PLAYING WITH EDGED TOOLS.

SOME one has been trying to write Latin verse at Dartmouth, and our friend the Advocate has quoted some of it; but without comment. For about a week the Dartmouth has probably been half tickled with the republication, half annoyed that there was no pointing out of special beauties. We strongly suspect that in a few days the Darimouth will be thankful the Advocate did not comment, and rather wish it had n't published.

Amateur Latin verse is all very well, if the quantities and forms are all right, and the constructions classical. But if the lines will not scan, it is of no account that they can be rattled over so as to read something like Virgil or Ovid.

The Dartmouth's lines read thus, with the correction of an obvious misprint at the end of line sixth, whether due to the Advocate or the original we cannot say. They are taken from the "Faerie Queene."

"Venit et autumnus croceo velatus amictu

Opibus ex pleno dives quas Copia cornu

Fusit. Ridet ut ob fruges quot percipit hornas

Importuna Famis jejunia temneret. Olim

Esurie domitus contracti ventris edace.

Coronae aristarum quovis de semine comam

Cinxerunt. Falcem et in manu sua tenuit curvam.

Dextra quo meteret segetem maturam abagris."

The first line is very pretty, being a judicious combination of Ovid, Met. II. 29, and X. 1. This patching is quite legitimate, and we wish all the rest were similarly constructed. The fourth and fifth lines also are correct, metrically; but esuries is a terribly rare and unpoetical word. In line second, opibus has the o short, so it cannot begin a hexameter. In line third, the perfect of fundo is not fusi, and the line is very jerky. Risit would have scanned as well, and suited the other tenses better. In line sixth, coronae cannot begin a hexameter, nor comam end one; moreover, cutting off a diphthong between the two short syllables of a dactyl is very unclassical. Of line seventh we can make nothing at all. The quantities run ____V ____V ____V ____VV ____, which no human power can get into a verse. But we strongly doubt if the translator knew that the em in falcem would go out before et, since line eight can only be scanned at all by keeping am in maturam before ab. In the same line, quo, though not positively wrong, should be rather qua.

Here, then, in five lines out of eight, is a series of radical blunders in quantity and formation, every one of which requires no further reading than the first book of the Aeneid to set right. After that, considerations of the general style, transference of thought, building up of sentences, are superfluous. There is so much fatally bad that it is not worth asking if there is anything good.

'59.