1860.] Pope's MS. Notes on Tickell's 'Homer.' style Pope is incomparably Tickell's 271 them to be members-unworthy ones, perhaps of the school of Virgil. The few faults of grammar are rightly noted, though Pope's own writings are not always immaculate in that particular. The mistakes of the sense of the original are too much dwelt upon: Pope was himself sufficiently guilty in the articles of addition and subtraction; he was not a good Greek scholar, and the guides he followed did not always lead him right. Perhaps the only passage where Tickell seriously mistakes his author's meaning is that which describes the sacrifice. For the complaint of plagiarisms there is still less excuse. Tickell borrows from Dryden and Maynwaring, as Maynwaring had borrowed from Dryden, and Dryden from Chapman; but Pope's debts to his predecessors are at least as heavy.P In later books Pope makes appropriations n 'Even these zealots [those who look upon Pope as a miracle] allow that you have out-done Pope in some particulars-e.g., the speech beginning "O sunk in avarice," &c. [v. 150], "And leave a naked, &c. [v. 390].'-Young to Tickell, quoted in Aikin's Addison, vol. ii. p. 131. • Essay on Pope in Oxford Essays for 1858, p. 14. P. Some of Pope's obligations to Maynwaring have been mentioned in a note to Oxford Essays, p. 34. That Pope owed much to Dryden, may be seen from the following instances, by no means all that might be given : Then softly murmur, or aloud complain, Rage as you please, you shall resist in vain.-DRYDEN. And rage he may, but he shall rage in vain.--POPE. Their sovereign seated in his tent they find, His pensive cheek upon his hand reclined.-Dryden. With gloomy aspect, on his arm reclined.-POPE. (The words in italics are quite unknown to Homer.) That action to his grateful mind recal: Embrace his knees, and at his footstool fall,-DRYDEN. This, goddess, this to his remembrance call: Embrace his knees, at his tribunal fall.-POPE. Here is a case where Ogilby's track is followed by three of his successors; Tickell is fortunately an exception : Atrides rising then extremely stormed, And what he raging threatened hath performed.-OGILBY, The swelling monarch stormed, And then the vengeance vowed he since performed.-DRYDEN. To threaten vengeance, which he since performed.-MAYNWARING. Then, rising in his wrath, the monarch stormed; Incensed he threatened, and his threats performed.—POPE. from translations of the first book which he did not venture to make when translating that book himself; in fact, as I have shown in my notes, he has more than once had his eye on Tickell. That Tickell should have borrowed from Pope himself is, as I have intimated above, hardly likely, if, as the advertisements show, he appeared in the field only two days after. Pope's was a volume, Tickell's hardly more than a pamphlet; but though plagiarism may have been possible, it would have required unusual expedition on the part of printers and publishers; and we may fairly ask whether it was worth Tickell's while to give and take so much trouble for so very small an advantage as criticism must pronounce him to have gained. The internal evidence of plagiarism from Pope seems virtually reduced to one line, verse 236, and that may surely be accounted for by coincidence." What was the precise charge which a E.g.: Pope intended to fasten on Tickell's management of the compound epithets, we cannot tell. Tickell had valued himself on it in his unpublished preface: but this Pope can hardly have known. Pope's mark appears when Tickell ventures on an English compound; it appears also when Tickell expands a Greek compound into a line. It cannot be a question of principle, for both English compounds and epithets expanded into whole lines are found in Pope himself. And though in this as in other respects Tickell's taste and poetical skill are inferior to Pope's, there seems no ground for anything like a charge of wholesale mismanagement. Here, however, as elsewhere, it should be remembered that we have to judge not of a work which Pope executed, but of a project which he abandoned. It is partly in his practice in the later books that we find contradictions to his theory, as indicated in this volume; To whom the goddess with the charming eyes: and It should in fairness be added that there are one or two other coincidences, unnoticed by Pope, but not therefore to be disregarded. That strives to learn what heaven resolves to hide.-POPE. But dread the power of this avenging hand.-POPE. Nor tempt the force of this superior hand.-TICKELL. There is one particular in which I have taken the liberty to differ from all the translations of Homer that I have seen; and that is in the rendering of the compound epithets rather by a paraphrase than by compound words in our own tongue. After repeated trials of skill to link many words in one, to answer a sonorous word in the original, have we not found that these painstakers have been translating Homer into Greek, and what was elegance and music in one language is harshness and pedantry in another? In the first Iliad, for example, the cloud-compelling Jove, the golden-throned Juno, the far-shooting and silver-bowed Apollo, the white-armed Juno and ox-eyed Juno, the swift-footed Achilles, the brazen-stepped house, the thunder-loving god, the much-snowy Olympus, the much-sounding shore, &c., are so many several epithets which, though elegant and sonorous in the Greek, become either unintelligible, unmusical, or burlesque in English. And that this is wholly owing to the different genius of the two languages is hence apparent; because the same ideas, when expressed in a manner suitable to the turn of our tongue, give the same pleasure to us that the ancients received in reading the original. And I cannot but observe upon this head, that Virgil himself, in a language much more capable of composition than ours, has often governed himself according to this rule. As this manner of translation is much the most pleasing to the reader, it is the hardest to the translator, it being no less, when it is judiciously performed, than to take an image that lay confused and draw it out in its fairest light and full proportions; or, in a similitude used by my Lord Bacon upon another occasion, it is to open the embroidery that is folded in the pack, and to spread out every figure in its perfect beauty.'Extract from Tickell's unpublished preface, quoted in Aikin's Life of Addison, vol. ii. pp. 128, foll. Compare Pope's remarks on the same subject in his published preface. 1860.] Chronicle of Current History. the contradiction may imply no more than that at a later period he abandoned the theory. If he afterwards borrowed from passages previously criticised in Tickell, not only when translating later books of Homer, but when revising his version of the first, we may infer that the rival performance approved itself more to his calm reflection than it had done to his irritated self-love. In conclusion, we may observe that a perusal of Pope's remarks lends scarcely any support to his opinion that his real rival was not Tickell, but Addison. The notes on the Dedication and Address are indeed intended, as we have seen, to substantiate that opinion, whether they have really any such force or no: but those on the text do not even show that such an opinion 273 existed, unless anything lies hid in the mysterious marks which I have been content to represent by a simple asterisk. Two or three lines, if so much, are attributed to Addison, one apparently to Philips, as if the charge were merely that the translation had been revised by Addison and his coterie, which, from Addison's own admission, may very well have been the case. Probably in Pope's mind, as in the minds of his friends, suspicion hardened into conviction from mere lapse of time: he knew that he had once persuaded himself that Addison was guilty, and he registered the belief as a permanent one, to be produced when necessary, without asking himself what he should do if he were called upon to embody it in full and establish it in detail. CHRONICLE OF CURRENT HISTORY. THE resolutions with which the Commons met the rejection of the Bill for the Repeal of the Paper Duty, will be remembered in history as a singular example of the facility with which Englishmen make and accept illogical compromises. Lord Palmerston in a very adroit speech argued that the Lords had acted legally and wisely, but that if they did so again, the Commons would resent the infraction of their privileges. This exactly expressed the general feeling of the country, and if we may judge from the speeches of some of the more eminent peers since, it is a view which the Lords are substantially inclined to adopt. The Lords retire from the field with the credit of a successful interference generally approved, but they have been given to understand that such interferences ought to be very rare. The debate on the resolutions was enlivened by several remarkable speeches. The Premier could scarcely have made a speech better calculated to disarm those of his followers who affected to believe in the existence of great popular indignation against the Lords, nor VOL. LXII. NO. CCCLXVIII. offered could he easily have T too far into the regions of theory, and that it did not offer any suggestion for the cure of those defects in the House of Lords to which Mr. Bright referred, and the existence of which would make the nation unwilling to see the authority of the Upper House extended. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has had the humiliating duty to perform of confessing that the money saved to the country by the Lords was very much wanted. The Chinese budget must have been as nasty a piece of work to Mr. Gladstone as a minister ever went through. He had to confess that he had made a financial mistake, and that there was a miscalculation in the estimates; he had to impose a new indirect tax, and he had to support Lord Palmerston in undertaking a Chinese war. The moment when the House of Commons was overcome with a sense of the ludicrous, while the Chancellor of the Exchequer explained to Mr. Roebuck that he could easily reconcile the present with the past, and offered to his questioner's consideration the characteristic proposition that 'this may be wrong and that may be right, or this may be right and that may be wrong, or both may be wrong or both may be right,' must have been one of deeper mortification than we could have wished should have befallen a man whose mistakes are always those of a large and generous mind. It is seldom that a minister loses so much in reputation within a single session as Mr. Gladstone has lost since the night when the delivery of the speech on the Budget relieved the nation from the anxiety with which it had been watching the progress of his influenza. One fault, we are delighted to say, Mr. Gladstone has not committed. He has not suffered his mortification to lead him into the uselessness of independent opposition; and by retaining his seat in the Cabinet he has kept the door open for future efforts to retrieve his reputation. The Session has been almost entirely barren of legislation. After the Reform Bill was abandoned, the Bankruptcy Bill was to be the great achievement of the Government; but the Bankruptcy Bill has been withdrawn. The AttorneyGeneral recoiled before the opposition which awaited him on the question of applying the same law to traders and non-traders, after he had been beaten on the question of the compensation to the officials to be displaced by the new system. On both points he was, we think, clearly right. The objection that any gentleman taking a month's run in Switzerland might return and find himself a bankrupt, simply depends on refusing to acknowledge the precautionary restrictions on creditors which legal ingenuity could easily devise; and the principle that if the nation has made a mistake by having passed a bad bankruptcy bill, it, and not future suitors in the Bankruptcy Court, ought to pay for the introduction of a better system, is obvious as soon as it is stated. However, the Bankruptcy Bill has been successfully opposed, and is withdrawn. So is the Corporation of London Bill; so is the Savings Bank Bill; and so are many other bills of equal importance. The impotence of legislation displayed by Parliament has drawn from Lord Derby an eloquent and able speech, in which he reviewed the failures of recent years, and suggested that some means should be taken to prevent all the pains bestowed on abortive bills being utterly thrown away. If any effectual means could be devised, the country would have great cause to congratulate itself; but when we hear it said that constitutional government is on its trial, and that Parliament is useless if it cannot pass bills, we must observe that it is a great mistake to suppose that the passing of new statutes is the only object of Parliament assembling. A session in which not a single bill became law, except those necessary to carry on the administration of the country, might be a most useful and creditable session, and might confer benefits on the nation which no despotic country can hope for. The main duty of Parliament is to express and fix free opinion. That 1860.] The Census Bill. the voice of the people should be man. That is the real contrast; and this fundamental difference is not affected by a happy, contented, and free people having to wait another year for a bankruptcy bill. Among minor subjects of dispute, none has excited greater interest than the proposed insertion of the clause requiring the declaration of religious opinion in the Census Bill. Theoretically, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis observed, there could be no harm in recording to what denomination each person included in the Census belonged, supposing that everybody belonged to some definite denomination or to none. But there are very many English people who do not belong to any except in the most nominal way, and who yet would not like to record that they belonged to none. It is not at all desirable that these persons should be invited to register a purely nominal and artificial adhesion to some denomination, and it is certainly not the interest of the Church of England that they should do so. The wish to annoy Dissenters by showing the numerical superiority of the Church is one that ought to be studiously checked. It is probable that the bulk of those who belong really to no de nomination, or who attend at many places of worship indifferently, would describe themselves as belonging to the body that is socially the most respectable and is in possession of the parochial churches. But although the triumph thus obtained might vex jealous Nonconformists, it would be a very barren and dangerous one for the Church. The Church has everything to gain by allowing the neutral ground between itself and dissent to be as wide as possible, and by exercising its attracting influences as quietly and noiselessly as possible. As long as no one can say of the poor that they belong definitely and by specific record to a distinct Nonconformist denomination, they will belong theoretically to the Church; and the Church, with its higher education, social prestige, and enormous wealth, has much the best chance in competing for the real adherence of the millions that are now practically unattached to any religious body. Far the most really important measure of the session has had a narrow escape of sinking into a personal quarrel between Sir Charles Wood and Mr. Horsman. It is difficult to overrate the consequences of making a mistake in the composition of our Indian army; and the overpowering majority with which the second reading of Sir Charles Wood's Bill was carried, after a feeble defence and a languid debate, must dishearten those who hope against all experience that Parliament will interest itself in the Government of India. The authorities on each side of the controversy seem so nearly balanced, and India is so far off, and is in every way such a bore to the House of Commons, that all parties agreed to throw the entire responsibility of the decision on the Cabinet, and accept the proposal submitted to them. This was an easy way of getting out of the difficulty; and it must be allowed that if members had attempted to go into the merits of the question, they would have found a vexatious weight of argument against the Ministerial scheme. All those who have known India by T 2 |