REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Plutarch’s Lives. The Translation called Dryden’s.  Corrected from the Greek, and Revised, by A.H.  CLOUGH, sometime Fellow and Tutor of Oriel College, Oxford, and late Professor of the English Language and Literature at University College, London.  Boston:  Little, Brown, & Company. 1859.  Five vols. 8vo.

In these five handsome volumes, we have, at length, a really good edition in English of Plutarch’s Lives.  One of the most delightful books in the world, one of the few universal classics, appears for the first time in our language in a translation worthy of its merits.

Mr. Clough, whose name is well known, not only by scholars, but also by the lovers of poetry, has performed the work of editor with admirable diligence, fidelity, and taste.  The labor of revision has been neither slight nor easy.  It has, indeed, amounted to not much less than would have been required for the making of a new translation.  The versions in the translation that bears Dryden’s name, made, as they were, by various hands, and apparently not submitted to the revision of any competent scholar, were unequal in execution, and were disfigured by many mistakes, as well as by much that was slovenly in style.  At the time they were made, scholarship in England was not at a high point.  Bentley had not yet lifted it out of mediocrity, and the translators were not stimulated by the fear either of severe criticism or of comparison of their labors with any superior work.  The numerous defects of this translation are spoken of by the Langhornes, in the Preface to their own, with a somewhat jealous severity, which gives unusual vigor to their sentences.  “The diversities of style,” say they, “were not the greatest fault of this strange translation.  It was full of the grossest errors.  Ignorance on the one hand, and hastiness or negligence on the other, had filled it with absurdities in every Life, and inaccuracies on almost every page.”  This is a hard, perhaps an extreme judgment; but it serves to show the difficulties that would attend a revision of such a work.  These difficulties Mr. Clough has fairly met and overcome.  We do not mean to say that he has reduced the whole book to a perfect uniformity, or even to entire elegance and exactness of style; but he has corrected inaccuracies, he has removed the chief marks of negligence or haste; and, after a careful comparison of a considerable portion of the work as it now appears with the Greek text, we have no hesitation in saying that this translation answers not merely to the demands of modern scholarship, but forms a book at once essentially accurate and delightful for common reading.[A] We think, moreover, that Mr. Clough was right in choosing the so-called Dryden’s translation as the basis of his work.  Its style is not old enough to have become antiquated, while yet it possesses much of the savor and raciness