ÆSCHYLUS. We believe it is generally acknowledged that military men make, for the most part, but indifferent poets. There is too little sentiment, and too much matter of fact, in the use of the sword and the musket, to induce a half-pay captain to exchange his jack-boots for the cothurnus, or a field-marshall to turn sonnetteer. In short, Mars and Apollo, though both very respectable gentlemen in their way, are shrewdly suspected of entertaining nothing less than a very marked and decided aversion to each other. You may peer through your best telescope for a month together into the sky, before you see them walking arm in arm, or playing at skittles, or smoking a friendly cigar in each other's company. It must be this animosity of the heavenly powers, pervading and influencing the minds of earthlings, which places poetry much in the same relation to gunpowder that fire bears to water. Sure soldiers would scribble like the rest of the world, if they could! One can hardly believe that men should fear critics when so accustomed to reviews, or dread being cut up when their own profession is to cut down. Yet it is certain that they very rarely do scribble. Their writing is done with a steel pen and red ink: all the impression they make is external. Moreover, they have too strong an antipathy to the pure element, to drink more than a very few sips of the Castalian spring; and too great practice in horsemanship, to feel either pleasure or novelty in soaring on the back of Pegasus. Most of them, indeed, like mounting a step or two, but that is only in the army, and not up the side of Parnassus. And though several ensigns in love have been known to write verses with a very fair approximation to metre, and tolerably intelligible in some parts; yet, generally speaking, a poetical soldier is about as seldom seen as a musical sailor, or a literary dust man. But Eschylus-the warrior-poet Eschylus, is a signal exception to our rule. He certainly did write some sublime poetry; but he as certainly wrote no small quantity of unintelligible, bombastic, unmeaning, unmitigated trash! Alas, that valuable lives should be sacrificed in the truly vain task of restoring such a corrupt medley of mysteries as an Eschylean chorus! If Eschylus had not been a military man, which, we maintain, sufficiently accounts for his poetical delinquencies, we should certainly have taken him for an opium-eater. We have often wondered how such a sensible man as Parson Adams could have found so much entertainment in perusing his manuscript of Æschylus for months and years together: yet there are higher dignitaries of the church than country curates, who have found both entertainment and advantage in the same pursuit: for it is not too much to assert, that Æschylus has raised two of his worshippers to the episcopal bench,—some will perhaps say by corrupt influence. Much of Eschylus' most worthless trash is made to sound respectable, or at least bearable, by dressing it up in finer language than the original at all deserves. Take the following specimen, which is not a chorus; and let the reader of Eschylus learn how to translate his author in future from our faithful version. We protest we give no parody, but a literal translation, with a spice of the burlesque to render it palatable. Choeph. 470. ORESTES. O father, who most vulgarly wast burked, To fly when I have punched Egisthus' head! ORESTES. Think on the bath in which they burked you, sir! Or make them catch it well that murdered you- And don't wipe out all Pelops' ancient line, Of governors to Davy's locker gone! you ; And, like a string of corks, bear up the net But you, Orestes, since you will be rash, CHORUS. Conceive what means this most absurd concern: I ought to know a thing or two about it! Which we had doused in darkness,-so next day Surely to pronounce this poetry, must argue a perverted judgment indeed! Dark-minded hero of Marathon! Man of ghosts, and dreams, and murders, and tortures, and horrors! Why thus combine the ludicrous with the disgusting, the unintelligible with the nonsensical, and harass us poor unhappy Grecules with so much of what (if you had your deserts) would be unanimously condemned as "BOSH." STANZAS. Or all the thoughts that pass the soul, A weary lot is mine; And of the smallest cares of life, But one small part is thine. Yet still there is nor night nor morn, For all I feel that thou dost cast I do not wish thy peace should fly, THE LADIES' DEFENCE. (From Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusa, 785.) WHEN lovers sing of bleeding hearts, Their zeal, alas, as time will prove. For HUSBANDS!-they are not the same, Now, if you think that nought that's made is Nay, that our very names possess An antidote to happiness; Pray what's the reason each one strives To win those animals called WIVES? Why, if the sex ye thus disparage, Why seek your own distress by marriage? If we're an evil, what's the reason You lock us up as in a prison, And keep us with such jealous care, That we may scarcely breathe fresh air ? To let us run whene'er we can. But if your cunning wife, while you Have left the house, should pop out too, And not return again before Her husband thunders at the door, Ye rave, ye curse, ye stamp, ye swear,- For being rid of all your cares: And stay till half-past one, or so, The very evil he abuses! If ever at a window nigh The source confessed of all your pain! While thus your words your deeds belie, Don't talk of inconsistency. THE EMIGRANT'S FAREWELL. WHEN I go to the land of the stranger, One hearth-stone was dew'd at my parting, Then why flee my country?-The dwelling The cause of my wandering now. There poverty pillows the dying, While I am afar on the sea: Round her hut the wild plover is crying, I cling to the country that spurns me, Farewell! for the night breeze is swelling J. M. J. T. |