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is needlessly harsh, though it preserves sent "evicit." "Herds and stalls " hardly something of the epigrammatic character of gives the sense of "cum stabulis armenta," the Latin. Trapp perhaps comes next, as not indicating the close connection between he has more rapidity than Mr. Kennedy; and the two, "the herds and their stalls," or in a passage like this rapidity is indispensa-"herd, stall, and all." "From every plain" ble. But he has various shortcomings, and seems to us an unhappy use of the distribunot a few blemishes. "Fit via vi," which tive; and we see no reason for changing he tells us in his note is no pun, but a like-"per" into "from." "Descendants" is ness of sound, which sounds prettily, he prac- not "nepotum ;" and whether "postes" are tically slurs over altogether. "The rich the doorposts or the doors, they are certainly apartments" is a poor substitute for " loca," not the doorways, which could not have been and "late" is left out. The simile is short-"rich with spoils." "Lay prostrate" turns ened by being stripped of two pieces of Vir- the perfect into an aorist. The best part of gilian iteration, "aggeribus ruptis" being the version is the last sentence, where "tenfused with " oppositas evicit gurgite moles," ent" and "deficit" are both well rendered. and " campos per omnes" dropped after" in arva." "Nepotum," which is meant especially to fix our thoughts on Priam and Hecuba, is lost in the generality" of numerous future heirs," and the precise meaning of "spes tanta" apparently misunderstood. "Raging, smeared with gore," is very far from "furentem cæde," which is best rendered by Mr. Singleton's "raving with butchery." Mr. Kennedy seems to us to fail in strength throughout. He is injudicious in his management of the simile, reversing the order of the clauses, so as to put the triumph of the torrent in the foreground, and its struggle with obstacles afterwards; whereas Virgil evidently intended us to pause awhile on the struggle, like the torrent itself, and then hurry along—like the torrent itself, stronger for the delay. "These eyes beheld" should not have been exchanged for “I saw," thus ignoring Virgil's emphatic repetition of "vidi." "Which had raised hopes of a long posterity" is not poetry, but prose. "Fall down" does not give the force of the perfect "procubuere." "Greeks plant their footsteps where the flames relent" is pointless where point is wanted: "plant their footsteps " does not answer to "tenent," nor "relent" to "deficit."

Dr. Owgan's translation is respectable, but there is nothing in it which can be called striking; and the exact force of the Latin is not always given any more than in the metrical versions. "Open space" is poor for "late loca," which is doubtless meant to give us a vague, illimitable notion of the royal palace. "O'erflows" and "washes down" miss the tense, which Virgil evidently meant to discriminate from that of "fertur" and "trahit." Nor does "washes down" repre

Putting aside the question of the propriety of its Pindaric rhythm, we must allow that Dr. Henry's version has its merits. The first strophe (so to call it) is well done; the second not so well; the third worst of all. "Myself have seen " is, we think, a mistake, as the sense seems to require the past, not the perfect; at any rate, we may say that the former is the predominant notion. "Furious and reeking slaughter" is a most unfortunate dilution. “So rich hope of a teeming offspring" is another instance of blindness to the real force of "nepotum." "The Danai or the fire have all " gives the epigram, but we are not told, what Virgil certainly intended us to understand, that of the two enemies the Greeks were the more indefatigable.

Were it not for fear of tiring our readers, we would gladly continue our examination of these competing translations, feeling as we do that to produce a single passage from each is a little like the uncritical procedure of the man who brought a brick as a specimen of his house. Perhaps, however, we have quoted enough, if not to determine the rank of the translators, at any rate to justify our opinion of the various styles which they have attempted. Not wishing to prejudge the success of any coming poet, who may reclaim for Virgil the rhythm for which Milton it seems is indebted to him, we cannot think blank verse well chosen as a vehicle for close rendering. It has, perhaps, its advantages as an exercise for boys, who may be supposed to be unacquainted with the possible harmonies of poetical prose, and to be incapable of recognizing any thing as poetry which does not run to the eye in measured lines. But one who can really wield prose will, we think, find it beyond comparison the better instru

"Si qua est cælo pietas quæ talia curet." becomes,—

ment. We do not of course deny that Eng-|ous Latin line is turned by Mr. Singleton lish verse per se is a better representative of into two feeble lines of English :Latin verse than English prose. Mr. Singleton may be right in saying, that if Virgil and Cicero could be got to translate Homer closely into Latin, Virgil's translation would be the one we should prefer. But we are dealing with those who are neither Virgils nor Ciceros, but simply men of culture, with a good command over their own language, and a good eye for the beauties of their author; and such men, we conceive, will do wisely to try the yet unexhausted resources of prose.

"If any righteousness exist in heaven Which may concern itself about the like." If the writer of rhythmical prose cannot be said to be free either from the temptation or from the compulsion to expand himself, he does himself and his author far less harm by yielding to them. No doubt, as Sydney Smith said, a prose style may often be greatly improved in vigor by striking out Only a great master can handle blank every other word from each sentence when verse so as to give real pleasure to his read-written; but there are occasions where difers. A versifier of very moderate preten- fuseness is graceful, and a certain amount of sions may write it with ease, but no one will surplusage may sometimes be admitted into thank him for it. Blank verse, like other harmonious prose for no better reason than verse, presupposes and promises a certain to sustain the balance of clause against clause, sustained pitch of poetical elevation, and any and to bring out the general rhythmical efdescent from it is felt and resented at once. fect. Brevity is of course the preferable exProse, on the other hand, promises far less; treme; but redundancy has its charms if a and any thing which it gives beyond its writer knows when to be redundant, as the promise is accepted with pleasure and sur- readers of Mr. De Quincey and Mr. Ruskin prise. The indeterminate character of its are well aware. On the other hand, such rhythm, which does not require that empha- rhythmical writing as Dr. Henry's or Mr. sis should be placed on this or that word, Singleton's where he is not actually metrical, much less on this or that syllable, allows to has no real advantage that we can see over admit unhesitatingly words which, if intro- more recognized modes of composition. It duced into blank verse at all, would be felt gives up the benefits of association, no one to be feeble and burdensome. The passage in reading it being reminded of any thing alwhich we have just been examining supplies ready existing in English, while the uniforman instance in point. Virgil talks of " Hec-ity of its structure imposes virtually as great ubam centumque nurus." A prose transla- a restraint on a writer as actual metre. tion need not shrink from the word "daughters-in-law," nor from the use of many words which embarrass the writers of verse, and which, though essential to a lucid representation of the sense, add nothing to the poetical dignity of the passage. Thus a vigor

Johnson advised poets who did not think themselves capable of astonishing, and hoped Translators who despair of imitating Virgil's only to please, to condescend to rhyme. diction, and are ambitious only of giving his meaning in a pleasing form, may, reasonably be content with prose

NEW INVENTION FOR BEEHIVES.-A new | of wax which is by an ingenious process ininvention to make bees more regular in their dented with the six square foundation of the habits is thus described in a California paper-cell, having the exact size and shape necessary "The practice of these insects is, as every to be used by the bee in commencing the cells. bee-keeper knows, to crowd their combs about This foundation, being fastened to the desired in irregular ways, wasting the room in the hive, place in the hive, will be used by the workers, and also losing much time in preparing for the time saved and the inconvenient placing of the first row of cells. This invention is a thin plate comb in the hive obviated."

From All the Year Round.
THE LAST LEWISES.

THE HEADLESS.

hours! How we rejoiced as we got them clear of the city, when the huge mountain of a berline was ready waiting, and saw that great lumbering thing roll away! How we chafed and fumed over its crawling progress, and the delays and mistakes about the posthorses, and how we lost our temper with that stupid round-faced king, who would keep

IN the gaudy relic-room of the Louvre, near the window, is a white round table, engraved all over curiously with a sort of map or projection. Not far off is exposed a little satin slipper creased, soiled, and very tiny. Holiday folk do not much regard these curi-putting his head out of the window and unosities, being wholly engrossed with the fineries and the table services, the body linen, and, most precious of all, that poor battered St. Helena hat. But the geographical table was engraved by the fingers of Louis Capet, sometime king of France, and the tiny slipper belonged to that ill-fated Widow Capet, Marie Antoinette. When did she wear that soiled slipper last? At the Versailles dance? At the palace window when she faced the mob howling below? Upon a worn sou-piece of the period, is about the best likeness of Lewis the Desired. From that coin looks out upon us, the round bulb-shaped face, sloped away to where it sprouts in the tie-wig, the large nose, the fat hanging double chin, the amiable fatuity, the gentle inanity. We can read his whole life and all its sorrowful adventures on the one-sou piece-his delights, his lockmaking, his joys and trials, and his weaknesses. Alack! as we put it by in the drawer, we see that such a face was not the face for the crisis. Perhaps another with sterner lines and less florid cheeks would have fared no better. The family estates had come down to him, ruinously mortgaged, rack-rented, harried, wasted, burnt up, and here at least were the tenants at bay, and proceedings in court, and a bloody foreclos

ure.

How well we know him? With whose sorrows are we so familiar? Whether in that pathetic story-book shape over which our child's eyes have filled and glistened, the legend of The Peasant and the Prince, as told by the Lady of Ambleside; or in that fierce scorching handwriting on the wall, of Mr. Carlyle's; it has all the same touching power. Oh, for that terrible night of Varennes, feverish, protracted, never ending! How long did we wait beside the hackneycoach, panting, fluttering, for the two dark figures who had stolen by a back-door from the Tuileries, and, floundering through the narrow streets, made us lose two precious

doing all! How we panted and trembled as the long day drew on, for that poor crowded party packed closely inside, as the sultry sun began to sink, and we began to think that after all they might get clear, oh, the miserable bungle about the dragoons! Then the stupid mistake about the posthouse, when every second was precious. No matter, put the horses to any way! Forward! Quick! Use whip and spur for Heaven's sake! But that wretchedly suspicious postmaster, whom we should have ridden down, or brained, or felled to the earth, has sent for the banknote with the king's picture, and here is the archway where is the barricade, and here armed men. All is over! King Lewis does not fight for it, nor cut a passage through. But the heavy old gentleman in the corner, making believe to be an honest citizen in a dark wig, going on his travels, says he supposes they had best go back. Go back! We give him up from that hour. With shame and burning cheeks we turn to the brave ladies. As to him, we never recover the shock: through all those indignities of the Temple, the insults, that bearding of him as Louis Capet, and even that cruel last ending of all, we never quite get over the long Varennes night. If any reader is unacquainted with that night, happy is such reader to have yet in reserve Mr. Carlyle's wonderful picture of it. There is no more masterly and comprehensive piece of description in all history or fiction.

He was good, honest, kindly, and well meaning, this penultimate of reigning Lewises. There are a hundred little stories of his tenderness, of his pastoral charities, of his lifting the latch of the peasant's cottage in the disguise of a simple squire, and of his climbing that Alp of six and seven stories, a house in a squalid Parisian street, up to the kennel in the roof, where the sick workman lay. No wonder Apostle Paine said of him that if he had been only born a simple agriculturist, he would have been the

Genteel infidelity had spread universally, and was more fashionable than the new headdress or the jewelled canes. Gentlemen of

most honest man in his canton. Apostle Paine only did him justice in his rough way. Poor king! He thought to stop an express engine by standing in the roadway and wav-nice susceptibility were wounded by being ing his arms. It ran over him. It destroyed taken for deists instead of atheists. In the him. He turned a whole menagerie loose, wake of this unholy war, a huge sewer burst and then wished to whistle and wheedle the and flooded the country with its unclean wacreatures into their cages again. They de- ters. The landmarks of decent literature voured him. The great Lewis saw the old were carried away, and Paris became one palace crumbling over his head, and break- huge and frightful Holywell Street. It makes ing into alarming fissures; but he merely our blood curdle to read the frightful uses got his architects to shore it up. Then he to which the innocent type and papers were said, "It will last my time-after me, the degraded. Not long since, the writer of deluge." This foolish Lewis would have a these notes purchased at a book sale, a little thorough repair and restoration, and the regiment of some forty French pocket rowhole thing fell in and crushed him. That mances, neatly printed, and in a uniform of long night in the heavy berline was a com-gilt edges and mottled calf coats. They were pressed copy of his life. There were other tempting; but the lying imprint "London" critical seasons besides that one, when he would put his head out of the window, when he must get down and walk up the hill, and when he would inappropriately call for meat and drink. Even when the tiger had got him down and was standing over him with hot reeking jaws, he must childishly play tricks with the furious beast; and, promising to be very good in future, and to be a liberal constitutional master, is detected writing to foreign armies, hurrying them on to come quick and cut the tiger's throat. Is it wonderful that the tiger snapped his head off?

Looking back to Paris society of that day, is like looking down from the boxes at the flashes and humors of a masked ball. Every human being is theatrical, is painted, and has a party-colored domino on. It is a Babel, or Babylon, of tumbling men and women: a jumble of philosophers, mountebanks, harlequins, courtiers, valets, queans, and felons. Never was there such a fusion of ranks. There is a pure dead level as to character, no one having too much to spare; for the corpulent bonhomme, the rubicund bourgeois citizen with the double chin will have decency and correct manners (under a domino at least), and has hunted the painted ladies from court. There is a wild book, in eight volumes, still to be found on bookstalls, called A Picture of Paris, which is a perfect looking-glass for those times. It reads like a nightmare, and brings up the crowded streets, and the operas, and the churches, and the dinner parties of Pandemonium Paris, with a startling vividness.

-where they were never printed-should have excited suspicion. The dainty volumes taken home proved to be a company of little lepers, fashionably dressed, and destined for "the ladies' boudoir." As I look at their gilding and their pretty "getting up," and feel the scent of those boudoirs still clinging to them, I think they must be very like the masked heroes of the court, the human lepers who went about in the bag-wigs and skyblue silken coats.

As this miasma lifts itself slowly and opens partially, we, who are looking back, see the strangest spectral figures and ghostly lights. flitting to and fro, like exhalations over a marsh. It seems like the last grand round of the masked ball, when the Pierrots and Débardeurs are fetching up their wildest antics; and we take a sort of morbid interest in this unholy rout, from knowing that this and that poor wretched reveller will be by and by dragged out into the cold glare of daylight, and sacrificed bloodily, with all the paint and gauds on. Poor unconscious mummers! They show us glimpses of their fairyland. We cross over from Dover, and find at Dessein's, getting ready to post it up to Paris, the Prince of Gossip, the most dclightful of scandal-mongers-most welcome of cronies-diverting Sir Nathaniel Wraxall. He has the choicest bits in his wallet. He has been round all the courts in his light carriage, scandal-hunting. But there is scandal and scandal as there is fagot and fagot; and the babbling baronet only relished such as dealt with courtly matter: as those dark whispers concerning Caroline Ma

of quills of that animal, and, with a gay capriciousness, made all her ladies carry gardens, forests, mountains, parterres, and other curious devices, upon their heads. A naval captain raised the public to enthusiasm by acquitting himself with respectability in action, and presently fashionable tresses were seen to be trained into a faint likeness of a frigate of war, which ingenious style was christened à la Belle Poule, the name of the vessel. Some forty years back there was pointed out to Dumas the Elder, a man who had often constructed these frigates, parks, and cabriolets (for mimetic vehicles of this nature were also borne upon the head) for the queen, and had manipulated professionally those long soft tresses with comb and irons and lubricants.

tilda, the indiscretion of the illustrious Em- | talent. She set the fashion of that coiffure press Catherine, the fatal escapade of the à la hedgehog, which suggested the outline Count Koenigsmarck, and other little adventures. If he should but offer us a seat in his chaise, what a feast of tattle we shall have, as we rattle through Montreuil and Abbeville, and those other posting towns, by which the Reverend Mr. Sterne had already travelled sentimentally! We rattle into Paris at nightfall, under the lanterns hung from lines across the streets, and plunge into the revel with the rest. We go out to Versailles upon a gala day, see the great waters spouting, and then look on from reserved places as their gracious majesties dine before the world. Such magnificence, such fine clothes, such a happy people! Then, their majesties rise and walk among their faithful subjects. A heavy bulky figure, with the onion-shaped head of the sou-piece, shambling from leg to leg, as though one limb were shorter than We see her still in the will-o'-the-wisp the other; a good-natured fatuous face, suf- light of the memoirs-walking in the garfering much from the heat-this was his dens, playing games with a herd of doubtmajesty, the eldest son of the Church. But ful gallants, a sort of hoyden queen and on his arm-the fat arm of the shambling royal Glorvina. She was about as indiscreet Lewisleans that famous lady, the hap-as that full-blown lady who was imported less queen, for whom, alas, Mr. Burke's ten thousand swords should have made that famous leap from their scabbards. As she moved among those Versailles bosquets, and trimmed hedges, and spouting mermen and other conceits, there was in her walk and carriage something that verged upon the god-up with a very curious speech. She showdess. Sober Englishmen, posting it round the world upon the grand tour, presented by his Grace of Dorset, our ambassador, became infatuated, and linger on for months. The cold classical mind of Mr. Burke was clearly unsettled by this vision; and later on in Parliament, as in other places, he was accustomed to rave of this enchantress. One special declamatory raving is often spouted on a schoolroom platform, and Master Pickle hymns it with appropriate sing-song, how it was now sixteen years since he saw the queen of France, and that surely mortal eye had never rested on any thing so lovely. It is to be feared she took too much delight in that turning of heads; conquests to which contributed mainly that light, forward manner of hers, and that superb hair with which she used to play fantastic tricks.

She flits past in the tricky light of the memoirs of her time-with a new headdress for every day, each a prodigy of inventive

for a noble George of our own. She fretted, like the full-blown lady, against the nets and strings of etiquette with which she was hampered. A sort of reigning schoolgirl, she ran races on donkeys, was thrown from her donkey a little awkwardly, and was picked

ered nicknames plentifully, laughed loudly, said what first came into her head, and (we are afraid) was a little too fond of admiring any handsome gallant she saw. The babbling baronet-very clubbable he must have been-who was at my lord duke's, the ambassador's, and the court and nobilities, and knew the old marshals and the whole squadron of demireps-tells some odd stories. He describes the Descampativos, or Games of Romps, to which the royal lady was passionately addicted, but in which he says there may have been no harm. The Romps were conducted on these principles: the scene was usually the greensward of the palace gardens, St. Cloud or Versailles; the trees were hung with lamps, and the public jealously warned away. The fine ladies and gentlemen, with the king and queen, collected round Vaudreuil, whom they appointed high-priest of the party, and who was said to fulfil his functions with much