With sounds that echo still.”
Milton may be said to have concluded, as Spenser preluded, that mighty time, without fairly belonging to it. They belonged rather to each other. “Milton has owned to me,” says Dryden, “that his original was Spenser.” They were the epilogue and the prologue of that mighty opening chorus of our literature, in which the translators, too, had their parts, but only as prompters to the great singers, to help them to add to their native melody here and there some sweetness of a foreign note.
The time of critical translation, of translation for its own sake, as an art, came in only with Dryden—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest of the transition poets. Then, too, translators began first to repeat each other’s work. Before the year 1580 most of the classic poets had been translated into English verse. They were not duplicated, because, as we have said, the time wanted first of all the knowledge of them, and it was not fastidious as to the shape in which it came. For a hundred years after its appearance Phaer’s version of the Æneid had no rival. Then came Vicars’, only to disappear almost as quickly. Doubly lapped in lead, it sank at once in that Stygian pool where Dulness tries the weight of her favorites, and there it has since remained, like Prospero’s book and staff, drowned
“Deeper than did ever plummet sound.”
Undeterred by this untoward fate, John Ogilby brought out his translation soon after, first at Cambridge and again in London, “adorned with sculptures and illustrated with annotations”—“the fairest edition,” grave Anthony à Wood assures us, “that till then the English press ever produced.” This gorgeous work, pronounced by Pope to be below criticism, nevertheless went through four editions before descending to the congenial fellowship of Vicars under the forgetful wave—a proof how much a good English version of the Æneid was desired. Ogilby had been a dancing-master, and perhaps learned in his profession to rival Lucilius, who
“In hora sæpe ducentos
Ut magnum versus dictabat stans pede in uno.”[[172]]
At all events, although he took to literature late in life—he was past forty before he learned Latin or Greek—he was a prodigious author, as we learn from the Dunciad:
“Here groans the shelf with Ogilby the great.”
Besides translating remorselessly everything he could lay hands on, from Homer to Æsop, he found time to write various heroic poems, and had even completed an epic in twelve books on Charles I., when fate took pity on his fellows and sent the great fire of London to the rescue. Phillips, in the Theatrum Poetarum, styles Ogilby a prodigy, and avers that his “Paraphrase on Æsop’s Fables” “is generally confessed to have exceeded whatever hath been done before in that kind.”[[173]] As Milton’s nephew can scarcely be suspected of a joke, we must conclude that this is not one of the critical judgments which Milton inspired. Nevertheless, Ogilby’s translations and paraphrases procured him a “genteel livelihood” which many better poems have failed to do for their authors.