and especially now, when he felt that he was dying, longing to be at peace with all men, Cheynell, on finding him one day a little more hearty than usual, made an onslaught with a terrible question-Did he conceive that a man living and dying a Turk, Papist, or Socinian could be saved? Chillingworth wished to decline the controversy, but in vain; Cheynell persisted in tormenting him, though he gained for his pains only this answer from Chillingworth respecting Turk, Papist, and Socinian, that he did not absolve them, and would not condemn them. Half of the answer Cheynell dismissed with a sneer. It was frivolous for Chillingworth to talk of absolution; priest though he was, he could not absolve them if he tried. With the other half he professed himself gravely dissatisfied. If he could only have extracted an anathema from the lips of the dying man, he would have had some hope of his salvation. And one passage in Chillingworth's works had encouraged him to think that he might be successful in the attempt. In replying to one of his most formidable assailants, Chillingworth had written as follows: "You charge me with a great number of false and impious doctrines, which I will not name in particular, because I will not assist you so far in the spreading of my own undeserved defamation; but whosoever teaches or holds them, let him be anathema!" On these latter words the eye and the memory of Cheynell fixed themselves, as on something sound, wholesome, and satisfactory, occurring in the midst of a hotchpotch of Arminianism, Socinianism, and Popery. And when the dying man declined to repeat the formula, Cheynell expresses his fear lest "Mr. Chillingworth grew worse and worse, and would not anathematise a gross Socinian." Poor Cheynell! incapable of perceiving that if there be a time for cursing, there is also a time for abstaining from curses; that a dying man has something better to do than to condemn the gravest errors of his neighbour, and that the heartiest anathema directed against a heretic is a miserable substitute for the faintest faith in a Saviour.

Within two months after the death of Chillingworth, the trial of Laud began. But had the archbishop been able to leave the Tower, and to visit his dying friend and godson, we can imagine some of the incidents of the visit. He would have come, Prayer-Book in hand, and would have turned to the Visitation of the Sick. As he used it, he would very probably have indulged in sundry gestures and bowings, and have longed in his heart for the oil of unction. Still he would have been faithful to its words; and when he came in its course to inquire whether the sick man believed as a Christian man would or no, he would simply have rehearsed the Apostles' Creed, and have asked Chillingworth if he believed it. The sick person having

answered, "All this I steadfastly believe," the archbishop, or any other minister, must go on to other matter. The clergy of the Church of England have no reason or excuse for forcing on the sick and dying the language of scholastic distinctions and ecclesiastical censures. The Apostles' Creed must suffice them when they admit the babe into the Church at baptism, or strive to strengthen those who are ready to die. The Athanasian Creed is an occasional incident in morning prayer; it never touches font or altar, or blends itself with even the skirts of a sacrament. Falkland and Hales and Chillingworth, we cannot doubt, would gladly have dispensed with it. Laud might have comforted himself on its removal, with the reflection that the Councils both of Ephesus and Chalcedon had forbidden any addition to the Nicene Creed; an archbishop of Canterbury, not long after Laud, wished the Church well rid of it. It has become offensive in the course of two hundred years, even to the more judicious successors of Cheynell. Its days in the Church of England are surely numbered; and though it is too much to expect that churchmen of strong conservative instincts will be pleased at its final disappearance, yet their children of the next generation will take up a prayer-book which contains neither the State Services nor the Athanasian Creed, and rejoice that their good fathers had not their own way in all things.

ART. II. PROFESSOR CONINGTON'S HORACE.

The Odes and Carmen Sæculare of Horace translated into English Verse. By John Conington, M.A., Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. London: Bell and Daldy.

The Odes of Horace translated into English Verse. With a Life and Notes by Theodore Martin. London: Parker, Son, and Bourn.

HORACE occupies a peculiar position not only in Roman poetry, but in the history of Europe. As a poet he stood on the boundary-line between the objective poetry of the earlier Romans, and the more subjective poetry of the Empire. More than any other man he may be called the art-poet of Rome. More than any other man, without sacrificing the objective form of the antique, he embodied that reflex play of conflicting feelings which accompanies every culminating civilisation, and which is essentially subjective. Horace first, as a poet, began to

muse over his own feelings, and to play with his own experience. When Montaigne sat in his arm-chair spinning his own soul for future generations, he merely did in uncouth gothic style what Horace had taught him to do in the perfection, but also in the trammels, of ancient beauty. It is true that, when compared with later Europeans, with Shakespeare or Schiller, with Shelley or with Goethe,-Horace's writings seem strangely shallow and meagre, as no doubt to him theirs must, could he have read them, have seemed the ravings of madmen or sick girls. But all proportion kept, if we compare Horace with other ancient authors, Latin and Greek, it is impossible, we think, not to feel that he is, by comparison with them, essentially subjective, and already, though with a youthful hand, unconsciously busy interpreting the self-inspection and self-dissection of his time. The key-note of his character in this respect (oddly enough, for it cannot have been by design) appears in his dedication to Mæcenas. The "sunt quos juvat" words which, somehow or other, have served to stamp the feeling of the difference of human tastes ever since, and which ticket the ode in the schoolboy's mind-describe the very essence of his character. Let Lucretius describe the mysteries of creation uncreated, and Virgil her outward beauties; let Plautus set the manners of his countrymen in action; Horace is absorbed in his own feelings and those of the men around him, whom he personally knows. His classical conventional imagery is mere conventional drapery, a pure make-believe that he is sailing in the clouds. No man really hugs the ground closer, or is more intent upon the actual living throng about him. The real secret of Horace's hold upon later European thought arises precisely out of the living reality of his experience, coupled with the translucency of ancient forms, which made them readily intelligible. And it would be difficult to point to any set of feelings in modern society, the germs of which are not to be found in Horace, invested with that peculiar freshness which belongs to every first crop. His position as a freedman, belonging to the mercantile class, gave him an insight into the whole tract of sentiment arising out of the jealousy between the political aristocracy and the plutocracy of his day. All that he writes is written with a living personal feeling which is unmistakable. Every phase of this multiplex social conflict was minutely and vividly familiar to him. He was born tolerably well off. Like many a young man, he took the noble and loyal, but losing side. He tasted comparative poverty. He was by whatever train of circumstances reconciled to his victors. He became partly dependent upon their good offices. He adopted their politics. He preached poems to their adversaries, his former friends. He

rose to the enjoyment of universal popularity. He kept his personal pride. In a word, he passed through every vicissitude which could make the life of his time a living reality, vividly and personally familiar to him in its most fleeting and evanescent details. Another man passing through the same train of events might not have written as Horace, but assuredly without his experience Horace would never have written as he did, or become the household author in the hands of what may be called the European "man of the world."

It is this singular combination of ancient art and complex personal feeling which makes Horace so peculiarly untranslatable. Had he written poems for the sake of writing poetry and not to express his feelings, they would have been much more imperfect (judged by the highest standard), but probably much more translatable. The source of their perfection-their personality is also one cause of the impossibility of adequately rendering them,-their intensely conversational tone, differing only from spoken language by the more exquisite crystallisation of forms, and a certain additional care and apparatus. Whether he begins, "Lydia, dic per omnes te deos oro," or "Nullam, Vare, sacra vite prius severis arborem,"-whether he wards off, with averted head, the "brutal crowd," or asks Asteria, why she weeps for Gyges,-there is almost always and throughout a strictly spoken tone. And this of all others, though apparently the smallest difficulty in the way of the translator, is absolutely insuperable. To translate Horace into English which shall preserve his feeling, yet sound like the English addressed by one Englishman to another, is an impossibility. If any one will satisfy himself of this, let him compare the fiery and talented distortions of Mr. Theodore Martin with the cool, wary, and wonderfully elaborate translation of Professor Conington. It is not too much to say, that in nine cases in ten, Professor Conington comes infinitely closer to the tone of Horace than Mr. Martin, and in nine cases in ten he is still at an infinite distance from the original. Who would ever, in any English form of address, say:

"O, wont the flying Nymphs to woo,

Good Faunus, through my farm," &c. ?
The Latin is in the quietest form of colloquial appeal:

"Faune, Nympharum fugientum amator,
Per meos fines et aprica rura

Lenis incedas," &c.

In this instance Mr. Martin has the advantage:

"Faunus, lover of the shy

Nymphs, who at thy coming fly,
Lightly o'er my borders tread," &c.

This is better just because it is more simple and natural. But after the unlucky first line, Professor Conington falls on his feet again, and proceeds more soberly, if not as happily as usual. Mr. Martin's second stanza is all in the plunging style:

"When December's Nones come round,
Then the cattle all do bound
O'er the grassy plains in play."

This "when," "then," "bound," "round," hop-skip-and-jump translation is manifestly alien to the easy, serpentine, conversational tone of the Latin:

"Ludit herboso pecus omne campo
Cum tibi Nonæ redeunt Decembres
Festus in pratis vacat otioso
Ĉum bove pagus."

But in order to place the conversational character of Horace's style more strikingly in view, we ask our reader's leave to print one of the odes without the rythmical division into lines, as if, in fact, it were prose:

“AD LEUCONDEN.

Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi finem dî dederint, Leuconoë, nec Babylonios tentaris numeros. Ut melius, quicquid erit, pati, seu plures hyemes, seu tribuit Jupiter ultimam, quæ nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare Tyrrhenum. Sapias, vina liques, et spatio brevi spem longam reseces. Dum loquimur, fugerit invida ætas.. Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

There is in these lines an undulating grace and variety, an ease, a refinement, and a coincidence of sense and metre so exact, that the rhythm seems to differ at every step. In other words, the metre has followed the sense, a humble handmaid following her mistress with a basket of flowers; the sense is not manacled in the metre, like a rogue in the pillory. Compare with the Latin Mr. Martin's version of the same ode, which we also print as prose:

"Ask not of fate to show ye-such lore is not for man-what limits, Leuconoë, shall round life's little span. Both thou and I must quickly die! Content thee, then, nor madly hope to wrest a false assurance from Chaldean horoscope. Far nobler, better were it, whate'er may be in store, with soul serene to bear it. If winters many more Jove spare for thee, or this shall be the last, that now with sullen roar scatters the Tuscan surge in foam upon the rockbound shore. Be wise, your spirit firing with cups of temper'd wine, and hopes afar aspiring in compass brief confine. Use all life's powers, the envious hours fly as we talk. Then live to-day, nor fondly to to-morrow trust more than you must or may."