When laughing vallies sport their flowery pride,
With jests and jeers the frolic moments glide:
The jocund gambol, and the rustic song,
And the loud laugh that stops the flippant tongue;
The rosy wreaths each honoured head that crown,
Or from the shoulders hang in clusters down;
The vigourous leap, the freak, the boisterous mirth,
The antic dance that shook their Mother Earth;
Successive sports that still their joys prolong,
And still relieved by many a trolling song;
By many a tale that age hath still in store,
And many a trick that ne'er was played before;
And many a tune that many a joke succeeds,

When runs the bending lip along the whistling reeds;
These are the sweets the rural swains enjoyed,
These the delights that many a night employed:
That bade the simple, easy, heart be blest,
And robbed the drowsy midnight of its rest.'

Vol. ii. b. v. pp. 113-14.

The following passage has a tender and pathetic sweetness, and is exceedingly well translated.

When on the altar of the gilded fane,
To angry Gods, a tender heifer's slain;
When life flows issuing in a purple flood,
When reeks the flamen with the smoking blood,
The hapless dam explores the fields around,
And with impatient hoofs imprints the ground,
Each lawn, each grove, surveys with anxious eyes,
And fills the woodlands with her piteous cries;
Oft to her solitary stall returns,

Oft the sad absence of her offspring mourns:
No more the tender willows please, no more
Those streams delight her, which allured before:
The freshened herbs, impearled with silvery dews,
Their wonted beauty and their sweetness lose.
Though heifers fair in thousands round her feed,
And sport and frolic o'er the joyous mead,
These she regards not, but her own requires,

Whose absence all a mother's grief inspires.' Vol. i. B. i. p. 26. The conclusion of the second book is atheistical and unsound; but with respect to poetical merit we have always placed it with the most shining passages in the work.

Thus, too, the heavens (this world's surrounding wall,)

Must feel the assault of Time, decay and fall.

Nature with constant aid all things supplies,
But vain her efforts, and the creature dies.
Sufficing juice no more the veins receive,
Nor due recruit can failing nature give.
This Globe now waxeth old: enfeebled Earth
Scarcely to puny animals gives birth;

Though once a huge athletic race she bore,
Gigantic creatures which she yields no more.
Can I suppose a golden chain let fall

All kinds of beings on this nether ball?

Did Ocean form them? did the waves, which beat
The rocky shores, these various things create?
Surely this earth, where sovereign Nature reigns,
First gave them being, as she now sustains.
Spontaneous once her shining fruitage rose,
And the rich vine whose juice exalting flows.
Each grateful produce of the pregnant soil,
Now yields reluctantly to human toil:

The cleaving spade, the shining ploughshare's length,
Our oxen's vigour, and our peasant's strength,
To till the sterile fields but scarce suffice,-
Things ask such labour, and so slowly rise.
His head the lusty ploughman, sighing, shakes,
And frequent rues the pains he vainly takes.
The present age comparing with the last,
He envies those who occupied the past:
Proclaims aloud that men of ancient days
Their hours could give to piety and praise;
Happy, though then their lands were more comprest
Than those by men of modern times possest:

Nor dreams that things by dint of age revolve,

To ruin hasten, and by death dissolve.' Vol. i. B. ii. p. 80-2, As a supplement to the above we may add the description of the first race of men from the fifth book.

Huge the first race of men, their limbs well strung,
Hardy as hardy earth from which they sprung;
On strong and massy bones their structure rose,
Firm as the firmest oak that towering grows:
Nor heat nor cold they felt, nor weakness knew,
Nor from voluptuous feasts diseases drew;
Through long-revolving years on nature thrived,
And, wildly bold, in savage freedom lived.
No sturdy husbandmen the land prepare,

Plant the young stocks, or guide the shining share :
For future crops the seed no sower throws,
Nor dresser clips the wilds luxuriant boughs.

What earth spontaneous gave, and sun and showers,
Careless they took, and propt their nerved powers;
Their giant energies with acorns fed,

Wild summer-apples, indurate and red:
Such in our wintry orchard's sparing hang:
But larger theirs, and more abundant, sprang.
Earth in her primal strength these things bestowed,
With rich fecundity her bosom glowed;
O'er her broad surface various plenty reigned;
Het voluntary gifts man's hapless race sustained.

Thus by her fruits the human race was nursed:
And springs and rivers slaked their parching thirst;
Called them, as now the fall from pouring heights
The thirst-afflicted savage tribes invites.
For nightly roofs to hollow caves they hied,
Or with their Gods in sylvan fanes reside:
Whence a sweet spring in silvery drops distils,
And rolls o'er polished stones its bubbling rills;
O'er polished stones and mossy greens they flow,

Meandering through the fertile vales below.'-pp. 75, 76.

In the following instance, four lines of the original make eight in the English; yet we should not scruple to point out the passage as a specimen of very fine translation. Quod si immortalis nostra foret mens : Non jam se moriens dissolvi conquereretur ; Sed magis ire foras, vestemque relinquere, ut anguis, Gauderet, prælonga senex aut cornua cervas.

Or say, the Soul eternal, would she grieve
Her onds to loosen, and her prison leave?
Would she not rather, with a just delight,
Rush to her freedom and celestial flight!
Joy, like the snake, her ancient slough to throw,
Wake to fresh vigour, with new lustre glow?
Or like the stag, that casts his antlers' weight,

Exulting bound-and hail the happier state? Vol. I. B.3. p. 44. In the next quotation our readers will trace the origin of Gray's, For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn.'

But ne'er again that happiness will come,
That earthly paradise, a smiling home:
No loving wife shall greet thy glad return,
For the first kiss no joyful children burn;

To thy loved, fondling, arms contending dart,

And touch with secret bliss thy bounding heart.' p. 68.

We cannot forbear giving our readers the following little picture from nature. The poet is speaking of grim Molossian mastiffs.'

But view them when, with soft, caressing, tongue,
Gently they lick their sprawling, playful, young;
Now feign to bite, now roll them o'er and o'er,
Now, fondly gaping, threaten to devour;

But cautiously their harmless teeth employ,

And in soft whinings tell their tender joy.—Vol. ii. b. v. p. 85, We shall close our quotations with the succession of the seasons à l'antique.

Lo! Spring advances with her kindling powers,
And Venus beckons to the laughing hours,

VOL. XI.

Pp

Fly the winged Zephyrs forth, and all things move
The earth to beauty, and the soul to love:
Maternal Flora wakes her opening buds,

With sweetest odours fills the groves and woods,
With flowers of richest dies prepares the way
For rosy Pleasure and the genial May.
Her fervid rays then scorching summer pours,
And dusty Ceres brings her gathered stores:
Fierce from the north arrives the Etesian blast,
And, roaring, tells the flecting summer's past.
Then Autumn comes, and Bacchus reels along,
Flushed with the purple grape, and revelry, and song:
Now raging storms and boisterous winds awake,
The loud South-East and South their prisons break,
The sultry South full-charged with burning drought,
And heapy clouds with bursting thunder fraught.
Then chilling snows, with gelid frost, advance,

And shivering Winter ends the annual dance. pp. 59–61. Our readers will now be able to appreciate the merits of Dr. Busby. They will probably not see any sufficient reason for imagining that he has been gifted by nature with great poetical powers; but he is well qualified as a translator of Lucretius: he is capable of inoral energy, and has rendered the scientific parts of the poem with great neatness. His verse is vigorous, though sometimes a little awkward in it's gait; and his style is manly and forcible, though occasionally not very well knit together. He admits triplets and alexandrines; though a person whose ear is much affected by rule would object that the latter are not always perfectly constructed. He is not very careful of his rhymes.

But of these trivial objections our most considerable is to his love of new words, some of them most unnecessarily coined. Surely the English language was rich enough without the addition of such words as sensile, sensate, darkly, (an adjective,) lingual, saporous, nervid, calor, cumbent, concuss. Refect, tenuous, suscitate, are, we think, old words: we had no wish to see them revived. Finity might as well have been finitude. Fictious was born with Prior, and might have died with him without any loss to the language. Intégral and contráry seem to us wrongly accented; and we cannot but wonder that a classical man, like Dr. Busby, should have made a trisyllable and quadrisyllable of globule and pellicule.

On the whole, we think this the best translation of Lucretius that has appeared: but, considering how uninviting the subject is, we think that the public would have been satisfied with the elegant version of Mr. Goode, or even the homely accuracy of Creech.

We have said nothing here on the subject of the fourth book, because we fully expressed our sentiments upon it in our review of Mr. Goode's translation.

Art. VI. Considerations on the Causes and the Prevalence of Female Prostitution; and on the most practicable and efficient means of abating and preventing that, and all other crimes, against the virtue and safety of the community. By William Hale. 8vo. pp. 72. Price 2s. Williams and Son. 1812.

IF nothing that concerns even the minor interests of man, can

be indifferent to the sincere philanthropist, it would certainly be difficult to mention the subject that has a higher claim on attention than that of the pamphlet before us. It regards the strongest obligations of religion, the bonds of civil society, the tenderest of human relations, and the most essential welfare of the individual. The illicit connection of the sexes is the gangrene of national safety, no less than of domestic happiness; and this, from both physical and moral causes. The influence of the former set of causes appears in the puny size, the feeble constitutions, the predispositions to disease, and the absence of mental energy, which, on the general scale, characterize the children of those fathers whose animal powers have been impaired by premature and criminal indulgences. To this may be added the quality of pernicious cunning, which is observed to take the place of better properties in the diminutive breeds of domesticated animals: and the laws of animal physiology apply to the human species. The moral effects are easily estimated from the connubial choice which such parents are likely to make, from the example which they generally exhibit, and from the almost total want of moral restraint and religious instruction, which is the probable lot of their unfortunate children.

All history shews that when sexual corruption has become widely spread, when female honour is held cheap, and when extensive prostitution has gained establishment, then political decay has begun, public spirit is hastening to extinction, and unless averted by a moral change, ruin is the consequence. Ancient Egypt and Babylon, republican Rome, the Italian states of the middle ages, and France, Italy, Spain, and Germany in our own days, have owed their subversion, in a great measure, to this undermining vice.

The best friends of their country have bewailed the alleged increase of this evil in the British metropolis: and we fear that the allegation of such increase is but too well supported by evidence. The Lock Hospital, the Magdalen, and the Female Penitentiary, have been established with the laudable design of counteracting and lessening this tremendous evil. The leading Pp?