Shakespeare in fertility of invention and dramatic insight,
inspired by a religious fervour like that of Doune or Crashaw, and
endowed with the wild and ethereal imagination of Shelley. But the
religious fervour is Catholic, not Protestant, Southern, not Northern:
it is intense, mystical, and ecstatic: like a tongue of upward-darting
flame, it burns and trembles with impassioned impulse to mingle with
empyrean fire. The imagination, too, is not merely southern, but with
an oriental element shining through it, like the ruddy heart of an
opal". . .

"But our purpose is not to speak of Calderon, but of his translator Mr.
MacCarthy; and to make our readers acquainted with his very successful
effort to reproduce in English some of the most characteristic
productions of the genius of Spain, retaining even one of the
peculiarities in the structure of the verse which has hardly ever been
transplanted from the soil of the peninsula". . . .

"Mr. MacCarthy's translations strike us as among the most successful
experiments which have been made to represent in our language the
characteristic beauties of the finest productions of other nations.
They are sufficiently faithful, as may be readily seen by the Spanish
scholar, as the translator has the courage to print the original and his
version side by side. The rich, imaginative passages of Calderon are
reproduced in language of such grace and flexibility as shows in Mr.
MacCarthy no inconsiderable amount of poetical power. The measures of
Calderon are retained; the rhymed passages are translated into rhyme,
and what is more noticeable still, Mr. MacCarthy has done what no writer
in English has ever before essayed, except to a very limited extent--he
has copied the asonantes of the original". . . .

"We take leave of Mr. MacCarthy with hearty acknowledgments for the
pleasure we have had in reading his excellent translations, which have
given us a sense of Calderon's various and brilliant genius such as we
never before had, and no analysis of his dramas, however full and
careful, could bestow".

From a Review of "Love the Greatest Enchantment", etc., in the "New York
Tablet", July 19, 1862, written by the gifted and ill-fated Hon. Thomas
D'Arcy M'Gee, of Montreal.

"This beautiful volume before us--like virtue's self, fair within and
without--is Mr. Mac-Carthy's second contribution to the Herculean task
which Longfellow cheers him on to continue--the translation into Englis