When the anapasts end, the chorus break out into Ionic a Minori,' that is, into a Bacchic strain. This we had always supposed to be a very stirring metre, and we still suspect that it is; but, nevertheless, Mr. Blackie has tuned it to a sort of 'God-save-the-Queen,' with excellent effect; as also in his very spirited termination of the Suppliants.

Proudly the kingly host,
City-destroying, crossed
Hence to the neighbouring
Contrary coast;

Paving the sea with planks,
Marched he his serried ranks :
Helle's swift rushing stream
Binding with cord and chain,
Forging a yoke,

For the neck of the main,' &c.

There are so many choruses admirably executed, that we should overfill our pages if we attempted to denote all that best pleases us. Yet when we call them admirable, we do not mean that they fulfil our best idea of faithfulness. Very frequently far from it-rhyme forbids! Nevertheless, they are at worst general similarities, and, more or less, in Eschylean spirit. To make one general criticism, we think Mr. Blackie is far too fond of the trochaic metre; and our notion of what is a good trochaic line is more severe than his; we do not like what is called an initial trochee to be in fact a better iamb than trochee. Nor are we without many questionings of his interpretings of the text. But we must restrict our remarks, in order to observe reasonable limits, to a single drama, and in it shall avoid minute scholarship. We select the Choephori (Choephora, he calls it), as very corrupt, and therefore giving Mr. Blackie much scope, besides that it is less hacknied; and we must be satisfied to remark on his execution of the lyrical parts.

*

In the first chorus, he has not succeeded in making the personification of Terror very clear. The poet says, ' for clearspeaking Terror, with hair erect, the dream-seer [i.e. dreaminterpreter] of the house, breathing wrath out of sleep, spake from the recesses an utterance in the untimely night.' But hear Mr. Blackie :

'Breathing wrath through nightly slumbers,

By a dream-encompassed lair,

Prophet of the house of Pelops,

Terror stands with bristling hair.

* As: 'My vex'd heart on grief is feeding;' where we know not how to get the accent on my, which properly belongs to vex'd.

Through the dark night fitful yelling,
He within our inmost dwelling

Did the sleeper scare.'

Many readers will have to peruse this twice, and even three times, before they understand it. TERROR is not made prominent in the beginning of the sentence, as by Eschylus: the second line is hardly intelligible,-(the desire to get a rhyme has foisted in the lair)-the ambiguous preposition by so perplexes the reader, that he cannot at first tell whether prophet is vocative or nominative. Altogether, it wants directness, and therefore power. In the end of the chorus, we cannot at all find in the Greek his sense;

'I for my mistress' woes must wail,

And for my own beneath the veil.'

The poet merely makes the leader of the chorus say: 'I weep beneath my veil at the undeserved calamities of my lords' (Agamemnon and Orestes)—with nothing at all about her own woes."

*

The second is a short chorus, rather difficult, but not in the last sentence. The poet there wrote: Where is the spear-strong man to disentangle the house, a Scythian and a war-god, brandishing in fight back-stretched [or back-bent] weapons, and hand-on-hilt wielding arms for close combat?' Mr. Blackie expresses it:

We are here sorry to miss the Eschylean identification of the Scythian with the war-god, and the loss of condensation is the loss both of an Eschylean, and of a classical quality. But we say not this in censure, except of adhering to rhyme; for that it is which necessitates the expansion.

There next follows an interesting and most curious Hymn of Sorrow, on the mechanism of which we hoped for some comment from the stores of Mr. Blackie's erudition. It is not a wail of fresh grief, like those before alluded to, over one recently dead, but it is an elaborate waking-up of old sorrow, and impresses

We are not satisfied with the very first word of the hymn, Missioned,' for laλrùs. 'Idλaw is rather antique and naïve, we think, than grandiloquent.

us with the fancy (which we cannot confirm by references) that the Greeks must have indulged in sacred poetical laments, artificially constructed, perhaps, on the recurring anniversaries of a parent's death. The strophes and antistrophes are not ejaculatory, but of moderate length, and are so intertwined as at first to appear in total confusion; but on closer examination we find an order that cannot have been accidental. Let the reader study the subjoined diagram:

OEC OEC E C

γ

ولا

When a Greek letter is repeated, as and we of course use them for strophe and antistrophe. C, O, E are the initial letters of the speakers, viz. Chorus, Orestes, Electra. In the first system, it will be seen that the mesode, or central song, is sung by the chorus; it is not antistrophic. But on each side of this are two similar systems, having each its mesode, y, but the two gammas are antistrophic. These also are sung by the chorus, and like the principal mesode, are perfect anapæstic systems. Observe, farther, that each 6 is a mesode in detail, yet the two betas are antistrophic, and are sung by the chorus; and the same applies to. The other songs fall to the two children, with the arrangement, however, that before the mesode, Orestes leads and Electra responds; which is reversed after the mesode. There is in the Edipus Coloneius,' a hymn of similar complication, but as the responses are shorter, they were not so readily discerned to be antistrophic, and the text is less perfectly preserved. It is unimaginable that Eschylus can have invented for the occasion an artificial system which would have been unintelligible and distracting to the hearers; it must have grown up. Was it possibly a part of the Arian mourning' alluded to in this chorus? where Mr. Blackie has changed Arian into Persian in order to be more popular. We conjecture that the whole depended on a scheme of dancing, and that Electra and Orestes exchanged places during the mesode, so as to reverse their parts; but the Choregus always sustains her central and presiding place. In the second system, there is doubt concerning the speakers of strophe 0, and there is a breach of analogy observable. In ««, the voices succeed quick, and in the former, the Chorus tell us that they sing in band.

Concerning Mr. Blackie's execution of this whole piece, we find room for both praise and blame. How much sweetness and

variety he can command, the reader will see from the following

specimens:

'Electra. Hear thou our cries, O father, when for thee

Again,

The frequent tear is falling.

The wailing pair, o'er thy dear tomb, to thee
From their hearts' depths are calling;

The suppliant and the exile at one tomb

Their sorrow showering,

Helpless and hopeless, mantled round with gloom:
Woe overpowering.'*

'Chorus. Like a Persian mourner
Like a Cissian wailer
O'er my head swiftoaring
The voice of my deploring
Sorrow's rushing river
Black misfortune's quiver

Singing sorrow's tale,
I did weep and wail.
Came arm on arm amain:
Like the lashing rain.
O'er me flooding spread,
Emptied o'er my head.'

The reader may, perhaps, here see the truth with which Mr. Blackie styles the Dramas of Eschylus' sacred operas. It would be curious if the Italian Opera should ever be traced historically to the Arian, Kissian, and Mariandynian mourners!

Mr. Blackie is not quite enough on his guard against phrases which make grief ridiculous to men of German race; among whom it is honourable for women to weep, and men to remember;' but we forbear to quote. Occasionally, he is too indirect, or obscure, and we have some smaller questions with him, into which † we cannot enter; but we are annoyed by one ambiguity. The chorus says, that Agamemnon is 'In the underworld revér'd,'' a chieftain mighty and brilliant;' out of which Mr. Blackie makes, that Agamemnon marched to Hades dread, the monarch of the awful dead;' giving the reader to suppose that Hades (i.e. Pluto) is the monarch intended. An easy and great improvement is, to write, a king among the awful dead;' but the word Hades should be avoided, because its personification is common. Here, as elsewhere, we feel confident that a still closer translation in the unrhymed parts (the anapæstic systems) is not possible only, but easy; and might be more melodious and more Eschylean than Mr. Blackie's trochees. He too much approaches our vulgar ornamental amplifiers, when he expands, by Scamander's channel,' into, where far Scamander rolls his swirling flood,' and he is unfortunate in

It is printed overpouring; but the Greek, as well as the rhyme suggests misprint.

+ Does not beds xew mean, God, if he will?' Is Zeds aμpans anything but 'Jove, in the fulness of might?' or does he take it to mean, Patron of children of both sexes?

translating per a May with many brothers,' where it is a phrase of contempt, with the vulgar herd;' but brothers (alas!) was wanted to rhyme with others.

The fourth chorus is splendidly executed; at once thoroughly Eschylean and thoroughly English. Its directness and simplicity add vigour to its beauty. We object only to one phrase, 'the bristling line' for you the foe; it wants simplicity and clearness, and offends even one who does not know what is the Greek (such, indeed, was our own case in reading); but here, also, line is wanted to rhyme with divine!*

The fifth chorus is dreadfully corrupt, and Mr. Blackie has taken advantage of this to launch out in his own way, producing an elegant and striking piece of poetry, far more interesting than the vexatious original, which, nevertheless, has suggested every line of the translation. We were amused with his dexterity in remoulding a line, in which Eschylus has always seemed to us to provoke the sceptic's laugh most unseasonably. As we translate, it stands: (Apollo), if he pleases (xon), will show many other secrets. When he speaks an aimless word, he brings before the eyes night and darkness; but in (his) daylight he is nowise clearer.' But hear Mr. Blackie :—

'Dark are the doings of the gods; and we,
When they are clearest shown, but dimly see:
Yet Faith will follow

Where Hermes leads, the leader of the dead,
And thou, Apollo.'

But we deprecate this remodelling and elevating of their religious sentiment, for it spoils the historical truth, and hinders the English reader from confiding in his translator. We do not think Mr. Blackie prone to this fault.

The last choral hymn is not quite so corrupt, and we propose finally to quote it as a specimen of Mr. Blackie's anapæstic metre, and as a trial of his faithfulness. By accidental error it is marked as not antistrophic; indeed, we think that what is given as an epode should be antistrophically arranged. With this exception Mr. Blackie has it thus:

Str. Hall of old Priam, with sorrow unbearable,

Vengeance hath come on the Argive, thy foe:

A pair of grim lions, a double Mars terrible,
Comes to his palace that levelled thee low.
Chanced hath the doom of the guilty precisely,
Even as Phoebus foretold it, and wisely

Where the god pointed was levelled the blow.

We must add: The poet regarded Skylla as actuated not by love, but by avarice and vanity, to sell her father's life to Minos.