annulling all previous Acts regarding censures of the Church or worshipping of saints; 2, abolishing the pope's jurisdiction within the realm; and, 3, making it criminal to say a Mass or hear a Mass. The first offence was to be punished with confiscation of goods, the second with banishment, the third with death. Edmund Spenser was at this time about seven years old. 4. The sweet spirit of song rises in the early years of Elizabeth's reign like the first chirping of the birds after a thunderstorm. Tottel's Miscellany, issued in June, 1557, as Songes and Sonnettes, written by the Ryght Honorable Lorde Henry Haward, late Earl of Surrey, and other (ch. vi. § 60), was as a brake from which there rose, immediately before the reign began, a pleasant carolling. Among the smaller song-birds there were two with a sustained rich note, for in this miscellany were the first printed collections of the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (ch. vi. § 43) and the Earl of Surrey (ch. vi. § 44, 46). This is our earliest poetical miscellany, if we leave out of account the fact that pieces by several writers had been included, in 1532, in the first collected edition of Chaucer's works. Tottel's first edition contained 271 poems, the second contained 280; but 30 poems by Grimald, which appeared in the first edition, were omitted in the second, which appeared a few weeks later, so that between the two there were 310 poems in all. In 1559 there was a third edition of the "Miscellany;" in 1565, the year after Shakespeare's birth, a fourth; the eighth, and last of the Elizabethan time, in 1587. During the reign of Elizabeth other books of the same kind appeared: The Paradise of Dainty Devices, collected by Richard Edwardes, of Her Majesty's Chapel, then dead, for a printer named Disle, and published in 1576; A Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions, edited by Thomas Proctor, in 1578, with help from Owen Rawdon; A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, by Clement Robinson and divers other, in 1584; The Phonix Nest, edited by R. S., of the Inner Temple, gentleman, in 1593; England's Helicon, edited by John Bodenham, in 1600; and A Poetical Rhapsody, edited by Francis Davison, in 1602. The most popular of these was The Paradise of Dainty Devices. In the first edition of Tottel's Miscellany there were thirty-six poems by the Earl of Surrey, to which four were added in the next issue; ninety by Sir Thomas Wyatt, to which six were added; forty by Nicholas Grimald; and ninetyfive by unnamed authors, among whom were Thomas Church TO A.D. 1559] EARLY POETICAL MISCELLANIES 327 yard, Thomas Lord Vaux, Edward Somerset, John Heywood, and Sir Francis Bryan. Nicholas Grimald was born about 1519, in Huntingdonshire, was educated at Christ's College, took his B.A. in 1540, in 1542 was incorporated at Oxford, and elected a probationer fellow of Merton College, Oxford. In 1556, Tottel published for him a translation of “Tully's Offices.” His connection with Tottel at this time, omission of so much of his verse from the second edition of the "Miscellany," and reduction of his name in that edition to the initials N. G., make it possible that Grimald edited the "Miscellany." In 1558, Tottel issued a second edition of Grimald's translation of the "De Officiis." Grimald was dead in May, 1562. Two poems of his which were not omitted in the second edition have especial interest as the first specimens in English of original blank verse (ch. vi. § 47). One was a piece of one hundred and fifteen lines, on The Death of Zoroas, an Egyptian Astronomer, in First Fight that Alexander had with the Persians, beginning: "Now clattering arms, now raging broils of war, Can pass the noise of taratantars' clang " ("taratantars" altered in the next edition to "dreadful trumpets"). The other was a somewhat shorter piece, upon the Death of Cicero. 5. In 1559, Richard Tottel printed "in Flete Strete, within Temple Barre, at the signe of 'The Hand and Starre,'" a translation into English verse of "the sixt tragedie of the most grave and prudent author, Lucius Anneus Seneca, entituled Troas, with divers and sundrie additions to the same, newly set forth in Englishe by Jasper Heywood, student in Oxforde.” John Heywood (ch. vi. § 49) had two sons-Ellis, the elder, a good scholar, who joined the order of the Jesuits in 1560; and Jasper, who was born about 1535, was educated at Oxford, and, some months before the publication of his version of the Troas, being twenty-three years old, had resigned a fellowship at Merton College for fear of expulsion. He was elected to a fellowship of All Souls', but left the University, and in 1561, having held by his father's faith, became a Roman Catholic priest. He joined the Jesuits, studied theology for two years, and, after some time abroad, returned to England as Provincial of the Jesuits in 1581. He went abroad again, and died at Naples in 1598. Some poems of his are in the Paradise of Dainty Devices; and he translated from Seneca, in the first years of Elizabeth's reign, not only the Troas, but also the Thyestes, in 1560, and the Hercules Furens, in 1561. Other men set to work on other tragedies. Alexander Neville published, in 1563, a translation of the Edipus; John Studley translated four-Hippolytus, Medea, Agamemnon, and Hercules Oetœus; Thomas Nuce translated Octavia, and the Thebais was translated by Thomas Newton, who, in 1581, collected the ten translations into a single volume, published as Seneca: his Tenne Tragedies, translated into Englysh. These translations indicate the strong influence of the Latin tragedy upon the minds of scholars and poets in the birthtime of our native drama. There is no blank verse in them. Jasper Heywood opened his Troas with a preface in Chaucer's stanza, but he wrote his dialogue chiefly in couplets of fourteen-syllabled lines. Thus, for example, Hecuba begins: "Whoso in pomp of proud estate or kingdom sets delight. Or who that joys in princes' court to bear the sway of might, But fast affiance fixed hath in frail and fickle things; Let him in me both see the face of Fortune's flattering joy, And eke respect the ruthful end of thee, O ruinous Troy!" Sometimes the measure of the dialogue changes to four-lined elegiac stanza, which is the measure also of a chorus added by Jasper Heywood himself to the first act : "O ye to whom the Lord of land and seas, Of life and death, hath granted here the power, At the opening of the second act of the "Troas," Jasper Heywood raised the sprite of Achilles, and made him speak in Chaucer's stanza : "The soil doth shake to bear my heavy foot, And fear'th again the sceptres of my hand, With The other translators followed Jasper Heywood's lead. some further variety in the choruses, these are the metres into which the poets of the first years of Elizabeth translated the tragedies of Seneca. 6. In the earlier years of Elizabeth's reign the revived taste TO A.D. 1562] TRANSLATORS OF SENECA, VIRGIL, OVID 329 for classical literature not only, through Plautus and Seneca, became part of the early story of our drama, but showed itself variously in the form of bright translations from the Latin. Gavin Douglas's translation of the Æneid (ch. vi. § 32), finished in 1513, was first printed in 1553. Thomas Phaer, who was born at Kilgarran, in Pembrokeshire, studied at Oxford and at Lincoln's Inn, became advocate for the marches of Wales, afterwards doctor of medicine at Oxford. In May, 1558, in the days of Philip and Mary, six months before Elizabeth's accession, there appeared, "The Seven First Books of the Eneidos of Virgil, converted in Englishe meter by Thos. Phaer, Esq., sollicitour to the King and Queenes Majesties, attending their honourable counsaile in the Marchies of Wales." He continued the work, and had begun the tenth book, when he died, in 1560, and was buried in Kilgarran Church. In 1562 there were published, dedicated to Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, Phaer's Nyne First Books of the Eneidos. The translation was completed with less ability by Thomas Twyne, a Canterbury man, practising as a physician at Lewes, and published in 1573. Phaer, who was a fair poet, wrote also on law and medicine. His "Virgil" is in the same fourteen-syllabled rhyming measure which we have seen used in the translation of Seneca. The other chief translation from the Latin poets in the early part of Elizabeth's reign was Arthur Golding's "Ovid," also translated into fourteen-syllabled lines. Arthur Golding was a Londoner, of good family, and lived at the house of Sir William Cecil, in the Strand. He translated Justin's "History" in 1564, and "Cæsar's Commentaries" in 1565, which was the year of the publication of "The Fyrst Fower Bookes of the Metamorphoses, owte of Latin into English meter, by Arthur Golding, gentleman." Ten years later, when Shakespeare was eleven years old, Arthur Golding published his complete translation of The XV. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphoses, dedicated to Robert, Earl of Leicester. This was the book through which men read the "Metamorphoses" in English till the time of Charles I. 7. The fourteen-syllabled line is one of the favourite measures in the completed version of "The Whole Booke of Psalmes (ch. vi. § 54), collected into English metre by T. Sternhold, L. Hopkins, and others, conferred with the Ebrue, with Apt Notes to sing them withall." This appeared in 1562, and was then attached for the first time to the Book of Common Prayer. is that to which the 100th Psalm was Among the " apt tunes sung, now known as "The Old Hundredth." It had been one of the tunes made by Goudimel and Le Jeune for the French version of the Psalms by Clement Marot. 8. Among the "others" who translated was Thomas Norton, whose initials were appended to twenty-eight of the Psalms, and who had a hand with Thomas Sackville in the writing of the first English tragedy. Thomas Norton, eldest son of a small landed proprietor, of Sharpenhoe, in Bedfordshire, was born in 1532. He became a good scholar and zealous Protestant, served in his youth the Protector Somerset, and then, in 1555, entered himself as a student of the Inner Temple. In 1561 he published a Translation of Calvin's Institutes, which went through five editions in his lifetime; and it was in this year that Norton, aged twenty-nine, joined Sackville in the production of the tragedy of Gorboduc. He was translating Psalms also, for it was in the following year, 1562, that the completed Psalter of Sternhold and Hopkins appeared. Thomas Sackville was four years younger than Norton. He was born in 1536, at Buckhurst, in Sussex, and was the son of Sir Richard Sackville, whom we shall find befriending Roger Ascham. Thomas Sackville went to Oxford at the age of fifteen or sixteen, and thence to Cambridge, where he took his degree of M.A. His University reputation as a poet was referred to by Jasper Heywood, before his version of Seneca's "Thyestes," published in 1560: "There Sackville's sonnets sweetly sauste, And featly fyned bee." Thomas Sackville married, at the age of nineteen, the daughter of a privy councillor, and sat in a Parliament of Philip and Mary at the age of twenty-one, as member for Westmoreland. In the first year of the reign of Elizabeth he was member for East Grinstead, and took part in business of the House. When he left the University, Sackville had entered himself to the Inner Temple. Thus it was that he joined Norton, also of the Inner Temple, in the writing of Gorboduc for Christmas recreation of the Templars. Great lords had for many years kept servants paid to provide them with amusement. Records of the Augustine Priory at Bicester show that, in 1431, minstrels of different lords visited the monastery. In a like record of another house of the Augustines, such entertainers were before 1461 called mimes and players. A MS. of the time of Henry VI. laid against |