Ever moulded by the lips of man,"
than Conington's modern version in the metres of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel". It was clearly through Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (1567, Four Books in 1565) that Shakespeare knew Ovid best. Golding also did Cæsar's "De Bello Gallico" (1565), and Sir Henry Savile, Provost of Eton, undertook Tacitus.
Among books from foreign modern authors, William Painter's "Palace of Pleasure" (1566-1567) with tales from Boccaccio, Queen Margaret of Navarre, Bandello, and Straparola (as well as from classical sources) was a treasure-house of plots and situations for the playwrights. In the tragedies and comedies of the age, Italian characters are predominant. The Spanish novel of the roads and inns and adventures, "Lazarillo de Tormes," was done out of Spanish in 1576, and set the example of this kind of fiction to Nash. Ariosto and Tasso were translated, the former by Sir John Harington (1591), the latter by Edward Fairfax (in 1600), and Richard Carew, but Dante was neglected. Of Chapman's "Homer," elsewhere spoken of, seven books appeared in 1598, and Shakespeare either glanced at it for his "Troilus and Cressida," or used, in places, a French or Latin version of Homer. It is impossible to enumerate all the translators, most of them are very readable, more so, in fact, than our most exact literal renderings of Greek and Latin originals into prose.
The Authorized Version of the Bible.
The noblest and most enduring monument of Elizabethan prose is, of course, the Authorized Version of the Bible. The nature of the texts to be translated suppressed all tendency to wilful conceits; a substratum of simple English from the time of Wyclif's versions in Chaucer's day, and from Tyndale's learned rendering, was retained; the lofty poetry of the ancient prophets was echoed in English as stately, balanced, and harmonious; and if it be said that the English does not represent "the speech" of any one age in the life of England, we may reply that the original texts also are the work of a thousand years in different languages.
Pulpit Eloquence.
It has often been remarked that sermons, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "discharged one part of the function of the modern newspaper" (though this is more true of Scotland than of England), and that sermons, where published, were a favourite form of reading. That is proved by their abundance in country house libraries, where old sermons usually occupy much valuable wall-space, as they cannot be sold, and present an imposing array of calf-backed volumes. Our space does not permit us to do more than name the famous preachers of the Elizabethan age, such as Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Bishop of Winchester under James I; James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (1581-1656), a man of varied learning who arranged the chronology of the Bible; Bishop Joseph Hall (1574-1656) and Donne whose prose has many of the merits and defects of his age.
[1] To take a very simple instance, a critic, observing that Hector, in the "Iliad," slays some men who lived on the road from Thessaly to Boeotia, infers that Hector's exploits are a record of the wars of a tribe advancing in that direction. But he entirely overlooks the "contradictory instances," those in which Hector spears men from other remote parts of Greece.