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Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix," with a preface of eighteen bad lines, arranged first as shaped verse, in the form of a lozenge upon a little pedestal, then as a compound acrostic. Then followed a short bit 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." Here we find, among other things, that the technical name then given to Chaucer's stanza was derived from Chaucer's most popular example of it. It was called "Troilus Verse."

52. We glance abroad to connect the narrative with facts in foreign literature which concern our story. Michel de Montaigne, who had been among 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 a 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, at his seat of Montaigne, near Bordeaux.

In 1581, when TORQUATO TASSO was still a prisoner with the insane, appeared his great heroic poem in twenty-four books, on the First Crusade, and recovery of Jerusalem from the Saracens, at the end of the eleventh century. The poem had two names, Goffredo, from its hero, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Gerusalemme Liberata (“Jerusalem Delivered "), from its action. There were eight independent and sometimes conflicting issues of this poem in Italy within nine months of its first publication. One of these had an essay prefixed on the question of the two titles. To one of the last of them there was appended an allegorical interpretation. The old relish for allegory in literature, which we have traced down from early Christian days, was in Elizabeth's time unabated.

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But for some years after 1581 the fame of the now obscure Du Bartas rose higher than that of Tasso. The "Divine Week" of Du Bartas was followed by a Second Week" (Second Sepmaine), in 1584. This divided into seven periods, poetically called days, the religious history of man expressed in the successive histories of Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, Zedekiah, the Messiah, and, for seventh "day," the Eternal Sabbath. Du Bartas only lived to complete four of the seven sections of this work, but he wrote also many other moral and religious poems. He also repaid the royal compliment of a translation

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407 of ĽUranie by translating into French, as La Lepanthe, the poem on the battle of Lepanto which King James of Scotland wrote soon after publishing his "Essayes of an Apprentise." This appeared with a preface of the translator to the author, wherein James was honoured with the name of a Scotch Phoenix, and the divine Du Bartas himself declared that he could not soar with him, could only stand on earth to see him in the clouds. Du Bartas wished he had only so much of James, as to be but the shadow of his shape, the echo of his voice.

"Hé! fusse ie vrayment, O Phoenix Escossois,

Ou l'ombre de ton corps, ou l'echo de ta voix !”

There was another Frenchman then in high and deserved repute among English Reformers, one of Philip Sidney's friends, Philip de Mornay, Seigneur du Plessis. He was not much older than Sidney, for he was born in 1549; and he would have been endowed with good things in the Church by family influence, if his mother had not become Protestant, and trained her child from ten years old in the Reformed opinions. He served awhile in the army, went to Geneva, studied law in Heidelberg, travelled in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and England. He went in 1576 to the court of King Henry of Navarre, became one of his nearest friends, and helped to make him Henry IV. of France. Philip du Plessis Mornay was an accomplished man of the world, with tact, experience, and a practical mind, as well as religious earnestness and a delight in literature. He became known as an envoy at Elizabeth's court, where the best men were his companions. The influence obtained by his high character, his skill in management of affairs, and the pure tone of his writings, caused him to be called sometimes the Pope of the Huguenots. In 1587, Arthur Golding (§ 6) published a translation of Du Plessis Mornay on the Truth of Christianity.

53. There were still also translations from the ancient poets. Richard Stanihurst, who was son of a Recorder of Dublin, had written at University College, Oxford, a system of logic, in his eighteenth year, had studied law also at two Inns of Court, had been married to a knight's daughter, and was living at Leyden, when he published in 1582 a translation of the first four books of Virgil's "Eneid" into English hexameters. This was made at the time of the small war against rhyme, and fashion for this sort of "new English versifying” (§ 43); and Stanihurst was accounted a fine scholar. His attempt at an

English "Virgil" in Virgil's own measure was praised by those who encouraged the experiment, attacked by others. Had Virgil himself written in English in 1582, he would hardly have expressed Jupiter's kiss to his daughter by saying, as Stanihurst made him say, that he "bussed his pretty prating parrot," or written hexameters of this sort to describe Laocoon's throwing his spear at the great wooden horse:

"My lief for an haulfpennie, Troians,

Either heere ar couching soom troups of Greekish asemblie,
Or to crush our bulwarcks this woorck is forged, al houses
For to prie surmounting thee town: soom practis or oother
Heere lurcks of coonning: trust not this treacherus ensigne;
And for a ful reckning, I like not barrel or herring;
Thee Greeks bestowing their presents Greekish I feare mee.'
Thus said, he stout rested, with his chaapt staffe speedily running,
Strong the steed he chargeth, thee planck ribs manfully riding.
Then the iade, hit, shivered, thee vauts haulf shrillie rebounded
With clush clash buzzing, with droomming clattered humming."

Richard Stanihurst published in 1584, in Latin, four books of an Irish chronicle, De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis Libri IV. He had been at work on this since the close of his college days, and though born in Dublin he had been bred in England, and was trained into the prevalent opinion then held by the English of the native Irish race. It is not necessary to believe that he desired to write only what would please his English patrons. He afterwards took orders in the Catholic Church, and, it is said, undertook to recant the errors in his "Irish Chronicle." In 1587 he published at Antwerp, in two Latin books, a Life of St. Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, and his later writings were religious. He lived on through a great part of the reign of James I., and died in 1618.

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.

54. Barnaby Googe, born about 1540, at Alvingham, and son of the Recorder of Lincoln, was a translator from the moderns. In 1560 he issued the first three books, and in 1565 all twelve books of an English version of the Italian Manzolli's satirical invective against the Papacy, The Zodiac of Life. In

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1570, Googe published a translation of another Latin invective, written by Thomas Kirchmeyer, which he called The Popish Kingdome; or, Reigne of Antichrist. In 1577 he published a translation from the Latin of the Four Bokes of Husbandrie, by Conrad Heresbach. He also translated from the Spanish; and a little volume of his own verse, Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes, was issued in 1563. Googe died in 1594.

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George Whetstone, a minor poet of this time, who was in repute with his contemporaries as one of the most passionate above us to bewail the perplexities of love," wrote under a name taken from the popular story-book of Marguerite of Navarre, A Heptameron of Civil Discourses. This also is a book of tales. Among those which he took from the "Hecatommithi," or Hundred Tales," of Giraldi Cinthio, first published in 1565, tales which deal with the tragic side of life, is one that was used by Shakespeare for the plot of his Measure for MeaWhetstone had himself written a play on the same subject, Promos and Cassandra, in two parts, printed in 1578.

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Anthony Munday was a minor writer, whose literary activity in verse and prose, as playwright, ballad writer, and pamphleteer, began in 1579, and extended through the rest of, the reign of Elizabeth, and the whole reign of her successor. He died in the reign of Charles I., in 1633. He was bred in the English college at Rome, and afterwards turned Protestant. His earliest introduction to literature was as a player and a writer for the stage. In 1582 he gave great offence to the Catholics by publishing The Discoverie of Edmund Campion, the Jesuit, which provoked reply. After this he was in the service of the Earl of Oxford, and was also a messenger of the queen's bedchamber. He had reputation among our first dramatists for skill in the construction of a comic plot. His earliest printed book is religious in its tendency; and so indeed was a great part of the drama during Elizabeth's reign. Its title explains its purport. It was in verse, and called The Mirror of Mutabilitie; or, Principal Part of the Mirrour of Magistrates: Selected out of the Sacred Scriptures. The titles of his next two books may be taken as examples of Euphuism; they are both dated in 1580, the year of the second part of Lyly's Euphues (§ 22). One is The Fountaine of Fame, Erected in an Orchard of Amorous Adventures; the other, The Paine of Pleasure, profitable to be perused of the Wise, and necessary to be by the Wanton.

Munday took violent interest in the arrest and execution of

the Jesuits sent by the pope as devoted missionaries for the reconversion of England. Edmund Campion had been an Oxford student and a Protestant. He changed his faith from conviction, became a Jesuit, and exposed himself to death in England for devotion to what seemed to him the highest duty he could find. In his torture and execution, and in the other executions of like men, we feel painfully, as elsewhere proudly, the intensity of conflict in their day. They did not, it was said by those who sent them to death, suffer for their faith, but for their political assent to the pope's right to depose the Queen of England. They did suffer for that assent; but then unhappily it was a part of their religious faith. There were high principles, momentous interests of the future, then at stake; the immediate issues of the struggle were uncertain, peril was great, on each side temper rose with the excitement of a noble energy: but we need not now read with the pleasure that was taken in the writing of it, Anthony Munday's Breefe and True Reporte of the Execution of certaine Traytours at Tiborne, the xxviii. and xxx. Dayes of May, 1582; though we can understand the ground of his Watchwoord to Englande, to beware of Traytors and Tretcherous Practises, which have beene the Overthrowe of many famous Kingdomes and Commonweales (1584); and see the harmony between this strength of public feeling and the religious temperament which caused him to print in 1586 a book of Godly Exercise for Christian Families, containing an Order of Praires for Morning and Evening, with a little Catechism between the Man and his Wife. Such men were of the common crowd of English dramatists of Elizabeth's day, and there was a bright spirit of song in them all. Munday's next book (in 1588) was A Banquet of Dainty Conceits; furnished with verie delicate and choyce Inventions to delighte their Mindes who take Pleasure in Musique; and there withall to sing sweete ditties, either to the lute, bandora, virginalles, or anie other Instrument.

55. George Peele, a playwright with genius, who belonged also to this early group, was born in 1558, a gentleman's son, and said to be of a Devonshire family. He became a student of the University of Oxford, at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, took his degree of B.A. in June, 1577, became M.A. in 1579, when twenty-one years old. He remained another two years in the University, thus having been a student there for nine years, when he married a wife with some property, and went to London. While in the University he was esteemed as a poet,

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