A little anterior to the birth of our great poet, W. Copland printed, without date, a romance entitled The Seven Wise Masters, a direct version from the Latin of a book published in Germany, soon after the discovery of the art of printing, under the appellation of Historia Septem Sapientum. This interesting series of tales has been traced by Mr. Douce[531:A] to an Indian prototype; to "The Book of the Seven Counsellors, or Parables of Sendebar or Sandabar," an Indian philosopher, who is supposed to have lived about a century before the Christian æra. The work of this sage, it appears, had been early translated into Persic, Syriac, Arabic, and, from this latter, into Hebrew by Rabbi Joel, under the title of Mischle Sandabar, a version which is conjectured to have been made about the middle of the fourteenth century, and is believed to be the only oriental manuscript of these Parables which has been subjected to the press; having been printed at Constantinople in 1517, and at Venice in 1544 and 1608. A MS. of this Hebrew Sandabar is in the British Museum (Harleian MSS., No. 5449.), but no English version of it has been hitherto attempted.
The romance of our Indian fabulist made its next appearance, though with some alterations in the incidents and names, in Greek, under the title of Syntipas, of which many MSS. exist, the greater number professing to be translated from the Syriac; but in the British Museum is preserved a copy from the Persic, of so late a date as 1667.
The first Latin version is said to have proceeded from the pen of
Jean de Hauteselve, a native of Lorraine, but the existence of such a copy is now only known, from its having been translated into French verse, by an ecclesiastic of the name of Herbers, who died 1226, and who, in the opening of his poem, to which he has given the singular title of Dolopatos, confesses to have taken it from the "bel Latin" of Hauteselve.
Another French version, however, of greater importance, as it makes a nearer approach to the remote original, and has been the source of numerous imitations, is preserved in the French National Library, and numbered 7595. It is a MS. in verse, of the 13th century, and was first noticed by Mr. Ellis, through a communication from Mr. Douce, who believes it to be not only the immediate original of many imitations in French prose, but the source whence an old English metrical romance in the Cotton Library (Galba, E. 9.) has been taken.
This poem, a large fragment of which exists in the Auchinleck MS., is entire in the Cotton Library, and is written in lines of eight syllables. It is entitled "The Proces of the Sevyn Sages," and Mr. Ellis refers its composition to a period not later than 1330.[532:A]
The copy, however, which has given rise to the greatest number of translations, is that already mentioned under the title of "Historia Septem Sapientum," the first edition of which, with a date, was published by John Hoelhoff at Cologne in 1490. This was very rapidly transfused into the German, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, English, and Scotch languages.
Of the Scotch version, which is metrical, and was undertaken by the translator "at the request of his Ant Cait (Aunt Kate) in Tanstelloun Castle, during the siege of Leith," 1560, the first edition was printed at Edinburgh in 1578, with the following title:—"The Sevin Seages, Translatit out of Prois in Scottis Meter, Be Johne Rolland, in Dalkeith; with ane Moralitie after everie Doctouris tale, and siclike after the Emprice tale, togidder with ane loving and
laude to everie Doctour after his awin tale, and ane exclamation and outcrying when the Empreouris wife after hir fals construsit tale. Imprentit at Edinburgh be John Ros, for Henry Charteries."[533:A]
The prose translation by Copland, which made its appearance between the years 1550 and 1567, under the title of "The Seven Wise Masters," was one of the most popular books of the sixteenth century. It has undergone a variety of re-impressions, and when no longer occupying its former place in the hall of the Baron and the Squire, descending to a less ambitious station, it became the most delectable volume in the collection of the School-boy. This change in the field of its influence seems to have taken place in little better than a century after its introduction into the English language; for in 1674, Francis Kirkman, publishing a version from the Italian copy of this romance, which he entitles the "History of Prince Erastus, son to the emperor Diocletian, and those famous philosophers called The Seven Wise Masters of Rome," informs us, in his preface, "that the book of 'The Seven Wise Masters' is in such estimation in Ireland, that it was always put into the hands of young children immediately after the horn-book."[533:B]