29 APRIL 1876, Page 22

CURRENT LITERATURE.

Lays front Latin Lyrics. By F. H. Hummel and A. A. Brodribb. (Longmans.)—This is a volume of translations, or rather, we should say, of paraphrases, executed with taste and feeling, and altogether quite creditable productions of a leisure that loves to amuse itself with the Classics. Our own taste is for something more exact in the way of versions from another language. Messrs. Hummel and Brodribb do not scruple, we see, to leave out a couplet or so, when it pleases them. Perhaps the effect of the original is not always injured by the omission, but these exercises have their chief value in the mastery over two languages which they exhibit, and where is the mastery, if you are to leave out what refuses to come easily into your verse ? It is our belief that everything, or, to be moderate and well within the truth, almost everything, will yield to labour, if the labour be only long enough and hard enough. Sometimes, we allow, consider- able freedom may be not only excused, but praised,—witness the very elegant poem which Mr. Brodribb has built on Ovid's " Annule, for mosaa digitnm Tincture puella3" (" Amores," ii. 15), including, as it does, much of the grace and excluding the coarseness of the original. We can afford space but for one specimen, the "Passer deliefte mete puelke ":—

"Bird that my darling loves to play with, Loves to nurse on her bosom white,— Loves to tease thee, loves to give thee her Delicate finger-tip to bite ; When she is sighing in my absence, Thou must comfort her, playing near ; Till love's fever abate and leave her, Thou art near to make her cheer.

How I long for thee, in my loneliness! Yea, I yearn as the bleat princess Yearned for the golden fruit that fated her, Scornful maid, to a bridal dress."