KENNEDY'S "VIR,GIL."* A SCHOOL edition of Virgil, prepared by an
exceptionally brilliant and successful schoolmaster, is in a certain sense critic-proof. For in reply to all objections, such an editor might say that he had written what he had written because experience had taught him the best way of getting at the minds of boys. Such a line of de- fence is practically unassailable, and such a line of defence, if barred to editors of inferior calibre, is one which Dr. Kennedy is clearly entitled to take. It is with this proviso, then—a moat important one, be it observed—that we shall proceed to criticise a book which, if it falls short of Dr. Kennedy's great reputation and of our own expectations, is still, beyond all question, the best school edition of Virgil in our language. But if mere justice requires us to say thus much in praise of Dr. Kennedy's com- mentary, we must add that his arrangement of that commentary is almost as bad as can be imagined, and many a tutor and student will, we prophesy, endorse deeply, if not loudly, our assertion that it is detestable. The Professor, in his preface, tells us that as a classical student he had always been troubled by the variety of matter usually crowded together in foot-notes, and that for this reason he divided his commentary into several distinct heads. "The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley," and a plan he adopted to ensure perspicuity has merely served to make confusion worse confounded. These distinct heads are six in number :—First, " Introduction ;" second, " Outline ;" third, " Translation ;" fourth, " Select Vocabulary ;" fifth, " Notes ;" sixth, "Parallel Passages." We take no exception to the "Intro- duction ;" it is brief, and might enable a student to find a passage of which he had forgotten the whereabouts, but we venture to doubt whether schoolboys will trouble themselves at all with the " Outline." This " Outline " is nothing more than the " Intro- duction " amplified,—a prolix analysis, intensely uninteresting, and quite as useless to a clever and industrious boy as to an idle and stupid one. The "Parallel Passages," too, seem open to a some- what similar objection. As a rule, editors are far too fond of adducing what they call parallel passages, and as a rule, we think, such passages should always be quoted in full, and immediately below the text. And this leads us to a minor objection to this edition, viz., that the commentary is relegated to the end of the volume, where, it is only fair to add, the student will also find an excellent appendix. We now come to the " Select Vocabulary," and we confess that we are fairly puzzled to guess upon what prin- ciple the selection was made. There is nothing in it, if we except such information as would be more fitly found in the notes, which a fourth-form boy could not easily obtain from Smith's Smaller Latin Dictionary; and it seems ludicrous to find in an edition of such pith and moment as this, and from the pen of such a scholar as Kennedy, notes of this description. We open the book at random, at page 470 :—" Pecten; quill ; nitens, sleek ; castus, pure, innocent ; Caspius, of the Caspian Sea ; Maeotius, of the Palus Maeotis," &c. In spite of the proviso we began with, we cannot help thinking that a serious mistake has been made here ; these third-form vocabularies do not assimilate with their sur- roundings, and the whole commentary, in spite of the attempt to divide it into six strata, may be likened to a mass of conglomerate or pudding-stone. We are irresistibly reminded of that labyrinthine book, the Public Schools Latin Grammar, and are reluctantly driven to confess that among all Dr. Kennedy's splendid and varied accomplishments, a genius for lucidus ordo has no place. The notes, however, are the most important part of the commen- tary in every way ; and being so, we are not at all surprised to find that they are by far the beat done. In many respects, they are excellent, and the faults, as might have been safely anticipated, are chiefly faults of omission.
• The Works of Virgil, with Commentary and Appendix. By B. IL Kennedy, D.D. London: Longman and Co. 1876. There is little, indeed, to be found in this book which those who use it will have to unlearn. Anthon is not a more dangerous guide than Kennedy is a safe one, and although we differ from the latter on not a few points, we frankly admit that it would be safer for a student to be wrong with him than right with us. We have said that the faults of this edition would probably be those of omission. We do not by this mean to insinuate that the Pro- fessor would be likely to cut the difficulties. Far from it. He rather revels in them than otherwise, and sets a useful example in this respect to the ever-increasing mob of cautious commen- tators, of whom, in quite other than in the Horatian sense, it may be said,—Nil mortalibus arduurn est. What we complain of is that he passes over, or treats with too much brevity, passages which a sixth-form boy would gladly find explained more fully. We do not, for instance, grumble because he has thrown no new
light upon the mysterious nec cedit honori 484), or upon the still more mysterious cuniulatant morte remittam (iv., 436). An ampler ether and a sun of his own were needed by the commen- tator who is to accomplish that feat. But we cannot help think- ing that more information is required than is given about sortiti remos, primusque M achaon, defensoribusistis, auraisinzplicisigneus,and a host of phrases of the same stamp. The Professor's explanations are correct and clear, but not, to our mind, full enough ; and he dis- plays so much acuteness when he does discuss a difficulty in all its bearings, and in lively contrast to Conington, gives his adhesion to one view so decisively, that we all the more regret a reticence which is as untimely here as it would have been welcome in the " Outlines." Not, indeed, that we accept all Dr. Kennedy's elaborately-argued conclusions, but we gratefully acknowledge that much may be learnt from his able treatment of a difficulty, even when we deem his solution to be erroneous.
Few students of Sophocles can be ignorant—none ought to be —of the strange interpretation which the Professor has persuaded himself is the correct interpretation of 2vt.apopec; gooXeviccirea, and it is amusing to find this adduced in support of what we cannot help fancying is an incorrect interpretation of rapidum cretm in the first eclogue. His translation of this phrase is " chalk- rolling." Authorities are too evenly balanced as to the admissi- bility of such a translation from a grammatical point of view for us to venture upon siding with either. But from an msthetic point of view, we have no hesitation whatever in rejecting it. A description of a river so graphic and so geologically correct (assuming, of course, its correctness) is not in Virgil's style at all, while the geographical difficulties which the other reading, Crete, presents are exactly what might be expected from him. We believe Crete to be the right reading, and that the correction cretz is as erroneous as Munro's emendation Thynus for Poenus is in Horace (Odes 2, 13), and due to a similar misconception. How- ever this may be, we have no doubt whatever that Dr. Kennedy is wrong in his interpretation of the next line, Et toto penitus divisos orbe Britannos, "the Britons utterly separated by the whole world" from the river Oaxes. We have no space to discuss this, nor is there, we think, much need ; it is just one of those cases where a commentator who ventures to differ from all other commentators is likely to remain in a minority of one. A good example of the Professor's style of criticism may be found in his excursion to the first book of the "Eneid, where we hold that he is quite right as against Conington, but decline to go with him in his separation of esse from gentibus, and his novel rendering of tendit. There are many passages in Virgil, as well as in Shakespeare, which elude minute analysis, and it may be that this is one of them. But a schoolmaster naturally and properly gets into the habit of making every phrase, however bold, pass under the yoke of some gram- matical rule or other. A curious example of the error into which such a turn of mind may lead a writer may be seen in the note on the well-known " Quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore, qui redit exuvias indutus Achilli. Vel Danaum Phrygios jaculatus puppibus ignes." " We know no instance," says the editor, " of historic present to be compared with this for audacity, and we could almost wish there were MS. authority for reading exuvius rediit." We, on the other hand, hold that redit is not an historic present at all, and that qui redit=redeunte=cum rediret, and forms a different proposition altogether from qui rediit, which, it seems to us, would turn the passage into nonsense.
Of the translation, we can only say that, like all translation, it is unequal. We should prefer good prose ourselves to mediocre blank-verse, produced too often by inversion. But here, no doubt, the great schoolmaster's tact comes in, and he knows that a tolerably spirited verse translation will often weigh greatly with an examiner, and is also much easier writing than scholarly and vigorous prose. The whole question of Vir-
gilian translation is far too wide for us to touch upon here, but we cannot refrain from expostulating with the Professor upon the ill-judged favour which he has shown to incompetent labourers in that field. The old odium scholasticum was as ludicrous as it was reprehensible, but for men like Kennedy and Mayor to set the seal of their approval to a translation so lame and unprofit- able as Lee and Lonsdale's, is, if not so ludicrous, quite as repre- hensible. Even Conington's translations, both verse and prose, are strangely unequal, and as in the former he alternates now and then from lines fully worthy of Scott to lines which are nothing but Virgil travestied, so in the latter a brilliant and scholarly sen- tence is often succeeded by a lumbering and wooden one, and poetical phrases are jumbled up continually with what, for want of a better word, we must call parliamentary phraseology. But Conington at his worst is better than Lee and Lonsdale at their best, and it is not creditable to the state of Latin scholarship in England that so bad a translation as theirs should be foisted on the public, without a more energetic remonstrance from those who are competent to make it with authority and effect.
In spite, however, of the drawbacks which we imagine are to be found in this edition, there is not a student of Latin in the British Empire or in the United States who has not reason to be grateful to Professor Kennedy for it. We sincerely hope that- his life may be spared to revise not a few of the many edition& which it will undoubtedly and deservedly reach, and were it for nothing else, the thanks of every one who can read are due to him for having stamped out for ever that pestilential bantling of the sciolists, "Vergil." Of Virgil himself and of the estimate formed of his poetical genius by the editor we have no space to speak. In an excellent essay on the life and writings of the poet many interesting questions are raised and suggestions made, and it is characteristic of Dr. Kennedy's strong sense and good-taste, that he shows himself in this essay quite free from that excessive admiration of the object of their labours which is the besetting sin of editors and biographers.
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