Scalpri salubris ictibus
Et tunsione plurima,
Fabri polita malleo
Hanc saxa molem construunt,
Aptisque juncta nexibus
Locantur in fastidia.
Daniel in his first volume prints fifty-five of these recasts in parallel columns with the originals, and to that we will refer our readers for further specimens. It is gratifying to know that not all the scholarship of that age was insensible to the qualities which the revisers sacrificed. Henry Valesius, although only a layman and a lover of good Latin—as his versions of the historians of the early Church show—uttered a fierce but ineffectual protest in favor of the early and mediaeval hymns. And the Marquis of Bute, a convert to Catholicism, who published an English translation of the Breviary in 1879, says that the revisers of 1602 “with deplorable taste made a series of changes in the texts of the hymns, which has been disastrous both to the literary merit and the historical interest of the poems.” He hopes for a further revision which shall undo this mischief, but in other respects return to the type furnished by the Breviary of Quiñonez.
The translations from the hymns of the Roman Breviary have been very abundant. Those by Protestants have been due to the fact that the texts even of ancient hymns were so much more accessible in their Breviary version than in their original form. Among Roman Catholics, of course, other considerations have weight; and in Mr. Edward Caswall’s Lyra Catholica and Mr. Orby Shipley’s Annus Sanctus will be found some very admirable versions. The latter book is an anthology from the Roman Catholic translators from John Dryden to John Henry Newman.
From the Breviary text Mr. Duffield has made the following translations of two hymns by Gregory the Great: