FREE TRANSLATIONS.

'Multa absurda fingunt.'

CAMBESARIUS.

WHO has not amused himself in his classic hours, in making free translations? There is a kind of intoxication in it. The Oxford student who completed a travestie of all the books in Homer's Iliad, must have had a glorious time of it; for Melesigenes was not beyond the power of ridicule, and Socrates long remembered the quizzing of Aristophanes. Some of those old and choice spirits in the Spectator,-Johnson, Addison, and their coterie,—with all their veneration for the blind Bard of Greece, could not refrain from showing up his occasional sinkings in poetry. They cite the passage where he compares a warrior in the midst of a desperate contest, to a jackass surrounded in a corn-field, with peculiar pleasure, as a scrap of pure bathos. It is Shakspeare's, and of course Nature's, truth, that no earthly thing, however good, is insusceptible of some gross admixture; and I think the mode in which college boys murder the dead languages,-(forgive the bull,)—is, so far at least, a complete verification of a saying quoted in substance from one who, according to Ben Johnson, understood small latin and less Greek.'

I am getting deplorably rusty in my memory of free translations. My brain used to be stored with them; yet I bethink me now, of but one. It was made by an unhewn fellow, in his freshman year;-and I have heard it quoted by my friend Lemuel Turquoise, (the finest observer of the burlesque in all my clique,) with an oratund fulness that would have pleased the discriminating and subtle ear of RUSH himself. Here it is:

'Old Grimes is mortuus, that agathos old anthropos

Nunquam videbimus eum plus;

Usus est to habere an old togam,

All ante-buttoned down!'

Verses of this kind are arbitrary in their construction, and the pause or accent can rest any where the reader chooses to fix it. At the moment I record this, many other renderings come suddenly to my mind; but such reminiscences, though indescribably pleasing to me, have no charm for the public. I associate them with the hearty, laughing faces of school companions who have been swept from my side by the course of circumstance and time; some of whom are pursuing their destiny in other lands-some, dead-some on the wave, in the service of their country. How soon do our better hours and opportunities wane into things that were!

Among the free translators of small latin scraps in modern times, I reckon Thomas Hood to be the very best. He is himself alone. In his annual, he furnishes many, and they are always good. They generally serve as mottos for pictures. I recollect a few of these, and will set them down. One of his plates represents a female cook, 'doing' some meat in a frying-pan. The fat, or grease, has increased to the overflow, and the whole dish is in a blaze. The brawny arms of the maid are up

lifted, and her countenance indicates the utmost perplexity and consternation. The motto is- Ignis FAT-uus! Another sets forth a mad bull, with his tail curled in air, his nostrils expanded, and his whole port bewildered. He is surrounded by a crowd of gaping rustics. Motto, De Lunatico Inquirendo! In one of these sketches, a specimen of French is given. An English cockney is depicted riding in a private coach, on a French highway. He is passing a field of oats; and the postillion, accidentally stretching out his whip in that direction, says to his horses, Vite-vîte!' (quick,-equivalent in this case to Go ahead!') No,' says the cockney, thinking himself addressed, and the field the subject, no,-them ar'nt w'eat-them's hoats!'

Some odd translations have been done into French, from the English. One of the Parisian authors, in rendering the passage,

-Out, brief candle,

Life's but a walking shadow,' etc.,

from Shakspeare, gave it thus―

Namely:

'Sortez, sortez, vous courte chandelle!'

'Get out, you short candle!

But I am persuaded that the French make fewer blunders than their neighbors across the channel. A regular John Bull, wishing to shut the mouth of a drunken hack-driver at Calais, said to him in a pompous and menacing voice: Tenez votre langue: vous êtes en liqueur!' The equivalent English of these words, rendered as they stand, is ludicrous enough.

Of all the free translations, however, that I ever met with, commend me to a work recently published in London, from the pen of one John Bellenden Ker, Esq., A. S. S. etc., entitled, 'An Essay on the Archaiology of Popular Phrases.' Having been favored with this work by a transatlantic friend, I take the liberty of presenting a few specimens of the author's stupid ingenuity to the American public. He gives a large number of nursery ballads and common adages; and by the most distorted construction, traces them either to the Anglo or Low Saxon. The absurdity of these translations constitutes the only claim to attention, preferred by this queer etymological. Nothing can be more laughable than his derivations, several of which I proceed to serve up. The first I select is the common phrase, 'Oh, the pride of a cobbler's dog.' Mr. Ker refers it to the Saxon: Hoe die prijckt op de kopplers doogh!' i. e. Oh how this person prides himself!' He is as poor as a church mouse.' 'Het is al pur als hij ghiere moes:' i. e. He is reduced to be importunate for victuals.' He does not care two straws for her.' 'Het deught niet gar toe's troren vor hær!' i. e. It is not worth while to grieve for her!'

I cannot refrain from giving one specimen of the Nursery Ballads, with Mr. Ker's original definition :

'Cock-a-doodle-doo

Dame has lost her shoe;
Master's broke his fiddle-stick,
And don't know what to do!"

'Gack en duijdt het t'u,
Di'em aes lost ter s'du;

Mij aes daer's brok es vied t'el stick,
End doedt nauw wet tet u

The definition is: Dolt of a peasant!-your life is a hell upon earth; you are so foolish as to delight in hard work,' etc.

From the quizzical parodies which this work has excited abroad, I subjoin the following. It is by the editor of the London Examiner, who, after some study of Mr. Ker's glossaries, felt himself au fait at his system of etymology. He gives this liberal interpretation of God save the King." The Saxon, if it be not as pure, reads at least as well as Ker's:

'God save great George our King,

Long live our noble King,

God save the King!

Send him victorious,
Long to reign over us,

God save the King!

'Goets aef gregte Gorgch oor Kynck! Lon glyff oor nobblekin;

Goets aef thee king!

Sen dym vych toe rye oose,
Lonkturane o vyrues,
Goets aef theeking!'

Definition-(free!)-Foolish is the idea of a government compounded of a king, an hereditary peerage, and a popular representative assembly; it is foolish altogether! Under such a state of things, the taxes become insupportable, the people are besotted by the priesthood, and live miserably under bad laws: it is foolish altogether!'

Not content with Europe as the arena of his researches, Mr. Ker has embraced America in his derivative enterprise. Here is a phrase that he has most learnedly illustrated; one that until quite lately was never heard of out of the United States. If Mr. Ker's humbug were not absurd, it would be criminal. Stange to say, it has many implicit believers:

'He went the whole hog'-in the sense of he went the whole length, took a deep interest in, made it his own business: 'Hij wendt de hold hoogh: i. e. 'He turned the feelings of a friend to the subject in question!'

The author quotes from Mr. Clayton's Speech in the United States Senate in support of his etymology.

Encouraged by our writer's example, I offer one or two translations, à la mode Ker. I take a revolutionary saying, and one verse of Yankee Doodle. I am not at liberty to mention the derivative language, only so far as to say, that it is a mixture of Mormon and Choctaw. I will merely remark, for the benefit of philologists, that the parlance is not extant in the schools:

The times that tried men's souls: Thett ymms then dried mens 'oels :'-i. e. 'The time when we threshed our invaders, and gained a republic.'

'Corn stalks twist your hair,
Cart wheels go round ye;
Fiery dragons carry ye off,
And mortar pestle pound ye!'

'Köern stoelks twijsdt y'er aer,
Kar t'oeils göer un ghe;
Phy ried rag undts kar e oopgh,
An dmor t'arp oestil poenndjie!"

On the whole, from the evidences that I meet with daily, I am persuaded that free translations are on the increase. Their utility may be judged of from the foregoing specimens. That they are amusing, admits of no doubt: but there are many who will reject them altogether, as things that have no moral, and as possessing nothing that one can go about to prove.

W.

AMERICAN PTYALISM.

'I MUST humbly crave leave hereinne, to be deliverel of a bouldnesse wherewith my pen is in travaile. SIR HY. WOTTON'S 'RELIQUIE.'

BIG words, now-a-days, are all the rage, and I flatter myself that I have selected a pretty tall one for this article. It stands as the expositor of an alarming epidemic which has long prevailed in our well-beloved country; and for which the land is cursed, by travelling cockneys, and cosmopolitan old women. Ptyalism, gentle reader, is the effusion of spittle, as is worthily illustrated by that venerable lexicographer, Sam. Johnson, the prince of his tribe, and the sometime lion to that jackal, Boswell. This is my theme; it is the evil whereupon I design to expatiate; and I can say with my motto-maker, that it is one which I have not undertaken out of any wanton pleasure in mine own pen; nor truly with out pondering with myself beforehand, what censures I might incur; for I know that the object against which the lance of my reprobation is to be tilted, is grievously circumvested with the affection of habit and the sanc tity of time. I mean not to be a sweeping opponent, but a commentator merely. To advocate the ptyalism of this nation, would be 'a sin to man,'-for an amendment in the custom is most imperiously demanded.

Whether the corporeal juices are more abundant in the citizens of the United States, than in the people of other countries, it is not pertinent just now to enquire. At all events, they are less regarded; for we are said to be the most notoriously salivating nation on the face of the globe. But the custom is as old as time. We hear of it in the first origin of our religion. It was by spittle that the blind man was healed with the clay which our Saviour applied to his eyes: and in many countries it has been invested with peculiar sanctity. In Scotland, as may be learned from works relating to its popular superstitions, the virtue of spittle has long been held in high estimation by that proverbially neat and thrifty people. Authors have thrown much light upon this subject. They prove that the properties of the human saliva have enjoyed singular notice in both sacred and profane history. Pliny devotes an entire chapter in describing its efficacy among the ancient pagans, with whom it was esteemed an antidote to fascination, a preservative against contagion, a counteracting influence upon poisons, and the source of strength in fisticuffs. Some of these uses, the moderns retain. When they fight, they spit in their hands; and they indulge in the same process under the humiliation of defeat. Your Irish or English servant will spit on an eleemosynary shilling, for he thinks that it blesses the coin. In the country of the former, it is said to be an invariable habit among the peasant girls, whenever they fling away the combings of their hair. There is sometimes a dignity, or grandeur, and sometimes a solemnity, in the custom. I always think well of those ladies one meets in romances, when they express themselves in that way. Who has not joined in the feeling of Rebecca in Ivanhoe, when the lustful templar, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, invades her in her tower, to compass her dishonor,—and when she, standing on the parapet, ready

to spring from that lofty height into the court-yard below, says to the craven knight, with a look of withering contempt: 'I spit at thee-I defy thee! Thanks to him who reared this dizzy tower so high, I fear thee Rot! Advance one step nearer to my person, and I will plunge, to be crushed out of the very form of humanity, in the depth beneath!' The reader almost sees the scornful foam escaping from the curled and beautiful lip of the Jewess, and is himself inclined to suit his action to the thought. Our ideas of propriety are derived, to a greater extent than we are aware of, from novels; and if their pages may be relied on, their heroines (being always encompassed by scoundrels whom they have much ado to keep at a proper distance,) must have been spitting at their detested supernumerary lovers about half the time. Contempt is well expressed by that action, and by the word. There is innate disdain in the saliva itself. It leaves the haughty lip of the offended one, and lies before the contemned person-perhaps upon his beard,-like a gage of war, as potent as the glove in the days of the Crusades. In his work of England and the English,' the author of Pelham alludes to one Westmacott, (who seems a common libeller in London,) under the name of Sneak, in the following expressive phrase: His soul rots in his profession, and you spit when you hear his name!' Among the various and opposing inferences derivable from the custom and the use of the word, one is, that saliva is inherently contemptible; and if so, is it not a noble proceeding to dispossess one's self as much as possible, of that which is unworthy? Is this a non sequitur?

6

In one of the remote islets of Scotland, spitting into the grave forms a part of the funeral ceremony. Relations and friends gather round the narrow mansion of the departed, and each one ejects the salivary tribute of sorrowful remembrance. Happy,' says the old adage, is the new grave that the rain rains on;' and in the island of which I speak, perhaps the saying may be, Beloved is the dust that we spit upon.' Anciently, the subject of Optics was illustrated only by those who possessed ample knowledge in relation to the qualities of saliva. The popular oculist was

one who saw,

'or fancied, in his dreaming mood, All the diseases that the spittles know.'

Even modern opticians, in their discussions upon the eye, have recommended a research of the old schoolmen's tomes, that it may be decided whether any solvent, sanative, or medicament,' connected with saliva, and lost to the oculists of the present day, was not in vogue of yore. But I do not wish to discuss the virtue of that which I esteem the parent of a vice.

I look upon TOBACCO, in all its shapes and varieties, as the prime cause of the very extensive ptyalism which prevails in this nation. It is passing strange that this article ever came to be beloved. It is wonderful, that a weed which is in itself, in its original state, acrid and disagreeable, and which contains poison as deadly as the sting of a scorpion, should have pushed its way into use, until it has become a matter of traffic in all quarters of the world. I can hardly imagine how it ever spread its magic beyond the wigwam of the Indian, or came to mingle its fumes with any thing but the