We sympathize heartily with such gentle enthusiasms as this of Dr. Coles. It is the interest of all Grub Street that men should be encouraged whose amiable weakness it is to fall in love with pieces of poetry. In this case, to be sure, the verses are Latin, and the author more nameless even than Junius; but who knows but some one's turn shall come next whose verses were at least meant to be English, and whose name is--Legion? If some translator, charged from the other pole of Dr. Coles's enthusiasm, should favor us with thirteen Latin versions of some modern English poems, it would give them a chance of being more generally intelligible to the laity. Nay, even if such a baker's-dozen of mediæval-Latin renderings of Mrs. Browning's last poem--and by this term we mean, of course, the rather shady Latin of middle-aged men--should be shuffled together, we are not sure that it would not be a help to the understanding of the Coptic original. But this, perhaps, is hoping too much.
In the case of Dr. Coles, how lucky the direction of the superfluous energy! how wise the humane precaution of Nature! For there is no destructive agency like a doctor with a hygienic hobby. If your constitution be a salt or sugar one, he will melt you away with damp sheets and duckings; if you are as exsanguine as a turnip, his scientific delight in getting blood out of you will be only heightened. For such erratic enthusiasms as this of Dr. Coles we want a milder term than monomania. Something like _monowhimsia_ would do. It is seldom that an oddity takes so pleasant a turn. He has published a dainty little volume, with a well-written introduction, giving the history of the "Dies Iræ," and an account of the various versions of it; this is followed by his own thirteen translations; and an appendix tells us what is meant by a Sequence, has a page or two on the origin of rhyming Latin, and concludes with the music of the hymn itself. The book is illustrated by delicate photographs from the Last Judgments of Michel Angelo, Rubens, and Cornelius, and from the "Christus Remunerator" of Ary Scheffer. It is exquisitely printed at the Riverside Press, which is doing such good service to everybody but the spectacle-makers.