‘Antistrophe I.
‘’Twas dead of night, and silence deep
Buried all in dewy sleep,
For feast, and dance, and slaughter done,
Soft slumber’s season had begun.
The lyre was hushed, the altar cold,
The sword, the lance, all bloodless lay;
My husband, softly resting, told
The toils and dangers of the day:
No longer watching for the foe
Sworn to lay proud Ilion low.‘Strophe II.
‘I strove my flowing hair to bind
With many a festal chaplet twin’d;
The mirror’s rays of glittering hue
Betrayed me to my virgin view,
Hast’ning to rest—Then peal’d on high
O’er Ilion’s walls the victor’s cry;
Troy heard the shout that sounded then,
“Dash’d down the turrets of the foe,
Shall sons of Greece again, again
To home, and rest, and glory go.”’
In 1892 appeared ‘An Academic Sketch’ by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., being the Romanes Lecture delivered in the Sheldon Theatre, Oxford. Whilst it did not detract from, it scarcely added to, Mr. Gladstone’s reputation. It was, in fact, a speech somewhat of the after-dinner type. All the world knew that the Oxford of the past was a theme on which he could pleasantly dilate.
In 1894 there appeared from Mr. Gladstone’s pen an article in the Nineteenth Century on the ‘Atonement,’ occasioned by the study of Mrs. Besant’s ‘Autobiography.’ He says of her: ‘Mrs. Besant passes from her earliest to her latest stage of thought as lightly as a swallow skims the surface of the lawn, and with just as little effort to ascertain what lies beneath it. Her several schemes of belief or non-belief appear to have been entertained one after another with the same undoubting confidence, until the junctures successively arrived for their not regretful, but rather contemptuous, rejection. They are nowhere based upon reasoning, but on the authority of Mrs. Besant.’ The special proposition which Mr. Gladstone examines is one of four, the difficulties of which led Mrs. Besant to reject Christianity—the nature of the atonement of Christ. In dealing with this topic, Mr. Gladstone, after condemning the crude utterances of some theologians and preachers, by whom the New Testament doctrine has been travestied and misconceived, lays down what he conceives to be the true teaching. ‘What is here enacted in the kingdom of grace only repeats a phenomenon with which we are perfectly familiar in the natural and social order of the world, where the good, at the expense of pain endured by them, procure benefits for the unworthy.’
In the same year appeared Mr. Gladstone’s Horace. It was on the whole a failure. A critic writes: ‘The uncouth diction, obscurity of expression of the rendering, are patent evidences of the translator’s being ill at ease under the restraint of narrow bounds of rhyme and metre.’ The same writer observes: ‘Mr. Gladstone’s translation of the Odes of Horace will escape oblivion. Historians will remember it as they remember the hexameters of Cicero, the verses with which Frederick the Great pestered Voltaire, and the daily poems Warren Hastings used to read at his breakfast-table.’ An ingenious contributor to Blackwood, on the publication of the book, contributed a letter from ‘Horace in the Shades,’ intimating that he had nothing to do with the matter. It is to be questioned whether worse verses were ever written than the following in the ‘Horace’:
‘No; me the feast the war employs
Of maids (their nails well clipt) with boys,
Me fancy free; or something warm,
My playful use does no one harm.’
‘Then shalt thou with flagrant passion
Like the beasts be torn,
And with fire of cankered entrails
Thou shalt grieve forlorn.’
Or,
‘The Furies grant in war no scant;
Devouring seas o’er sailors roll;
Young funerals hold their place with old;
Proserpine spares no breathing soul.’
Thus is the death of Cleopatra recorded: