manuscript in question belonged to Sig. Grigolli of Desenzano, in the province of Brescia, and has recently been acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale of Paris. The manuscript and Old French text are both in poor condition.

A. Piaget. Le Chemin de Vaillance de Jean de Courcy et l'hiatus de l'e final des polysyllabes aux XIVe et XVe siècles. 26 pages. This tedious poem of forty thousand verses is modeled upon the Roman de la Rose and similar works.

Comptes rendus. Wilhelm Röttiger, Der heutige Stand der Tristanforschung (Ernest Muret). 12 pages. "Parmi la foule des récits divergents qui étaient colportés en Angleterre et sur le continent par des conteurs en prose, les deux principales versions de la légende de Tristan se seraient constituées par les préférences de deux éminents poètes. L'œuvre de Thomas était peutêtre plus belle, mais celle de Chrétien semble être plus ancienne en date. Aussi bien que le roi Arthur et les compagnons de la Table Ronde, que le Chevalier au Lionet Perceval, que Lancelot et Guenièvre, Tristan et Iseut ont probablement été introduits dans la littérature française et européenne par le célèbre poète champenois. Si Thomas était une âme plus poétique, plus sensible et plus profonde, nous reconnaissons toujours mieux en Chrétien de Troyes l'un de ces heureux génies qui ont su révéler aux autres hommes des sources cachées de joie et d'émotion."Alfred Linder, Plainte de la Vierge en vieux vénitien (Alfred Pillet). Gustave Maccon, Note sur le mystère de la résurrection attribué à Jean Michel (G. Paris).

Périodiques. Zeitschrift für rom. Phil. XXII 3, summary of contents and discussion of etymologies (G. Paris).-Revue de philologie franç. et prov. IX, X, XI, summary of contents.

Chronique. Festschrift zum VIII. allgemeinen deutschen Neuphilologentage, verfasst von Mitgliedern der österreichischen Universitäten und des Wiener neuphilologischen Vereines, herausgegeben von J. Schipper. Contains a number of articles of interest to Romance scholars.

Livres annoncés sommairement. 3 titles. Franz Xaver Kraus, Dante: Sein Leben und sein Werk, sein Verhältniss zur Kunst und Politik.

GEORGE C. Keidel.

BRIEF MENTION.

Translation is a fertile theme; for the problems it involves are as numberless as the phenomena of language. And they are problems that no practical teacher can escape. I venture to say that any one who has been engaged in the work of giving instruction in any language could write out of his own experience essay after essay on the different ways of making bad translations, with ample illustrations from the performances of his pupils, and, if he would be candid, from his own. The positive side of the art is far more difficult, but there is no lack of tractates by which scholars have vainly endeavored to impart correct principles. Tycho Mommsen's book was reviewed in this Journal fourteen years ago (VIII 231), and mention was made of WilamowitzMoellendorff's brilliant essay on the same theme (XIII 517), and now CAUER's Die Kunst des Uebersetzens has been found so suggestive by Professor TOLMAN that he has been prompted to put forth a slender volume of some 80 pages on The Art of Translating (Sanborn), which follows the lines of Cauer's book. It is not a translation of Cauer's book, for that would be absurd on the face of it. True, there is a body of doctrine that abides on account of the modern character of both English and German, but the difference between the two languages over against Latin and Greek is very great, although it has not been taken into account sufficiently by those who translate German manuals into English.

In the hands of a master the German language, as is well known, lends itself to translation much more readily than English, not simply because of its various virtues on which I need not expatiate, but because of its comparative freedom from reminiscential phraseology. Into the text of our literary language have been woven threads from five hundred years of continuous tissue; and despite the 'decay of literary allusion' over which great lamentation has been made of late, no one can write English like a native without enriching his discourse with the filaments of earlier fabrics, distinctly the products of individual looms. Now, a language that is stiffened with such embroidery is hard to translate from, because so much is lost; it is hard to translate into, because it can not wrap itself so closely round a foreign original as a language which, if one excepts Luther's Bible-to which our Authorized Version is more than an offset-has only a century and a half of phrase-makers to supply the fibre. However that may be, the temptation of the

ready-made locution is ever present in English, and, the worst of it is, that to yield to the seduction is to earn applause. The judicious may be supposed to grieve. But the judges are bribed. There is no one to protest against the incongruity. There is no one to consider the warning which Frere gives in his review of Mitchell's Aristophanes. Theoretically the translation ought to be achromatic. It may be nothing but an etching, but, in the name of the Muses, do not color an etching. Now, some of the translations that Professor TOLMAN admires are of this very reminiscential order, and, as Professor Shorey says in his memorable review of Jowett's Plato (XIII 351), a distinct charm of that much lauded performance is the interweaving of familiar quotations and literary allusions. But there is really no defence of these dulcia vitia. Vergil and Tennyson are near akin, and when the eagle 'clasps the crag with hooked hands' there is a certain satisfaction in recalling Palinurus, 'prensantem uncis manibus capita aspera montis'; but it ought not to work the other way, and yet when Professor Tyrrell translates Ennius' famous line: Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque by

Broad-based upon her men and principles
Standeth the state of Rome,

Professor TOLMAN applauds the Tennysonianism. When Walter Savage Landor puts into the mouth of one of his Greek characters the Ovidian reminiscence 'rude and undigested mass,' one is tempted to cry out: 'A gross anachronism! Not more so than 'broad-based' in translating Ennius. And yet, who can withstand the temptation to applaud despite the incongruous association of Republican Rome with Constitutional Victoria? My own sins in this line are ever before me, but 'You're another' has lost its terrors for me, and when Dr. HEMPHILL translates Persius, II 71 magna lance by 'lordly dish,' I object to the association of Sisera with Messalla, just as if my own diction were not penetrated with the Biblical phraseology on which I was nurtured. In my edition of Persius-a task to which I was impelled not so much by my admiration of that poet, as by the ingeni largitor, which is responsible for so much of my published work-I have frequently found myself obliged to comment on the false picturesqueness of Conington's version, who has often overdone what was already overdone; and yet I have laid myself open to another charge. Persius is the most reminiscential of all poets, and therefore I ventured to sow reminiscences of English poetry up and down my summaries, which are often half translations. But Persius' range of reminiscences was very narrow, and I ought to have kept myself mainly to Pope, who would have been a manner of analogue to Horace; but I did not conceive my task in so purely artistic a spirit, though I am very glad that I haven't it to do over again, and it is very much more pleasant to study the results that have been reached by others. So, for instance, a comparison of Dr. HEMP

HILL'S Translation of Persius (London, George Bell) with that of Conington can not fail to interest and instruct any student of that crabbed coxcomb,' as a character in Ben Jonson calls the youthful satirist 'who will come after the king?' True, Conington has been considered one of the kings of the translating world, and the old question recurs, 'who will come after the king?'; and yet, though Dr. HEMPHILL has been under Conington's influence to some extent and has followed him at points about which I have taken the pains to protest, still his careful and spirited version is a distinct addition to our apparatus and his introduction has gone far to reconcile me to the memory of the year that I spent in the company of an uncongenial prig, whom I have liked better since I have not been obliged to live with him.

A word more on this interminable subject of translations. The reproduction of the effect of the style has its limits. Professor TOLMAN says: 'Don't make the translation more elegant than the original.' But if the style of the original is perverse or awkward, it falls outside of the artistic category, and the original is not worth translating except for the contents. Who but Professor Tolman would find fault with Mr. Frazer for not reproducing what I have called the string-halt of Pausanias' style? Who would blame Dr. White for not giving us painful parallels to Appian's diction? Take Xenophon. Xenophon is not a Pausanias, nor an Appian; he is a classic, and whatever faults modern Hellenists have found with his language, an old Greek writer, on rhetoric-Aristeides or another-has left us an elaborate study of his style as a model of artistic apéλeia. Such a style, then, might challenge artistic reproduction. And yet Mr. Dakyns in his admirable version has not undertaken to bring out consistently the American tang which he has discovered in the honey of the Attic bee. There are cases in which one is privileged to improve on the original. Swinburne has said that Byron is much better reading in French prose than in the original English verse, and Swinburne, by his own command of poetic rhythm, has earned a right to quarrel with the original and to enjoy the translation. Let us read Amyot's Plutarch and North's Plutarch without asking whether they are not better than the original. And let us remember that there is a serious side to this hyperaestheticism. How much fewer fastidious souls would have been saved, if the Greek of the New Testament had not been transposed into the organ notes of the Authorized Version. Only the robuster sort can forgive ear with the indicative and associate with the riffraff of worse than plebeian names that figure in the last chapter of the Epistle to the Romans.

Persius seems to haunt this batch of Brief Mention. In reading a recent edition of Juvenal I was struck by the scant mention of a satirist to whom Juvenal may indeed have owed little, but who, for all that, furnishes apt illustrations to Juvenal's text. In my boyhood both Persius and Juvenal were read ante pilos, at an age when many youngsters of to-day are still wrestling with the Bellum Gallicum, and while our vision may have been vague, some of the moral lessons did not fail to strike deep, and I did not have to wait until I became an editor of Persius to learn the moral of

usque adeone

Scire tuum nihil est nisi te scire hoc sciat alter?

and many a formula picked up in reading or gained by observation had become part of my being before I thought fit to put it in print. The philological world, especially the grammatical section of it, is full of claimants, some of them Roger Tichborne claimants, some of them unfamiliar with the records of research. In his very readable Grammatica Militans, PAUL CAUER (p. 15) attributes to Kern the formula of the Accusative of the Object Affected and of the Object Effected. Where I got it from I do not remember, but Object Affected and Object Effected figure in my Latin Grammar of 1867. The same scholar records his pleasure at the cleverness of a young boy who, instead of giving the current whence-case explanation of the than-ablative with the comparative, called the said ablative an instrumental. Was the boy really clever or had he been reading an old copy of Madvig? "Der Ablativ scheint eigentlich zu bezeichnen dass der höhere Grad durch das Andere, welches mit zum Vergleiche gezogen wird, zum Vorschein kommt" (Madvig, §271. Anm.). To think that the doctrines of such a light as Madvig should have already fallen into the thick darkness of oblivion! To a survivor like myself these rediscoveries are a perpetual source of amusement.

How any one born to the English language or furnished with a decent knowledge of Greek, even if unacquainted with Krüger (43, 3, 6), should ever have interpreted eis didaokádov as an ellipsis for εἰς διδασκάλου οἶκον (leg. οἰκίαν) has been a matter of amused wonder to me for fifty years. Tom's is Tom's house or Tom's shop or Tom's barroom, Tom's characteristic locality. So ev διδασκάλου, 50 ἐκ διδασκάλου. Cf. Ar. Pl. 84: ἐκ Πατροκλέους ἔρχομαι. The genitive depends on the idea of locality contained in the local adverb. There is no ellipsis whatever, though, to be sure, it is more common to use napá of the characteristic locality with the appropriate case. It is to me an old story. Imagine, then, my surprise to find in a recent number of the Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift (Dec. 19, 1900) that Herr MEISTER claims this as his discovery and points triumphantly to his Griech.