"All travellers doo gladlie report great praise to Ulisses
For that he knewe manie mens maners, and saw many citties."
(Discourse of English Poetrie, p. 72.)
But the Queene in meane while with carks quandare deepe anguisht,
Her wound fed by Venus, with firebayt smoldred is hooked.
Thee wights doughtye manhood leagd with gentilytye nobil,
His woords fitlye placed, with his hevnly phisnomye pleasing,
March throgh her hert mustring, al in her brest deepelye she printeth.
Theese carcking cratchets her sleeping natural hynder.
Thee next day foloing Phœbus dyd clarifye brightlye
Thee world with luster, watrye shaads Aurora remooved,
When to her deere sister with woords haulf gyddye she raveth.
"Sister An, I merveyle, what dreams me terrefye napping,
What newcom travayler, what guest in my harborye lighted?
How brave he dooth court yt? what strength and coorrage he carryes?
I beleve yt certeyn (ne yet hold I yt vaynelye reported)
That fro the great linnadge of gods his pettegre shooteth."
(Richard Stanyhurst: Vergil's Æneid, bk. iv. 1582.)
Stanyhurst's Vergil is one of the curiosities of Elizabethan literature, not only from its verse-form but from its spelling and diction. The translator declares himself a disciple of Ascham, in his antipathy to rimed verse; "What Tom Towly is so simple," he asks, "that wyl not attempt too bee a rithmoure?" In an address to the Learned Reader he explains his system of English quantitative prosody. In 1593 Stanyhurst's hexameters were severely noticed in a passage by Thomas Nash directed primarily against the classical versifying of Gabriel Harvey. "The hexamiter verse," said Nash, "I graunt to be a gentleman of an auncient house (so is many an English begger), yet this clyme of ours he cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in; hee goes twitching and hopping in our language, like a man running upon quagmiers, up the hill in one syllable and down the dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gate which he vaunts himselfe with among the Greeks and Latins.... Master Stannyhurst (though otherwise learned) trod a foule lumbring boystrous wallowing measure, in his translation of Virgil." (Works of Nash, Grosart edition, vol. ii. pp. 237, 238.)
Stanyhurst was also ridiculed by Joseph Hall, in the Satires of his Virgidemiarum (1597):
"Another scorns the home-spun thread of rhymes,
Match'd with the lofty feet of elder times:
Give me the numbred verse that Virgil sung,
And Virgil's self shall speak the English tongue:
Manhood and garboiles shall he chaunt with chaunged feet
And head-strong dactyls making music meet.
The nimble dactyl striving to out-go,
The drawling spondees pacing it below.
The lingring spondees, labouring to delay,
The breathless dactyls with a sudden stay.
Whoever saw a colt wanton and wild
Yok'd with a slow-foot ox on fallow field,
Can right areed how handsomely besets
Dull spondees with the English dactylets."
(Chalmers's English Poets, vol. v. p. 266.)
Compare the lines of Chapman, in his Hymn to Cynthia, where he says that