Robert Ashley, his schoolfellow, says that the school was confined to "sixteen or twenty youths of good family"; and that "it was a rule in it that all should speak French; he who spoke English, though only a sentence, was obliged to wear a fool's cap at meals, and continue to wear it till he caught another in the same fault." 1 This kind of teaching was no doubt adopted with a view to the preparation of the scholars for a mercantile life of the kind to which Sylvester was apparently very early destined, for he was removed from school in his thirteenth year, and—as he himself tells, in some verses gratefully recalling Saravia's care of him—was never at either of the English universities. How he was employed it is impossible to say with certainty, but we know that in 1590-91 he was a member of the Merchant Adventurers' Company, to which, in 1597, through the influence of the Earl of Essex, he sought to become secretary. In this hope he was disappointed; and he did not obtain the post he desired till 1617, when he was obliged, by the nature of his duties, to reside at Middleburgh. Here he died on 28th September 1618.

It is plain that Sylvester's heart was not in commerce, and that he would have preferred to maintain himself by his pen, for he began his work of translation as early as 1591, in which year his rendering of Du Bartas' Battle of Ivry is entered in the Register of the Stationers' Company. His Essay of the Second Week of the noble, learned, and divine Saluste du Bartas was published in 1598; and in 1604 he dedicated to the King The Divine Weeks of the World's Birth. The translation of Du Bartas' Weeks was completed in 1606. Though it brought its author much popularity and reputation, it does not seem that he was directly patronised 1 Grosart's edition of Sylvester's Works, vol. i. p. x.

2 His love and labour apted so my wit,

That when Urania after rapted it,

Through Heaven's strong working, weakness did produce

Leaves of delight and fruits of sacred use;

Which had my Muse t' our either Athens flown,

Or followed him, had been much more my own:

Then was the fault that so it fell not out.-Elegy on Mrs. Saravia.

by the King. Prince Henry, however, made him his Groom of the Privy Chamber, and to him Sylvester dedicated his translation of the Tetrastika of Pibrac, and afterwards that of Du Bartas' Second Week. Henry Peachem, in his Truth of Our Times (1638), speaks of the translator "having had very little or no reward at all for his pains or dedications"; yet his needs were considerable, as he had a family of six persons dependent on him.1

The style of the translation is very noteworthy. Sylvester warmly admired and sympathised with Du Bartas' religious views, as well as with his poetical qualities, and he reproduces, on the whole, with great fidelity the matter of his original. But with it he mingles much that is peculiar to himself and his circumstances. His taste had been formed in the school of the poetical Euphuists, so that he never fails to heighten the capricious flights of Du Bartas by elaborate conceits of his own. The metre he adopted was a loosely-knit variety of the heroic couplet, which, wandering on from line to line, with an air of conversational ease, gave ample opportunity to the poet to stamp on each individual expression the impress of his own taste and character. Sylvester was, like many of his contemporaries, a lover of country life, and he writes with particular zest whenever his translation offers him an opportunity to make a digression descriptive of the neighbourhood of his own home. Here, for example, is a characteristic passage:—

Let me, good Lord, among the great un-kend

My days of rest in the calm country end.

Let me deserve of my dear Eagle-Brood

For Windsor Forest walks in Almes-Wood :

Be Hadley-Pond my sea; Lambs-bourn my Thames;
Lambourn my London; Kennet's silver streams

My fruitful Nile; my Singers and Musicians
The pleasant Birds with warbling repetitions;

1 Unless, by others' help or by your own,

The tender pity of your princely hand

Quick hale me out, I perish instantly,

Haled in again by six that hang on me.

Dedicatory Sonnet to the Second Session of the
Parliament of Vertues Royal.

My Company pure thoughts, to work Thy will;

My Court a cottage on a lowly hill;

Where without let I may so sing Thy name,
That time to come may wonder at the same.

Milton,

In lines like these we have plainly before us one of the sources of inspiration of William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, which afterwards themselves exerted a powerful influence on the genius of Keats. Indeed, the translation generally, with its vast field of allusion, its multitude of isolated images, and its quaintness of individual expression, proved full of suggestion for later poets. among others, evidently derived many hints from Sylvester for Paradise Lost. The latter also, by the naturalisation of Du Bartas' style in English, helped to promote the rapidly increasing tendency to poetical "wit," of which we shall presently have to note so many varieties. He could never resist the temptation to embody in his verse a jingle of words, a pun, or a paradox, as in the following lines from the Elegy on Mrs. Saravia :

Such was her Minor-age; such Maiden-life,
Such Woman-state; and such she was a Wife
To my Saravia; to whose reverend name
Mine owns the honour of Du Bartas' fame.
For as our London (else for drought undone)
Sucks from the paps (the pipes) of Middleton
(Whose memory mine never shall forget,

But to Hugh's name add the surname of Great,
For his great work, abundant streams to drench,

Cool, cleanse, and clear, and fearful flames to quench),
From the ample cisterns of his sea of skill

Sucked I (my succour) my short shallow rill,

In three poor years at three times three years old.

The general character of his translation, exemplifying at once its fidelity to the spirit of his original and the freedom and amplification of its details, may be gathered by his rendering of the passage I have already quoted from Du Bartas, viz. his appeal to the princes of Europe to abstain from war :

O Princes (subjects unto pride and pleasure)
Who (to enlarge but a hair's-breadth the measure
Of your dominions) breaking oaths of peace
Cover the fields with bloody carcases!

O magistrates, who (to content the great)
Make sale of Justice on your sacred seat!
And breaking laws for bribes, profane your place
To leave a leek to your unthankful race!
You strict extorters that the poor oppress,
And wrong the widow and the fatherless,
To leave your offspring rich (of others' good)
In houses built of rapine and of blood!
You city-vipers that incestious joyn
Use upon use, begetting coin of coin!
You marchant-mercers and monopolites,
Gain-greedy chapmen, perjured hypocrites,
Dissembling brokers, made of all deceipts,
Who falsify your measures and your weights,
T'enrich yourselves, and your unthrifty sons
To gentilise with proud possessions !
You that for gain betray your gracious Prince,
Your native country, or your dearest frinds!
You that, to get you but an inch of ground,
With cursed hands remove your neighbour's bound
(The ancient bounds your ancestors have set),
What gain you all? alas, what do you get?
Yea, though a king by will or war had won
All the round earth to his subjection;
Lo here the guerdon of his glorious pains,
A needle's point, a mote, a mite he gains,
A nit, a nothing (did he all possess),
Or if than nothing anything be less.1

Interest of another kind is excited by the work of George Chapman, the first English translator of Homer's Iliad. Born in 1559, and bred at Hitchin in Hertfordshire, Chapman is said by Antony Wood to have been educated at Oxford, where, however, he took no degree; and Warton (who ought to have been well informed on this point) states that he was a member of Trinity College. Though almost all the latter part of his life was devoted to the pursuit of literature, we have no record of any work of his produced before 1594, when he published Σxía VURTÓS, The Shadow of Night, Two Poetical Hymns,

1 For the original French, see p. 89.

which was followed in 1595 by Ovid's Banquet of Sense, with other poems, and in 1598 by a continuation of Marlowe's Hero and Leander. From this date onward to 1613 Chapman appears mainly to have supported himself by writing for the stage, while at the same time. he pushed forward his translation of the Iliad, the first seven books of which he published in 1598, completing the whole work in 1611. In 1614 he added a translation of the Odyssey, and completed his version of Homer with the Batrachomyomachia, the Hymns, and Epigrams in 1624.

His plays, of which I shall have something more to say hereafter, comprise The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1598); The World runs on Wheels, or All Fools but the Fool, and A Humorous Day's Mirth (1599); Eastward Hoe, written in partnership with Ben Jonson and Marston (1605); The Gentleman Usher (1606); Bussy d'Ambois (1607); The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608); May Day (1611); The Widow's Tears (1612); The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois (1613). He was also the author of several masques, of which the only one that survives is The Memorable Maske of the two Honorable Houses or Inns of Court, the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn, written for the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth, 15th February 1614. Ben Jonson couples his name with Fletcher's as the only two men who, besides himself, were capable of making a masque.

His original poems, which are strongly tinctured with the Euphuistic pedantry of the period, besides those which I have already mentioned, include Peristeros, or The Male Turtle, Euthymia Raptus, or The Tears of Peace; Epicede, or Funeral Song, on the death of Prince Henry; Andromeda Liberata, an allegorical poem on the marriage of the Earl of Somerset and the divorced Countess of Essex, the unfortunate title and subject of which were the cause of much offence; Eugenia, or True Nobilitie's Trance, an elegy on the death of William, Lord Russell. He also translated in 1616 the Divine Poems of Musaus, and in 1618 The Georgicks of Hesiod. Among his