Tea:at...knees AND VERSES.—The Agamemnon of rEschylus, revised and translated by

John Fletcher Davies, B.A. (Williams and Norgate). We will content ourselves with giving one specimen of Mr. Davies's re- vision of the Agamemnon. On lino 7, ,g"-fe-;ou Too' cLeilzoivro ipriAtvwv azoc," he observes, "ma/lot earimp.o.," and he incorporates the sug- gestion in his translation, which runs thus, "Plying that knife of song to cure ray sleep." All our readers may not be aware that ihom is the word that Hippocrates uses for a probe, but, knowing that, they will see what a singularly felicitous and poetical emendation they have got. Now for the translation. This aims at being literal and lino for line, and at reproducing the metres of the Greek text. We do not mean to say that such a task is hopeless. A man of consummate ingenuity and taste, who would devote his life to it, might accomplish it, that is, might produce a poem which could be read with pleasure. That any one could read what we have here with pleasure, that he could even understand it without knowing something about the Greek, we do not believe for a moment. Give this as an original poem to any one, and he would pro- nounce the choral odes to be sheer madness, and most of the soliloquies and dialogue to be the strangest, baldest, most disjointed verse that he had ever come across. Now, if literal translation cannot be made anything better than this, it had better bo left alone. It is the merest waste of author's and reviewer's time, of paper and ink and printer's labour, and everything else concerned in the matter. This is how Mr. Davies renders part of the famous picture of the sacrifice of Ipbigenia :- "And shedding her crocus-tinctured tunic

To earth, she smote each of her Slayers with a pity-kissing eye-dart; And made a show, as in painted forms, as fain

To speak; for she many a time

Within her sire's rich spread hero-guest-balls

Had sung, and with voice all pure, free from mate, trilled with love

Her loving sire's hymn of praise for happy Fortune, at third bowl-mixing."

The tunic was surely 3(1(1i-on-tinctured, or crocus-hued. What is " pity- kissing" ? What murdering of the exquisite re ,7pia-6:nicc, (;); is 7 pa9cce is "made a show, as in painted forms." We have to endure the cumbrous " hero-guest-halls " because aybp(7,-.0a; " is a trisyllablo. "At third bowl-mixing" is utterly unintelligible. Who would guess that it repre- sents an epithet of "fortune," and means something like "worthy of a triple libation ?" Wo have space for but one more of Mr. Davies's ren- derings. " Xpenceitcot134 5A p; nceacit-ont " is translated by "Mars who discounts the slain warrior's corpse." This cannot be surpassed. Mr. John George Harding, who publishes Flosculi Literarum (Effingham Wilson), must be a bold man. To render "faithfully into English verse" "gems from the poetry of all time" is to challenge some very dangerous comparisons. Mr. Harding attempts many languages, and fails, as far as we can judge, with impartial uniformity in all. In the famous passage from the Inferno about Francesca da Rimini, Francesca appears as Frances ; "E cib so '1 tuo dottore" is rendered, "This knoweth well thy doctor." Lettura is "letterpress." And into the exquisite " Quel giomo pill non vi loggemmo avante " is interpolated the stupid "we closed the tome." Perhaps the best thing is tho "Parting of Hector and Andromache," though it does not attempt to be faithful or complete. For instance, "lofty Thebes "represents the sonorous "Tads KIXIZWY miEnicatray (*gni/ idNiikruXoy." But any reader who may want a third- rate imitation of Pope, not without occasional vigour in the verse, may find it here. The worst translation it is not so easy to select. We are inclined to prefer the second line of the following couplet from a render- ing of Tibullus :— " Balm of my cares, thou light of my dark night, A crowd to me to catch of Mee a sight!"

Our readers ought to have something sweet after this, and they shall have the original,—

" Tu mihi enrarum regales, to node vel atra Lumen, et in sells tu mihi turbo lode:" Mr. John Herbert Noyes, jun., who gives us an Idyll of the Weak with other Lays and Legends (Hutton) a volume of which somewhat more than a third consists of translations, does not fail so conspicuously ; he is sometimes fairly good ; we cannot say that he is ever happy ; we cannot profess that we should care to read what he has written again, or that we have folt much pleasure in reading them once. Let any one compare with what he may remember of Lord Derby or Mr. Glad- stone's version of the "Donee grams eram tibi" this stanza,— " "Isis Chloe now I most admire, Who sings so sweetly to the lyre;

For her sweet sake I'd dare Death's ire, So she escaped the fatal pyre."

Or tako this as a rendering of the first stanza of the " Integer vitae scelerisque purus If, friend, your life be blameless, if your heart be pure, Then Moorish lance is needless, bow you may abjure; No venomed dart and quiver then

Need ever freight your back again."

Worse still, we have for "Pone sub curru nimiwn propingui Solis in terra' domibus negata,"— "Or where the car of Phcebus, driven too near the earth, Of human dwellings causes an utter hopeless dearth." "As grows a widow'd vine in open fields It haugs its head, no mellow clusters yields; So droops the fragile stem, its topmost shoot With nerveless tendril hangs about its root; That vine no husbandman nor rustic swain Math cared to tend, or cultivate, or train; But if by happier chance that self-same vine Around a husband elm its tendrils twine, Thou many a husbandman or rustic swain Its shoots will tend and cultivate and train. Even such the virgin, and unmized as much, That fades, untended by a lover's touch, But when in fullness of her maiden pride, Some lilting mate has won her for his bride, She's loved as never she was loved before, And parents bless her and are stern no more."

This is certainly too wordy, especially in the lines,—

.1Iane nulll agricolae nuili coiner° juvenci." "Cars Tiro magis eel, minus eat invisa paranti."

Mr. Noyes in his original poems is free from the fetters with which the difficulties of translation encumber him, and he moves more easily, but we cannot say that ho shows more genius. The Poems Original and Translated by a Cambridge Graduate (John Russell Smith) are decidedly superior to anything in the volumes pre- viously noticed. The writer has something of style and force. If he would expend more pains on his work, and if ho would remember that any extra syllable is just as much of an intruder in the middle of an English as it would in the middle of a Greek iambic, he might do very woll. Here is a specimen of his translation from Catullus, "Lo as a spouseless vine in barren fields

Can never raise herself, and never yields The mellow grape, but bowing, with her head And tender body cleaves unto the ground, And with her root can touch her topmost boughs; No husbatolmen, no heifers plough her round.

But when she takes unto herself a mate,

And in her arms a lover elm will hold, The husbandmeu, the heifers plough her round.

Just so that maid is who intact grows old;

But when in time she takes a fitting mate, Her lover's love grows, wanes her parents' hate."

Mr. Martin's version is much smoother, more elegantly versified, but not so close to the letter or, we are inclined to think, the spirit of the original :—