Mr. Arnold advises young poets to avoid modern innovations in poetic style and diction, and to seek their models in classic antiquity. His own poetical productions all evince a highly cultured taste.

A. Austin.

Alfred Austin began his poetical career by the publication of the satirical poems, the Season, and the Golden Age; but he is not exclusively a satirist, and he has since then produced the Human Tragedy, Savonarola, Soliloquies in Song, and at the Gate of the Convent. From one of his later works we extract a few characteristic lines, instinct with a pleasing hopeful feeling:

I feel no more the snow of years,
Sap mounts and pulses bound;
My eyes are filled with happy tears,
My ears with happy sound.

My manhood keeps the dew of morn,
And what I have I give;

Being right glad that I was born,
And thankful that I live.

M. F. Tupper.

Martin F. Tupper, born in 1810, the author of Proverbial Philosophy and Geraldine, a sequel to Coleridge's Christabel, has likewise written Ballads for the Times, many of which have been set to music, and they are all recommended by the hopeful and manly sentiments they express. Among the most popular are the following:

HONEST FELLOW, SORE BESET.

Honest fellow, sore beset,

Vexed by troubles quick and keen,
Thankfully consider yet

How much worse it might have been.

Worthily thy faults deserve

More than all thine eyes have seen;
Think thou, then, with sterner nerve,
How much worse it might have been.

Though the night be dark and long,
Morning soon shall break serene;
And the burden of thy song,

How much worse it might have been.

God, the Good One, calls to us,
On his Providence to lean,
Shout, then, out, devoutly thus,
How much worse it might have been.

I LOVE TO LINGER.

I love to linger on the track
Wherever I have dwelt,
In after years to loiter back,
And feel as once I felt.

My foot falls lightly on the sward,
Yet leaves a deathless dint;
With tenderness I still regard
Its unforgotten print.

Old places have a charm for me
The new can ne'er attain;
Old faces! how I long to see
Their kindly looks again!

NEVER GO GLOOMILY.

Never go gloomily, man with a mind,
Hope is a better companion than fear;
Providence, ever benignant and kind,

Gives with a smile what you take with a tear.

All will be right, look to the light,

Morning is ever the daughter of night

All that was black will be all that is bright.
Cheerily, cheerily, then cheer up!

Many a foe is a friend in disguise,

Many a sorrow a blessing most true,
Helping the heart to he happy and wise,
Bringing true love and joys ever new.

Stand in the van, strive like a man,
This is the bravest and cleverest plan
Trusting in God while you do what you can:
Cheerily, cheerily, then cheer up!

Mr. Tupper is certainly not one of the great poets of the Victorian Age, but he is always clear; and pos

sessing the valuable secret of popularity, has a large circle of admirers.

Among the remaining poets of this period we may mention Dr. C. Mackay (Egeria, etc.), Mr. D. F. M'Carthy, author of the Poets and Dramatists of Ireland, and the translator of several of Calderon's dramas; George Eliot (Spanish Gipsy); Miss Procter, (daughter of B. W. Procter, better known as Barry Cornwall), author of Legends and Lyrics; Rev. William Barnes (Poems in the Dorset Dialect); Rev. John Keble (the Christian Year, Lyra Innocentium, etc.) Mr. C. Patmore (the Angel in the House); Mr. Charles Swain (Metrical Essays); Mr. Francis Davis, the "Belfast Man" (Lispings of the Lagan, etc.); and Mr. John W. Pitchford (Bramble Cloisters) from whose Idyll of the Dawn we give a brief extract, not unworthy of the author of the Seasons: Now shoot o'er dewy hedge,

Through opening woods, the sun's first rays,
Reddening and warm; and with a thrill of life
All things awake; the hum of bees is heard
About the garden hives, and round the elms
The buzz of darting flies; chirp, twitter, song,
Glad flit of hasty wing, the upward soar
Of joyous-throated lark, the blackbird's song,
Warbled in rounded tones, make sweet the hour.
Sparkles the hoary dew upon the grass;

The trailing mists drift from the shining woods,
From out whose dark blue depths come gentle sounds
Of cooing doves, happiest of happy birds.
Cutting and driving through the freshened blue
Of cloudless heaven, the arrowy swallows dart.
Ere pale blue wreaths of climbing smoke arise
Above the garden trees, from cottage roofs,
The satchelled labourers come, with tools in hand,
Bound for the hay-fields or the distant woods.

Poet-Translators.

Among the very numerous poet-translators of the present period, it is impossible for us to notice any but the most eminent; and one of the first of these is Edward Earl of Derby, the author of an admirable translation of Homer's Iliad, in English blank verse,

which appeared in 1864. Of the many existing English translations of the Iliad it is generally considered the most perfect. Chapman's version, in fourteen-syllable metre and in rhyme, is now out of date, though it was a wonderful work for the Elizabethan age; Pope's celebrated translation, in the English heroic metre, however brilliant and harmonious, is rather a paraphrase than a translation; Cowper's version is accurate, but dull. In Lord Derby's translation we find accuracy and elegance most happily combined; as may be seen by his rendering of the well-known moonlight scene in Book VIII:

Full of proud hopes, upon the pass of war

All night they camped, and frequent blazed their fires:
As when in heaven around the glittering moon
The stars shine bright amid the breathless air,
And every crag and every jutting peak
Stands boldly forth, and every forest glade.
E'en to the gates of heaven is opened wide
The boundless sky; shines each particular star
Distinct; joy fills the gazing shepherd's heart;
So bright, so thickly scattered o'er the plain
Before the walls of Troy, between the ships
And Xanthus' stream, the Trojans' watchfires blazed.
A thousand fires burnt brightly, and round each,
Sat fifty warriors in the ruddy glare;

With store of provender before them laid,
Barley and rye, the tethered horses stood
Beside the cars, and waited for the morn.

The attack of Hector on the Achaean camp, in Book XII., shows us that Lord Derby is as much at home in depicting a warlike scene as a peaceful one:

Close to the gate he stood, and planting firm
His foot to give his arm its utmost power,
Full on the middle dashed the mighty mass.
The hinges both gave way: the ponderous stone
Fell inwards: widely gap'd the opening gates;
Nor might the bars within the blow sustain.
This way and that the severed portals flew
Before the crashing missile. Dark as night
His lowering brow, great Hector sprang within ;
Bright flashed the brazen armour on his breast,
As through the gates, two jav'lins in his hand,

He sprang the gods except, no power might meet
That onset; blazed his eyes with lurid fire.
Then to the Trojans turning, to the throng
He called aloud to scale the lofty wall.

Another translation of the Iliad, not quite so equable, but in other respects hardly inferior to that of Lord Derby, has been made by the philologist, critic and historian, Mr. Wright. We subjoin Mr. Wright's rendering of the indignant rejoinder of Achilles to the taunts of Agamemnon, in Book I.:

O clothed with insolence, rapacious chief,

What Greek henceforth will prompt obedience yield,
March at thy word or strenuous urge the fight?
I came not to avenge a private wrong.

I have no quarrel with the Trojans: they
Ne'er drove away the herds or steeds of mine,
Nor roamed injurious o'er my fruitful fields
In fertile Pythia, for between us lie

For shadowing mountains and the roaring sea.
Thy cause espousing, and at thy behest
We came to Troy, O most unblushing chief,
Not on our own behalf, but to redress

Wrongs suffered by thy brother and by thee,
Thou dog in shamelessness.

Mr. W. E. Gladstone, the late Premier (author of Studies on Homer) has published a translation of the first book of the Iliad in the trochaic measure of Tennyson's Locksley Hall. So far as the translation goes, it is pleasant enough reading; but we scarcely think the fifteen-syllable metre could have been maintained without wearisome monotony in so long an epic as the Iliad.

Mr. Worsley has undertaken, and very creditably executed, the difficult task of adapting the Odyssey to the English Spenserian stanza.

With regard to most of the other Greek and Roman poets, the English versions of Dryden, Rowe, and Moore are still the best. Dr. William Maginn (1793-1842), the poet and critic, who spoke fluently and wrote in six languages, produced some admirable translations from Lucian, and a series of lays, called Homeric Ballads, in the style of Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. In modern literature, the translations from the German