the Flood." His next publication was The Jewel (vindicating the Scots nation and proposing the adoption of a highly ingenious universal language), which, despite its obvious extravagance, has not only many graphic and humorous touches, but much truth of observation; and in 1653 appeared his admirable translation of the first two books of Rabelais. After 1653 practically nothing is known of Urquhart; but it is very probable he remained for some years longer in London, continuing his translation of Rabelais, a third book of which appeared after his death. (The version was completed with great adroitness by Peter Anthony Motteux in 1708.) It is stated that Sir Thomas died abroad, from an uncontrollable fit of laughter upon hearing of the Restoration early in 1660. In an age of " concettists" and "metaphysical" writers, emblematists, and Platonists, not to speak of Muggletonians and literary quakers, Urquhart with his "antimetathetick commutation of epithets," his "illative ratiocination," his "exclamations in the front and epiphonemas in the rear," could have given points to Cowley himself. Few Englishmen before Sterne could have known. the great Valois humorists as well as Urquhart did. His qualities suggest a veritable transfusion of blood from his original Rabelais (who affected craziness as a mask) into the pedantic Scots virtuoso, whose shrine might seem to have been sheer eccentricity. It seems almost a pity that the creator of Baron Bradwardine, of Jonathan Oldbuck, Dominie Sampson, and Dugald Dalgetty, not to mention James I. in The Fortunes of Nigel, should never have infused the breath of enduring life into this Ancient Pistoll. The Rabelais is perhaps the most brilliant and the most noteworthy of these three great prose translations, but it can hardly be said that any of them survive, except as landmarks, in the history of English prose: they have all been superseded. The ornament in all these versions is extremely fine; they are adorned with a fancifulness which is thoroughly Elizabethan in form and colour, but the first object of a translation they do not succeed in compassing. They paraphrase with an emphasis and a brilliancy that is derived, not from their author, but from their own inner consciousness, and consequently transform more than they translate. 1 Florio by the vigorous and spirited version of Charles Cotton; Shelton by Ormsby and Watt; and Urquhart by W. F. Smith (2 vols., 1893). Among the minor translators of early Elizabethan time ought perhaps to be included the great Eliza herself. She produced some renderings from Boethius, Sallust, Plutarch, and Horace. Her letters, whether in French or English, certainly illustrate the vigour of her mind, but as a prose stylist the most that can be said in extenuation is that her translations were done rapidly, and with no idea of future publication. Creighton accepts as genuine the impromptu lines made to foil her inquisitors when her life was in danger under Mary, and a direct denial of transubstantiation might have been fatal: "Christ was the word that spake it, He took the bread and brake it, And what His words did make it, She was emphatically a learned lady in a period of unrivalled feminine accomplishment; spoke Italian perfectly, Latin easily, Greek moderately, turned out prose and verse indifferently well, and regarded the professional tribe of authors with a cool glance of contemptuous disapproval. CHAPTER II FROM TRANSITION TO TRANSFORMATION-II 66 Songs and Sonnets, wherein oft they hit On many dainty passages of wit." Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset-The Mirror for Magistrates -George Gascoigne-The Steele Glass-Thomas Churchyard-George Whetstone-George Turberville-Tottel's Miscellany-The Paradise of Dainty Devices-Some later Miscellanies. BETWEEN the death of Surrey and the appearance of The Shepheards Calender in 1579, when English poetry, like a tropical forest in a south wind, begins to "rustle with growth," the field of verse is occupied by two notorious conglomerates, The Mirror for Magistrates and Tottel's Miscellany. Both of these works owed their origin (like the Lives of the Poets and Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club) to the enterprise of "stationers "the booksellers of Pope's day, the publishers of our own. The Mirror for Magistrates was a bookseller's plan for a rhyming sequel to Lydgate's dull but popular Fall of Princes. Its main purpose was didactic; moralising such incidents of English history as illustrate the fall from high estate, the humiliation of the strong, and the fickleness of Fortune. The same theme had appealed both to Chaucer and to Gower, and the original model was the De Casibus Illustrium Virorum of Boccaccio. On its appearance in 1559 nineteen historical tragedies were narrated by six poets: Baldwin, Ferrers, Cavill, Chaloner, Phaer, and Skelton. The sources from which these poets derived their materials were mainly the chronicles of Hall and Fabyan, and they cover the same ground as several of Shakespeare's historical tragedies, as well as of Marlowe's Edward II. In 1563 the collection was reprinted with an addition of eight legends by, among others, Dolman, Churchyard, and Sackville. Sackville contributed not only a legend, but also an allegorical Induction, and, both as regards conception and artistic skill, his work far surpasses that of the other contributors. Thomas Sackville, who became Baron Buckhurst and eventually first Earl of Dorset, was born in Sussex in 1536. He is said to have graduated at Cambridge; he appears to have studied at Hart Hall, Oxford, and at the Inner Temple; he travelled and sat in Parliament; it was primarily, no doubt, his remote kinship with Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn, that procured his elevation to the peerage. He was, however, a cultivated, sagacious, and highly presentable man, and was frequently selected for ceremonial duties. About 1571 he joined the Privy Council, and in 1586 he was selected for the painful duty of communicating the death sentence to Mary Queen of Scots. He was severely rated by Elizabeth in 1587 for having "spilled" her case in the Netherlands, and was directed to confine himself to his house. So well were the nobles of this queen trained in submission that Buckhurst not only kept to his house, but refused to see his wife and children during his nine months' disgrace so acute was his fear of giving umbrage to his royal mistress. He reaped his reward in 1599, when he was made Lord Treasurer of England, an office which he preserved under James I., and retained until his death in April, 1608. He was then Earl of Dorset. His father was the Sir Richard Sackville who suggested to Ascham the task of writing The Scholemaster; he made such a pile of money that Naunton with unusual sprightliness said that he ought to be called Fillsack, not Sackville. Thomas Sackville had a share, and that no unimportant one, in a work which was in many respects more epochmaking than The Mirror for Magistrates-namely, in the first English tragedy, Gorboduc; but for the present we must return to Sackville's part in The Mirror. Sackville commences his powerful Induction with a sombre description of winter. He may have derived the scene from Gavin Douglas, but if he adopts he improves upon it, as he does likewise upon that poet's device of associating the phenomena of Nature with the mournful events which he has to narrate, and with the mood in which he approaches them. Amidst the chill and gloom of winter he meets Sorrow, a woe-begone woman clad in black, whose home is among the Furies of the Infernal Lake. Like the Sibyl in the sixth book of Virgil, she takes the poet down to Avernus. At the porch of Hell they encounter a number of allegorical figures: Remorse, Dread, Revenge, Misery, Care, Sleep, Old Age, Malady, Famine, and others. When these abstractions have been passed, the poet and his guide are ferried across the Acheron and come to the region of departed spirits. At the cry of Sorrow the rout of unhappy shades gather about them, among them Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, wringing his hands With ghastly looks as one in manner born, Oft spread his arms, stretch'd hands he joins as fast And so he makes his poetic Complaint which brings the collection of rhyming tragedies to a close. Harmonious and finely felt though it is, The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham does not attain quite to the poetic level of the Induction, in which some of the allegorical figures are described with a graphic vigour worthy of Dunbar, with the advantage that harmonious language must ever have over dialect, however strong and homely. It is almost |