It is a hundred years ago that a certain physician in the employment of the East India Company, who then represented British supremacy in Bengal and Calcutta, published the "Story of Sohrab," a poem in heroic couplets, being a translation of the most pathetic episode in the "Sháh Námeh." If we compare this English poem with Jules Mohl's literal translation of the Persian epic into French, we find that James Atkinson stands very much in the same relation to Firdusi as Pope does to Homer. It would be indeed absurd for an English writer to attempt to conform, in an English version, to the vagaries of Persian idiom, or even to attempt a literal rendering of the Persian trope. The manner of a poet can never be faithfully reproduced in a translation, but all that is really valuable, really affecting, in an epic poem will survive transfusion into the frank and natural idiom of another tongue. We say epic poem, because one of the distinguishing features in this form of literary expression is that its action hinges on those fundamental passions of humanity, that "touch which makes the whole world kin," whose alphabet is the same in every latitude. The publication of "Sohrab" was nevertheless the revelation of a new world to London coteries, and the influence of Mr. Atkinson's work can be traced as well in the Persian pastorals of Collins as in the oriental poems of Southey and Moore. This metrical version of "Sohrab" is the only complete episode of the Sháh Námeh contained in the present collection. When we consider that the Persian original consists of some one hundred and twenty thousand lines, it will easily be understood that a literal rendering of the whole would make a volume whose bulk would put it far out of reach to the general reader. Atkinson has very wisely furnished us with a masterly _résumé_ of the chief episodes, each of which he outlines in prose, occasionally flashing out into passages of sparkling verse, which run through the narrative like golden threads woven into the tissue of some storied tapestry. The literary style of the translator is admirable. Sometimes, as when he describes the tent of Maníjeh, he becomes as simple and direct as Homer in depicting the palace of Alcinous. The language of his Sohrab recalls the pathos of Vergil's Nisus and Euryalus, and the paternal love and despair of Dante's Ugolino. But in Rustem the tears of anguish and sorrow seem to vanish like morning dew, in the excitement of fresh adventure, and human feeling, as depicted by Firdusi, lacks not only the refined gradations, but also the intensity, which we see in the Florentine poet. Atkinson's versification is rather that of Queen Anne's time than what we of the Victorian age profess to admire in Browning and Tennyson. But it is one of the chief praises of Tennyson that he has treated Sir Thomas Malory very much in the same way as Mr. Atkinson has treated Abul Kasim Mansur, by bringing the essential features of an extinct society within the