who had repeatedly pressed him for his opinions on purgatory, declared, sitting next him at dinner, that she must know what he thought on the subject. "I told her," he said, "that I really knew very little about it, except what I had learned from the church in the Floriana, which I pass on my way into Valetta. The church, you remember, is surrounded with groups of figures carved in stone, and rising out of stone flames, and I told her that, if the reality were at all like that, I was clearly of opinion that the flames were necessary for the decent clothing of the figures. After that she managed to talk about something else."

He took a very gloomy view of the political future.

He viewed with alarm the growing tendency of statesmen of all parties to follow, instead of aspiring to lead and direct, public opinion -a tendency which he foresaw must often transfer the initiation of great measures from the wisest and best informed to those who were simply discontented with the existing order of things. He especially disliked the new name under which the broken ranks of the Tories had been rallied after the Reform Bill. "Why do you talk of Conscrvatives?" he asked; "a Conservative is only a Tory who is ashamed of himself."

Mr. Frere's chief literary occupation in Malta was, as we have already said, the translation of Aristophanes. He translated five plays in all :-The Acharnians,' 'The Knights,' 'The Birds,' The Frogs,' and 'The Peace.' They were printed at Malta for private circulation, and were scarcely known beyond a limited circle of friends till Sir George Cornewall Lewis published considerable extracts from them in the first volume of the Classical Museum,' in 1844, with a critical eulogy, which, coming from so distinguished a scholar and singularly cautious critic, possesses peculiar value. Like all other scholars, Sir George C. Lewis entertained the highest opinion of these versions, and expressed to us his desire, a few months before his lamented death, to obtain the consent of the family to reprint them, with the intention of prefixing to the publication a memoir of Mr. Frere's life. These translations are now for the first time accessible to the general public; and they will secure for Mr. Frere a permanent and unique place in English Literature. The close of an article-in which our object has been to make our readers acquainted with one of the best types of the scholar and gentleman of the last generation -is not the place to discuss the art of translation, nor the nature of the Aristophanic Comedy. As to the former, we must be content with a most emphatic protest against stigmatising the successful translator for lack of originality. We need not dwell upon instances of the loving labour which poets of the highest

original

original genius have spent upon translation; nor, on the other hand, upon the many cases in which their noblest utterances have been based on the thoughts of other men. Expression is quite as essential a part of poetry as invention; and it is a high triumph of the art so to transfuse the utterances of another age and style of thought into the language of our own, as to make them such as the author might himself have written in our tongue, had he lived in our times. It is Mr. Frere's peculiar merit, not merely to have accomplished this-though it has scarcely been ever done so well, even by Chapman for Homer, or Fairfax for Tasso-nor to have accomplished it for the Greek Comedian of whom Sir George C. Lewis most truly says:

"The reproduction of the comedies of Aristophanes in a modern language seems almost a hopeless task. The endless variety of his style and metres, the exuberance of his witty imagination, the richness and flexibility of the Attic language in which he wrote, and the perpetual byeplay of allusions, often intimated merely by a pun, a metaphor, or a strange new compound, to the statesmen, poets, political events and institutions, manners and domestic history of his times, appear to make it equally difficult to execute a poetical version which shall adhere to the letter or render the spirit of the original but it is Mr. Frere's unique merit to have clearly apprehended and almost perfectly fulfilled those canons of translation, which he has expounded in the article (above noticed), in the 'Quarterly Review,' which will be found reprinted in these volumes. With his own vivid power of style and illustration, he discerns the opposite errors of the Spirited Translators, whose spirit and ability consist in substituting a modern variety or peculiarity for an ancient one, to the utter confusion of all unity of time, place, and character, and the Faithful Translators, who preserve all the local colouring, style, and foreign costume of the original, often encumbered of necessity with tedious explanatory notes; while the true Translator reproduces both language and allusions in 'those permanent forms which are connected with the universal and immutable habits of mankind,' and so makes them a possession of his own and every age.

We subjoin one or two extracts, in the hope of persuading our readers to make acquaintance with the translations for themselves, assuring those who are not scholars that they will obtain from them as vivid an idea of the Aristophanic wit, humour, and poetry as is possible to any one who does not read the original Greek.

Our first extract shall be from the commencement of the celebrated Parabasis of the 'Birds.' We may observe that the poet's theory of cosmogony evidently suggested that of the Anti

Jacobin;"

Jacobin; and either may be not disadvantageously compared with some theories of later days.

'Ye Children of Man! whose life is a span,
Protracted with sorrow from day to day,
Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous,
Sickly calamitous creatures of clay!

Attend to the words of the Sovereign Birds,
(Immortal, illustrious, lords of the air)
Who survey from on high, with a merciful eye,
Your struggles of misery, labour, and care.
Whence you may learn and clearly discern
Such truths as attract your inquisitive turn;
Which is busied of late with a mighty debate,
A profound speculation about the creation,
And organical life, and chaotical strife,
With various notions of heavenly motions,
And rivers and oceans, and valleys and mountains,
And sources of fountains, and meteors on high,
And stars in the sky. . . . We propose by-and-by,
(If you'll listen and hear) to make it all clear.
And Prodicus henceforth shall pass for a dunce,
When his doubts are explain'd and expounded at once.

Before the creation of Æther and Light,
Chaos and Night together were plight,
In the dungeon of Erebus foully bedight.
Nor Ocean, or Air, or substance was there,
Or solid or rare, or figure or form,
But horrible Tartarus ruled in the storm:
At length in the dreary chaotical closet
Of Erebus old, was a privy deposit,
By Night the primeval in secresy laid-
A mystical egg, that in silence and shade
Was brooded and hatch'd, till time came about,
And Love, the delightful, in glory flew out,
In rapture and light exulting and bright,
Sparkling and florid, with stars in his forchead,
His forehead and hair, and a flutter and flare,
As he rose in the air, triumphantly furnish'd
To range his dominions on glittering pinions,
All golden and azure, and blooming and burnish'd;
He soon, in the murky Tartarean recesses,
With a hurricane's might, in his fiery caresses
Impregnated Chaos; and hastily snatch'd
To being and life, begotten and hatch'd,
The primitive Birds: but the Deities all,
The celestial Lights, the terrestrial Ball,

Were later of birth, with the dwellers on earth

More

More tamely combined, of a temperate kind;
When chaotical mixture approach'd to a fixture.
Our antiquity proved, it remains to be shown
That Love is our author and master alone,
Like him we can ramble, and gambol and fly
O'er ocean and earth, and aloft to the sky:
And all the world over, we're friends to the lover,
And when other means fail, we are found to prevail,
When a Peacock or Pheasant is sent as a present.'

The only other extract, for which we can afford space, is a portion of the dialogue between Bacchus and the Chorus of Frogs, as he rows in Charon's boat across the lake at the entrance of the infernal regions:-

B.

Well, my spirit is not broke,

If it's only for the joke,

I'll outdo you with a croak.

Here it goes-(very loud)" Koash, koash."

Frogs. Now for a glorious croaking crash,

B.

(Still louder).

Brekeke-kesh, koash, koash.
(splashing with his oar).

I'll disperse you with a splash.

Frogs. Brekeke-kesh, koash, koash.

B.

I'll subdue

Besides his Aristophanic labours, Mr. Frere also translated the fragments of Theognis, of which he made a new arrangement, so as to form an autobiography of the poet. This work was printed at Malta in 1842, under the title of Theognis Restitutus; the Personal History of the Poet Theognis, deduced from an Analysis of his existing Fragments,' and was favourably noticed in this Review in the following year. We will only express our admiration, with Sir George C. Lewis, of the facility with which Mr. Frere has passed from the wild, grotesque, and ever varying language and metres of Aristophanes, to the sedate admonitions and reflexions of the gnomic poet, and the fidelity with which he has represented both sorts of diction in English, always pure, terse, and idiomatic.'

Mr. Frere died of a paralytic seizure on the 7th of January, 1846. He was laid beside his wife in the English burialground in one of the Floriana outworks overlooking the Quarantine Harbour.' His death was lamented by all classes in Malta, but especially by the poor; and, even now, 'when the generation of those who were the objects of his active sympathy has passed away, there are Maltese who will point out his tomb as the grave of the noble-hearted Englishman, known in his day as the best friend of their fellow islanders in want or distress.' In politics he was a disciple of Pitt and Canning.

'From conviction, not less than from early association,' says his biographer, he had a rooted distrust as well as dislike of sudden