CHARLTON'S PLAYS AND POEMS.* The best part of this volume

is comprised in the republished translations of two excellent plays, the" Son of the Wilderness," which may be already well known among readers of German, and the "Gladiator of Ravenna," a later production of Baron von Miinch Bellinghausen, otherwise styling himself "Friedrich Halm." Of the former of these Mr. Charlton's version seems to have given entire satisfaction to the author himself, who wrote to him in 1847, "Your work is not less remarkable for the accuracy with which the sense of the original has been comprehended, than for the cleverness and terseness with which it is expressed." We have found no particular reason to qualify this eulogium ; but a short extract from the English play may enable our readers to form their own estimate of its diction and versification. We may remind them that the story turns on the different modes of living of the native Gauls, and of the early Greek settlers of Marseilles, who in outward refinements are supposed by our naive though sentimental dramatist to differ almost as much as did the French and their Iroquois allies of the last century :— "Isoosua.

"Thou lov'st me—nco!—the stranger, the barbarian !

" PARTHENIA.

"Call thyself not to me by such a name !

Compared to thee—what arc we ? How they stared

At thee—those haughty Greeks, ashamed and silent,

When thou, who hither cam'st to learn our customs, Taught'st them one custom, and that sacred one, Which the great gods have stamped upon our hearts !

How great, how noble didst thou stand before me, When thou, to act aright, didat give up more Than thine own life,—the hope of all that lire!

How did I blush, that I would be thy teacher !

And what to teach ?—What through long years with pain Was taught mo,—lifeless forms, words, tinselled prate.

But thou haat from the hand of gods received Immediate the pure gold

And I—oh, fool presumptuous !—I had thought To mould thy true heart to a lying shape ! Forgive me ! oh, forgive !—Now clear I see; To be a Greek is nothing, but to bear A true and human heart is all in all."

In this play the Baron seems to have set a higher value on the latent capacities of the human mind than in his more serious drama, "The Gladiator of Ravenna," which nowadays exhibits a striking contrast to our countrywoman's "Spanish Gipsy" by representing (and not without a calm confidence in the truth of the idea), that a man's character and sentiments are not to be determined by the blood of his ancestors, where education and habit have steadily exerted a counteracting influence. Ilere the German Queen, Thusuelda, the wife of the great patriot Armiuius, has after her removal to Rome borne him a son, who is immediately separated from her by Tiberius and kept as a hostage, in order that she may submit to be led in triumph and abstain for the rest of her time from suicide and rebellious behaviour. After many years she is allowed to meet this son again in the shape of an expert gladiator, while the courtiers of Caligula, anxious to protect themselves from his cruelty by the interposition of other victims, lend their warm approval to a fancy that he takes to de stroy or afflict all the survivors of the family of Arminius. Thus nelda learns that her " Sigmar " is to fight in the circus before her, where she must sit habited to personify Germania ; even her brother-in-law, Flavius Arminius, who has hitherto enjoyed the favour of his masters by dint of the most abject obsequiousness, is doomed to superintend the arrangements for this atrocious spectacle. Meanwhile, the captive queen receives clandestine visitors from her native country, and forms a plan for escaping thither with them and with her son, and again making head against the power of the Empire. In the sequel, she encounters no obstacle but from the perversity of Sigtnar himself, who is now so inured to his profession, so trammelled with its low ambitions and quarrels, and above all, with the low amours which have been thrown in his way, that he cannot understand why his mother should think it a disgrace to him to contend in the arena, or why she should wish him to go to Germany, which has never done aught for him, and to revenge a father whom he has never known. The natural interpretation of his conduct is, as we hear from a subordinate character, that he has become a Roman by living among the Romans. His mother, indeed, starts a subtler theory, but it is most likely meant only to beguile or entertain us a single moment :—

"In every heart-throb, every drop of blood, German he is ! 'Tis with a German's faith His heart doth cling to Rome, because she reared Lim; German's the courage urging him to fight ; And German even his folly, who would be Aught else, save German ! Yes! he is a German."

Under these circumstance we rapidly approach the catastrophe. Thusuelda is detained in coaxing her son and his mistress till she has no resource left but to kill him with her own hand, and save the trouble to those who were meditating foul play against him. She defies the vengeance of Caligula, and kills herself before him with the same weapon as she used before (the sword of Arminius) ; even her brother-in-law finds no other course open to him than to follow her example. We leave Caligula in a towering passion. his first thought is to complete the pageant by sending more Christians to feed his lions ; but the conspiracy against his own life is by this time matured ; and Cassius Chwrea perceives that he has no time to hesitate. It is a deplorable thing, but perhaps not abnormal, that the voice of nature and kinship should have spoken to the heart of the young German prince leas powerfully than they did to Fedalma's under the providence of another author ! We should strongly recommend the perusal of this play, either in German or English, as well on account of its pathos and the originality of the design, as the force of imagination with which the author has realized the training of the gladiators and similar phenomena that he encounters.

The shorter translations of Mr. Charlton (from only four German poems) are all commendable, though we like-his blank verse some what better than his rhymes. We have noticed in his language a few curious Germanisms, as the use of an adjective for an adverb in

"Hurrah, the dead can swift career—" "0 ye rulers, crafty hounding." "Brothers on to brothers' trace."

But as these are only hazarded at long intervals, they may not be felt as a serious blemish. The former of the above lines is, as may be conjectured, from Burger's Lenore ; but we hope this new version will not be deemed superfluous merely because Sir Walter Scott has so finely imitated the poem. It has in its original form a local colouring which it quite loses in that author's story of the Crusades (Judah's Wars); and he has, moreover, divested it of its peculiar and impetuous rhythm, and of several fine touches, like the bride's expostulation :—

" Ah no ! lot rest in peace the dead."

Even some later and more faithful translations than Scott's are not so well suited as the one now before us to give a true impression of the characteristics of the German ballad.

We must proceed in our inventory of the Plays and Poems, by mentioning one sonnet and one ballad of Mr. Charlton's which seem to have dropped into this volume from his former collections We must mention also his drama of "Pausanias," though merely as one in which the style far surpasses the matter. Yet the scenes are neatly arranged ; and help us to bring well into focus the scattered particulars which we have read in history respecting the royal Spartan plotter. The author's language and blank verse are always decently good ; and on the whole we find in this composition

£0 much taste and sobriety that it is difficult to feel offended by its displaying little power of invention or intensity of sympathy. But we hardly know what use can be made of it, unless it were to furnish a resume' of Thucydides that might conciliate or refresh the attention of a school-boy or a young lady who is for the first

time labouring through the deep and slippery sentences of that famed historian's, or perhaps over Thirlwall's more and pages. At all events, we think the public might be better

inclined to do justice to Mr. Charlton's careful and skilful translations, if he had not swollen his volume with the much lest interesting products of his own ingenuity. We have little hope that either his classical play or his occasional poems on the Havelocks and the Author of Jane Eyre, can be floated by the mod rigorous attachment to the disjecta membra of even Heine, or Griin, or Briiger. We are partly tempted, however, to suspect that the book is a posthumous collection still wanting a methodic editor. Hew comes it that the memoir of Baron von 3Iiinch Bellingbausen, though 'written in 1847, has not been augmented by a single sentence, not even so much as to tell us that the

original " Fechter von Ravenna" came out in 1860?