The Sun.
London, England, 1856-02-26 00:00:00

LINES L.

L ITERATURE.

The Divine Comedy • or, The Inferno, Purgatory,
and Paradise of Dante Alighieri. Rendered into
English by Frederick Pollock, Esq. With Fifty
Illustrations, drawn by George Scharf, jun.
Chapman and Hall.
An exquisite gift book—the very jewel of a
library—being, as it is, one of the grandest poems
ever penned by mortal, faithfully and gracefully
translated from the original Italian into our Eno.
lish vernacular, and adorned by a most delicate
pencil with a profusion of classic and imaginative
illustrations. Again we say, an exquisite gift-
book, being all this, as it actually is : the Divine
Comedy of Dante Alighieri, embellished by the
crayon of George Scharf, and rendered into Eng-
lish by the pen of Frederick Pollock—the artist
proving himself to be no less ingenious and fanciful
than the translator_ shows himself to have been
faithful and competent throughout. Perused in
any form—in the melifluous terza rima of the
original—in Cary's prose translation—in Pollock's
recent version of it in blank verse—how wonderful
it that Divine Comedy, that threefold and celes-
tial epic—the Paradise, the Purgatory, the Pande-
monium ! If, as Lord Byron said in one of his re-
pentant notes to " Don Juan," one can almost hear
the footsteps of the elder gods resounding through
the sonorous verse of Keats while reading his sublime
fragment of " Hyperion "—how truly may it not
be said that while reading the "Divine Comedy "
of Dante, one can hearken to the howlings of the
damned in the "Inferno," hear the sweet and
solemn harmonies of repentant life-in-death through
the "Purgatorio," or watch the gleaming features
and the glowing robe of the angelic Beatrice
floating for ever and ever in the glorifying at-
mosphere of the Paradise. What marvellous visions
of beauty and horror they are, crowding upon us
with aspects so weird arid awful for the most part
as we follow the shade of Dante and the attendant
ghost of Virgil through the regions of the after
life—" down to Hell," by Acheron, by Styx, by
Phlegethon—up, up, from the „sea, beyond the
flowery valley, past the successive regions of the
Proud, of the Envious, of the Angry, of the Sloth-
ful, of the Avaricious, of the Prodigal, of the
Gluttonous, of the Luxurious, even with the limits
of the crowning garden of the Earthly Paradise—
" higher still and higher," beyond the " Sphere of
Fire," successively more and more heavenward to
the Moon, to Mercury, to Venus, to the Sun, to
Mars, to Jupiter, to Saturn, to Gemini in the fan-
cied regions of the fixed stars, onward, outward,
upward, further and further, beyond the Primum,
Mobile into the infinite and ineffable Empyrean of
" Paradise." 0 the wondrous flight— the
most daring ever essayed by mortal imagination !
And to follow the dauntless poet in this his flight
of audacity the merely English scholar finds, as it
were, wings given to him by Mr. Pollock's transla-
tiou. A translation most remarkable for its faith-
fulness. Insomuch that we might pronounce in
regard to these 580 pages the dulcet panegyric
uttered by the bard of the " Paradiso "in refer-
ence to the faces seen in the beatific vision recorded
in the third Canto of the third division of the
" Divine Comedy " :
" Quail per vetri transparent' e tersi,
0 ver per acque nitide e tranquille,
Non si profonde che i fondi sein persi.
Tornan de' nostri visi le pastille
Debili si, che perla in bianca fronte
Non vien men forte alle nostre papilla ;
Tali vid' io pia facce a parlar pronte."
Yes ! tali—tali—yet non si profonde che i fondi
sein, persi : though Debili si, che perla in bianca
fronte non, rim men forte alle nostre pupille !
Ind many pearls of great price there are, dropping
ever and ever from the lips of the glorions poet as
he speaks—pearls so reflected through the truth-
fel and transparent medium of Mr. Frederick
Pollock's fanciful and eloquent translation !
It was Coleridge, if we recollect rightly, who some-
where about 1818 first awakened public attention
to the merits of the prose version of Dante given
to the world some time before by the Rev. Henry
Francis Cary—a version which had, nevertheless,
remained wholly unnoticed until thus spoken of iu
earnest terms of praise by the authoritative voice
of the author of " Christabel." This justice was
done, moreover, by the genial and discerning cri-
ticism of Coleridge through the opportunity pre-
sented to him for so doing by a lecture he delivered
upon the subject of the sublime poetry of Dante
Alighieri. Whereupon the reviewers of the Edin-
burgh and Quarterly " followed suit" immediately,
and the reputation of Cary as a Translator was in
a manner instantly made and permanently esta-
blished. Mr. Pollock, in his turn, deserves pre-
cisely such an appreciative lecturer to give the key-
note to after poeans in his honour to be chaunted
by the critical Boanerges of the blue-and-buff and
the stone-coloured old Whig and Tory quarterlies.
Happily the time may yet come sooner than might
be anticipated even by those dubious lookers-
on who pin their faith exclusively to
the poetic prose of Cary. When it does
—among the admirers of the charming volume
under notice may we take rank, as numbered in
the category of its prophetic appreciators ! Honour,
meanwhile, say we, without, waiting for any such
lecture, honour to the scholarly hand that penned
this strictly accurate, and yet gracefully rhetorical
English version of the "Divine Comedy"—a ver-
sion beautifully embellished by the classic limnings
lavished upon the letterpress by the Flaxinan-
like pencil of George Scharf, the younger. Alto-
gether the volume may be accepted as a tributary
memorial to the genius of Dante not unworthy of
the literary and artistic enterprise of this nine-
teenth century—a monument nobler than cue of
brass or marble, and more durable, according to
the familiar boast 'of Horace Commemorative of
the heroic student-life' comprised between the
memorable dates of 1265 and 1321, the dates of
the birth and death of that grand old Dante
Alighieri of Florence, whose name his colossal
masterpiece of the " Divine Comedy" has securely
immortalised.

Men of the Time. Biographical Sketches ef Emi-
nent Literary Characters. One Vol. David
Bogue.
- - - - •

A biographical dictionary of eminent contempo
raries—hastily collected together, it would almost
seem, for the purpose of puffinge' certain sixth-rate
names into a spurious sort of an artificial celebrity.
The original germ of the work appeared three or
four years since in the form of a small squab vo-
lume of 400 and odd pages—now extended into
a little unwieldy monster of nearly a thousand.
At the outset the production bore evidence from
preface to finis of the merest book making. Snip-
pings from country newspapers, and all sorts of
little rags and tags of information, for the most part
worthless, were the raw materials out of which
this veracious instructor appeared to be chiefly
fabricated. The article devoted to the
biography of Dickens, for example, was
eked out through some eight vapid pages by
about the oily good thing in it—viz., the bodily
reprint of a letter addressed by that glorious no-
velist to our contemporary, the Times, giving a
description of the rabble congregated outside
Horsemonger-lane Gaol to witness the execution of
those horrible wretches the Mannings. The omia-
sions
,observable in the work, even in its second
edition (1853), were something preposterous. And.
with these errors of omission there were errors of
commission, if possible, yet more preposterous.
There was an especial little glorification, for
example, of George Dawson of Birmingham
and not a word, good, bad, or indifferent
about Samuel Warren, author of " Ten Thou-
sand a-Year" and the " Diary of a Late Physi-
cian." So with regard to many another idol of
some obscure little clique, and many another
world-wide celebrity. As the compilation has
grown it has, as a matter of course, given signs of
very considerable improvement. Numerous men
of mark previously overlooked have been at length
remembered, and their names duly inscribed upon
the long catalogue of eminent contemporaries.
But with the really distinguished, other persons
have had their lives emblazoned upon Mr. Bogue's
scroll of fame, whose lights are still hid away in darks
corners under bushels, and by this premature ex-
posure to the winds of heaven are threatened with
being more effectually extinguished by means
of the very puffs designed to blow them into
a blaze of renown—a " conflagration of genius"
expected, of course, by the puffer-general ulti•
mately to set the Thames on fire. The uninten-
tionally destruetive influence of these same mis-
rtaaktheenrifffireffeslywbilyl tbheeabiduerdstsof
moreover,
we conjecture,
laughter certain to be
provoked by their extravagance, from every reader
blessed with a keen sense of the ridiculous. Pane-
gyrics, some of them are, kindred in their preter-
natural absurdity with that which has just led Mr.
Ruskin into the ludicrous gaucherie of mentioning
quietly, and, as a matter of course in the same
breath, as sages (vide Vol. lll.of " Modern
Painters ")—Plato, Carlyle, and
amazing little demigods in Noah' Helps ! Such
s-Ark-coats and
all-round collars as are here strutted out
r to the astonished gaze of the multitude and pelted
with sugar plums and bouquets, like the punchi-
nellos of a carnival, or the debadeurs and pierrots of
a masquerade. 0 the wonderful little emulate of
insignificance who are here vaunted into a kind of
angelic men-mountains ! Figures shown to us
through a magnifying
medium of infatuation until
they assume to themselves the apparent dimensions
of colossi. Nevertheless when the compiler lists
he can so contrive that his information becomes at
once instructive and entertaining. Several of the
more important biographical sketches contained in
the new and enlarged issue of "Men 9f the Time "

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