there, amid his burial blazing,
The infernal realm in high disdain he held."

In this scene, however, the radical defect of Dr. Parsons's work
appears: it is unequal, and unsustained even in some of its best parts.
It seems scarcely credible that the poet who could produce the grand
lines just given, could also mar the whole effect of the father's
frantic appeal to know if his son Guido be no longer alive, by putting
in his mouth the melodramatic words,

"Sayest thou, 'he had'? _what mean ye!_ is he dead?"

But our translator does this, and he makes Ugolino report little Anselm
as saying,

"Thou look'st so, father! what's the matter, what?"

--a line that Melpomene herself could not read with tragic effect,--for,

"Disse; tu guardi si, padre; che hai?"

As he likewise causes Francesca to say,

"Love quick to kindle every gentler breast
_Fired this fond being with the lovely shape_
Bereft me so!"

for,

"Amor, che al cor gentil ratto s'apprende;
Prese costui della bella persona
Che mi fu tolta ";

and,

"Where Po descends in Adria's peace to rest
_Raging with all his rivulets no more,"_

for,

"Su la marina dove 'l Po descende
Per aver pace co' seguaci sui,"

Indeed, we have to confess that the present is on the whole not a
satisfactory translation of the episode of Francesca da Rimini. The
inscription on the gate of hell, also, is rendered in a manner scarcely
to be called successful, and not bearing comparison with that of the
other rhyming translators,--Ford, Wright, and Cayley. As to the
beginning of the seventh canto, we must think that Dr. Parsons was
chiefly moved by the prevailing sentiment of mankind to translate

"Pape Satan! pape Satan aleppe!"

into

"Ho! Satan! Popes--more Popes--head Satan here!"

These and other blemishes arrest the most casual glance. The merits of
any work are harder to prove than its faults, though they are quite as
deeply felt; and, as we have already intimated, it is the misfortune of
Dr. Parsons that some of his greatest defects are in passages otherwise
the most generally successful. There are probably few pages of the
translation which do not offend by some lapse; but at the same time
there is no page which will not command admiration by sublime and
striking lines. We think the whole of the following passage from the
thirteenth canto (it is the well-known description of the sentient woo