Page:Lyracatholicacaswall.djvu/15

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AMERICAN EDITOR.
7

much to say that it wholly supersedes all other translations, and is a most valuable addition to our devotional literature. A very high critical authority (the Dublin Review for June, 1849) renders to Mr. Caswall and his work the following emphatic and discriminating tribute of its approbation:—

"Mr. Caswall could not, in our judgment, have earned a stronger title to the gratitude of the Catholic body in England, than that which he may rest upon the volume now before us. His collection is exempt from all the striking defects of those which preceded it, It is complete, supplying a metrical version of every hymn in every office and mass, throughout the year; it is free from those arbitrary and capricious mutilations which destroy the unity and pervert the character of the original; it is, above all, fully and fearlessly Catholic in its spirit, in its tone, in its imagery, and in its language. And, in addition to these negative, but yet very important excellencies, its positive merits, m a literary point of view, are of the very highest order.

"Indeed, a person who would be disposed to estimate the merit of a poetical translation of the hymns of the Breviary, by comparison with almost any other species of poetical composition, would render