-
ever—that in Dr. Kenealy's Farewell the pathetic
is at times strangely, almost, one might say, hyste-
rically, mingled with the humorous. The sobs are
not unfrequently interrupted by wild shrieks of
laughter. As a collection of poetical pieces of a very
miscellaneous character, the volume before us is, in
many ways and for many reasons, very remarkable.
It is in one sense, if so paradoxical a phrase might
for a moment be just barely tolerated, a sort of a
posthumous bcok published during the author's
lifetime. For it is so—partially and actually—in
this way: it is posthumous in regard to the
poet's youth. These Poems were, as Dr.
Kenealy tells us in his preface, originally
intended to precede the publication of his
Xe-w Pantomiine. Many of the productions here
collected together are manifestly enough the effu-
sions of that happy " golden age" for us all—la
jeunesse. That sweet spring-time in the Year of
Life for each ! The time—hcw often wistfully looked
back to now !—when we went a-maying ! Poems
like these of the vernal season, of the early morn-
ings, when the flowers were opening, and the dews
sparkling, and thO delight of life was new—may
be found here by the reader scattered up and down
the volume very refreshingly. That is one of the
peculiarities we have alluded to, as especially no•
ticeable in this book, published as it is by its
author during what Longfellow tenderly speaks of
as " the winds of autumn and the first fall of the
snow." Another curious particularity here on the
part of the writer is visible at the first momentary
glance at his title page. The word translations
being far more conspicuous, there, than the word
poems—meaning, by the last-mentioned word, poems
of an original character. Yet, strange though
this is upon the surface, when we
come to look more closely into the depths of the
current of thought flowing down these 460 pages—
far more for the most part than a mere rivulet of
rhyme running (according to Sheridan's droll alli-
teration) through a meadow of margin—the empha-
sis, so to speak, laid upon that ordinarily subordi-
nate word translations on the title-page, becomes in
no way at all so very surprising. For, what are
these same translations by Dr. Kenealy ? Transla-
tions they are such as render the book almost a poly-
glot edition—translations so various that they might
have amused the leisure hours of a leviathan of lan-
guages, like the late wonderful Cardinal Mezzofanti.
Upon the mention of whose world-famous name as
the very Paragon of Philologists, we may avail
ourselves of this first opportunity to relate what we
may at once entitle
AN ORIGINAL ANECDOTE ABOUT MEZZOFANTI—as
told to us by an accomplished Welch gentle-
man recently returned from Rome—a Welch-
man, not only as born in Wales of Welch
parents, but as heart and soul a descendant of the
ancient Britons, speaking the Welch language, a
cumstance not very general among the more highly
educated and patriotic of Welchmen of the upper
class. Our informant, by the way, as a native of
North Wales, speaks fluently and familiarly the
dialect of North Wales—finding it to this
day, however, a matter of extreme difficulty
(though himself a Welchman) to understand, or
be understood by, a native of South Wales
—so widely different are the two dialects. Yet
upon the testimony of our Welch friend, how stood
the matter in respect to those two diametrically
different dialects, in the instance of that most mar-
vellous of linguists, Cardinal Mezzofanti ? Mezzo-
fanti—remember--never having, all his life, been
in Wales, either North or South ! Why, the matter
stood simply thus—that Cardinal Mezzofanti could
converse with perfect facility, (whenever circum-
stances threw them together), either with John
Gibson, the great sculptor, or with Henry Williams,
the eminent landscape painter, the one a native of
South Wales, the other of North Wales. The diver-
sities of dialect baffling an accomplished retire of
the land in which they occur, proving no difficulty
or impediment whatever to one so rarely endowed
with the gift of tongues as his Eminence Cardinal
Mezzofanti.

Returning to Dr. Kenealy, however, and his
translations, we find the latter introduced afflu-
ently upon these pages from 271 to 459—from
the Greek, from the Latin, from the Swedish, from
the Danish, from the Spanish, from the Magyar,
from the Italian, from the German, from
the Portuguese, from the Irish, from the Arabic, from
the Bengali, from the Persian! Translations, among
others, from Homer, and Catullus, and Mendoza,
and Petrarch, and Vietor 119 go, and Camoens, and
Goethe ! As a pretty little preliminary pastime,
the introductory " Sonnet" (reprinted, as a footnote
tells us, from an earlier volume of verses published
originally several years ago) is translated by our
author himself, not only into Latin, and German,
and Irish—the former we may venture to say most
gracefully, the latter, we must confess, being utterly
incomprehensible to us—but, in addition to
all that, Dr. Kenealy must needs give three
distinct versions of that one sonnet, on page
3, on page 4, and on page 5 in Hindostanee.
We suppose there are are but two or three men in
this country, who could, with ease and pleasure to
themselves, conn these manifold " translations"
(from and into English) by Edward Vaughan
Kenealy, weighing all them discriminatively against
their respective origim.ls, in the balance of an
appreciative judgment—there are, let us repeat it,
we should suppose but one or two in the whole
country who could really do this with ease and
pleasure to themselves, Dr. Bowring let us say, or
his Eminence Cardinal Wiseman. Yet it is a man
as accomplished as Dr. Kenealy, a ripe scholar, a
writer gifted with no small share of eloquence in
rhythmical composition—who can nevertheless have
the exceeding bad taste to mix the true grain
with so much mere draff and husks—husks
and draff that nearly choke us in our
endeavour to swallow them. What possibly,
for example, could have possessed Dr. Ken ealy
to write, to correct the proof-sheet, actually to
publish, such mere lyrical jibbering, as that song
poem, doggrel, what shall we call it? (pp. 264-5)
--entitled " The Three Wolves," with a burden or
refrain at the close of each stanza, for all the
world like that inarticulate baby-talk, familiar iu
the nursery, when the palm of the hand is rapidly
patted against the little rosy lips—
,6 Witte, wan, wau, wau, watt I
Wille, woh, woh, woh, woh I
Whit to whoo I whit to whoo I woh I "
But the " Nursery Rhymes," as here actually
preserving for us, to the number of nine—one
a-piece for the Muses in their second childhood !
those, in truth, are very marvels of effrontery, put
forth gravely, as they are, by a learned adult like
Dr. Kenealy for indefinite preservation. Shall
we so far partake of the silliness rampant in these
same Nursery Rhymes as to give one or two of them
in the way of quotation ? Take the following—

Little black Bob
Was a desperate snob—
His tongue was as sooty as grandmother's hob;
But the brain that he had
Was so hopelessly bad,
There wasn't in Bedlam one equally mad.
That, we take it, is a case de lunatic° inquirendo,
Or, read the bllowing—

There was a man,
He took his knife,
And he said to a lady—
" Will you be my wife ?
For if you wo'nt,
I'll have your life"—
" Sir," says she,
" be your wife."
That being clearly a case for the Court of Probate
and Divorce. If we venture upon giving just one
more—Say the following
LITTLE JACK SNIPE.
Little Jack Snipe,
He found some tripe,
And didn't know how to cook it,—
So a cat came up,
And gobbled it up,
Saying, " lhat' s the way Icook it—"
we can only say if such morceaux are specimens of
our author's taste, whether of rhyme or rearion—