SPECIMEN

OF A

TRANSLATION OF VIRGIL.

BY

THE RT. REV. WILLIAM ALEXANDER, D.D.,

Lord Bishop of Derry and Raphoe.

SPECIMEN

OF A

TRANSLATION OF VIRGIL.

VENTURE to submit to your notice to. day an attempt at a translation of the earlier part of the Sixth Book of the Eneid into the Spenserian metre. I say an attempt, for in a few distracted hours no one can do justice to a poet whose sense of finish was so exacting, that he made it his dying request that his Æneid should be burned as an imperfect and unfinished thing. Before making some remarks upon the book and upon the measure which I have adopted, I shall ask your permission to read, by way of preface, a brief study upon St. Augustine and Virgil.

ST. AUGUSTINE AND VIRGIL.

ONE of the best known passages of Christian antiquity is that in which Augustine reproaches himself with the fascination which Virgil had exercised over him in his boyhood. The student of Augustine lights upon much which leads him to conclude that the Christian bishop never emancipated himself from

the spell. The chain, of which the first link was set in motion in the school of rhetoric at Thagaste, continued to vibrate to the same touch through all the excitement of controversy and the labours of the episcopate. It may be interesting to consider the sides of Virgil's genius which rendered Augustine susceptible to his influence.

It must be confessed that Virgil's consummate taste and sense of form do not serve to answer our question. These are rarely the characteristics of a provincial society like the Roman-African, never of a civilization in decline, and of a language in the agonies of dissolution. Bad taste abounds in Augustine's writings, if perpetual antithesis, tortuous conceit, and grotesque disproportion of arrangement, be bad taste. Indeed, when the Saint exhibits good taste in his compositions, it is a moral quality, a Christian sentiment, not a literary tact. In reviewing a passage of the Confessions, the writer feels that he has been guilty of an extravagant expression. "I felt that my soul and his were one soul in two bodies,” he exclaims, in describing his youthful sorrow for a school-fellow and friend. "Therefore," he adds, "I conceived a horror of life, because I was unwilling that I should live on a halved existence. And perhaps I was afraid to die for this reason, lest he whom I loved so tenderly should wholly die.”" In his Retractations, Augustine condemns this hyperbole severely. "However qualified this impertinence may be by the insertion of the word forte, it seems * Confess. iv. 6.

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