of greatness, the evanescent character of prosperity, the slipperiness of the heights of pride. Thomas Newton, who collected the translations of the several tragedies in 1581, enlarged expressly on their moral tone. He affected to believe that Seneca might be charged with encouraging ambition, cruelty, incontinence, &c. ; and affirmed in denial of any such charge that "in the whole catalogue of heathen writers there is none that does so much with gravity of philosophical sentences, weightiness of sappy words, and authority of sound matter, to beat down sin, loose life, dissolute dealing, and unbridled sensuality."

It is not worth while, if it were possible, to recall the personalities of the several translators. The first of them was Jasper Heywood, then an Oxford undergraduate, who set to work to translate the Troas,' immediately after the publication of the 'Mirror for Magistrates' in 1559. He was followed by Alexander Nevile, John Studley, and Thomas Nuce: and the separate translations were collected into one volume by Thomas Newton in 1581. The translations are avowedly free. In his preface to the 'Troas,' Heywood says that he has endeavoured to keep touch with the Latin, not word for word or verse for verse, but in such a way as to expound the sense; and Nevile, who was but sixteen when he wrote, and whose preface is an amusing study of inflated precocity and stilted moralising, boldly affirmed his intention of wandering from his author, roving where he listed, adding and subtracting at pleasure. Of course none of the translators make the remotest approach to the style of Seneca: they simply transmute him into the poetical commonplaces of Lydgate and the 'Mirror.' Look, for instance, at Studley's rendering of the invocation of Medea in the Fourth Act :

"O flittering flocks of grisly ghosts

that sit in silent seat,

O ugsome Bugs, O Goblins grim
of hell, I you entreat!

O lowering Chaos, dungeon blind
And dreadful darken'd pit
Where Ditis muffled up in clouds
of blackest shades doth sit!
O wretched woful wawling souls
your aid I do implore,

That linked lie with jingling chains
on wailing Limbo shore !

O mossy den where death doth couch
his ghastly carrion face :

Release your pangs, O sprites, and to
this wedding hie apace.

Cause ye the snaggy wheel to pause
that rents the carcase bound;

Permit Ixion's racked limbs

to rest upon the ground;

Let hunger-bitten Tantalus
with gaunt and pined paunch,
Sup by Pirene's gulphed stream,
his swelling thirst to staunch."

A collector of "sound and fury" would find many amusing passages in these translations. At the same time, the raw material, very raw though it was, may have been useful to Shakespeare or any dramatist that knew how to refine it. It is not impossible that Shakespeare derived from these rude translations some hints for his incomparable studies of oppressed and desperate

women.

What drew Arthur Golding to translate Ovid's Metamorphoses, is hard to conjecture. If it had been Ovid's 'Art of Love,' one might have pointed to the translation as part of the amatory movement in literature, standing to the translation of Seneca as Tottel's Miscellany to the Mirror for Magistrates.' But Golding was not the sort of man from whom one would expect a translation of an amatory work. He was an indefatigable translator from Latin, but his subjects generally were of a different cast. He began in 1562 by translating with fervent Protestant zeal a brief treatise on the burning of Bucer and Phagius in the time of Queen Mary, setting forth "the fantastical and tyrannous dealings of the Romish Church, together with the godly and modest regiment of the true Christian Church.” The tract is picturesque and forcible. His next performance was a translation of Aretine's history of the wars between "the Imperials and the Goths for the possession of Italy," published in 1563. He translated from Justin in 1564; Cæsar's Commentaries in 1565; and numerous ecclesiastical and other works. His translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was completed in 1567. It is not very exact, nor calculated to convey an idea of the poet's exquisite delicacy of expression; but it was quite good enough to reveal to non-classical readers a new world of graceful fancies. Shakespeare must have revelled in it, denuding the exquisite fancies of what was rough in the manner of their presentation, and letting them lie in his mind, and stimulate his imagination to beget many others of the same kind. The following is a specimen which may have been in Shakespeare's mind when he imagined the station of Mercury new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill:

"And thereupon he call'd his son that Maia had him born,
Commanding Argus should be killed. He made no long abode,
But tied his feathers to his feet, and took his charmed rod

(With which he bringeth things asleep, and fetcheth souls from hell,)
And put his hat upon his head; and when that all was well,
L

He leaped from his father's towers and down to earth he flew,
And there both hat and wings also he lightly from him threw,
Retaining nothing but his staff, the which he closely held

Between his elbow and his side, and through the common field
Went plodding like some good plain soul that had some flock to feed."

Prefixed to the work is an epistle also in Alexandrines, moralising the various fables, asking the pious reader to understand good men by "gods," and to see in Fate and Fortune aspects of the eternal Providence; and arguing that, though the Scriptures are the only true fountains of knowledge, yet much may be learnt from these pagan writers when rightly interpreted. The following is part of the moral of Phaeton :

"This fable also doth advise all parents and all such

As bring up youth to take good heed of cockering them too much."

163

CHAPTER IV.

EDMUND SPENSER.

(1552-1598.)

I. HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER.

ALTHOUGH, in Dryden's phrase, "Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body," there can be no doubt that Spenser's chief impulse in the composition of his principal poem was derived from Ariosto and Tasso. It is, indeed, not difficult to adduce passages from the 'Faery Queen,' founded on Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory. Spenser was a most learned poet, more so probably than any great English poet, except Mr Swinburne; and he assimilated and incorporated material from many predecessors-English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. "E. K.," the inspired commentator on his 'Shepherd's Calendar,' after enumerating as writers of pastoral poetry Theocritus, Virgil, Mantuanus, Petrarca, and Boccaccio, comes finally to Marot, Sanazarro, "and also divers other excellent both Italian and French poets," and adds, "whose footing this author everywhere followeth, yet so as few, but they be well scented, can trace him out." Our poet laid all under contribution, not stealing clumsily and mechanically, but using the products of other imaginations as food for his own. The Italian masters, undoubtedly, were his chief models and exemplars, although he never followed them to the oppression, still less to the suppression, of his own spirit. The Faery Queen' is of the same kindred with the 'Orlando Furioso' and the 'Gerusalemme Liberata.' In Spenser's poem, perhaps, the allegory had greater generative force: but all three agree in the essential respect of having the elements of chivalrous romance used by great artists for purely artistic purposes.

The translations of Ariosto and Tasso executed about the time of the appearance of the 'Faery Queen,' are a proof of the interest

then prevailing in these poems of chivalry. A translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso,' by Sir John Harrington, was published in 1591: one translation of Tasso's 'Godfrey of Bulloigne,' or 'Jerusalem Delivered,' by Richard Carew, in 1594, and another, more celebrated, by Sir Edward Fairfax, in 1600. Both Harrington's and Fairfax's are smooth and copious, and supplied 'England's Parnassus' with many choice extracts. They are in ottava rima, and are far from having Spenser's inimitable music; yet, if an unobservant reader were set down to some of those extracts, the general resemblance of strain, of matter and imagery, is such that he would probably refer them at once to Spenser.1

Spenser's lineage and life have been made subjects for laborious inquiry and nice speculation. He was born in London, and is supposed to have belonged to a Lancashire branch of the ennobled family of Spencer. The date of his birth is generally fixed about 1552. He entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar, in 1569; became B.A. in 1573, M.A. in 1576. After his residence at Cambridge, he is believed to have gone to the north of England; to have returned south in 1578 by the advice of his college friend Gabriel Harvey; and to have been introduced by Harvey to Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney and the Earl of Leicester took him by the hand and advanced his fortunes.

In 1579 he dedicated to Sidney his first poetical effort, 'The Shepherd's Calendar,' containing twelve pastorals, one for each month, classified as moral, plaintive, and recreative. About this time, in his correspondence with Harvey, mention is made of various works now lost, but probably, with the exception of his 'Nine Comedies,' partially embodied in what he afterwards published. By that time, also, he had begun the 'Faery Queen.'

In 1580, at the age of twenty-seven, he entered upon official life in that year he went to Ireland as secretary to the viceroy, Lord Grey. He is usually said to have returned to England in 1582, when Lord Grey was recalled: and his business employment for the rest of his life is ignored. Only three facts are known, but they are significant. In 1581 he was appointed clerk to the

1 Sir John Harrington might be taken as a typical Elizabethan courtier-a handsome young fellow, possessed of a keen eye for fun as well as for beauty, and a very ready command of language. Besides translating Orlando Furioso,' which the Queen is said to have imposed upon him as a punishment for translating the episode of 'Alcina and Ruggiero,' he wrote epigrams, composed 'Polindor and Flostella,' a mock-heroic poem in couplets, full of fresh feeling and cleverness, and expounded the merits of one of the most valuable sanitary contrivances of civilised life in a prose treatise- Ajax Metamorphosed-boiling over with gross Rabelaisian humour. Fairfax was a quieter man, of secluded studious habits. Dryden, in the preface to his fables, is loud in praise of the beauty of Fairfax's numbers, which, he says, Waller himself owned to have been his model, "Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr Waller of Fairfax."