translator. This was Richard Stanyhurst, an Irish- man, a graduate of Oxford and student of Lincoln's Inn. He seems to have been the original prophet of that "pestilent heresy," as Lord Derby calls it, the making of English hexameters; for that was the metre which he chose, and he congratulates himself in his pre- face upon "having no English writer before him in this kind of poetry." Without going so far as to endorse Lord Derby's severe judgment, it may be confessed that Stanyhurst did his best to justify it. His translation, which he ushered into public with the most profound self-satisfaction, is quite curious enough to account for its reprint by the "Edinburgh Printing Society" in 1836. One of the points upon which he prides him- self is the suiting the sound to the sense, which Virgil himself has done happily enough in some rare passages. So when he has to translate the line,
"Exoritur clamorque virum clangorque tubarum,"
he does it as follows:—
"The townsmen roared, the trump tara-tantara rattled."
When he has to express the Cyclops forging the thunderbolts, it is
"With peale meale ramping, with thick thwack sturdily thund'ring;"
and very much more of the same kind.
The Earl of Surrey and James Harrington tried their hand at detached portions, and although the quaint conceits which were admired in their day have little charm for the modern reader, there is not want-
