be often in harmony with the contained quietness of Horace's spirit. Yet there is abundant evidence that he considered him as his master, and followed him often in thought while writing his poems. A Poem on the glorious Successes of her Majesty's Arms has echoes of Horace's eulogies of Augustus, but it is impossible to lay one's hand on any definite allusion. So it is also in the Ode for the New Year 1716, for which Rowe has chosen the motto:1 Custode rerum Cæsare, non furor Et miseras inimicat urbes; And in the fourth stanza of the Ode he addresses George I as 'Young Augustus.' But it is too florid, too full of such images as the 'Hours,' and of deified qualities, to be Horatian in tone. In writing Maecenas, Verses Occasioned by the Honours conferred on the Right Honourable the Earl of Halifax, 1714, Rowe was looking upon Mæcenas in another light than that in which Horace sees him. He could not, however, fail to have him in mind, and that this was the case is indicated in the line, There let thy Julian Star an Emblem shine, where Julian Star' is the 'Julium sidus' of Horace's Twelfth Ode of the First Book. Possibly too the second line of the poem, A noble Knight, of ancient Tuscan Race, 2 has its origin in one of the Odes, though Mæcenas' Tuscan origin is a frequent boast, and is to be found in Livy and other Roman historians. The little poem, Upon Nicolini and Valentini's first 10. 4. 15. 17-20. 20. 3. 29. 1; S. 1. 6. 1. coming to the House in the Hay-Market, begins with the lines, Amphion strikes the vocal lyre, And ready at his call, Harmonious brick and stone conspire which echo the lines,1 Dictus et Amphion, Thebanæ conditor urbis, Saxa movere sono testudinis, et prece blanda Finally, there is a reflection of the Seventh Ode of the Third Book, 'Quid fles, Asterie,' in the Stanzas to Lady Warwick on Mr. Addison's Going to Ireland. The situation is the same: the loved one across the sea, an assurance of his constancy, and an injunction to faithfulness to Chloe, Horace's Asterie; the poems are otherwise unlike. Much of Rowe's fame rests upon the merit of his translations. Besides those from the French, he translated the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, the story of Glaucus and Scylla from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lucan's Pharsalia, and adapted some of the Odes of Horace to the situations of his own time. His version of the Pharsalia still remains the best English translation of that poem. In his dedication of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, he explains his attitude toward translation in the case of the Greek, which applies equally to his method of translating Horace: 'I hope the Reader will forgive the Liberty I have taken in Translating these Verses somewhat at large, without which it would have been almost impossible to have given any kind of Turn in English Poetry to so dry a Subject. The Sense of the Author is, I hope, no where mistaken; and if there seems in some Places to be some Additions in the English Verses to the Greek Text, they are only such as may be justify'd from 1 A. P. 394-396. Hierocle's Commentary, and deliver'd by him as the larger and explain'd Sense of the Author's short Precept.' In his poem, Horace, Book 2, Ode 4, imitated, The Lord G[riffin], to the Earl of S[carsdale], he has used Horace's Ode as a framework. The situation is the same in both poems: Horace's Phocian Xanthias has become Rowe's Earl of Scarsdale; the slave-girl Phyllis is the actress 'Bracegirdle the Brown.' Achilles, Ajax, Agamemnoneach had his love in heroic Trojan times; the heroes of the battlefields of the early eighteenth century With Drabs have deeply smitten been. Each poet veils his contempt of the union in mock praise of the pedigree and the character of her he is defending; each proclaims himself exempt from suspicion, Rowe as the Lord Griffin whom he is impersonating: Then be not jealous, Friend, for why? To see I ne'er shall hurt ye; Besides, you know full well, that I and Horace: Fuge suspicari, Cuius octavum trepidavit ætas The irony of the poem is not so subtle as is that of its model; the touch is heavier, the expressions coarser, and there is not the same restraint. This lack of restraint is in part due to the impossibility of expressing thought in English with the precision of which the Latin tongue is capable, in part to the freedom of early eighteenthcentury expression, and to the established custom of imitating the original only when it suited the poet so to do. The Reconcilement between Jacob Tonson and Mr. Congreve, in Imitation of Horace, Book 3, Ode 9, is an absurd travesty of the delightful little poem, Horace and Lydia, in which travesty Tonson takes the part of Horace, Congreve that of Lydia. Horace, Book 3, Ode 21, Ad Amphoram, is a translation rather than an imitation, but one so much amplified, in the manner of the poets of this period, that it is practically a paraphrase. At times Rowe keeps close to his original, as when he translates: by Non ille, quamquam, Socraticis madet To thee, my Friend, his Roughness shall submit, At other times he amplifies to the extent of translating the line, Tu spem reducis mentibus anxiis, by the following seven: The wretch who press'd beneath a Load of Cares, If thy kind Warmth does his chill'd Sense invade, And to the God resign his Breast, Where Hopes of better Days, and better Things return. Rowe has, however, gone further than amplification, and has added some thoughts of his own for which he found no authority in Horace, and which do not contribute beauty to his poem. Another such free translation is Horace, Book 4, Ode 1. In this poem the lakes of Alba have become 'the shade of Odel's wood' and 'the banks of Ouse's gentle flood,' the grassy Campus Martius and the rolling river are 'woods, and plains, and seas'; but the classic names have been retained, and the bands of youths and maidens dance 'Salian measures' round the altars of the 'queen of love.' The editions of 1720 and 1733 have Sylvia for Horace's Paulus Maximus, an evident mistake, and in subsequent editions, as well as in the series of the British poets, 'Sylvia' has been changed to 'Damon.' It is a pleasing rendering of Horace's Ode, and may be placed beside Prior's more delicate Cantata and Pope's imitation, the Ode to Venus, without suffering too much by comparison. Horace, Book 1, Epist. 4, Inscrib'd to R. Thornhill, Esq., is, allowing for Rowe's tendency to translate freely and to amplify, a comparatively accurate translation. Horace's Epistle to Albius Tibullus he has inscribed to a correspondent of lesser fame. The little poems of Cassius of Parma have become 'what moving Otway wrote'; and Horace's simple 'Me . . . vises cum ridere voles' has been modernized and localized into Me, when to Town in Winter you repair, -the Vine being a famous tavern in Long Acre. Horace probably wrote his Epistle from the country, but Rowe imagines himself in town, his correspondent in retirement in the country. He has, however, not rendered very successfully any of the striking and well-known lines with which this brief Epistle abounds. There is sufficient reference to Horace in Rowe's few prose writings, especially in Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear, to show that he looked up to him as a master in the art of poetry. The catalogue of his library1 includes the names of many Latin authors, and sets down seven or eight editions of Horace, including the English translation by Samuel Dunster, and the French translation by Tarteron and Dacier. 1 Reprinted by P. Borgwardt in his edition of the Royal Concert, Rostock, 1909. |