The work was dedicated from Leyden on 30 June 1582 to Stanyhurst's brother-in-law, Patrick Plunket, lord Dunsany, who had married a sister of his late wife. In the dedication he warmly deprecates the suspicion that he had plagiarised the work of Thomas Phaer [q. v.], whose translation of nine books of the ‘Æneid’ appeared in 1562. The first three books, he affirms, he compiled at his leisure; the fourth he ‘huddled up’ in ten days. In an address to the learned reader he developed that theory of English prosody of which Gabriel Harvey was the champion, maintaining that quantity rather than accent ought to be the guiding principle of English as of Latin metre. Stanyhurst rendered ‘Virgil’ into hexameters by way of proving that position. The result was a literary monstrosity. The Latin was recklessly paraphrased in a grotesquely prosaic vocabulary, which abounded in barely intelligible words invented by the translator to meet metrical exigencies. Frequent inversions of phrase heightened the ludicrous effect. Gabriel Harvey, who proudly boasted that he was the inventor of the English hexameter, wrote of Stanyhurst as a worthy disciple (Four Letters, 1592, pp. 19, 48). But, at the hands of all other critics of his own and later days, Stanyhurst has been deservedly ridiculed. In his preface to Greene's ‘Arcadia’ (1589), Nash justly parodied his effort when he wrote of him:
Then did he make heaven's vault to rebound with rounce, robble, bobble,
Of ruff, raffe, roaring, with thwicke, thwack, thurlerie, bouncing.
Subsequently Nash wrote: ‘Master Stanyhurst (though otherwise learned) trod a foule, lumbring, boystrous, wallowing measure in his translation of “Virgil.” He had never been praised by Gabriel for his labour if therein he had not bin so famously absurd’ (Nash, Pierce Pennilesse, 1593). The translation could ‘hardly be digested’ by Puttenham. Bishop Hall was equally contemptuous. More recently Southey, in ‘Omniana, or Horæ Otiosiores’ (i. 193, ed. 1812), wrote in reference to ‘the incomparable oddity’ of Stanyhurst's translation: ‘As Chaucer has been called the well of English undefiled, so might Stanyhurst be denominated the common sewer of the language. He is, however, a very entertaining and, to a philologist, a very instructive writer. … It seems impossible that a man could have written in such a style without intending to burlesque what he was about, and yet it is certain that Stanyhurst seriously meant to write heroic poetry.’
Stanyhurst appended to the translation of Virgil a rendering into English of certain psalms of David, i–iv., in classical metres, with a few lumbering original poems and epitaphs, some in Latin, others in English. The Leyden volume was reissued, with a slight revision, in London in 1583, by Henry Bynneman, and this was reprinted in an edition limited to fifty copies at Edinburgh in 1836, under the direction of James Maidment. The Leyden edition was reprinted by Mr. Arber in his ‘English Scholars' Library’ in 1880 (with new title-page, 1895). A careful philological study of Stanyhurst's ‘Virgil’ was the subject of a thesis by Heinrich Schmidt, issued at Breslau in 1887.
Stanyhurst was not encouraged to repeat his incursion into pure literature, or indeed to publish anything further in English. He thenceforth wrote solely in Latin prose, and confined himself to historical or theological topics. Removing to Antwerp, he published there in 1584, at the press of Christopher Plantin, a treatise on the early history of Ireland down to the time of Henry II, with an annotated appendix of extracts by Giraldus Cambrensis. The title of the volume ran ‘De rebus in Hibernia gestis’ (in four books), and it was dedicated, like the ‘Virgil,’ to his brother-in-law, Baron Dunsany. Combining legendary history with theology in a very credulous spirit, Stanyhurst produced in 1587, again with Plantin at Antwerp, a life of St. Patrick. This was entitled ‘De Vita S. Patricii Hyberniæ Apostoli,’ and was dedicated to Alexander Farnese, archduke of Parma and Placentia. The volume marked the close of Stanyhurst's researches in Irish history and legend.
In all his works on Ireland Stanyhurst wrote from an English point of view. Barnaby Rich, who often met him at Antwerp, criticised adversely, in his ‘New Description of Ireland’ (1610, p. 2), his want of sympathy with the native Irish and his prejudiced misrepresentations. Keating, in his ‘General History of Ireland’ (1723, p. xii), condemns Stanyhurst on the three grounds that he was too young when he wrote, that he was ignorant of the Irish language, and that he was bribed by large gifts and promises of advancement to blacken the character of the Irish nation. The last charge is unsubstantiated. Keating adds, on equally doubtful authority, that Stanyhurst lived to repent of ‘the injustice he had been guilty of,’ and, after formally promising to revoke all his falsehoods, prepared a paper in that sense to be printed in Ireland; of this nothing further is known. Sir James Ware likewise asserts that Stanyhurst's books on
