But rots in filth at home, a very pest,
And thinks it loss of leisure to be drest.
For him she breathes of nard, for him alone,
She makes the sweets of Araby her own;
For him, at length, she ventures to uncase
Her person; scales the rough cast from her face,
And (while her maids to know her now begin)
Washes, with asses' milk, her frowzy skin;
Asses, which, exiled to the Pole, the fair,
For her charms' sake, would carry with her there.
But tell me yet; this thing, thus daub'd and oil'd,
Thus poultic'd, plaister'd, bak'd by turns and boil'd,
Thus with pomatums, ointments, lacquer'd o'er,
Is it a FACE, Ursidius, or a SORE?"

Dr. Johnson, in his imitation of the 10th Satire, has drawn a very striking and well executed picture of Charles XII., which he substitutes for that of Hannibal in the original poem. We have now an opportunity of exhibiting a good copy of the Hannibal of Juvenal:

* Produce the urn that Hannibal contains,
And weigh the mighty dust which yet remains :
And is this all! Yet THIS was once the bold,
The aspiring chief, whom Afric could not hold,
Afric, outstretch'd from where the Atlantic roars,
To Nilus; from the Line, to Lybia's shores!
Spain conquer'd, o'er the Pyrenees he bounds;
Nature oppos'd her everlasting mounds,

Her Alps, and snows: through these he bursts his
And Italy already owns his sway-

way,

Still thundering on,-" think nothing done," he cries,
Till low in dust our haughty rival lies;

Till through her smoaking streets I lead my powers,
And plant my standard on her hated towers."
Big words! But view his figure, view his face :

O, for some master hand the chief to trace,

As through the Etrurian swamps, by rains increas'd,
Spoil'd of an eye he flounc'd, on his Getulian beast!
But what ensued, illusive glory! say?-

Subdued on Zama's memorable day,

He flies in exile to a foreign state,

With headlong haste; and, at a despot's gate

And weigh the mighty dust, &c.] I do not know that this was ever done; at least with regard to Hannibal; but in the Statistical Account of Scotland, I find that Sir John Paterson had the curiosity to collect, and weigh the ashes of a person discovered a few years since in the parish of Eccles; which he was happily enabled to do with great facility, as "the inside of the coffin was smooth, and the whole body visible." Wonderful to relate, he found the whole did not exceed in weight one ounce and a half! AND IS THIS ALL!'

Sits, wond'rous suppliant! of his fate in doubt,
'Till the Bithynian's morning nap be out.

Just to his fame, what death has Heaven assign'd
This great controller of all human kind?

Did hostile armies give the fatal wound,

Or mountains press him, struggling, to the ground?
No; three small drops, within a ring conceal'd,
Aveng'd the blood he pour'd on Canna's field!
Go, madman, go! the paths of fame pursue,
Climb other Alps, and other realms subdue,
To please the rhetoricians, and become,

A DECLAMATION for the boys of Rome!'

Surely, when these two parallel passages are compared, Mr. Gifford will retract the observation made in the Essay, at the bottom of p. lxi., that Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes has scarcely a trait of Juvenal's manner.

The conclusion of this Satire of Juvenal, Nil ergo optabunt homines? &c. is extremely beautiful; and we shall finish our extracts with Mr. Gifford's translation of it:

Say then, must man, depriv'd all power of choice,
Ne'er raise to Heaven the supplicating voice?
Not so; but to the gods his fortunes trust;
Their thoughts are wise, their dispensations just.
What best may profit or delight they know,
And real good, for fancied bliss bestow;
With eyes of pity they our frailties scan;
More dear to them, than to himself, is man.
By blind desire, by headlong passion driven,
For wife and heirs we daily weary Heaven;
Yet still 'tis Heaven's prerogative to know,
If heirs, or wife, will bring us bliss or woe.

But, that thou may'st (for still 'tis good to prove
Thy humble hope) ask something from above;
Thy pious offerings to the temples bear,
And, while the altars blaze, be this thy prayer.

O THOU, who see'st the wants of human kind,
Grant me all health of body, health of mind;
A soul prepar'd to meet the frowns of fate,
And look undaunted on a future state;
That reckons death a blessing, yet can bear
Existence nobly, with its weight of care;
That anger and desire alike restrains,
And counts Alcides' toils and cruel pains,
Superior to the feasts, the wanton sport,
And morbid softness of the Assyrian court.

THIS, thou to give thyself may'st well suffice:-
The only path to peace through virtue lies.

O Fortune,

O Fortune, Fortune! all thy boasted powers
Would shrink to nothing, were but prudence ours
But man, fond man, exalts thee to the spheres,
And clothes thee in the attributes he fears!'

Sat. VIII. 1. 97,

· furor est post omnia perdere naulum,

Mr. G. conceives to be a proverbial expression corresponding to the English saying, "Do not throw the haft after the hatchet;" and he thus renders it:

-'tis honest craft:

Thou could'st not keep the hatchet,-save the haft."

The peculiar conciseness of the Latin is generally beyond the power of imitation in an English translator; and hence he must yield to the necessity of being more or less diffuse. The following five words, in Sat. 8. 1. 165,

breve sit quod turpiter audes,

are expanded into a couplet,

O friends! be folly's giddy reign concise,
And brief the hour ye consecrate to vice.'

Sat. V. 1. 66. (cum multis aliis,) is, however, dilated to a fault. Here, and in several other places, we lament that Mr. G. has given specimens of incorrect language, by the omission of the relative but we are still more displeased with the number of low expressions, bad rhimes, and prosaic lines, to which we have already alluded; such as

With whom wives, widows, every thing went down.'-
Since, in his days, it ask'd no mighty pains.'-

Spasm, sudden death, and without a will.'

The last is a line which wants the rhithm of poetry.

The word betrays is in one place employed as a rhime to disease, and bought to throat in another; and the following inelegant couplet presents itself at p. 97,

And sure, in any corner we can get,

To call one lizard ours, is something yet!'

The exclamation in this line has been thought to savour of the sufficiency of Stoicism, but without reason; since, it must, in fairness, be restricted to the independence of the wise and virtuous man on fortune. Wisdom and virtue, indeed, Juvenal thought, with the rest of the heathen world, men could attain by their own exertions; but there were some at Rome, as Madan finely observes, at that time, who could have taught him, that, EVERY GOOD GIFT,

AND EVERY PERFECT GIFT, IS FROM ABOVE; AND COMETH DOWN
FROM THE FATHER OF LIGHTS.'

age/

At p. 144, we have this line, which is eked out by an unnecessary be:

Come at your beck; he heeds not, he, the poor.'

• What all amort in the first line of Sat. 9. is an obsolete or at least a provincial expression.

Many more spots and blemishes may be pointed out: but it is barely justice to add plura nitent, and to give Mr. G. the praise of being the best translator of Juvenal into English verse.

The first twenty or thirty lines of the 11th Satire were translated by Mr. Cookesley, the friend and patron of Mr. G.'s youth, and he has preserved them as a testimony of respect.

To the notes and illustrations which accompany the text, much commendation is due; and we purposed to have made larger extracts from them, than the length to which this article has already extended will now admit. As an annotator, Mr. Gifford excels; and he rarely draws us from the text to the bottom of the page without fully compensating us for the interruption. He is erudite, judicious, and sprightly, and is never a dead weight on the reader.

Critics have differed in their explanation of the passage in Sat. I. 1. 155-157. Pone Tigellinum, &c.*

The reader will be gratified by Mr. G.'s note.

• Touch Tigellinus now, &c.] Fielding makes Booth, in the other world, inquire of Shakspeare the precise meaning of the famous apostrophe of Othello, "Put out the light," &c.; and if some curious critic had done the same of Juvenal, respecting the sense of the following lines, he would have done a real service to the commentators, and saved an ocean of precious ink, which has been wasted on them to little purpose. The lines stand thus in the old editions, as cited by Lipsius.

"Pone Tigellinum, tæda lucebis in illa

Qua stantes ardent, qui fixo gutture fumant,

Et latus mediam sulcus diducit arenam."

"Touch but Tigellinus, and you shall shine in that torch, where they stand and burn, who smoke, fastened to a stake, and (where) a wide furrow divides the sand.”

The dreadful conflagration which laid waste a great part of Rome in the reign of Nero, broke out in the house of Tigellinus. As his intimacy with the Emperor was no secret, it strengthened the general belief, that the city was burned by design. Nothing seems to have enraged Nero so much as this discovery; and to avert the odium from his favourite, he basely taxed the Christians with having set fire to his house. Under this pretence, thousands of these innocent victims were dragged to a cruel death. The Emperor, says Tacitus, (Ann. xv. 44,) added insult to their sufferings; some were covered with the skins of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs; others

* See our account of Madan's prose translation of Juvenal, Rev. Vol. lxxxi. and Vol. i. N. S. p. 239-240.

REV. JAN. 1803.

C

were

were crucified, and others, again, WERE SMEARED WITH INFLAMMABLE MATTER, and LIGHTED UP WHEN THE DAY DECLINED, TO SERVE AS TORCHES DURING THE NIGHT! This last horrid species of barbarity sufficiently explains the two first lines; the remaining one, it seems, is not so easily got over.

I once supposed that a part of the amphitheatre might be separated from the rest by a "wide furrow," or ditch, and allotted to this dreadful purpose: this idea, however, does not seem to have occurred to any of the critics, (no great recommendation of it, I con. fess,) since they prefer altering the text, and reading,

"Et latum media sulcum deduces arena,".

66

"And you shall make, or draw out, a wide furrow in the sand." That is, say they, " by turning round the stake to avoid the flames :" which, as the sufferer was fixed to it, he could not well do. If the alteration be allowed, I should rather imagine the sense to be, "when the pitched cloth, in which you are wrapped, is burnt out, your scorched and half consumed body shall be dragged by a hook out of the arena." In the translation (for I am not quite satisfied with this last interpretation), I have taken "et" for a disjunctive, and supposed the passage to relate to a separate punishment. Madan's, or rather Curio's, idea, that the expression is proverbial in this place, and means 66 labouring in vain," is almost too absurd for notice. "You will be burned alive if you touch any of the Emperor's favourites, and besides, you will plough the sand, you will lose your labour!"

There is yet another meaning adopted by some of the learned, and which is produced by a gentleman in his remarks on Madan's translation of this very line. " I am surprised (he says) that Mr. M. when he knew so much, should not have been acquainted with the following passage of Jos. Scaliger, which sets the whole in the clearest light. Stantibus ad palum destinatis unco (ne motatione capitis picem cadentem declinarent) gutturi suffixo è lamina ardente pix aut unguen in caput liquefiebat, ita ut rivi pinguedinis humana per arenam sulcum facerent. By this interpretation, so intuitively true, that, by one acquainted with the facts, it might have been deduced from the vulgar text without the emendation of Scaliger," (rather of Lipsius, Scaligero, as Ferrarius says, non improbante,) "the spirit of the poet is vindicated, history illustrated, and the image raised to its climax."

I have seen enough of criticism to be always on my guard against interpretations" intuitively true." Human fat, whether dissolved" in streams," or, as this gentleman translates it, "drop by drop," could scareely make a wide furrow in the sand; and, indeed, both Ferrarius and Vossius, who had this interpretation of Scaliger's before them, concur in rejecting it as improbable. With respect to the "illustration of history," the former adds, "Que Scaliger de lamina et pice adhibita Christianis ad palum, non memini me apud alios legisse !" I see no reason to alter my translation.

To return to Tigellinus; he was recommended to Nero by his debaucheries. After the murder of Burrhus, he succeeded to the command of the prætorian guards, and abused the ascendency he had over the Emperor, to the most dreadful purposes. He after.

wards