Oh! then, my burning heart to cool, Oh! hadst thou seen the smile arise Hadst heard but pause, my heart, I fear Oh! 'gin not your reproach anew, If firm thou stoodst, yet, think how few And, trust me, father, hadst thou known Some hope of pardon due thou'dst own, ART. XLVII. Petrarch translated; in a Selection of his Sonnets and Odes; accompa nied with Notes, and the original Italian; by the Translator of Catullus. 8vo. pp. 258 UNDER the head of translations we have so often had occasion to review poems, which if not original, at least bore no resemblance to the productions of their reputed author, that we were not a little gratified by the perusal of the present work. On one page the original pocm is printed, opposite to it the version. This is an honest way of challenging criticism; and had the author proved less successful, he would have been entitled to the praise of every liberal reader. As it is, we have only to regret, that the present is but a selection. from Petrarch, and to hope that the whole of the Sonnets and Canzons will be published in the same form. In all amatory poems there must necessarily be much sameness. A mistress is either kind or cruel, and the poet has either to lament his hard destiny, or to exult in his happiness. The same situations must have frequently excited the same feelings, and called forth the same ideas, but one individual will be more power fully affected than another, and express himself with greater energy and clearness. The lover who wishes to call in the aid of poetry after exhausting his imagination, will find every thing he has written had been said before; and after toiling to invent, will at last find, that there is nothing new to be said upon the subject. Even Petrarch, from whom our modern sonneteers have pilfered so largely, has himself borrowed from the ancients; often he may have been unaware of the similarity, but he frequently imitated designedly. In the notes to the present volume the classical allusions and imitations are pointed out, and the translator displays a very considerable knowledge of both ancient and modern poetry. The old Latin proverb, "Gladius retusus non sanat vulnus," does not in the first instance appear likely to have furnished the turn of a most beautiful sonnet. When Laura's charms beto fade, one gan of Petrarch's friends expressed himself disap pointed with the appearance of a lady of whom he had heard so much; in reply the poet sent him the following sonnet. «Her golden tresses on the wind she threw, cease. Which twisted them in many a beaute- Sightless I see my fair; though mute, I ous braid; And in her fine eyes burning glances play'd, With lovely light, which now they sel dom shew: Ah then it seem'd her face wore pity's hue, Yet haply fancy my fond sense betray'd; Nor strange that I, in whose warm heart was laid Love's fuel, suddenly enkindled grew! Not like a mortal's did her step appear, Angelic was her form; her voice, methought, Pour'd more than human accents on the mourn; I scorn existence, and yet court its stay; By grief I'm nurtur'd; and, though tearDetest myself, and for another bura; ful, gay; Death I despise, and life alike I hate ; Such, lady, dost thou make my wayward state!" We do not select this sonnet for its beauty, though it was very popular at the period alluded to. Sir Thomas Wyat the elder translated it. In his collection, it is entitled, sions of a lover. description of the contrarious pastract the most beautiful sonnet in We will now exthe present volume. Petrarch taking leave of Laura previous to his departure from Avignon she became sensibly affected and turned pale. "The pallid tint of loveliness, which threw A tender cloud upon her smiling face, grace, That in my looks that heart to meet it flew. Then how in paradise the blessed view Each other I perceiv'd; e'en so took place The gentle sentiment none else could trace, Save me, whose gaze no other object knew. The most angelic look that face could wear, To earth she calmly bent her decent brow; And silently she said, or seem'd to say, Who bears far hence my faithful friend away?" " The exquisite passage Conobbi allor, siccome in paradiso Vede l'un l'altro; in tal guisa s'aperse Quel pietoso pensier ch'altri non scerce Ma vidil'io, ch'altrove non m'affiso, is here excellently rendered, and we could not exhibit a more favourable specimen of the talents of the translator. The frontispiece to the present volume is from an antique bronze in the possession of Richard Heber, Esq. a gentleman whose name is too well known to require any praise from us for his unabated ardour in the encouragement of every attempt towards enlarging the bounds of human knowledge. ART. XLVIII. The Satires of Boileau, translated; with some Account of that Poet's Life and Writings. 8vo. pp. 195. night, When I mean black says white; mien, my stubborn verse If I should paint a coxcomb's flippant flow, My heart says Virgil, but my pen Quin THIS is a decently executed In vain I often muse from dawn till translation, which may serve, in our present want of a better, to convey to the mere English reader the sense, though by no means the delicate expression, of the most polished and correct of satirists. The life is a tolerably neat, but spiritless compilation; both it and the translations are infected with Scotticisms besides the usual mistakes of will and shall, we learn, that a person was " in use" to do so and so, and a person stops another upon the street. The French names are also ignorantly accented. Of the general execution a short extract from a very celebrated passage will afford a sufficient specimen. ault; In short, whatever I attempt to say, way. At times, fatigued and fretted with the When every effort for relief is vain, more. But after thousand vows, perhaps by chance, Before my careless eyes the couplets dance. Then with new force my flame bursts ART. XLIX. Partenopex De Blois, a Romance, in Four Cantos. Freely translated from the French of M. Le Grand, with Notes, by WILLIAM STEWART ROSE. 410. Pp. 225. at A PROSE translation of the ro- knighthood. By degrees the art of mance of Partenopex occurs the minstrel fell into contempt, and the end of M. Le Grand's fabliaux. the successors of the order were li It was abridged from a metrical terally doomed to recite to peasants original, and thrown into that quaint and vulgar revellers the tales which and lively narrative which distin- had gained the attention of moguishes Le Grand, Tressan, and narchs. The legends became deother French writers, in the Biblio- graded with the character of the aultheque des Romans But the tale dience, and of the reciters; and as previously existed, like almost all they first swelled into bulk and the celebrated legends of chivalry, poetical importance from rude in the shape of a metrical romance. songs, they again degenerated into These legends have, in the course rugged ballads, sung, as Sir Philip of time, undergone a strange mu- Sidney expresses it, by some blind tation of form. Originally they crowder with no rougher voice than were probably the rude ballads of rude style, and evil apparelled in the the barbarous inhabitants of Nor- dust and cobwebs of antiquity. At mandy. The minstrels, a race of length even this melancholy remmen about whom much is spoken nant of the race altogether disapand written, though but little known peared; and our modern antiquaries with precision, seized upon the po- have, through eyes bedimmed with pular stories as their property, ad- sympathetic tears, scarcely been ded, enlarged, altered, and detail- able to trace the last vestiges of ed, until the hero of a song of a their abasement. Ellis, we believe, few stanzas became the champion or Walter Scott, grubbed up some of a poem, epic in length and so- evidence, that the metrical romance lemnity, if not in regularity. The of Roswal and Lilian was sung manners were altered as the ground- through the streets of Edinburgh, work was enlarged; and as the min- in the memory of man. strel failed not to grace his hero corded the existence of the last with the attributes most honoured London minstrel; who sung the in the courts and castles where his ballad of Lord Thomas and fair history was recited, until the Sa- Elinor, to the music of that harmochem of a rude tribe stalked forth nious instrument vulgarly called a a preux chevalier with all the punc- hum-strum. But, apparently even tilio and dignity, as well as the va- this last miserable representative of lour, inculcated by the laws of the gentle minstrel found his trade ANN. REV. VOL. VII. Nn Ritson re too poor to live by, and was at length seen by the sympathetic antiquary in the guise of an ordinary mendicant, his song forgotten, and his hum-strum hung upon the willows. Yet when the minstrels fell into contempt and obscurity, their "lays degraded and their harps unstrung," the stories which they had versified maintained their ground among the higher ranks in the altered form of the prose romance. Then the newly invented press groaned under the folios of Tristran, Lancelot, Le Sangreal, Palmerin, Amadis, and all their tribe, for which ladies bartered their sleep, and Don Quixote mortgaged his estate. These huge tomes had their day, and then shrunk by degrees into abridgements for the kitchin and nursery. But the buoyancy of the fictions prevented their sharing even in this second declension. The muse of Italy, and that of England, held forth her aid to the legends of chivalry, and embalmed them in the lays of Pulci Boiardo, both the Tasso's, and above all of Ariosto, Chaucer and Spenser. And after a long interval, the spirit of chivalry seems to have again found in England the same means of transmigration. Our readers are no strangers to the beautiful tales of which Mr. Way rendered from the French fableaux, a translation so chaste, so simchaste, so simple, and so truly English in the versification, so interesting from the enthusiasm of the author. Mr. Rose has formed his present romance upon the same model, as being at once original and appropriate to his subject. It is time to give some account of the narrative of the poem. Partenopex, Count of Blois, nephew to the reigning monarch of France, a youth of great personal beauty, 66 some fifteen winters old," sallies forth to the knightly amusement of the chase. He bewilders himself in the pursuit of a wild boar, no unusual commencement of a tale, and at length wanders to the sea-shore, where he finds a bark at anchor. "Gay was the hull and seemly to behold, The flag was sendal purfled o'er with gold." no hero in romance can resist, the There are too temptations which above six feet high, and to enter propensity. to attack every mortal every boat which he finds moored in a solitary spot, without a living creature on board: and indeed, unless in the case of Don Quixote's windmills, and his embarkation on the Ebro, the issue, however contrary to ordinary rules, is always favourable; the giant being commonly slain, while the bark,uniformly getting under weigh without waiting for the boatswain's piping all hands up, conveys the champion to a place where some strange adventure abides him, which none but himself is destined to achieve. But no barge of romance, no not even that which conveyed Arthur to the vale of Avalon or Rinaldo to the gardens of Armida, or Guyen to Acrasea's bower of bliss, was bound in so pleasant a destination as that of Partenopex. An enchanted palace fill'd with all that could charm voyager; the eye, received the weary bounties to his taste, and to charm a feast displayed its his ear, Was "Tho' no wight appear'd, fast by, Child, of heart so faint, That dream'st, I know not what of ill, |