ich is advantageously avoided by Mr. Wright,--

"Here Epicurus hath his fiery tomb,
And with him all his followers, who maintain
That soul and body share one common doom";

and is still better rendered by Dr. Parsons,--

"Here in their cemetery on this side,
With his whole sect, is Epicurus pent,
Who thought the spirit with its body died." [39]

[39] "Suo cimitero da questa parte hanno
Con Epieuro tutti i suoi seguaci,
Che l'anima col corpo morta fanno."
Inferno, X. 13-15.

And here my eyes, reverting to the end of Canto IX.,

fall upon a similar contrast between Mr. Longfellow's lines,--

"For flames between the sepulchres were scattered,
By which they so intensely heated were,
That iron more so asks not any art,"--

and those of Dr. Parsons,--

"For here mid sepulchres were sprinkled fires,
Wherewith the enkindled tombs all-burning gleamed;
Metal more fiercely hot no art requires." [40]

[40] "Che tra gli avelli flamme erano sparte,
Per le quali eran si del tutto accesi,
Che ferro piu non chiede verun' arte."
Inferno, IX. 118-120.

Does it not seem that in all these cases Mr. Longfellow, and to a
slightly less extent Mr. Cary, by their strict adherence to the letter,
transgress the ordinary rules of English construction; and that Dr.
Parsons, by his comparative freedom of movement, produces better
poetry as well as better English? In the last example especially, Mr.
Longfellow's inversions are so violent that to a reader ignorant of the
original Italian, his sentence might be hardly intelligible. In Italian
such inversions are permissible; in English they are not; and Mr.
Longfellow, by transplanting them into English, sacrifices the spirit
to the letter, and creates an obscurity in the translation where all is
lucidity in the original. Does not this show that the theory of absolute
literality, in the case of two languages so widely different as English
and Italian, is not the true one?

Secondly, Mr. Longfellow's theory of translation leads him in most
cases to choose words of Romanic origin in preference to those of Saxon
descent, and in many cases to choose an unfamiliar instead of a familiar
Romanic word, because the former happens to be etymologically identical
with the word in the original. Let me cite as an example the opening of
Canto III.:--

"Per me si va nella eitti dolente,