Tired limbs upon earth were folded to sleep,
Silent the forests and fierce sea-waves; in the firmament deep
Midway rolled heaven's stars; no sound on the meadow stirred;
Every beast of the field, each bright-hued feathery bird
Haunting the limpid lakes, or the tangled briary glade,
Under the silent night in sleep were peacefully laid:
All but the grieving Queen. She yields her never to rest,
Takes not the quiet night to her eyelids or wearied breast.

And this from the sixth book is worth quoting:

'Never again such hopes shall a youth of the lineage of Troy
Rouse in his great forefathers of Latium! Never a boy
Nobler pride shall inspire in the ancient Romulus land!
Ah, for his filial love! for his old-world faith! for his hand
Matchless in battle! Unharmed what foemen had offered to stand
Forth in his path, when charging on foot for the enemy's ranks
Or when plunging the spur in his foam-flecked courser's flanks!
Child of a nation's sorrow! if thou canst baffle the Fates'
Bitter decrees, and break for a while their barrier gates,
Thine to become Marcellus! I pray thee bring me anon
Handfuls of lilies, that I bright flowers may strew on my son,
Heap on the shade of the boy unborn these gifts at the least,
Doing the dead, though vainly, the last sad service.'
He ceased.

'Thine to become Marcellus' has hardly the simple pathos of 'Tu Marcellus
eris,' but 'Child of a nation's sorrow' is a graceful rendering of 'Heu,
miserande puer.' Indeed, there is a great deal of feeling in the whole
translation, and the tendency of the metre to run into couplets, of which
we have spoken before, is corrected to a certain degree in the passage
quoted above from the Eclogues by the occasional use of the triplet, as,
elsewhere, by the introduction of alternate, not successive, rhymes.

Sir Charles Bowen is to be congratulated on the success of his version.
It has both style and fidelity to recommend it. The metre he has chosen
seems to us more suited to the sustained majesty of the AEneid than it is
to the pastoral note of the Eclogues. It can bring us something of the
strength of the lyre but has hardly caught the sweetness of the pipe.
Still, it is in many points a very charming translation, and we gladly
welcome it as a most valuable addition to the literature of echoes.

Virgil in English Verse. Eclogues and AEneid I.-VI. By the Right Hon.
Sir Charles Bowen, one of Her Majesty's Lords Justices of Appeal. (John
Murray.)

LITERARY AND OTHER NOTES--II

(Woman's World, December 1887.)

Lady Bellairs's Gossips with Girls and Maidens contains some very
interesting essays, and a quite extraordinary amount of useful
information on all matters connected with the mental and physical
training of women. It is very difficult to give good advice without
being irritating, and almost impossible to be at once didactic and
delightful; but Lady Bellairs manages very cleverly to steer a middle
course between the Charybdis of dulness and the Scylla of flippancy.
There is a pleasing intimite about her style, and almost everything that
she says has both good sense and good humour to recommend it. Nor does
she confine herself to those broad generalisations on morals, which are
so easy to make, so difficult to apply.