“This beautiful volume before us—­like virtue’s self, fair within and without—­is Mr. Mac-Carthy’s second contribution to the Herculean task which Longfellow cheers him on to continue—­the translation into English of the complete works of Calderon.  Two experimental volumes, containing six dramas of the same author, appeared in 1853, winning the well-merited encomium of every person of true taste into whose hands they happened to fall.  The Translator was encouraged, if not by the general chorus of popular applause, by the precious and emphatic approbation of those best entitled by knowledge and accomplishments to pronounce judgment.  So here, after an interval of seven years, we have right worthily presented to us three of those famous Autos, which for two centuries drew together all the multitude of the Madrilenos, on the annual return of the great feast of Corpus Christi.  On that same self-same festival, in a northern land, under a gray and clouded sky, in the heart of a city most unlike gay, garden-hued, out-of-door Madrid, we have spent the long hours over these resurrected dramas, and the spell of both the poets is still upon us, as we unite together, in dutiful juxtaposition, the names of Calderon and Mac-Carthy.

“How richly gifted was this Spanish priest-poet! this pious playwright! this moral mechanist! this devout dramatist!  How rare his experience! how broad the contrasts of his career, and of his observation. . . . .  Happy poet! blessed with such fecundity!  Happy Christian! blessed with such fidelity to the divine teachings of the Cross. . . .

“Very highly do we reverence Calderon, and very highly value his translator; yet, if it be not presumptuous to say so, we venture to suggest that Mac-Carthy might find nearer home another work still worthier of his genius than these translations.  Now that he has got the imperial ear by bringing his costly wares from afar, are there not laurels to be gathered as well in Ireland as in Spain?  The author of ‘The Bell-Founder’, of ‘St. Brendan’s Voyage’, of ’The Foray of Con O’Donnell’, and ‘The Pillar Towers’, needs no prompting to discern what abundant materials for a new department of English poetry are to be found almost unused on Irish ground.  May we not hope that in that field or forest he may find his appointed work, adding to the glory of first worthily introducing Calderon to the English readers of this century, the still higher glory of doing for the neglected history of his fatherland what he has chivalrously done for the illustrious Spaniard”.

A list
of
Calderon’s Dramas and Autos Sacramentales,

Translated into English Verse
by Denis Florence Mac-Carthy, M.R.I.A.

THE PURGATORY OF SAINT PATRICK.

“With the ‘Purgatory of St. Patrick’ especial pains seem to have been taken”.

“Considerable license has been taken with the prayer of St. Patrick; but its spirit is well preserved, and the translator’s poetry must be admired”.