"Look on your Spain !-she clasps the hand she hates, Can spare a few to fight, and sometimes fly. "Look last at home-ye love not to look there; "Now fare ye well! enjoy your little hour; ♦ Blest paper ery lit last and best supply, That lends Corruption i 21 ter wings to fly."---Por And pirates barter all that's left behind." Droops o'er the bales no bark may bear away; And light with maddening hands the mutual pile. ""Tis done, 'tis past, since Pallas warns in vain; The Furies seize her abdicated reign: Wide o'er the realin they wave their kindling brands, And Gaul shall weep ere Albion wear her chains. But when the field is fought, the battle won, 5 The Deal and Dover traffickers in specie. The rifled mansion and the foe-reap'd field, HINTS FROM HORACE: BEING AN ALLUSION IN ENGLISH VERSE TO THE EPISTLE "AD PISONES, DE ARTE POETICA," AND INTENDED AS A SEQUEL TO "ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS." "Ergo fungar vice cotis, acutum Reddere quæ ferrum valet, exsors ipsa secandi." HOR. De Arte Poet. "Rhymes are difficult things-they are stubborn things, sir." FIELDING'S Amelia. INTRODUCTION TO HINTS FROM HORACE. To translate Horace has hitherto proved an impracticable task. It is comparatively easy to transfer the majestic declamations of Juvenal; but the Horatian satire is cast in a mould of such exquisite delicacy-uniting perfect ease with perfect elegance-that no version has at all preserved the lively graces of the original. Notwithstanding some brilliant passages in Pope's and Swift's Imitations, there was little temptation to repeat even that less difficult experiment. A happy adaptation of a modern example to the ancient text could only be fully appreciated by the scholar, and was dearly purchased by the many forced and feeble parallels with which it was conjoined. Lord Byron, who ran a free race with such majestic bounds, moved with a halting gait when he attempted to tread in the footsteps of a precursor. His own opinion was the other way; for estimating the merit by the difficulty of the performance, he rated the "Hints from Horace" extravagantly high. That he forebore to publish them after the success of Childe Harold was from no mistrust of their value, but from feeling, as he states, that he should be "heaping coals of fire upon his head" if he were to put forth a sequel to his juvenile lampoon. He could no longer lift his hand against men who had grasped it in friendship, nor retain in an hour of triumph that literary bitterness which had been mainly excited by the mortification of failure. Nine years afterwards he resolved to print the work with some omissions, and gravely maintained that it excelled the productions of his mature genius. "As far," he said, "as versification goes it is good; and on looking back at what I wrote about that period, I am astonished to see how little I have trained on. I wrote better then than now; but that comes of my having fallen into the atrocious bad taste of the times." The opinion of Mr. Hobhouse that the "Hints" would require "a good deal of slashing" to adapt them to the passing hour, again led Lord Byron to suspend the publication, and the satire first saw the light in 1831, seven years after the author's death. No part of the poem is much above mediocrity, and not a little is below it. The versification, which Lord Byron singles out for praise, has no distinguishing excellence, and was surpassed by his later iambics in every metrical quality,-in majesty, in melody, in freedom, and in spirit. Authors are frequently as bad judges of their own works as men in general are, proverbially, in their own cause, and of all the literary hallucinations upon record there are none which exceed the mistaken preferences of Lord Byron. Shortly after the appearance of "The Corsair" he fancied that "English Bards" was still his masterpiece; when all his greatest works had been produced, he contended that his translation from Pulei was his "grand performance, — the best thing he ever did in his life;" and throughout the whole of his literary career he regarded these "Hints from Horace" with the fondness which parents are said to feel for their least favoured offspring. |