I had known from infancy; all was at once familiar and new to me; but what I shall never forget is, the sensation I experienced on the sight of the first monument of this ever interesting country.

You may have observed, Madam, that when we read all the wonders told us of the ancients, a mixture of incredulity, at. least of mistrust, creeps in, which spoils our pleasure, and makes us uneasy under our admiration; the very greatness of the things is against them, and we are apt to think that there may be a little more fable than history in what we are told.. In consequence of this prepossession, many a traveller has gone into Egypt, with doubt of all that had been told him concerning its ancient magnificence ;-but the pyramids are standing; they bear sufficient witness to all the rest, and there is no incredulity which these enormous blocks do not shiver to pieces.

Such were my feelings at Athens. It is less gigantick indeed in its monuments, but more truly great than Egypt; it is true that the manners, the customs, the government, alas! even the city of the Athenians, are only now to be guessed at by a few ruins; yet hardly had I beheld these ruins, than an idea of grandeur impressed itself on all I had not seen, and on all I could no longer see. The three only remaining columns of the temple of Jupiter, rendered every thing I had read of probable to me, so striking are these remains for their magnificence and simplicity. I could never be satisfied with looking on these great and beautiful columns, of the most beautiful marble of Paros; so interesting by their own beauty, by that of the temples they decorated, by the remembrance of the splendid periods they remind us of, and more particularly because the more or less exact imitation of their fine proportions ever has, and ever will be the just measure of good and bad taste in all times, and with all people; I ran over them, I touched them, I measured them with insatiable avidity; it was in vain that they had fallen, and were falling to ruin, I could not help believing them imperishable; I trusted to make the fortune of my name, by engraving it on their marble, but I soon perceived my mistake; these precious remains have more than one enemy, and time is not their most terrible foe. The barbarous ignorance of the Turks sometimes destroys in a day, what ages had respected; I saw one of the fine columns, I have just been

mentioning to you, stretched out before the door of the commandant; an ornament of the temple of Jupiter, was about to decorate his Harem! The temple of Minerva, the finest work of antiquity, the magnificence of which made Pericles, who had built it, unable to lay his accounts before his countrymen, is shut up in a citadel, partly built at its expense; we went up to it by a staircase, composed of its ruins. As we walked upon basso relievos worked by Phidias and Praxiteles, I walked on the edge, or took four steps together, in order not to be an ac. complice in this profanation. Near the temple is a magazine of gunpowder, which blew up in the last war with the Venetians, and threw down several columns, which till then had been in perfect preservation. What put me almost out of my senses, was the order given, as we were coming down, to fire the cannon, in honour of the ambassador; I was fearful, lest the commotion occasioned in the air should finish the temple, and Mr. de Choiseul was in a tremour with the honours that were paid him. The temple of Theseus, which, but for some columns that have been moved a little out of the perpendicular by an earthquake, united all the freshness of a new building, to all the interest of the most venerable antiquity, has fallen, as we are told, a prey to the same barbarity. Its beautiful marble pavement, respected by so many ages, and trod by so many great men, has been taken away, by order of the same commandant, who is much too ignorant to know the mischief he is doing.

Besides these temples, one still sees with pleasure, seventeen columns of fine marble, the remains of one hundred and ten which supported, as it is said, the temple of Adrian. Near these is a threshing floor, which is paved with the magnificent ruins of this monument. There one discovers with infinite grief, numberless fragments of the superb sculpture, which adorned the temple.

Between two of these columns, there resided, six years since, a Greek hermit, who was prouder of the homage of the populace, who fed him, than the Miltiades and Themistocles had ever been of the acclamations of all Greece. The columns themselves call for pity, amidst their magnificence; I asked who had thus mutilated them, for it was easy to see that the

devastation was not the bare effects of time; I was told that they made lime of these ruins. I wept for rage.

The same cause of grief obtains all over the city. Not a pillar, not a stair, not a door threshold, but what is of antique marble, which has been torn by force from some ancient monument. Every where the whim of the modern buildings is a singular contrast to the magnificence of the antique. I saw a mechanick resting a bad deal board on columns, which had supported the temple of Augustus. The courts, public places, and streets, are strewed with these ruins. The walls are built of them. As you walk along the city, you are alternatively struck by an interesting inscription, by the epitaph of a great man, the figure of a hero, or a head or foot which belonged to a Minerva or Venus; here the head of a horse which still breathes, there superb Caryatides locked into the wall like common stones. As I was passing along, I saw a marble fountain in a court. This tempted me in, and I found it an ancient sepulchre, ornamented with fine sculpture. This put me on my knees, and I kissed the tomb. Unluckily in the madness of my admiration, I overturned the pitcher of a child who was laughing at my frolick. The accident turned his laugh into a cry, and as unluckily I had nothing about me to appease him, he would not have been comforted, had not some good-natured Turks threatened to beat him, to make him easy.

I must tell you another superstition arising from my love for antiquity. In the first moment of my entering Athens, its smallest reliques appeared sacred to me. You know the history of the savage, who had never seen any stones. I did like him. I filled the pockets of my coat, then those of my waistcoat with fragments of marble; and when I had done, threw them all away like the savage, but with more regret than he. To finish all, the Albanese have lately made a fatal invasion on these coasts. Walls were necessary for defence. Poor antiquity was taxed again, and the defence of the new city cost the old one more than one treasure.

Excuse, madam, this long account, the dulness of which will, I fear, cause you to hate the country, which I would make you love; but in order to make your peace with it, you will soon receive wine from these fine islands, made of grapes, ripened by their fine sun. Remember me when you drink it

with your friends. Mr. de Choiseuil desires your husband, whom he is better acquainted with, than he is with you, to make you accept of a small flask of essence of roses. More roses have gone to make it, than there are in all the gardens I have sung. My unhappy sight grows dim again; I can write no more, and it makes me a little dull.

FOR THE ANTHOLOGY.

REMARKS ON ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE ROMAN POETS.
No. 15.
JUVENAL,

I AM not prepared to make any remarks on Owen's translation of Juvenal, and therefore pass to a recent and popular version of this satirist by William Gifford, Esq. My observations on this work will not be very far extended. It has been ably and critically examined, as well in one of our own,* as in foreign journals, and its excellences and defects have been sufficiently illustrated.

It must be acknowledged, that Mr. Gifford's versification is sometimes unharmonious, and even harsh; that, like almost every other translator, he too often has recourse to eking words in order to complete his measure, and that his rhymes are frequently imperfect and faulty. There might also be selected from his version a long catalogue of unauthorized exclamations, and of low, and obsolete, and far-fetched terms. He might be asked why he puts into the mouth of Juvenal such phrases as these: O passing strange ! tip the wink, damning proofs, come along, &c. or what induced him to adopt such words as nonce, guerdon, orts, maw, tut, amort, &c. some of which are grovelling, and others long since obsolete; and some have been in almost undisturbed repose from the time of Shakespeare or Ben Jonson. The frequent use of triplets should also be remarked as a defect. There is an aspect of poverty in seeing a third line begging a place, already filled, as if it could not find a fellow. It is as awkward as an irregu

* See Literary Miscellany, Vol. ii. p. 171, &c.

larity in a procession, or inequality of numbers in the ranks of a battalion.

Whatever may be the defects of Mr. Gifford's translation, it will hardly be inquired, whether he has excelled his predecessors in the same task. I believe Owen has not been pronounced by any one to be his superiour in the attempt to present Juvenal to the English reader in an appropriate style and manner and as for the motley mixture, the true farrago libelli of Dryden and his associates, though it may be read with pleasure, it is well known, that the authors were more anxious to be witty than to be correct, and more solicitous for sprightliness than for fidelity.

If Mr. Gifford lay under any necessity of making an apolo gy for publishing his version of Juvenal, that which he offered must be deemed satisfactory. It is true, that, in proposing to give the whole of Juvenal, he hazarded something too much, and exposed himself to criticism which his work will not bear, and which we should not wish it to bear. In ascertaining whether he has performed his promise, it is but just that we should suffer him to be the expositor of the text, in which he announces that he is to give the whole of his author. In one place he does indeed assert his determination to render Juvenal entire, and reprobates any thing short of this. I am not very anxious to prove that he is altogether consistent with himself, and the attempt would probably be difficult of accomplishment. But his own explanation exculpates him from any gross violation of his promise.

"Shame and sorrow," says he, "on the head of him, who presumes to transfer the grossness of Juvenal into the vernacular tongue. Though I have given him entire, I have endea voured to make him speak as he would have spoken, had he lived among us."

"I have said above that the whole of Juvenal is given this must be understood with a few restrictions. I have sometimes taken the liberty to omit an exceptionable line. These lacu nae do not in all amount to half a page."

After this explanation we are so far from blaming Mr. Gifford for obscuring some of the grosser images of Juvenal, that we should not pronounce him less faithful to the spirit of his