whence all violent emotion, or, at least, the expression of it, is excluded.  This latter highly artificial and polished dialect is accordingly as suitable to the Mock-Heroic (like “The Rape of the Lock”) as it is inefficient and even distasteful when employed for the higher and more serious purposes of poetry.  It was most fortunate for English poetry that our translation of the Bible and Shakspeare arrested our language, and, as it were, crystallized it, precisely at its freshest and most vigorous period, giving us an inexhaustible mine of words familiar to the heart and mind, yet unvulgarized to the ear by trivial associations.

The whole question of Homeric translation in its entire range, between Chapman on the one hand and Pope and Cowper on the other, is opened afresh by this controversy.  The difficulty of the undertaking, and still more of dogmatizing on the proper mode of executing it, is manifest from the fact that Mr. Newman is quite as successful in turning some specimens of Mr. Arnold’s into ridicule as the latter had been with his.  Meanwhile we commend the two little books to our readers as containing an able and entertaining discussion on a question of general and permanent interest, and as showing that the “Quarrels of Authors” may be conducted in a dignified and scholarly way.

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OBITUARY.

The last English steamer brings us the sad news of the death of Arthur Hugh Clough.  Mr. Clough had so many personal friends, as well as warm admirers, in America, that his death will be felt by numbers of our readers both as a private grief and a public loss.  The earth will not soon close over a man of more lovely character or more true and delicate genius.  This is not the place or the occasion to do justice to the many eminent qualities of his heart and mind, and we only allude to his death at all because in him the “Atlantic” has lost one of its most valued contributors.