3. _The Romantic Scottish Ballads, and the Lady Wardlaw Heresy._ By NORVAL CLYNE. Aberdeen: A. Brown & Co. 1859. pp. 49. The expectations raised by the title of Dr. Prior's volumes are in a great measure disappointed by their contents. The book is of value only because it gives for the first time, in English, the substance of a large number of Danish ballads, and points out the relations between them and similar productions in other languages. Of the spirit and life of these remarkable poems a person hitherto unfamiliar with them would find but scanty indication in Dr. Prior's versions. He has merely done them into English in a somewhat mechanical way, and one scarcely gets a better notion of the more imaginative ones in his bald reproductions than of the "Iliad" from the analysis of that poem in the "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum." It seems to require almost as peculiar powers to translate an old ballad as to write a new one. Dr. Prior complains of Jamieson, that his versions from the Danish are done in a broad Scotch dialect, almost as unintelligible to ordinary readers as the language of which they profess to give the meaning. But if any one compare Jamieson's rendering of "The Buried Mother" with Dr. Prior's, (Prior, vol. i. p. 368,) he will, we think, see cause to regret that Jamieson did not do what Dr. Prior has attempted, and that he has not left us a greater number of translations equally good. Jamieson's fault was not so much his broad Scotch as his over-fondness for archaisms, sometimes of mere spelling, which give rise to a needless obscurity. We think that he was theoretically right; but he should not have pushed his theory to the extent of puzzling the reader, where his aim was to give only that air of strangeness which allures the fancy. As respects ballads dealing with the supernatural, Jamieson's notion of the duty of a translator was certainly the true one. There is something almost ludicrous in a ghost talking the ordinary conversational language of every-day life, which might, to be sure, serve very well for some of Jung Stilling's spirits in bottle-green hunting-coats with brass buttons, but hardly for the majesty of buried Denmark. Dr. Prior may claim that his renderings are more literal; but it is the vice of literal translation, that the phrases of one language, if exactly reproduced in another, while they may have the same sense, convey a wholly different impression to the imagination. It is to such cases that the Italian proverb, _Tradutiore traditore_, applies. Dryden, citing approvingly Denham's verses to Fanshawe, "They but preserve his ashes, thou his flame, True to his sense, but truer to his fame," says, with his usual pithiness, "Too faithfully is indeed pedantically." In Dr. Prior's version of the "The Buried Mother" we find a case precisely in point. The Stepmother says to the poor Orphans,-- "In blind-house shall ye lie all night." Jamieson gives it,--