6 to what he had been reading, and have all the thoughts of his author, only expressed in a different mode, and that without knowing that he was obliged to any one for a single thought in the whole poem. I,' says Pope, have experienced this in him several times (for I visited him, for a whole winter, almost every evening and morning); and look upon it as one of the strangest phenomena that I ever observed in the human mind.' SPENCE. PHAER AND STANYHURST'S " VIRGIL." THE earliest poetical translation of the entire "Eneid" into English, was the joint production of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne, both Doctors of Physic, and was published in 1584. The former of these had originally published the first seven books, in 1558. Phaer undertook this translation for the defence, to use his own phrase, of the English language, which had been, by many, deemed incapable of elegance and propriety, and for the "honest recreation of you, the nobilitie, gentlemen, and ladies, who studie in Latine." He has omitted, misrepresented, and paraphrased, many pas VOL. III. T sages of his original; but his performance is, in every respect, superior to Twyne's continuation, which commences in the middle of the tenth book. The measure is the fourteenfooted Alexandrine of Sternhold and Hopkins, whose couplets are now more commonly printed in stanzas of four lines. As an example of the style of this early predecessor of Dryden and Pitt, we extract the commencement of the first book. "I that my slender oaten pipe In verse was wont to sound, How fruit unto their greedy lust Of arms, and of the Man of Troy, Did thence arrive to Lavine Land, The reader has, probably, had enough of this specimen, to the measure of which the popular ear of the time was, however, tuned. It was then used in most works of length and gravity, and seems to have been particularly consecrated to translation, of which Golding's "Ovid," and Chapman's "Homer," (of which latter it forms, indeed, the chief defect,) are striking examples. But, as though this sort of metre were not sufficiently ridiculous, in the year 1583, Richard Stanyhurst, animated by a desire to try his strength against Phaer, put forth a wild version of the first four books of the "Eneid" into what he was pleased to call " English heroical verse," that is to say, hexameter. Of this silly affair, the four first lines of the second book will, probably, be deemed a sufficient specimen. "With 'tentive list'ning, each wight was settl'd in harking; Then Father Æneas chronicled from loftie bed hautie; You bid me, O Princess! to scarifie a festered old sore, How that the Trojans were prest by the Grecian armie." Some of his epithets are particularly amusing; for instance, he calls Chorebus, one of the Trojan chiefs, a bedlamite; says that Old Priam girded on his sword morglay, the name of a sword in the Gothic romances; that Dido would have been glad to have been brought to bed, even of a cockney, a dandiprat hop-thumb; and that Jupiter, in kissing his daughter, Venus, bust his pretty-prating parrot; and that Æneas was fain to trudge out of Troy. We must, also, introduce a specimen of his rhyme, taken from "An Epitaph against Rhyme, entituled, 'Commune Defunctorum,' such as our unlearned Rithmours accustomably make upon the death of every Tom Tyler; as if it were a last for every one his foot, in which the quantities of syllables are not to be heeded." "A Sara for goodness; a great Bellona for budgeness; For mildness, Anna; for chastity, godly Susanna ; Hester, in a good shift; a Judith, stout at a dead lift; Also, Julietta, with Dido, rich Cleopatra; With sundry nameless, and women, many more blameless." And yet the man who wrote these uncouth fooleries was, certainly, no mean scholar, and his translation was highly prized by some, at least, among his contemporaries. That such, however, was far from being the universal opinion, the following satirical quotation from Nash will be sufficient to prove. "But fortune, respecting Master Stanihurst's praise, would that Phaer should fall, that he might rise, whose heroical poetry, infired (I should say inspired,) with an hexameter fury, recalled to life whatever hissed barbarism hath been buried this hundred year, and revived, by his ragged quill, such carterly variety, as no hedge-ploughman in a country but would have held as the extremity of clownery." And Bishop Hall thus alludes to him in one of his excellent Satires: "Another scorns the home-spun thread of rhymes, The drawling spondees pacing it below, |