CHAPTER V TRANSLATIONS OF THE CLASSICS: VIRGIL, SENECA, OVID THE accession of Elizabeth marks a distinct epoch in the history of English poetry, because it was this which first helped to blend the study of the classics and the scholarship of the Universities with the taste and imagination of the Court. The new learning had established itself without much opposition in Oxford and Cambridge. In Erasmus and his fellow-workers there was no desire to tamper with the foundations of the Catholic religion; their aim was to revive the earnestness and simplicity of faith, and at the same time to reconcile it with whatever was valuable and beautiful in the genius of Paganism. The study of Rhetoric on these lines was encouraged by the best spirits of the age, and was only opposed by ignorance and fanaticism. An attempt was made by the Scotist party at Oxford to discredit the new learning, but their stupidity was ridiculed by Sir Thomas More.1 Wolsey promoted the study of Greek by the foundation of Christ Church. Colet and Grocyn lectured on the Greek orators and poets in the same University; and Cheke and Ascham familiarised their scholars at Cambridge with the dialogues of Plato, the philosophy most highly approved by the reformers of the Continent. But the study of the classics had not yet been definitely made part of the education of the courtier. Henry VIII. favoured scholarship, but his temper was largely leavened with scholasticism; he prided himself on 1 Froude, Erasmus, p. 131. his knowledge of theology, and he loved disputation. Moreover, his taste for all the externals of chivalry made the chase and the tournament the chief amusements of his Court. In his cultivation of music he approached the ideal of Castiglione, but his passion for masques and pageants had in it the colour of mediævalism. The times of Edward VI. and of Mary were too tragic to encourage social forms of gaiety, though dramatic exhibitions were still in favour at Court. Under the former monarch the spirit of the Renaissance continued to accompany the spirit of the Reformation. Under Mary, however, a returning wave of pure mediævalism overwhelmed for the moment all that had been gained for the cause of the Reformation and learning, so that when Elizabeth came to the throne the task of reorganising society had to be undertaken from the beginning. The new sovereign united in her own nature all the conflicting principles of the time. She was born of a mother whose marriage had occasioned the separation of the English Church from the Roman Communion, but of a father who was strongly attached to all the prescriptions of the Catholic faith. She herself adhered firmly to the usages in which she had been trained, and while she saw the necessity of yielding to the current of reform in doctrinal matters, she restrained the zeal of the Puritans when it was directed against rites and ceremonies. In this respect she truly represented the temper of her people at large, who had no desire to separate themselves from the life of the past. When she made her first entry into London the citizens welcomed her with a great show of those mediæval pageants which they loved: it was only in the sense of the allegory conveyed by these emblems that the spirit of change discovered itself: Time and Truth presented to the Queen a copy of the English Bible. The same double spirit shows itself in Elizabeth's attitude towards the institution of chivalry. She was delighted with the spectacles of joustings and exhibitions of arms; she loved the reading of romances, and the action of masquerades. But she looked on knighthood with the eyes of a woman, and used her royal influence to encourage the feminine element, always inclined to predominate in romance. Hence, as her reign advanced, the worship of the female sex, initiated by the Troubadours, was converted by flattery into the worship of the Virgin Queen; while the spirit of adventurous knight errantry, reflected in the Morte d'Arthur, was blended with the softer genius of pastoralism, introduced by the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. But the strongest influence that helped to modify taste in its transition from the chivalrous Court of Henry VIII. to the romantic Court of Elizabeth, was the Queen's love of learning. The following description of her accomplishments from the pen of Roger Aschamwhatever deduction may be made from it in consideration of partiality or flattery-must be accepted as the testimony of the highest possible authority : She speaks often conWhen she Among the learned daughters of Sir Thomas More the princess Elizabeth shines like a star of distinguished lustre ; deriving greater glory from her virtuous disposition and literary accomplishments than from the dignity of her exalted birth. I was her preceptor in Latin and Greek for two years. She was but little more than sixteen when she could speak French and Italian with as much fluency and propriety as her native English. Latin readily, justly, and even critically. She has versed with me in Greek, and with tolerable facility. transcribes Greek or Latin nothing can be more beautiful thar. her handwriting. She is excellently skilled in music, though not very fond of it. She has read with me all Cicero and a great part of Livy. It is chiefly from these two authors alone that she has acquired her knowledge of the Latin language. She begins the day with reading a portion of the Greek Testament, and then studies some select orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles. . . . In every composition she is very quick in pointing out a far-fetched word or an affected phrase. She cannot endure those absurd imitators of Erasmus who mince the whole Latin language into proverbial maxims. She is much pleased with a Latin oration naturally arising from its subject, and written both chastely and perspicuously. She is most fond of translations not too free, and with that agreeable clash of VOL. II K sentiment which results from a judicious comparison of opposite or contradictory passages. By a diligent attention to these things her taste has become so refined, and her judgment so penetrating, that there is nothing in Greek, Latin, and English composition which she does not, in the course of reading, accurately discern; immediately rejecting the one with disgust, and receiving the other with the highest degree of pleasure.1 A sovereign so favourably disposed to the advancement of the new learning naturally communicated her tastes to all those in attendance on her person. Nor was the influence of her taste confined within the limits of a stationary Court. Elizabeth loved change and excitement. She was constantly moving from one place to another, and wherever she went she expected to be amused by some kind of artistic display. Masques, pageants, speeches, and addresses welcomed the arrival of the Queen in every part of her dominions. The invention of the Court poets was racked to vary the entertainment provided as she passed from seat to seat belonging to her chief nobles and councillors, Kenilworth, Hunsdon, Chartley, Theobalds. The great provincial cities of Bristol and Norwich vied with each other in the splendour of the dramatic exhibitions by which they showed their sense of the honour done them by her visits. Above all, the Universities and the Inns of Court, as being the chief seats of English learning, exerted themselves to make a display worthy of their monarch's erudition as well as of their own. In 1564 the Queen visited Cambridge, and listened for hours with apparent delight to the disputations of the Doctors in the Senate House; the strain on her attention was relieved by the performance of a Latin play. Two years afterwards she proceeded to Oxford, where classical diversions, resembling those of the sister University, were varied by the representation of an English play, founded on the story of Palamon and Arcite, which seems to have given the Queen much pleasure.1 The members of Gray's Inn, Lincoln's Inn, 1 Nichol's Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, vol. i. p. 19. and the Temple constantly amused her Majesty in their own Halls or at her palace at Greenwich with the various kinds of stage inventions for which their societies were becoming renowned. The English imagination was thus in a state eminently favourable for acclimatising new poetical ideas. A period had arrived in which the genius of the nation, apt like the Roman for the assimilation of foreign elements, turned instinctively to translation. This was no new thing in our history. At a very early stage of the language Alfred had sought to enlarge the bounds of culture by his translations of Bede, Orosius, and Gregory the Great. In the reign of Edward III. Chaucer brought a new standard of refinement into the newly-formed Middle English by his translation of the Roman de la Rose and his adaptation of Boccaccio's Filostrato. The early portion of Elizabeth's reign is notable for translations of Virgil, Seneca, and Ovid, three authors whose matter and form exerted a powerful influence on the literature of the country in the latter half of the sixteenth century. From very early days in the history of the Church Virgil had been regarded with reverence by Christian society. His reputation was in the Middle Ages partly due to his unrivalled style, the beauty of which was perceived even in the ages of decline, partly to the religious feeling which pervades his verse and which endeared him to St. Augustine, but most of all perhaps to the belief that in his fourth Eclogue he had foretold the coming of the Messiah. The English poets, beginning with their founder, had unanimously done homage to his genius. Chaucer, in his House of Fame, makes a short abstract of the entire Eneid, and in the Legend of Good Women reproduces, with fuller detail, the story of Dido and Eneas. Caxton gave a résumé of the Eneid in English prose, but the looseness and inaccuracy with which this version was executed aroused the wrath of Gavin Douglas, who, in his enthusiasm for the poet, resolved, by rendering his great epic into English verse, to rescue him from the indignity with which Caxton Virgil |