THE EPITAPH ON LORD SHERBROOKE. [To THE EDITOR OF THE
" SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—The correspondence in the newspapers concerning the bi-lingual epitaph on the late Lord Sherbrooke may have unearthed the real author of the English lines ; but I doubt if it has had the same result with respect to the translation into Latin. This is attributed by various correspondents of high authority to Mr. Lowe himself, and undeniably they show that Mr. Lowe corrected and added to the translation, and that copies of it were extant in his handwriting. The question, however, still remains,—was he author, or editor only ?
Now, according to the story, as it was told in my Oxford days, the Latin rendering (which, so far as I remember, was much the same as that recently published) was the work of one of the Denisons—the Archdeacon, I imagine, but I am not sure—and what Mr. Lowe did was to cap the verses, when shown to him, by the following :—
" Carmen vence Fescenninw, Denisone, non Latine
Tam vertisti quam canine."
Certainly, if this triplet is genuine, and I confess, to my ear, it has the true Loweian ring, it seems to prove the existence at that time of a Latin version of Denisonian authorship, and if that version was not the original of the one now claimed for Mr. Lowe, it would be interesting to know what it was.—I am,
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