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Buchanan; a Presbyterian, austere but half-way through, with a face like a Scotch Socrates, although more apt than Socrates to take offence, familiar with Latin as with his native tongue, full of anecdote and good talk, familiar also with languages and people round about, and liking Scotland all the better for experience in other lands. But for James the horizon did not widen as he climbed the hill of knowledge, his heart did not swell as he rose to higher sense of harmony and beauty; he hammered at the stones about him, and was proud of being so far up. In 1585, when his age was but nineteen, he published at Edinburgh "The Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie." In preliminary sonnets of compliment, the Muses, through various courtly representations, sought to

"Tell how he doth in tender yearis essay

Above his age with skill our arts to blaise,
Tell how he doeth with gratitude repay

The crowne he won for his deservéd praise.
Tell how of Jove, of Mars, but more of God

The glorie and grace he hath proclaimed abrod."

The "Essayes" opened with twelve sonnets of invocation to the gods-namely, Jove, Apollo, each of the four Seasons, Neptune, Tritons and their kind, Pluto, Mars, Mercury, and finally, for the twelfth sonnet-

"In short, you all fore named gods I pray

For to concur with one accord and will
That all my works may perfyte be alway:
Which if ye doe, then swear I for to fill
My works immortall with your praises still :
I shall your names eternall ever sing,

I shall tread downe the grass on Parnass hill
By making with your names the world to ring:
I shall your names from all oblivion bring;
I lofty Virgill shall to life restoirr."

Buchanan was for three years dead, and there were few left who would tell a young king that his works were not

perfyte alway." Then followed a translation of "L'Uranie," or "The Heavenly Muse," from Du Bartas, original and translation printed upon opposite pages, with a modest preface in admiration of "the devine and illuster poete, Salust du Bartas," by the "oft reading and perusing" of whom James was moved "with a restless and lofty desire to preas to attaine to the like virtue." To the level of Du Bartas he could not at all aspire in his own verse; let him, he said, follow imperfectly as a translator. This represented only the common admiration of his time which Du Bartas enjoyed. In a copy of "Quintilian," annotated by Gabriel Harvey when the "Sepmaine" of Du Bartas was a new book, Harvey wrote in the margin, beside a mention of Euripides, "Euripides, wisest of poets: except now at length the divine Bartas." After his version of one of the shorter poems of Du Bartas, King James gave for his next essay a dim allegory, smoothly versified, in Chaucer's stanza, "Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix." It had a preface of eighteen bad lines, arranged first as shaped verse in the form of a lozenge on a little pedestal, then a compound acrostic. Then followed a small piece of translation out of the fifth book of Lucan; and then, lastly, "Ane Schort Treatise, containing some Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie."

Montaigne's
Essays.

As we draw near to the date of the first English essays, we may note now by the way that Michel de Montaigne, who had been one of George Buchanan's students at Bordeaux, produced the first edition of his Essays in 1580. There was a second edition in 1588. This first of the great essayists had learnt Latin as mother-tongue, had seen much of the world in his youth, and he died in 1592, aged fifty-nine, after much enjoyment, and half-philosophical, half-gossiping discussion of life through essays that weigh human nature as he found it in the man whom he knew best, and so give us the most

frank and exhaustive study of himself that anyone ever given to the world.

North's

has

Plutarch.

In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen years old, and Francis Bacon was nineteen, Sir Thomas North published his translation of "Plutarch's Lives." This was not from the original Greek, but from the delightful Plutarch in thirteen volumes (six for the Lives and seven for the Morals) published in and after 1567 by Jacques Amyot, who was in those days the prince of French translators. Amyot lived to within a year of fourscore, and died in 1593. Sir Thomas North was himself an active member of the English band of translators produced by the revival of letters. Among his other translations was, in 1570, one from the Italian version of a famous Arabian fable book called "Calilah i Dumnah," as "The Morale Philosophie of Doni." But he is here named because it was chiefly in North's Plutarch, published in 1579, that Shakespeare, as a playwright, learnt his history of Rome.

Arthur
Hall's Ten

The first attempt at a translation of Homer into English Alexandrine verse was begun in 1563, and published in 1581. This appeared in "Ten Books of Homer's Iliades." It was not translated from the Greek direct, but chiefly through the French version of Hugues Salel, by Arthur Hall, of Grantham, a member of Parliament. The fact that this is the first Englishing of Homer gives the book importance.

Books of the "Iliad."

Richard
Mulcaster.

In the same year, 1581, Richard Mulcaster, Spenser's schoolmaster, published an important treatise upon education, setting forth, as its title said, "Positions wherein those primitive Circumstances be examined which are necessarie for the Training vp of Children, either for Skil in their Booke, or Health in their Bodie." Here, after showing why he wrote in English, not in Latin, Mulcaster dealt with the first principles of teaching;

* "E, W." iii. 368; iv. 226,

reasoned against the misuse of authority; discussed the time when a child should begin to learn; what it should learn before it passed to grammar; the training of natural abilities; the exercising of the body, and that best under the same master who is trainer of the mind. He reasons how to choose wits aptest to be put to learning, and that young maidens as well as boys ought to be put to learn. He enters then into detail upon the training of young gentlemen, and advises that there should be training schools for teachers.

Richard Mulcaster, of an old Cumberland family, was born in the city of Carlisle, and educated at Eton under Udall, and at King's College, Cambridge. He left Cambridge after obtaining his B. A. degree, went to Oxford in 1556, was elected scholar of Christchurch, and graduated as M.A. at the close of the same year. He was distinguished, not only as a classical scholar, but for his knowledge of Oriental literature. On the twenty-fourth of September, 1561, Richard Mulcaster was appointed first Master of Merchant Taylors' School, then founded, and he held that office for thirty-five years. He paid unusual attention to the training of his boys in English scholarship. As part of that training they were practised in the acting of English plays, which were sometimes presented for the entertainment of the queen. Spenser must have benefited by Mulcaster's attention to English, and may have been among the boys who took parts in the play-acting. In 1582 Mulcaster published "The First Part of the Elementarie which entreateth chieflie of the right Writing of the English Tongue." Why, asks the schoolmaster, who shares the rising sense of nationality among the English people, why should we teach children through a language not their own?

Study of
English.

"Is it not a marvellous bondage to become servants to one tongue for learning's sake, the most part of our time, with loss of most time, whereas we may have the very same treasure in our own tongue with

the gain of most time; our own bearing the joyful title of our liberty and freedom, the Latin tongue remembering us of our thraldom and bondage. I love Rome, but London better; I favour Italy, but England more; I honour the Latin, but I worship the English.

If we must cleave to the eldest and not the best, we should be eating acorns and wearing old Adam's pelts. But why not all in English? I do not think that any language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments either with more pith or greater plainness than our English tongue is."

Fit schoolmaster for Spenser! In April, 1594, Mulcaster was collated to the prebendal stall of Gatesbury in Salisbury Cathedral. In 1596 he resigned his post in Merchant Taylors' School, and was High Master of St. Paul's School for the next twelve years. He died in 1611.

A more famous schoolmaster, who also expressed the rising sense of nationality, was William Camden. Camden was born in the Old Bailey, in the City of London,

William

Camden.

on the second of May, 1551, and differed, therefore, but a year or two in age from Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh. Camden's father came from Lichfield, and was working in London as a painter. His mother was of a Cumberland family. William Camden, when a boy of twelve, was nearly killed by the Plague. Upon his recovery he was sent to St. Paul's School, and there he distinguished himself as a scholar. He was sent in 1566 to Oxford, and placed under the care of Thomas Cooper, born the son of a poor tailor in Cut Street, Oxford, who lived to be a bishop, and with whom we shall meet again. Cooper had obtained a fellowship at Magdalen College, and had taught in the adjoining school, when Camden was placed under him. Then William Camden, through the good offices of Dr. Thomas Thornton, entered Broadgate Hall, called afterwards Pembroke College, and there he established friendship with Richard and George Carew, who shared his taste for the study of British antiquities. After three years Dr. Thornton became a canon of Christchurch, and took

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