The peculiar personality of the late Mr. William Gifford Palgrave - adventurous, receptive, versatile, impulsive, daring- may explain in part why he undertook a poem frankly and deliberately imitative of the Divina Commedia. Yet most of the reasons of such audacity must remain mysterious; they suggest a point where the over-weening visions in which an insane patient fancies himself a king or a divinity, become possible to a sane and well-furnished mind.
The history of all the nations-their art, their government, their civilization - is recalled in this picture of the Earthly Purgatory. The scheme of the work follows Dante closely; paraphrases and imitations, more or less unconscious, abound. Even the meter is the exacting terza rima, alien to the spirit of English speech. When the reader has somewhat recovered his composure after the shock of such colossal audacity, he learns to appreciate that Mr. Palgrave was no mean versifier or thinker; a man hardly could be such who had memorized almost the entire Commedia. The unsigned preface gives a very interesting account of Mr. Palgraves career; it was full of vicissitudes and adventures. He was a lieutenant in India, a Jesuit, an Oriental linguist, a missionary in Syria, a consul at such remote places as Trebizond and Manila, and finally British Minister to Uruguay.
A sample of Mr. Palgraves verse will most readily show its quality; we take at random the description of London:
The smoke-wove wreaths whose sullen curtains late
Shrouded that citys large magnificence
Were gone; and clear in view rose the proud state
Of the worlds empress; rampart none nor fence
Of brick or stone was hers; so firm she stood
In her own might, herself her own defense.
And as the tangled breadth of some great wood
With leafy domes and spires of shade and light
Mottles the lain from some sheer eminence viewed,
Or the pure blackness of a summer night
Scored and crow-fretted by the chequered rows
Of fleecy cloudlets with reticular white,
So the wide plain adown in sure repose
By the calm-gliding stream, that mighty town
Outstretehed its populous maze.
The meter is the meter of Dante, but the poetry is the poetry of Mr. Palgrave -- repsectable, well-equipped, cultivated, but how far below the divine stars!
-The Literary World, Vol. 23