for
“Conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant,”
or
“You bid me, ô princesse, to scarifie a festered old sore”
as an equivalent for
“Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem,”
must be content with “audience fit though few.” Sir Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey and a few other choice spirits, all bitten with the same flea, patted poor Stanihurst on the back and told him that what Nash called “his [and their] foul, lumbring, boisterous, wallowing measures” had “enriched and polished their native tongue.” But the rest of the world laughed with Nash, and may still for that matter; for Stanihurst’s version is full of conceits even droller than Phaer’s. “Bedlamite” for furiatâ mente, “Dandiprat hop-thumb” for parvulus, Jupiter “bussing his pretty, prating parrot”—i.e., Venus—and Priam girding on his sword Morglay, are some of them. The last shows how the glamour of the Gothic romances, in which Virgil figured sometimes as a magician—the Sortes Virgilianæ long outlived their origin—still hung about even the learned, of whom Stanihurst was indisputably one— “eruditissimus ille nobilis” Camden calls him. It may be interesting to add that he was a Catholic, a friend of Campion the martyr, and died in exile because of it.
Stanihurst seems to have played the part of horrible example to all after-translators; for although Surrey’s metre has been repeatedly used, and Phaer’s of late by Mr. Morris, and we might add by Prof. Conington (for his octosyllabic verse is but a variation of the Alexandrine, which skipped capriciously from twelve syllables to sixteen[[127]]), the hexameter has never again, so far as we know, been applied to rendering the Æneid. Yet the measure which in English goes by that name seems far better adapted, pace Mr. Arnold, to the pensive grace of Virgil than to the grave majesty of Homer. It may be true, as scholars contend, that it by no means reproduces the effect of the Greek or Roman hexameter, and it may be equally true, as other scholars tell us, that we have no conception of what was the effect of the Greek or Roman hexameter on the Greek or Roman ear—though the second objection might, in malicious hands, prove an embarrassment for the first. Yet as we read Homer and Virgil there is no doubt that hexameters can be—indeed, that such have been—constructed which do go far to reproduce the effect of Homer and Virgil, according to the modern reading, upon the modern ear. Grant that this is an entirely wrong effect; that either Homer or Virgil, hearing his verses read in modern fashion, would be sure to clap hands to ear, and cry out in an agony with Martial:
“Quem recitas, meus est, O Fidentine, libellus;
Sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuus”;[[128]]