The Sun.
London, England, 1866-09-01 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, SATLIMAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 1, 1866.

thinking such evidence of prudence and economy a
much better test of character than a mere residen-
tial qualification. Mr. LAING declared that any
good and comprehensive Reform Bill should have
his support, whoever introduced it, and this is the
spirit which we trust will animate all earnest Re-
formers. The question is a complex one, and the
vaned conditions of our social and political life
cannot be disposed of by a few theories. The re-
presentative system must be brought into harmony
with the character and wishes of the population, or
it will not suezeed in commending itself to the pub-
lic, or in fulalling its obligations.

The arrival of the Java, with news from New
York to the 22d, gives us some interesting details of
the immediate result of the Philadelphia Convention.
It is evident that it has materially strengthened
President JOHNSON'S position, since it has proved
the sense of the country to be entirely on his side in
oppOsition to the Radicals, who spared no abuse of
his policy and himself. The conviction was grow-
ing that the Radicals in reality only represented
their own particular faction, but the action of the
Convention has given the signal for so strong
and unanimous an expression of public
opinion that even the effrontery of the
extreme party can hardly refuse to acknowledge it.
A committee have visited the PRESIDENT to present
him with a copy of the proceedings in Philadelphia.
Mr. JOHNSON made a speech in return, reiterating
his determination to maintain his policy, and de-
claring the Convention to be more important than
any since 1787. The resolutions of the Convention
were, he said, a second Declaration of Indepen-
dence. The interests involved are certainly national,
and the result might affect the whole future system
of American Government, as well as the immediate
consequences to the people, both North and South.
The question of peace or war, of loyalty
and union, or sedition and rebellion, were
trembling in the balance, and who can say what the
consequence of another outbreak in the South might
be ? With Mexico in its present unsettled condi-
tion what a temptation there would be for
any great European Power, animated by that
madness for conquest and aggression which
possesses so potent an influence over some
nations to unite with the Southerners, and
thus present a formidable front to the North and to
the Mexican Republicans. The dangers which
threaten the peace and prosperity of the United
States should the Radical programme be carried
out, and discord kept up throughout the land, are
as various as they are vast. It is idle to suppose
that the Southern States would remain as tranquil
as they have hitherto been should the system which
degrades them from political equality, and rejects
their representatives, be much longer maintained.
They have been relying on the sympathy expressed
for them by the people of the North, and waiting
patiently in expectation of receiving political justice.
But matters could not have gone on much longer
without some definite change, and this has been
inaugurated by the proceedings at Philadelphia.
Encouraged by their support, the PRESIDENT has
issued a proclamation declaring Texas restored to
the Union, and stating that " peace, order, tran-
quillity, and civil authority now exist throughout
the United States." After this it will be difficult to
maintain the right of excluding from Congress any
properly elected representatives. The two services
intend to do their part towards the discomfiture of
the Radicals, for General GRANT stood by the PRE-
SIDENT during his speech to the delegates, and a
convention of soldiers and sailors has been called for
the 17th of September, to assemble at Cleveland,
and endorse the PRESIDENT'S policy. We learn by
the Atlantic Telegraph that Mr. JOHNSON has visited
New York, and met with an enthusiastic reception,
so that he may be satisfied that the great body of
the public has pronounced unmistakeably in favour
of his humane, enlightened, and truly national
policy.

LATEST INTELLIGENCE.

(REUTER'S TELEGRAMS.)

THE CESSION OF VENETIA.
• PARIS Sept. 1.

By virtue of a treaty signed on the 24th August
last between France and Austria for regulating the
cession of Venetia, the transfer of the fortresses and
territory belonging to the kingdom of Lombardo-
Venetia will be effected by an Austrian commis-
sioner, who will hand them over to a French com-
missioner, and the latter will arrange with the
Venetian authorities for giving up to them their
rights of possession. The populations will be called
upon to choose themselves their future destiny.

On the 11th August, the Emperor addressed the
following letter to King Victor Emmanuel:—" I
have learnt with pleasure that your Majesty agrees
to the armistice and peace preliminaries which have
been signed between their Majesties the King of
Prussia and the Emperor of Austria. It is there-
fore probable that an era of tranquility is about to
open up for Europe. Your Majesty is aware that I
accepted the offer of Venetia in order to save that
province from useless bloodshed. My intention was
alway to restore it to itself, in order that Italy might
be free from the Alps to the Adriatic, and mistress of
her own destinies. Venetia will soon be able to express
her wishes by means of universal suffrage. Your
Majesty will acknowledge that in these circum-
stances the influence of France has been again exer-
cised in favour of humanity and the influence of
peoples."

THE PEACE NEGONATIONS.
VIENNA, SEPT. 1.

The Presse of to-day says :—" We learn that
the peace negotiations between Austria and Italy
are rapidly and satisfactorily progressing. The con-
clusion of pea-ce may be an accomplished fact within
ten or twelve days, since it has been agreed to
transfer to special commissions, which are to be•
assembled after the conclusion of peace, the discus-
sion of all the negotiations requiring a longer time
for consideration, and only to establish for the pre-
sent the principles of a peace treaty.
" The discussions upon these questions will be
reserved to the commissions by an article in the
treaty of peace."

JAMAICA.
ARRIVAL OF TILE CUBAN.
LIVERPOOL, Sept. 1.
The steamer Cuban, with dates from Jamaica to
the 11th ult., has arrived here.
The Jamaica papers eulogise Sir Henry Storks.
Crime was dhninishiiag in the island.

A TRIBUTE TO HORACE.

A charming piece of scholarly criticism, com-
prising within it one or two masterly translations,
adorns the newly-published number of Fraser for
September. It relates to Horace, under the apt
title of " The Poet of Middle-Aged Men." It
passes carelessly, almost casually, in review several
of the recent translators into English verse of
the Odes and Epodes of that peerless lyrist : Lord
Derby, for example, and Mr. Gladstone, Mr..
Theodore Martin, Lord Redesdale, and Lord
Ravensworth. It evidences, throughout, on the part
of this anonymous critic in Fraser, a sense of dissa-
tisfaction, or at the least of incomplete satisfaction,
with even the most felicitous renderings of the most
skilled, sensitive, and accomplished among these
five eminent hands. Two quotations from the
paper to which we are here referring, we must per-
force indulge at once ourselves and our readers
with, the one illustrating the writer's competence as
a critic, the other his skill as a translator. Of his
critical acumen let the following passage be taken
as sufficiently demonstrative :

No man has revealed his whole being to us in his writ-
ings so thoroughly as Horace has done, so it is impossible
for any one to translate him well who has not become in-
timately acquainted with all his feelings and habits as man
with man. His translator should have a considerable affinity
with him in point of temperament, as we have already
remarked; and perhaps there is no qualification more re-
quisite for the man who would thoroughly enjoy Horace and
duly make him known to us, than that he should have de-
cidedly passed the flush of youth—be beginning to
gravitate towards the fogie class. For Horace, as some
one has right well said, is emphatically the poet of middle-
aged men. He grows upon us as we go down-hill. He is
not a poet whom our young enthusiasm reverences as an
oracle. He is not sublime, he is not even eloquent, per-
haps ; there is no thunder and music and pomp' of
utterance about him ; and we are very apt to pass him by
among the more majestic members of his brotherhood. It
is after we have had some considerable experience of the
world and its ways that we begin to discern the exquisite
delicacy of observation with which the poet noted down
the various colours of life and its minor morals, as they
presented themselves to his mind's eye under a state of
civilisation curiously analogous in many respects to our
own ; and the happy touches of wit by means of which he
brings his own conceptions within the view of his readers.
At such a periud of life too we feel inclined to regard in
our favourite poet rather the qualities of a friend than
those of a guide and philosopher : and we love a moralist
who can make us happier while he makes us better—even
though this characteristic of Horace's satire may have
seemed a weakness to the grave and earnest Persius, in
whose compliment there surely lurks something of con-
tempt, when he says :

Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico
Tangit, et admissus circum pranordia ludit.

In a word, when we love to sit in easy chairs, and have
easy chairs to sit in, then is the time that we most learn to
appreciate Horace, the most companionable of poets.
It seems to follow that, as so many various attributes
must combine to make a man a good translator of Horace,
we can hardly expect to find any very striking successes
achieved among the many Englishmen who have been at-
tracted to the task. The grace of cunning words in which
Horace .so wonderfully excelled is just the quality above
all others which most stimulates the ambition of the trans-
lator. He feels the charm which dwells about the mere
term or phrase of the original, and it is a delight as well as
a triumph to him to hit upon some term or phrase in his
own language which seems to convey, in a greater or less
degree, the like charm. But at the same time this grace
is of all others the most difficult to reproduce ; and it is of
so subtle a nature, that even when the translator has most
joyfully satisfied himself, it is still quite a chance whether
the chosen words strike his readers as furnishing the precise
equivalent to the original. Thus it happens that (so far as we
can venture to trust our own impressions) while so many
translators of Horace have hit off particular passages with
a happy skill which is above all praise, and fo hich every
student of Horace is grateful to them, there 7fe none tha t
do not continually disappoint us by some divergency or
other from the manner of their poet.
We have said thus much partly, we must confess, as a
sort of excuse for our presumption in giving our own ver-
sion of such passages as we shall cull from Horace's pages.
And yet we do not know that there is an excuse necessary.
To those who are interested in the tricks of translation, it
is both amusing and useful to set before them a variety of
versions of the same passage for the purp ,se of compa-
rison. Not only may one translator happen to seize on
some tint or tone which another has missed ; but the mere
examination of the different efforts serves to suggest to the
reader's mind a clearer conception of the individual passage
in question, and a clearer conception, too, of the nature of
a translator's work in ganeral. As regards the first con-
tingency, the possibility that some very inferior translator
may chance to succeed where his betters have failed, let
us remember that while so many unhappy attempts (of
which Cowper's is perhaps the worst) have been made to
imitate that remarkable line of Homer, in which you hear
the ringing of the bow :

afivri Si aayyi yiver' apyvpioto f 3 oto.
the only one which can be said to have caught the sound
of the original is that by Tickell
:
Then sprung the string and twanged the silver bow.
And yet poor Tickell was but a very humble labourer in
the same field with the many great names that have been
associated with the English rendering of Homer. So with
Tickell's fortune before use why should not we be tempted
to take our chance of filling up some of the gaps (of which
there will always be abundance left) in the adequate re-
presentation of Horace to English readers? It is always
a fair challenge to those who assume to sit in judgment on
the work of others—" Try what you can make of it your-
self." And if all critics were to do as we, do and expose
themselves to be criticised in their turn, there would be
much less of rash criticism, and much less of reasonable
wrath excited among the genus irritabile vatum.

And now of the critic's power as a translator, let the
subjoined be accepted as affording of that an ade-
quate attestation. It is his version of the famous
Eleventh Ode in the Second Book " Eheu ! fuzases
Posthume Posthume labunt ur anni" :
Ah ! Postumus, year after year
Goes gliding by apace ;
No pious prayer of ours can clear
Its wrinkles from the face,
Tho intrusion of old age defer,
Or win from Death some grace.
Ah, no, my friend, though every morn
Three hundred steers of thine
In votive hecatombs adorn
Relentless Pluto's shrine ;
Whose circling streams, a ghastly bourne,
Within his realm confine
Tityus and threefold Geryon :
Streams that we all must pass—
All who are fed by Nature's boon—
Of every rank and race ;
Whether we fill earth's lordliest throne
Or peasant's lowly place.
What boots it that our lot is cast
Far from the battle-fray ?
What that on shore our days are passed
When Adria breaks in spray ?
Or that we shun the southern blast
In autumn's sickly day ?
Down to the tide in sluggish coil
By dark Cocytus poured,
Our visit in some little while
Is verily assured ;
To see the Danaids, and the toil
By Sisyphus endured.
Thy broad lands thou must quit; thy hall,
Thy bosom's pleasing mate ;
Those rarest trees which thou mayst call
Thine for a fleeting date—
The dismal cypress of them all
Shall on thy parting wait.
Room for thine heir ! to him give o'er
Thy cellar's hundred keys ;
And lot his luxury stain the floor
With purple vintages,
Richer than e'er were broached before
For great Pontifices. _ _

Fragmentary though the specimens here afforded
us in evidence of this anonymous writer's capacity
as (what we should wish to recognise in him later on
by some more adventurous enterprise in this direc-
tion than a mere passing contribution like this to
the pages of Fraser) namely, as Critic, as Biographer,
and as Translator of Horace—the admirable
ability manifested by the writer of the article here
commented upon enable us to recognise in him a
very formidable contemporary and competitor—at
once as Horatian critic and Horatian translator
—of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Theodore Martin, of
Lord Derby, Lord Redesdale, and Lord Ravens-
worth. Tlie article from which the above excerpts
are taken, it seems hardly necessary to say, is
worthy in its entirety of a very careful examina-
tion.

THE FIRST DAY OF PARTRIDGE SHOOTING.—
With sunrise this day the partridge-shooting season
legally commenced. Birds and hares 'are plentiful, and
sportsmen who are first in the field may secure a heavy
bag of game. In many districts sporting landlords have
consented to defer partridge shooting for a fortnight, in
consequence of the late harvest and so much corn yet
standing which will " hold the birds," but amateur sports-
men who rent the right of shooting from farmers are not
bound by these arrangements, and will exercise their right
in the stubble and turnip fields.

The American Treasury has received since the
lose of the war $60,000 as Q 011660120 money.