An essay on the Etruscan tombs at Corneto follows, and the remainder of the volume is taken up by a most fascinating article called Le Pays de l’Eneide.  M. Boissier claims for Virgil’s descriptions of scenery an absolute fidelity of detail.  ‘Les poetes anciens,’ he says, ’ont le gout de la precision et de la fidelite:  ils n’imaginent guere de paysages en l’air,’ and with this view he visited every place in Italy and Sicily that Virgil has mentioned.  Sometimes, it is true, modern civilisation, or modern barbarism, has completely altered the aspect of the scene; the ‘desolate shore of Drepanum,’ for instance (’Drepani illaetabilis ora’) is now covered with thriving manufactories and stucco villas, and the ‘bird-haunted forest’ through which the Tiber flowed into the sea has long ago disappeared.  Still, on the whole, the general character of the Italian landscape is unchanged, and M. Boissier’s researches show very clearly how personal and how vivid were Virgil’s impressions of nature.  The subject is, of course, a most interesting one, and those who love to make pilgrimages without stirring from home cannot do better than spend three shillings on the French Academician’s Promenades Archeologiques.

Nouvelles Promenades Archeologiques, Horace et Virgile.  By Gaston Boissier. (Hachette.)

BERANGER IN ENGLAND

(Pall Mall Gazette, April 21, 1886.)

A philosophic politician once remarked that the best possible form of government is an absolute monarchy tempered by street ballads.  Without at all agreeing with this aphorism we still cannot but regret that the new democracy does not use poetry as a means for the expression of political opinion.  The Socialists, it is true, have been heard singing the later poems of Mr. William Morris, but the street ballad is really dead in England.  The fact is that most modern poetry is so artificial in its form, so individual in its essence and so literary in its style, that the people as a body are little moved by it, and when they have grievances against the capitalist or the aristocrat they prefer strikes to sonnets and rioting to rondels.

Possibly, Mr. William Toynbee’s pleasant little volume of translations from Beranger may be the herald of a new school.  Beranger had all the qualifications for a popular poet.  He wrote to be sung more than to be read; he preferred the Pont Neuf to Parnassus; he was patriotic as well as romantic, and humorous as well as humane.  Translations of poetry as a rule are merely misrepresentations, but the muse of Beranger is so simple and naive that she can wear our English dress with ease and grace, and Mr. Toynbee has kept much of the mirth and music of the original.  Here and there, undoubtedly, the translation could be improved upon; ‘rapiers’ for instance is an abominable rhyme to ‘forefathers’; ’the hated arms of Albion’ in the same poem is a very feeble rendering of ’le leopard de l’Anglais,’ and such a verse as