The Sun.
London, England, 1869-10-26 00:00:00

of Horace that is thus manfully vindicated. As for
his merits they are not simply enumerated, they
are defined with admirable precision and with evi-
dences here and there of very subtle appreciation
in the course of Lord Lytton's Introduction. The
terseness of the great lyrist, his " study not to be
tedious," his keen perception of the picturesque,
his dramatic element in what are nevertheless
throughout purely lyrical compositions, his magical
power of transforming a picture into a scene or a
situation, the conformity of his style with oratorical
art in its very perfection, these and other Horatian
traits are here in this masterly disquisition
moat strikingly particularised. And in commenting,
upon the iteration by Horace of the ideas consti-
tuting the body of his ethics, Lord Lytton speaks
of it very beautifully as " having a charm of repose
similar to the prevalence of green in the tints of
nature." As for the particular text, from which Lord
Lytton has translated,'selecting it from among all the
other varying texts as the most reliably authentic, it
may here be remarked, en passant, that he has wisely
accorded the preference to that of Orelli, relying
upon Youge almost entirely for the punctuation. It
will be regarded as a matter of satisfaction, we
doubt not, by the majority of his readers, as it
has certainly been by ourselves, that Lori Lytton
has refrained from following pedantically either
Ritter or Munro in their modes of spelling, upon the
specious plea of their being more faithful tran-
scripts from the ancient manuscripts. Due regard,
however,has been paid by him to all the leading cog
mentators, particular attention among these being
frequently directed to the opinions of Macleane and
Dillenburger. Lord Lytton's labours throughout the
whole book, one may say, as he says himself, have
been almost equally those of Critic anl of Trans-
lator. Horace with
.him has been a study not of
yesterday, but, one is temptel to say, of all his life
In his own noble poem of "The Souls of Books,',
Lord Ly tton wrote years ago of these superb Odes—.

" This Horace is thy heart,
I hear it beating through each purple line."

And the pulsations of that true heart he has here
himself at last undertaken to interpret. The merest
non-classical English scholar, thanks to him,
through this version may listen to its throbbing
as through a stethoscope. Conscientiously, as
already intimated, though the work has been
cared for throughout, it has not for all that
escaped—what in a work of such scope and com-
plexity in truth was a thing inevitable—being
done unequally. While some of the translations are,
just simply, in one word, masterpieces, others one
cannot but recognize as, in certain respects, unsatis-
factory. Keen in his appreciation of the terseness
of Ilorace, Lord Lytton, nevertheless, sometimes
runs int) paraphrase. This occurs, however, it
should be said, bat very rarely indeed. Frequently
enough, howbeit, for the sole purpose, obviously, of
eking out the rhythmic flow of his measure, the trans-
lator adds--and, what is remarkable at these times,
adds without embellishing. Take, by way of exam-
ple, one of the most hackneyed passages in all
Horace—

Pallida mors tequo pulsat pede pauper= tabornas
Regumque turres.
The superfluities of the Eaglish version we shall
mark by italicising—
"But all the while, with eqUal step, pale Death strides on
anpausing,
Knocks at the lowly shed and regal towers."

Or, again, in the instance of words equally fami-
liar--

Dum loquimur, fugerit invida
!Etas : carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.
The echo given to which—with a sort of reverbera-
tion—being as follows :—,
" While we talk, grudging Time will be gone and a part of
ourselves be no more.
Seize to-day—for to-morrow it is which in thy belief
should be least."
A. strange epithet, moreover, occasionally slips in
by way of needless emphasis, as in—

Duke et decorum est pro patria mod--
" Glorious and sweet it is to die for the dear native land.'
Or, again, ai in—

Vixere fortes ante Agamomnona multi.
" Many bravo mon have lived long before Agamemnon."
Or, yet once more, in the version of—

Duke est desipero in loco
. . . to be unwisa

Iu titree and place is sweet."
As affording far more than merely a counterpoise
to atom flaws such as these, ho bvever, let us
throw into the opposing scale exemplars of
what we cannot but term radiantly fe:icitous
translation. Literal wherever he can be literal,
as in pulvis et umbra sumus, " we are dust and a
shade," or as in the phrase splendide niendax, which
is here expressed, through a happy equivalent, " by
glorious falsehood "—Lord Lytton often upon occa-
sion (without painting the lily, or gilding refined
gold, or adding a perfume to the violet) contrives
to impart a fresh bloom and an added grace to the
glowing worth of Horace which he is thus at the
moment graciously turning into English. If very
rarely, indeed, and but once in a way (as in Hi.
xv.) the flos puTureus rose= shrinks simply to " the
rose," losing, in the transformation, the glory of
its purple efflorescence—elsewhere (as in iv. i.)
the mere non sine fistula becomes " nor silent bo
the fluten reed "—while the
pede candido
In morem Salium ter quatient humum

has, in truth, it must be said, adequate rendering,
through the words—

" As thrice, in Salian dance,
Quakes the green sod to feet that twinkle white."

Sufficient, too, and more than simply sufficient, is
the version here given of the memorable—

Decodit arata triremi, et
Post equitem sedit atra curs.
En glished thus-
4. Black care sits by him in tho bark,

Behind hint, on the steed."
Reasonably accurate, of course, but scarcely so
felicitous as this, to our thinking, is the—

Si fractus illabatur orbis
Impavidum ferient ruinm.
Here given as—
" If in fragments were scattered the world,
Him its ruins would strike undismayed."
Extravagant, even to the extent of being ridiculous,
it might seem, to those who have not as yet ex-
amined these translations for themselves,if we were
to commend Lord Lytton for having, here and
there, actually improved upon the terseness of
Horace ! Yet how otherwise eau we possibly speak ?
when we find at the close of the twelfth ode of the
fourth book, the—

" . . . minuentnr atria
Carmine curte—
sharpened, condensed, and perfected into—

"Song lessens sorrow."
No difficulty is ever once, by the way—what one
may call—slurred over by Lord Lytton. Frequently
when the maze is the most entangled, it is thridded
by him the most deftly. All that he here actually
passes sub silentio are, for decorous reasons (already
indicated) whole odes like the one having as its
first line, Non vides quanto moveas periclo, or that
other beginning, 0 crudelis huc ; or, again, an occa-
sional fragment of one such as the closing morsel of
the fourth ode in the first book ; or, finally, whole
Epodes (there are three of them thus directly skip-
ped), such as the Rogare longe putidam to sxculo.
How carefully the noble critic weighs in the
balance of his judgment the conflicting views
of the commentators, even as to the significance
of a single word, before he himself ventures to
decide upon its interpretation, can hardly be more
strikingly instanced, we conceive, than by reference
to his note on—

Militia simul
Fessas cohortos addidit oppidis.
Addidit, addidit, reddidit are the varied reading of
tie ancient manuscripts. Orelli preferring " addi-
dit," as signifying "new towns or colonies"—Dillen-
burger, on the contrary, preferring " abdidit," as
meaning, according to the interpretation of the
scholiasts, " winter quarters"—Lord Lytton (while
directing attention to the fact that Orelli is enabled
to cite, from Tacitus, in favour of his argument, a
kindred use of the very word he selects by prefer-
ence, and noting besides this the circumstance that
ISlaclene agrees with Orelli) extricates himself from
the snare woven by the contending critics by means
of this ingenious decision—that, the true reading
being still uncertain, he purposely leaves it thus
equally vague in the translation—

" Settling in peaceful towns war-wearied cohorts."
As further illustrative in a very remarkable man-
ner of the keenness and shrewdness of the critical