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neither has been nor can be read. Yet whatever we may think of his pretensions to superiority in any respect over Fairfax, we do not mean to assert that his production is utterly contemptible. He is evidently, to the best of his abilities, a faithful interpreter, and exhibits no instance of wanton deviation. His verses are polished with the nicest care, and in unexceptionable, or, to speak in the dialect of Mr Bowles, unpardonable harmony of numbers, he is scarcely outdone by Pope. But of the power of uniting smoothness with conciseness, of preserving at once the sound and the sense, for which that illustrious poet was so distinguished, he seems to have had no conception. This defect alone must render his version an erroneous representation of the Jerusalem Delivered. The distinguishing characteristic of Tasso's style, as a foreign student soon finds to his cost, is majestic brevity. We do not mean that he is what is generally called a concise writer. His is a closeness of phraseology, and not of thought; there is an ample expansion of ideas, but no redundancy of expressions. Of this elegant succinctness not the slightest trace is visible in the translation. Hoole appears to have viewed words in the light of musical notes, as mere symbols of sounds, and not of sentiments, and to have supposed that he had little more to do than to arrange them into harmonious couplets. We accordingly find his lines crowded with superfluous and common place epithets, and rounded off with unmeaning phrases. The following passage from the fourth book will illustrate and confirm these remarks. It is scarcely necessary to observe, that its striking tautology is imputable in no degree to Tasso :

Now was the night in starry lustre seen,
And not a cloud obscured the blue serene,
Her silver beams the rising moon displayed,
And decked with pearly dew the dusky glade,
With anxious soul the enamoured virgin strays
From thought to thought in Love's perplexing maze,
And vents her tender plaints and breathes her sighs
To all the silent fields and conscious skies.

We subjoin Fairfax's version of the same stanza:

Invested in her starry veil the night

In her kind arms embraced all this round, The silver moon from sea up rising bright, Spread frosty pearl upon the candied ground, New Series, No. 9.

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And Cynthia like for beauties' glorious light,

The love-sick nymph threw glist'ring beams around,
And counsellors of her old love she made,

Those vallies dumb, that silence and that shade.'

It cannot be denied, however, that the smoothness of numbers, of which we have already spoken, enables us to glide over many of Hoole's pleonasms with little annoyance; and this work, notwithstanding its numerous and manifest defects, was so popular, that in fifty years it has passed through more than twice as many editions as have ever been printed of Fairfax. The celebrity of the translation was indeed not a little promoted by that of the original itself. The Jerusalem Delivered is considered by many critics as the best poem in the most musical of languages; and Voltaire and Dryden have pronounced it the first epic of modern times. In one merit, and that certainly none of the meanest, Tasso has outdone every other heroic poet, that of sustaining throughout the interest of the story. He has combined an unbroken unity of design with an abundant variety of incident. We find in the Jerusalem no long prelude to the main narrative, as in the Odyssey; no fatiguing chronicles of successive combats with little intermission or variety, as in the Iliad; no falling off toward the conclusion, as in the Æneid, and in Paradise Lost. In a word, it is perhaps the only heroic poem which can be repeatedly read through in course without weariness. Much of this excellence must be retained in the most ordinary version, and that of Hoole was strangely believed on his own assertion to be the only one, which a modern reader could tolerate. His envious misrepresentations of his predecessor's merits, which for half a century were but too successful, are fortunately now detected and exposed. Fairfax has at last emerged from oblivion

'Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained
In that obscure sojourn'-

and has risen by the undivided suffrages of the best English critics to a far higher rank, as a poet, than he had ever enjoyed in the days of his former glory. His fame as an author is indeed almost the only vestige of his existence. Of his private life we have no ampler history than that which we have previously mentioned, which, to say nothing of its extreme scantiness, rests only on incomplete and contradictory evidence.

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We are told, that he was the son of sir Thomas Fairfax, who lived in the reign of queen Elizabeth; and that the legitimacy of his birth is an undecided, and, at the present day an inscrutable question. It is added that he passed his time in that undisturbed literary seclusion, of which all poets have dreamed, and many sung, but which scarcely one has enjoyed, and that his life was in a word serene, happy, and useful. Its usefulness it would not be fair to question, but we may safely presume that its serenity and happiness were disturbed on more than one occasion, for we find that our poet was deeply involved in religious controversy, and that he wrote a treatise on demonology, which he entitled a 'Discourse on Witchcraft, as it was acted in the family of Mr Edward Fairfax.' The time of his death is uncertain, but is supposed to have been in 1632.

He published nothing but his Godfrey of Bulloigne, but left behind him several manuscripts, none of which appear to have been ever printed, except a few religious eclogues. Of these, one is prefixed to his Jerusalem in the volume before us, and called by the editor a masterly allegory of the corruption of sin and the redemption of christianity; but though it contains several beautiful passages, it is on the whole nothing better than a heap of splendid absurdities. With his contemporaries his fame rested, as it must with all posterity, principally on his Jerusalem. On the general merits of this work, as a mere English poem, we shall make no comments, as on this head we shall presently allow it to speak largely for itself. It is rather our purpose to consider it as a mere translation, and we now proceed to answer the first inquiry, which such a view of it must naturally suggest in the reader's mind,-does it present (under all reasonable allowances) an accurate representation of the original? This question we have carefully examined by minute comparisons between various passages in the two authors, and believe that those of our readers, who are willing to submit to the same drudgery, must give an unqualified answer in the affirmative. That Fairfax has absolutely omitted or added nothing, that every thing of the original is retained but the mere phraseology, or that not a shade of sentiment is his own, are assertions which we do not intend to make, and which, if true, would be unimportant. Whoever,' says De Lille, undertakes a translation, contracts a debt which he must discharge, not with the same money, but with the same sum,' and few critics of the present day will seriously deny,

that if the original be neither impaired nor disfigured, slight deviations are always excusable, and often wise. Of our author's aberrations there is little reason to complain. Where he has altered the original, it is almost always by adding to it, and his additions are generally manifest improvements. We recollect only a single instance, in which Tasso has suffered materially at his hands. The following absurd couplet in the description of the infernal council (B. 4.) is a mere interpolation.

And some their forked tails stretch forth on high
And tear the twinkling stars from trembling sky.'

It is a curious fact, that notwithstanding the acknowledged spirit and ease of Fairfax's poetry, the translation is not only written in the measure of the original, but contains precisely the same number of stanzas. We now proceed to our extracts, and trust that few readers will object to their length, since scarcely any copies of the work have reached this country.

This said, the Angel swift himself prepared
To execute the charge impos'd, aright:
In form of airy members fair embar'd,

His spirits pure were subject to our sight;
Like to a man in shew and shape he far'd,

But full of heavenly majesty and might,
A stripling seem'd he thrice five winters old,
And radiant beams adorn'd his locks of gold.
Of silver wings he took a shining pair,
Fringed with gold, unwearied, nimble, swift,
With these he parts the winds, the clouds, the air,
And over seas and earth himself doth lift;
Thus clad he cut the spheres and circles fair,
And the pure skies with sacred feathers clift,
On Libanon at first his foot he set,

And shook his wings with rosy May dews wet.'

Funeral oration of Godfrey over Dudon.

'We need not mourn for thee, here laid to rest,
Earth is thy bed, and not thy grave; the skies
Are for thy soul the cradle and the nest,

There live, for here thy glory never dies:
For like a Christian knight and champion blest,
Thou didst both live and die; now feed thine eyes

With thy Redeemer's sight, where crown'd with bliss
Thy faith, zeal, merit, well deserving is.

'Our loss, not thine, provokes these plaints and tears,
For when we lost thee, then our ship her mast,
Our chariot lost her wheels, their points our spears,
The bird of conquest her chief feather cast:
But though thy death far from our army bears
Her chiefest earthly aid, in heaven yet plac'd
Thou wilt procure us help divine; so reaps
He, that sows godly sorrow, joy by heaps.

For if our God the Lord Armipotent

Those armed Angels in our aid down send,
That were at Dothan to his prophet sent,

Thou wilt come down with them, and well defend
Our host, and with thy sacred weapons bent

'Gainst Sion's fort, these gates and bulwarks rend, That so thy hand may win this hold, and we May in these temples praise our Christ for thee.' Pluto's speech to the infernal powers.

'Ye powers infernal, worthier far to sit

Above the sun, whence you your offspring take,
With me that whilome through the welkin flit,
Down tumbled headlong to this empty lake,
Our former glory still remember it,

Our bold attempts, and war we once did make
'Gainst Him that rules above the starry sphere,
For which like traitors we lie damned here.

And now, instead of clear and gladsome sky,
Of Titan's brightness that so glorious is,
In this deep darkness, lo! we helpless lie,
Hopeless again to joy our former bliss;
And more which makes my griefs to multiply,
That sinful creature man, elected is,

And in our place the heavens possess he must,
Vile man! begot of clay, and born of dust.

'Nor this sufficed, but that he also gave
His only son, his darling, to be slain,
To conquer so hell, death, sin and the grave,
And man condemned to restore again :
He brake our prisons and would algates save

The souls that here should dwell in woe and pain,

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