The Sun. — 1842-06-10 (London, England)

LITERATURE.  1 FAUST. Smith, London, 1842. The present translation of Goethe's Faust is the production of Mr. Lewis Filmore, and has been undertaken expressly for Smith's Standard Library, of which it forms one of the Numbers. The version is a spirited one ; and the famous Witch scene on the Hartz mountains, though it will not bear comparilion with Shelley's well-known translation, is rendered with much poetic feeling. No German work of fiction that has been printed for the last half century, has ap • peared so often in an English dress, as Faust; and Mr. Filmore's version may, we think, take rank among the best. It is introduced by a modest and judicious preface, wherein the author states the reasons that induced him to undertake his difficult task, observing, that all the previous translations having been published at a high price, and " more than one of them being accompanied by engraved illustrations in an exceedingly expensive form," it was thought that a version " printed in a cheap and accessible form, would still find a large circle of readers, notwithstanding the ground that might appear to be occupied already with its predecessors." As Mr. Filmore has succeeded so well in his version of Goethe's Faust, we must bargain for translations from other German poets. Let him try his hand, for instance, at some of Schiller's dramas, and begin with that striking play " The Robbers," which has never been adequately rendered into English, and to which, we doubt not, he will do ample justice. To be sure, the play exhibits frequent traces of youthful haste, and immature judgment; but it is full of spirit and enthusiasm, and well worthy of Mr. Filmore's attention.  CHATTER! ON'S WORKS, 2 Vols. Grant, Cambridge, 1842. In this edition we have all Chatterton's acknowledged works, both in prose and verse, together with his celebrated Rowley forgeries, which occasioned such a hot controversy among learned antiquaries, and heaped such a weight of unmerited scandal on the head of the unhappy author. The interest attached to the controversy has long since died away, never to be revived ; but not so the memory of Chatterton, who will be long regarded, by those who are familiar with the circumstances of his Rowley forgeries, and the poems themselves, as the most remarkably precocious genius that the last century produced. At the early age of sixteen, he had fabricated dramas and lyrics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which perplexed some of the wisest and shrewdest critics of the age, and filled the public at large with astonishment at the powers of imagination and sensibility displayed in them; and at seventeen, he had terminated his chequered, meteoric career, by poison, under the most afflicting circumstances ! Had Chatterton lived, and kept the promise of his early dawn, he would have been without doubt one of the most illustrious of the English poets ; for his fancy was fertile in an eminent degree, his command of language was unbounded, his feeling unquestionable, and his faults were all those of an exuberant, but unripened intellect. In his private character he seems to have possessed much of the pride, wilfulness, caprice, and sardonic humour of Lord Byron ; and, like .him, to have been the veriest slave to his passions. But thinking of his hard lot and early grave, it is impossible to animadvert with severity on his errors ; if he yielded to every stormy gust of feeling, and was swayed by every varying mood of his mind, disdaining to listen to the cool dictates of judgment, he paid. the penalty of his infirmity—and what a penalty it was—a year's starvation and solitude in a London garret, to be terminated only by suicide, and a pauper's burial in a workhouse in Shoelane ! The life of Chatterton, which introduces this edition of his works, is penned in a judicious and dispassionate spirit, and the biographer has the good sense to scout, with the contempt they deserve, the calumnies which were so perseveringly heaped on Horace Walpole, for his supposed ill-treatment of the young Bristol poet.