and an inconceivable stress upon his spine, felt his balance almost gone, as the energetic movements of his countenance indicated.-His feet too were motionless by the coil of his adversary's legs round his; so to save himself from falling backwards, he stiffened his whole body from the ankles upwards, and these last being the only liberated joints, he inclined forwards from them, so as to project both bodies, and prostrate them in one column to the ground together.-It was like the slow and poising fall of an undermined tower.-You had time to contemplate the injury which Cann the undermost would sus tain if they fell in that solid, unbending posture to the earth. But Cann ceased bearing upon the spine as soon as he found his supporter going in an adverse direction. With a presence of mind unrateable, he relaxed his strain upon one of his adversary's stretched legs, forcing the other outwards with all the might of his foot, and pressing his elbow upon the opposite shoulder. This was sufficient to whisk his man undermost the instant he unstiffened his knee-which Warren did not do until more than half way to the ground, when from the acquired rapidity of the falling bodies nothing was discernible. At the end of the fall, Warren was seen sprawling on his back, and Cann, whom he had liberated to save himself, had been thrown a few yards off on all-fours. Of course the victory should have been adjudged to this last.-When the partial referree was appealed to, he decided, that it was not a fair fall, as only one shoulder had bulged the ground, though there was evidence on the back of Warren that both had touched it pretty rudely.-After much debating a new referee was appointed, and the old one expelled; when the candidates again entered the lists. The crowning beauty of the whole was, that the second fall was precisely a counterpart of the other. Warren made the same move, only lifting his antagonist higher, with a view to throw the upper part of his frame out of play. Cann turned himself exactly in the same manner using much greater effort than before, and apparently more put to it, by his opponent's great strength. His share, however, in upsetting his supporter was greater this time, as he relaxed one leg much sooner, and adhered closer to the chest during the fall; for at the close he was seen uppermost, still coiled round his supine adversary, who admitted the fall, starting up, and offering his hand to the victor. He is a good wrestler too-so good, that we much question the authority of Thie Times for saying that he is not one of the crack wrestlers of Cornwall. From his amazing strength, with common skill he should be a first-rate man at this play, but his skill is much greater than his countrymen seemed inclined to admit.-Certain it is, they destined him the first prize, and had Cann not come up to save the honour of his county, for that was his only inducement, the four prizes, by judiciously matching the candidates, would no doubt have been given to natives of Cornwall. We trust that the trial between the two counties will instigate the crack men to come, and fairly meet each other, as such a measure might bring wrestling into vogue, and supply the gap left in the annals of Sporting by the extinction of the pugilistic club.

GYMNAST.

LORD F. L. GOWER'S FAUST.*

THE building of the Tower of Babel was an idle business. It contributed little, as far as we can learn, to the science of architecture; and had it not been for so airy a project, we should now have known the precise words with which the serpent prevailed upon the woman to do-as she listed ;- -we should now have known whether a chattering, grinning monkey, be really and indeed a man;-and, what is still more important, we should never have been plagued and distracted by the pestilent tribe of translators. Professional translators we of course mean;-not such as have made Bayle and Froissart a part of the literature of our country, whose services we acknowledge with gratitude; but that never-ending, still-beginning swarm of caricaturists, who with little knowledge of the genius and structure of their mothertongue, and still less of the language which they affect to translate ; and naturally endued with an equal poverty of words and ideas, regard a dictionary as the sole requisite for the work of translation. Scribendi recte sapere est principium et fons

is the maxim of Horace; to which, as writers modestly conscious of our own perfections, we unhesitatingly accede. But if this be the case, with respect to original composition, it is very different with translation. Generally speaking, the "principium et fons" of translation, are Mr. Colburn and Mr. John Murray; and the course of proceeding appears to be as follows. A foreign work happens to be talked of as abounding with agreeable lies, or disagreeable truths; with political invective or private slander; with an extra proportion of sentiment, either of the German or French school. It has been mentioned with encomium or execration in some review, or by some traveller; or, perchance, one of our own writers, in order to exhibit at once his candour, and the extent of his reading, pretends to have copied some common-place sentiment from it. It has procured its author a pension, or a prosecution; or has, perhaps, sent him on his travels. For one or other of these weighty reasons the work has acquired celebrity; and therefore the said " principium et fons" contract with some person, at so much the foot, to render it into such English as the translator may possess. Hence we have memoirs upon memoirs, and a host of other performances, executed in the same workmanlike style, which it would be tedious to enumerate.

There is also another process of translation, equally conducive to *Faust, a drama, by Goethe, &c. By Lord Francis Leveson Gower. Second edition. London, 1825. 2 vols.

Nothing can be more instructive than the remarks of travellers upon the writers of the countries which they visit. They string together some score of names, great and small, of all classes, and pronounce one sweeping eulogy upon them; or if they condescend to particulars, every historian is another Gibbon, and every dramatist a Shakspeare or a Sheridan. Take Mr. Blaquiere's Spain for example." It is impossible to repeat the names of such men as Lardizabel, Toribio Nuñez, Cambronero, Heneros, Salas, Cabrera, Hermosilla, Reinoso, Vascons, Andujar, Clemente, Rodriguez, O'Farril, Fernandez, Moratin, Gorostiza, without acknowledging," &c. p. 508. The same author, speaking of the "Delinquente honrado" of Jovellanos, observes, that it is " equal in comic power to the comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan." Now, as the play in question was written for the purpose of pointing out the unjust severity of the law of Charles III. against duelling, it contains, as might be expected, about as much comic incident, and comic power, as Moore's Gamester.

the interests of literature. Some aspiring youth, wishing to prepare himself for foreign parts, begins to study a foreign language. No sooner has he made such proficiency in his grammar as to enable him to distinguish, with tolerable accuracy, a verb from a substantive, but he takes up some work to translate; and in order that his mind, his pocket, and the world may be all simultaneously benefitted, he commits the result of his labours to hotpress and a handsome type. Not satisfied with following the example of an hereditary bel-esprit, who, a few years ago, appended his college themes to a political pamphlet by way of notes, he makes his task the very stock and substance of the volume; and his master corrects the press and his exercise at the same time.

To this source we owe "Popular Tales," novels, and sonnets without number; and to this source we are almost inclined to ascribe "Faust, a drama, by Lord Francis Leveson Gower."

The Faust of Goethe, the most splendid effort of a wayward and capricious, but transcendent genius, has appeared before the public in so many different garbs, that it is unnecessary to dwell upon its story. Such of our readers as have neither seen the original German, nor Lord Leveson Gower's translation, have at least read the short and spirited critique of Schlegel, or the more elaborate analysis of Madame de Stael, full of epigram, antithesis, and manner; or Boosey's prose, which is very prose; or Soane's specimen of a translation in verse, which is prose with rhymes appended; or they have seen the characteristic outlines of Retsch, which give the liveliest idea of the whole at a glance; or they have witnessed the representation at Drury-lane, which gives-no idea of any part of it.

An examination of the plot and moral of the piece would be equally beside our present purpose. We shall not dive into the poet's mind, and canvass his intentions. We shall not adopt the antithetical arrangement of Madame de Stael, who insists that the author's meaning is, that as Margaret suffered for her crime, and was pardoned by heaven, so Faust's life is to be saved, but his soul damned; * nor the more humane, though the less rhetorical disposition of the Quarterly Reviewer, "that if the author had ever completed the poem, the repentance of the seducer would have come forth, and been rewarded as fully as that of his victim Margaret.' We abstain from all such speculations, for the simple reason that as the author has been contented to leave the matter unsettled, we deem it superfluous to settle it for him; and proceed at once to the consideration of Lord Levison Gower's performance.

If nothing were requisite to a translation of "Faust" but an easy flow of language, a smooth, not unmusical versification, some delicacy of tact, and a perception of the pathetic in its tender unimpassioned form; we should have no reason to complain of his Lordship. But works of imagination require in a translator a kindred mind and congenial powers; and few works have ever appeared exhibiting powers so various and extensive as this drama. In it the author has

L'intention de l'auteur est sans doute que Marguerite périsse, et que Dieu Jui pardonne; que la vie de Faust soit sauvée, mais que son ame soit perdue.— L'Allemagne, ii. 216.

given a loose to the most luxuriant and wonder-working fancy; hurrying through the vast range of human sympathies and human pursuits; and not satisfied with the phenomena of the moral and the visible world, he transports the reader beyond the limits of reality into the sphere of dream;" a world peopled by beings of his own creation, fantastic, wild, and awful. Unfortunately the magic rod and spells of Faust are beyond the grasp of Lord Leveson Gower. The tumultuous workings of a soul thirsting for knowledge, that "in enjoyment pants for fresh desire;" its presumptuous aspirations, its feverish rapture, and its despondeney, are bat feebly portrayed in the Noble Lord's version ;-the bitter fiendish sarcasms of Mephistopheles fall pointless to the ground; and the bold imagery of the witches' festival dwindles into very edifying sing-song. The tender passages of the poem, on the contrary, are rendered with elegance, we wish we could add, with fidelity. The following lines from the prologue are a favourable specimen:

Then give me back the days of feeling,

When I was an expectant too,

When, through the wilds of fancy stealing,
The stream of song was ever new ;
When morning mists the scene surrounded,
And buds foretold the promised rose;
When, bee-like, o'er the flowers I bounded,
And pluck'd and rifled as I chose!
Enough, yet little, form'd my treasure―
The hope of truth, illusion's present pleasure.
Give me the active spring of gladness,

Of pleasure stretch'd almost to pain;

My hate, my love, in all their madness-
Give me my youth again!

A part of the melancholy musings of the philosopher in his stady,

is equally felicitous:

Thou silver moon, whose friendly light
Has shed, through many a wint'ry night,
Unwonted rays on learning's scrolls,
Her massy volumes, dusty rolls,
Would that beneath those rays my brow
Throbb'd with its last pulsation now;
And yet I feel the wild desire

To mount me on thy rolling fire,

With dæmons of the misty air

To wander in thy azure glare,

And bathe me in thy dewy deeps,

Where pain is hush'd and conscience sleeps.

Among those parts of the poem, in a deeper and more solemn tone of feeling, which has suffered least by the translation, is the soliloquy of Faust, in which he exults in the majesty of nature, and in his own faculty of comprehension and enjoyment.

Spirit of power! thou gavest me, gavest me all
My wishes ask'd :-not vainly hast thou turned
Thy awful countenance in fire towards me!
Thou gavest me Nature's realms for my dominiou,
And power to feel and to enjoy the gift.

Not with mere wonder's glance my eye was cheated;
Deep into Nature's breast at once I dived,
And scann'd it like the bosom of a friend.
Thou bad'st, in dark array, her living forms

Glide by thou teachest me to know my brethren
In air, in quiet wood, or glassy stream;

And when the storm is howling through the forest,
The storm that strikes the giant pine to earth;
While many a branchy neighbour shares the ruin,
And rocks give back the crash and the rebound;
Then, led by thee to some wild cave remote,
My task I ply--the study of myself,

Or, should the silver moon look kindly down,.
The vision'd forms of ages long gone by
Gleam out from piled rock, or dewy bush-
Mellow to kinder light the blaze of thought,
And soothe the maddening mind to softer joy!

Some-.

But his Lordship labours under one defect of somewhat more importance than he seems to consider it,—an ignorance of the language of his original. This is obvious throughout the whole poem. times he blunders on unconsciously; at others, where he is evidently aware that he does not understand, he throngs together sweet and high-sounding words:

A happy tuneful vacancy of sense,.

which bewilders and pleases. We are bound therefore to warn the readers of these volumes, that whenever they meet with such beautiful mystifications, they are to attribute them not to the author, but to the translator. Now as the noble Lord has been complimented in other quarters for his "thorough knowledge of the language of his original," and as Professor Schlegel's few words of passing commendation have been strangely magnified, we shall point out some of the most laughable blunders of his Lordship's performance.-When Faust gives Wagner an account of the preparation of the sovereign elixir, which in his and his father's hands had been more baneful than a pestilence, the translation runs thus:

There was a lion red, a friar bold,

Who married lilies in their bath of gold,

With fire then vex'd them from one bridal bed
Into another, thus he made them wed.
Upon her throne of glass was seen,

Of varied hues, the youthful queen..

We have certainly heard

Of the pale citron, the green lion, the crow,
The peacock's tail, the plum'd swan,

but we question whether in all the mystical jargon of alchemy a "friar bold" was ever heard of as the symbol of any ingredient, or any chemical result. The original however explains the mystery; for there stands the word "freyer," the English of which is and ever was "a suitor;"-we wonder the noble Lord did not translate "rother lue" a "red lie."-" Their bath of gold" too is gratuitous nonsense; for in the original it is a "tepid bath."

"Are you sure you loosed them

I'their own menstrue?" says Subtle.

'Yes, sir, and then married them,"

answers Pace; but who ever heard of a menstruam of gold? Mephistopheles exclaims elsewhere:

We give them words, cannot they be content?
Must they still be inquiring what was meant ?

And so seems to think Lord Leveson Gower.