Sir Walter Raleigh (born 1552, at Hayes Barton, Budleigh, Devonshire), educated at Oxford, a soldier with the Huguenots in France, familiar with the wits in 1576 (when he wrote commendatory verses for Gascoigne's "Steel Glass"), a courtier who enjoyed the sunshine and suffered from the frosts of Elizabeth's favour, when supplanted by Essex went to Ireland, as we saw, became the friend of Spenser, and was styled by him "The Shepherd of the Ocean".
In life and in literature a fiery and indefatigable adventurer, his productions, from sonnets and the long, and for the most part lost poem, "Cynthia" (on Elizabeth) to tracts on practical points; accounts of voyages and of South America, and the gigantic" History of the World," give proof of extraordinary energy and fertility. His description of the glorious fight of "The Revenge," and the death of Sir Richard Grenville (published in 1596) can never be forgotten. In 1596 appeared, too, his account of his first exploration (1595) of Guiana, with a description of "the great and golden City of Manoa,"—a mirage.
On the death of Elizabeth, James I, on grounds of not unnatural if baseless suspicion, imprisoned Raleigh in the Tower, where he was well treated enough, and, with what amount of aid from collaborators is uncertain (Ben Jonson said that he had much) but, in any case with portentous industry, Raleigh compiled his "History of the World," from the creation to 130 b.c. The book (1614-1615) had a very great popularity: even the Puritans read it with admiration. There was then no such world-history in English, and though, as history, it is now obsolete of course; it is admired for its vigour, for the character it displays, and the personal observations suggested by the author's wide experience of men; and above all for occasional passages of lofty eloquence, and the organ-tones of a magnificent style, as in the famous address to Death. The capacities of style in original work had never so been exemplified in English, though such examples are but occasional.
Raleigh's very title in "The Prerogative of Parliaments" was offensive to the king, who doted on the prerogative of princes, and the book was not printed till after Raleigh's execution, following his return from his second expedition to Guiana. He also wrote tracts on War in general, on "The Navy and Sea Service," on "Trade and Commerce," on "A War with Spain" (the last thing that James desired), on "The Arts of Empire" (published by Milton, 1658, as "The Cabinet Council") and doubtless much is lost of the 3452 sheets of Raleigh's writing which John Hampden was having transcribed before the Great Rebellion.
More than Bacon, Raleigh tuned the language of "lofty, insolent, and passionate English prose": these terms were applied by Puttenham ("Art of English Poesie") to Raleigh's "dittie and amorous ode". "Insolent," of course, means here "out of the common".
Overbury.
Sir Thomas Overbury was born in Warwickshire in 1581: was the son of a Gloucestershire squire, was a gentleman commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, 1595-1598, entered the Middle Temple, and passed some years abroad. On his return he became, in Scotland, the friend of Robert Carr (or Ker), son of Ker of Fernihirst, one of Queen Mary's Border partisans. Carr, who was handsome, became King James's minion, and, in 1613, was created Earl of Somerset. His friend Overbury obtained a place at Court; and was first the friend, then the foe of Ben Jonson. An ally of Somerset, Overbury dissuaded him from his fatal marriage with Frances Howard, who, after a child-marriage (1606) with the boy Earl of Essex, detested him, loved Somerset, and, backed by James's influence, in spite of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Abbott, obtained a decree of nullity against her husband. The poet Donne, as Somerset's adviser, and the poet Campion, as a physician connected with a courtier more or less concerned in the affair, were entangled in this odious and mysterious matter. Overbury, on the other hand, was opposed to the unholy marriage of Somerset, and is thought to have written his popular poem "The Wife," to show him that Lady Essex was not what a wife should be. She plotted in various ways to get rid of Overbury. The offer of a diplomatic post in Paris he refused, with insolence it seems; he was sent to the Tower, and there, through the instigation of Lady Essex, was poisoned, with circumstances of bungling cruelty: for, as we know in the Spanish case of Escovedo, the science of poisoning was then quite in its infancy. Overbury died on 15 September, 1613. His death provoked many elegies and gave popularity to his poem "The Wife" (1614), which is of very slight merit, and to his "Characters," brief mordant sketches of types of men, in prose by Overbury and his friends. They appear to have been suggested rather by the Characters of the Greek Theophrastus, than by Montaigne or Bacon. Some pieces are ideal, "The Good Wife," and the charming "Fair and Happy Milkmaid," worthy of Izaak Walton. "She is never alone for she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones.... Thus lives she, and all her care is she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet." Most of the other characters are drawn in a mocking style. Of "A Mere Scholar" we learn that "the antiquity of his University is his creed; and the excellency of his College, though but for a match of football, an article of his faith". "The Mere Fellow of a House," or don, with his airs of a man of the world, provokes the handsome courtier, and ex-undergraduate of Queen's. This on the scholar is good, "University jests are his universal discourse and his news the demeanour of the Proctors". Overbury jests at "The Melancholy Man". Melancholy, as Ben Jonson's Master Stephen had proved, was the fashion; a curious proof of this is the "Niobe" of Stafford (1611), a wonderful piece of railing at "the damnable times," of which a copy bears the arms of Charles I when Prince of Wales. "Straggling thoughts," says Overbury, "are the Melancholy Man's content, they make him dream waking; there's his pleasure!"
Translators.
Translation was a great, if not to the toilers a profitable industry between the reigns of Edward VI and James I. The wealth of classical, French, Spanish, and Italian learning, thought, and poetry was rapidly and strenuously conveyed into English, sometimes rough and ready, and rich in flowers of slang, sometimes replete with elegance and vigour. The translators certainly produced most idiomatic English; the ancients, in their versions, were not, as in reality, concise and classically self-restrained. There was, as a rule, no thought of minute accuracy. In fact, if some learned men were good Greek scholars, they did not write translations; the earlier translators in England used French and Italian versions of the Greek originals. Thus, Thomas Nicolls did Thucydides, the greatest of Greek historians, out of a French translation of an Italian version of the difficult original (1550). Nevertheless if you turn to the tragic pages on the utter ruin of the Athenian expedition to Sicily, the tale is still moving and rich in melancholy. Whoever B. R. was (Barnaby Rich?) the translator of the first two books of Herodotus (including his account of "the beastly devices" (as B. R. says) of the Egyptians), you cannot complain, as Macaulay did of another version, that Herodotus is "as flat as champagne in tumblers". B. R. uses slang, as "the Greeks were in the wrong box". Sir Thomas North, whose translation of Plutarch (1579) Shakespeare uses in his Roman plays, merely rendered the French version by Amyot. Whereas Plutarch's Greek lives of great men are, though in manner quiet, not frigid, North "picturesqued it everywhere". In fact these translators made Greeks and Romans speak as if they had come back to life and were writing in lusty Elizabethan England. Unluckily their volumes are not often to be picked up at bookstalls, and as magnificently printed in "Tudor Translations" they are expensive.
It is strange that the great Athenian dramatists, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the comic Aristophanes, were left untranslated; probably because no contemporary foreign versions were easily procurable. What our ancestors knew of ancient tragedy was mainly through the rhetorical Roman imitations by Seneca. Of Plato scarce anything was translated. By 1600 Philemon Holland (born 1552), who actually went to the ancient originals for his texts, published his translation of Livy. As early as 1547 John Wylkinson Englished the Ethics of Aristotle,—out of an Italian version. Philemon was rapid, racy, indefatigable. He translated Plutarch's "Morals" in a year, using but one quill. It was through Florio's English version that Shakespeare read Montaigne's Essays. It is hardly necessary to name Richard Stanyhurst's "Four Books of Virgil's 'Æneid'" (1582) written in hideous English hexameters; and Thomas Phaer's Virgil, in "fourteeners" like Chapman's Homer, is even more helpless as a reproduction of "the stateliest measure