BOOKS.

TFIE POPE AS A POET.* ildarrr verses, the sweetest things in the world," so said on one occasion Archbishop Benson, and so would have said five- sna.twenty years ago half the prelates on the English Bench, and, for the matter of that, half the English Judges, and not a few English statesmen. They had all been brought up on them, in the days of which Matthew Arnold in that most literary of skits, Friendship's Garland, calls "the good old fortifying classical curriculum." But what, said Arminius, did your friend really learn at the Charterhouse from this system? "I have seen some longs and shorts of his on the Calydonian boar which were not bad," replies his interlocutor. But neither the writers nor the critics of those days looked on Latin verses as poetry, even when they were so, but only as a charming and graceful exercise of special value in educating literary taste and skill. We should have to go a good deal further back than a quarter of a century to find the time when in England Latin was a living vehicle for poetry. A few admirable composers like Sir Richard Jebb, or Professor Robinson Ellis, or Mr. Godley, a poet here and there like Mr. Swinburne, may still write verses in Greek or Latin that are not only verses but poetry ; but the days are gone by when an English poet would naturally express his original thoughts in Latin, and Gray, the last English poet, probably, whose Latin verses are at all commonly quoted, thought the practice out of date. In England Latin has become really a dead language. In Italy, and especially in the Roman Church, this is not quite the case. The language, in which the Gospel, after speaking—

"to the South in Greek About the soft Mediterranean shores "—

spoke— "then in Latin to the Latin crowd"— is there still alive. The stream of its life runs thin, but it is yet a living stream. The Pope still makes his pronouncements urbi et orbi, and issues his letters out of the Northern or the Southern gate, in the Latin tongue. It is to him a natural vehicle of prose. There is no reason why it should not be a natural vehicle of poetry.

The Pope has long been known to be a scholar and a friend of scholars. He has done not a little to make the Vatican Library more accessible to them, and only the other day it was announced that, not content with the Vatican, his Holiness had purchased at the cost of 220,000 the Barberini Library, building and books together, and intended to throw it open to the studious public. But this is not all. Many Popes before Leo XIII., and very many Cardinals, have patronised learning and the love of classic antiquity. In the Renaissance they were tempted, and some yielded to the temptation, to patronise it too much. Good Latinity was almost more important than sound doctrine, and a false quantity worse than a peccadillo. We all remember Browning's Bishop "ordering his tomb in St. Praxed's Church," and how his taste for sensuous paganism mixes with his religion, and his love of elegant Latin with his hatred of his enemies, when he bespeaks for his monument "Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of," as well as "The Saviour at His Sermon on the Mount" and "St. Praxed in a Glory," and for his epitaph— "Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word. No gaudy ware like Gandolf's setond line, Tully, my masters, Ulpian serves his turn." Pope Leo is not a humanist, but he is a lover of humane letters, and, like Archbishop Temple, recognises their value he the training of the human intellect, and also their charm. _ffe is a scholar, but he is more than a scholar, he is a poet. We do not say that he is a great poet, for to be a great poet is hardly possible for any one very great in other ways. A Pope or Ring can scarcely be a great poet. There have no doubt been exceptions, even if, as the higher criticism seems to Postulate, Xing David never wrote a Psalm, or, at any rate, or which his people eared to preserve. But a Pope or Xing may show poetic quality ; and such is the character of the P.,„ Charades, Inscriptions, of Pope Leo XIII., Including the Revised LomPosItions of hts Early Life, in Chronological Order. With English • TranBla- deolnpLuiand:NThotaihr IL T. Henry, OTerbrook Seminary. New York and Phila. • voiptun Press (American Ecclesiastical w). [es. 6d. net.]

pieces in this volume. They show it all the more for what may at first sight seem their defect. They are not to be judged so mainly as efforts of scholarly composition. Many of his lines would not be passed at Eton or Shrewsbury. It is not only that they do not conform to the narrow Ovidian standard. All Latin elegiacs need not do that, any more than all English heroics need conform to the narrow standard of Pope. But they have the freedom of a living language and the license of Italian Latin.

"When in 1897 Andrew Lang, the foremost man of letters in England, cabled to the New York World his exquisite translation of the Epistola ad Fabricium Enfant, the general

reading public was made aware of the poetical attainments of Leo XIII." It is thus that the editor of this volume begins his preface. The deft and delightful writer whose name is thus introduced will be the first to smile at the position here assigned him, and it would be hardly fair to take the enthu- siastic language of Mr. Henry quite seriously; though if he means that Mr. Lang is one of the very happiest and most versatile of living English critics and translators, he means no more than is true.

We do not know who Mr. Henry, of Overbrook Seminary, is. He is not very strong as a critic, though the notes he has collected are full of interesting matter, and he is not very careful as an editor. There are too many misprints in the Latin, and he would have paid a better compliment to his Holiness, and also to Mr. Lang and Mr. Francis Thompson, if he had given their versions, of which he speaks so highly. There may be difficulties of copyright, but these could prob- ably have been overcome. For we cannot call his own adequate.

They are not very literal, and yet they do not sufficiently compensate by original merits, either of diction or versification.

A single example will suffice. Pope Leo was born at the little town of Carpineto, a sort of "eyrie," as it is described, high on a cleft of the Monte Lepine, a portion of the Volsci= range:—

" Quam felix flora in primo, quam laeta Lepinis Orta jugis, patrio sub late vita fait!"

Carpineto, like many such Italian towns, suffered from the want of good water. When the Pope became Bishop of Perugia

he set himself to remedy this defect. He constructed an aqueduct, and brought a stream of good water down from the Lepine Hills into the great square of the Cathedral. He commemorates the act in a Latin inscription :—

" Fons ego decurrens, nitidis argenteus undis Quem cupide irriguum florea prata bibunt. At non prata bibent, cives, me florea; vestris Gratius eat largo spargere rote domes."

Mr. Henry renders :— " I am a silvery fountain, at whose brink The flowery meadows love to drink. And yet they shall not ! It belongs to you Ye cits,—my widely-scattering dew."

But it would be ungracious to look too closely at the transla- tions. They have the merit of being generally pretty accurate, and making the meaning clear. And we are really indebted

to Mr. Henry for collecting and presenting the Pope's poems in this form for the English reader. The volume is daintily got up and turned out. And the collection is a very interesting one, and, as he very fairly says, "interesting because of the sublime dignity of their author, if possible even more valuable as mirroring the genial, cultured, affectionate, devout soul of the man and priest." Pope Leo XIII. is indeed a notable and beautiful figure. His immense age, his frail frame, the unearthly pallor of his

features contrasting with the lustre of the eyes through which the nimble Italian intellect and large soul still look so keenly, exactly become his unique throne. The question of the temporal power is a tremendous one, not to be discussed incidentally, but if ever a Pontiff seemed fitted to break with the temporal and assume a purely spiritual sway, it is he. And his has been a strange story. One of the poems, that first quoted, describes his life and fortunes. The first piece in the book was written in 1822, eighty years ago, a quarter of a century before, in days that now seem ancient history,

Lander in his classic letter hailed his predecessor, Pius IX., as the saviour of society. But the next, "De Invalitudine sua,"

is even more striking. At twenty the Pope despaired of long life, almost of life at all, so feeble was his health :— " Faber his denos Joachim viz creseis in annos,

Morborum heu quanta vi miser obrueris!"

He confronted the prospect of an early death with Christian resignation and fortitude, and seventy years later was writing his remarkable "Ode to a New Century." The secret of his life, and the most beautiful thing in the book, is not a poem, but a short piece of prose composition,—it is the vow which he made when he became Pope. We give it in English, though his Latin is finer. In it he resolves—" For the rest of my life daily to offer the Sacred Host, and so cleave closer and closer to God, and with ever-increasing diligence to labour with watchful spirit to procure the eternal salvation of man- kind."

In that striking, now perhaps little-known, novel of Cardinal Newman's, Loss and Gain, there is one scene marked by real humour: where it is whispered in a little Evangelical coterie that the Pope "has just died a believer." But in truth it is no little thing that the head of a Church which often appears one vast political and historical and worldly system should make and keep such a profession of simple piety. Had all Popes lived like this the history of the Roman Church and the history of the world would have been very different. It is that that gives this little volume its interest. It is what Tennyson said poetry should be,—the outcome of a life, in this case of a beautiful and cultivated and devoted life. Here are the Pope's interests, his deepest wishes, his keenest sorrows, his intellectual tastes, his recreations ; an Ode for a marriage, a solemn piece for his brother's death, stanzas for the literary club of which he was an ornament, a playful recommendation of plain living and high thinking, inscriptions, and charades.

The pieces are not all in Latin ; some are Italian, especially the charades, as, for instance, one addressed to Sylvia, in which the Pope shows that he knows his Shakespeare. He knows his Italian poets of course; but his favourite author seems to be Horace, whom he imitates alike in his Ode to the Twentieth Century and in his Epistle on a Frugal Life, the two most elaborate efforts in the volume. What, we may ask, would have been the feelings of the complacent little Epicurean poet-critic of Augustus's Court if he had been told that some nineteen centuries after he had written the Carmen Saeculare Rome would profess a faith of which he had never heard, the very antithesis of Epicureanism, and that its Pontifex Maximus sitting in Caesar's place would address a wider Empire than Caesar's in alcaics modelled on his own ? This would be indeed a strange Non omnis moriar. " Credat Juda,eus Apella," he might well say, "non ego, namque deos didici securum agere aevimi." But it is even the truth, so enigmatically is the history of mankind interwoven.