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hiiitel verse , had the boldness to print a translation in English eight feet couplets , but it did not attract notice enough to be laughed at : and we have some faint recollection of having seen ^ more than forty years ago , a sixpenny child ' s book of the story
in prose . Nevertheless so little is the poem known that we do not think it superfluous to add , that the subject of it is the history of the successful villanies of the subtle Reynard the fox , who , impeached at the parliament of Nobel the lion , by Isegrim the wolf , and Bruin the bear , of divers treasons and felonies , is convicted
and sentenced to be hanged . The rope is round his neck , when he demands a confessor , and being overheard by the King and Queen to speak of certain hidden jewels of which he had defrauded them , he is released from jeopardy on condition of producing the treasure . He is sent away in custody , contrives to get rid of all his guards , comes back empty , but by the inexhaustible resources of his knavish wit . discomfits his adversaries , who
are banished the court and he is proclaimed prime minister . Thus , concludes the pious author , pretty much in the tone of Pulci : * Highly honoured is Reynard now ; to wisdom let every man convert himself , eschew evil , and honour virtue . This is the meaning of the song , in which the poet has mixed fable and truth that ye may learn to know good from evil , and also that the purchaser may inform himself concerning the ways of the world ; for so is it formed , and so it will remain for ever . . . . . Amen . '
The poem is so full of fancy and gaiety , that we know no work of imagination in any language that offers so many inducements to the competent translator . Goethe ' s work is in hexameters , in conformity with the epic tone which he has preserved throughout . The translator , who ought to recur to the original in the Low German , would find half his rhymes ready made to his hand . The verse should be that in which Prior excelled , and who , of
our classics of a by-gone age , would best have performed the task . Swift jvould have done it con amove , but he would have enhanced its grossnesses . One advantage a translation might have in the present age beyond that of any other—rthe co-operation of Landseer , an artist eminently qualified to do justice to the graphical illustrations of which the > vork is susceptible . He might do well , however , to consult Jost A ^ mpnV wood-cuts , which belong to the 16 th century . * Hermann und Dorothea . Under this same title is inserted among our author ' s elegies a personal poem , from which we have already extracted an apologetic passage , vol . 6 , p . 367 . He proceeds , in allusion to the / weH-known theory of his friend Vrolf , * I was informed by my friend Kn . that he was present when Herder first directed Goethe ' s attention to * Reineoke Fucha . ' * Are you aware / said he , ' that we
have an epic poem in German , as wise and as original as the Odyssey P Groethe confessed , when the epic was named , that hearing of it only as modernized by Gotschedt he Had hitherto neglected it . The book was produced . Goethe carried it away with him , and almost immediately began his work . —JVb / c cvmmunicaigtl *
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280 Goethe ' s Works .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1833, page 280, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2612/page/64/
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