The Sun.
London, England, 1856-02-18 00:00:00

L ITERATURE.

JONATHAN FREKE SLINGSBY.

Poems. By John Francis Waller, LL.D. James
111‘Glashan.
Have you heard of J. F. Slingsby,
Slingsby of the manly chest,
How he slays the snapping Turtles,
In the regions of the West?-

reading, for the "snapping turtles" of Bon
Gaultier, all literary impostors, and for " the
regions of the West," Ireland. Of course—every-
body who is anybody has heard of him. Every,
body has, of course, heard of Jonathan Freke
Slingsby—bas read him—has laughed over his ex-
hilarating drolleries, and sighed over his amiable
sentimentalism. Every one who has an eye for fun
and frolic, for the humorous and the poetical,
knows almost by heart the " Slingsby Papers"—
the contributions of Jonathan Freke to the Maga
of Dublin—himself its Christopher North, and
Timothy Tickler, and Irish Shepherd, all rolled
into one ! Has he not long been its editor ? is
he not still its editor ? the best editor the Hiber-
nian Maga has had since the harum-scarum, rol-
licking reign of one Captain Harry Lorrequer !
Don't we all count, as upon a thing of course,
upon our finding, month after month, in the
pages of the clever old Trill. Coll, organ one
of those delightful effusions, half pathetic
verse, half humorous prose, by the penning
of which, Jonathan Freke Slingsby has won
for himself his own capital, delightful, pecu-
liar reputation. Well—here, in this charming little
volume of "Poems"—we have him at last in pro-
prui persona, and no longer in mere masquerade.
Ensign Beverley no more, but the veritable Cap-
tain Absolute. The mask of Mr. Slingsby dropped
—we recognise under the hood of the familiar
domino, the features of Dr. Waller. The genuine
Simon Pure is at length " brought to book" lite-
rally. It is " out," if in no other way at the end
of the work under notice, through the medium of
the fly-leaf advertisement. Rice Signum--"By
the same Author, THE SLINGSBY PAPERS, &C."
All hail ! to Dr. Waller in his own entity therefore,
and no longer half hidden by his facetious 113e1G-
donyin, his fantastic soubriquet, his quaint, queer,
odd, ridiculously circumstantial nom de plume—
Jonathan Freke Slingsby, eke contributor to, and
editor of, the Dublin University Magazine. Dr.
Waller, in truth, is to the Dublin University what
the famous Dr. Magian, of glorious memory, was,
once upon a time, to Eraser's Magazine—a prodigy
at once of animal spirits and scholarly accomplish-
ments. Learned and lively, witty and wise—how
shall we say it ? to the height of the ludicrous and
the depth of erudition ! Yet forgetting, as we
needs must, for awhile, his master-hand in the
authorship of the " Papers" by his alter ego J.
F. Slingsby—turn we our attention here for a
time exclusively to these " Poems" by himself,
in his own proper person as J. F. Waller. They
aro the natural express of the fruitfulness of his
poetic imagination. Not, that is to say, the second
and third squeezings of the vat, but the spon-
taneous running over of the wine of life—poesis
—as, in the grape countries, when the vine
gatherers collect the first rich streams exuding from
the mere weight of the ripe bunches, heaped one
upon another in a purple mountain of mellowness !
"Drink deep or taste not the Castalian spring !"
It will glide Pleasantly enough we warrant even
over the palate of the more fastidious. There is
temptation to the quaffing, moreover, even in the
very title of one of our author's minor productions
c., Bibe Amice de Mu)," suggested by a red
clay drinking-cep found at Pompeii, with that
alluring inscription around it, and still preserved
in the Neapolitan Musee Borbonico. Let us con-
fess it at once, however —we prefer the
sons and the fugitive pieces happily con-
stituting the bulk of the little volume before us,
to semi-Tenny-sonian love tales in verse such as
the iirst and longest of the "Poems" in the
collection, the one entitled "Ravenscroft Hail."
The daintiest, and most delicious, and delectable
morsel in which, Dr. Waller must forgive us for
saying, is the little fragment quoted in it from
the " Talking Oak" of the Laureate. Quoted,
however, in one verse, only to be spoilt (we will
believe at once, entirely by a slip of the printer),
namely—where it should have been, instead of

" A tear-drop trembled from its source
And down my surface crept.
My sense of touch is somewhat coarse,

But I believe she wept."
The typographical arrangements of the volume,
however, aro here and there by DO means irre-
proachable. As, for (another) example, where the
four lines from the original Italian of Metastasio
are given by Dr. Waller as the refrain-motto to
his charming translation of the old ecclesiastic's
" Hymn to Venus," might surely have been given
intact, being (to say the most of it) a quatrain so
exceedingly simple and sententious :
Scendi propinia,
Col tuo splendors,
0 bella Veoere
Madre d'Amoro.
A. charming translation we repeat this to be, to our
thinking, this sweet and dulcifluous version of the
melodious and dulcet how a Ven-eie of Metastasio:
and yet hardly so much a translation after all as au
elaborate paraphrase. Otherwise we should never
find developing into such ingenious labyrinths of
metaphor and versification, under the anglicising
auspices of Dr. Waller, th'at rapid glimpse of the
glories of cloudland vouchsafed to us by the Abbate
Pietro Metastasio, when he sings A Ventre—

Per to le tremule
Faci del cielo
Dell' ombre squarciatio

L'umido Tejo.
Or again, where the lovely phantasm of the Pagan
goddess is apostrophised by the Christian priest in
the courtly phrases of Parnassus—
Vien dal tuo spirito
Dolce e fecondo
CR. the d'arnabile
Racchiude it mondo.

Enough, however, in the way of what might, if
further insisted on, lie at once objected to, not un-
reasonably, as hypercritical fastidiousness in regard
to an English version of Metastasio, which, if not
a strictly accurate translation, is at any rate a very
graceful paraphrase. Several of the " Songs"
given in an earlier portion of the volume we
aro not at all surprised to observe have
been already set to music by different composers.
Harmonious lyrics as they are, for the most part
suggestive of melody and instrumental accompani-
ment. Witness this Dr. Waller's exquisite ditty,
entitled, tenderly, Cushle-mo-chrec, otherwise—