culated from St. Mary Hall, Oxford. He seems to have taken no degree. In 1610, the year of his mother's death, he left England on an extended foreign tour. He passed through France just after Henry IV's assassination, and, journeying through north Italy, sailed from Venice to the east. He spent a year in Turkey, in Egypt, where he visited the pyramids, and in Palestine. Before returning to England he studied the antiquities of Rome under the guidance of Nicholas Fitzherbert. In 1615 he published an account of his travels, with the title ‘The Relation of a Journey begun an. Dom. 1610, in Four Books.’ The volume was dedicated to Prince Charles, under whose auspices all Sandys's literary work saw the light. Sandys was an observant traveller. Izaak Walton noticed in his ‘Compleat Angler’ (pt. i. ch. i.) Sandys's account of the pigeon-carrier service between Aleppo and Babylon. His visit to the holy sepulchre at Jerusalem inspired an outburst of fervent verse—‘A hymn to my Redeemer’—whence Milton derived hints for his ‘Ode on the Passion’ (stanza vii). The volume was adorned with maps and illustrations, and at once became popular. Editions, with engraved title-pages by Delaram, are dated 1621, 1627, 1637, 1652, and 1673. An extract, ‘The Relation of Africa,’ i.e. Egypt, appeared in Purchas's ‘Pilgrimes,’ 1625, pt. ii. Sandys's accounts of both Africa and the Holy Land figure in John Harris's ‘Navigantium et Itinerantium Bibliotheca,’ 1705 (vols. i. and ii.).
Like his brother Sir Edwin [q. v.], Sandys interested himself in colonial enterprise. He was one of the undertakers named in the third Virginia charter of 1611. He took shares in the Bermudas Company, but disposed of them in 1619 when his application for the post of governor was rejected in favour of Captain Nathaniel Butler. In April 1621 he was appointed by the Virginian Company treasurer of the company, and sailed to America with Sir Francis Wyat, the newly appointed governor, who had married Sandys's niece Margaret, daughter of his brother Samuel. When the crown assumed the government of the colony, Sandys was nominated a member of the council (26 Aug. 1624), and was twice reappointed (4 March 1626 and 22 March 1628). He seems to have acquired a plantation and busied himself in developing it, but was repeatedly quarrelling with his neighbours and with the colonial council (cf. Sandys's letters among Duke of Manchester manuscripts in Hist. MSS. Comm. 8th Rep. pt. ii.). In 1627 he complained to the privy council in London that he had been unjustly treated. On 4 March 1627–8 Governor Francis West and the colonial council informed the privy council that Sandys had defied the rights of other settlers (Cal. State Papers, America and West Indies, 1594–1660, p. 88). A special commission ‘for the better plantation of Virginia’ was appointed by the English government on 22 June 1631, and Sandys petitioned for the post of secretary, on the ground that he had ‘spent his ripest years in public employment’ in the colony. His application failed, and he apparently abandoned Virginia soon afterwards.
While in America Sandys completed a verse translation of Ovid's ‘Metamorphoses,’ which he had begun in England. On 27 April 1621—when he was on the point of setting out—Matthew Lownes and William Barrett obtained a license for the publication of ‘Ovides Metamorphosis translated into English verse by Master George Sandes’ (Arber, Stationers' Registers, iv. 53). In the same year ‘the first five books’ of the translation was duly published by Barrett, and the volume reached a second edition. The title-page was engraved by Delaram, and Ovid's head in an oval was prefixed. Haslewood described a copy of the second edition (Brydges, Censura Lit. vi. 132), but no copy of that or of the first is now known. The remaining ten books were rendered by Sandys into English verse during the early years of his stay in Virginia. Two, he says, were completed ‘amongst the roaring of the seas’ (Neill, Virginia Vetusta, 1888, pp. 124–6). Michael Drayton, whose acquaintance he had made in London, addressed to him, soon after his arrival in Virginia, an attractive epistle in verse, urging him to ‘go on with Ovid as you have begun with the first five books.’ The completed translation appeared in London—printed by William Stansby—in 1626; it was dedicated to Charles I. William Marshall engraved the title-page; on the back of the dedication is a medallion portrait of Ovid. A biography of the poet with some of the laudations bestowed on him by early critics forms the preface; a full index concludes the volume. On 24 April 1621 Charles I granted Sandys exclusive rights in the translation for twenty-one years. A reprint appeared in 1628. An elaborate edition in folio appeared at Oxford in 1632, under the title of ‘Ovid's Metamorphoses Englished, mythologized, and represented in Figures. An Essay to the Translation of Virgil's “Æneis.” By G. S., imprinted at Oxford by John Lichfield.’ In an address to the reader Sandys refers to this as the ‘second edition carefully revised.’ The engraved title-page, although resembling in
