Iteration is part of a speaker's art, because the spoken word has wings, and may not always be caught as it is uttered. In our Church Service its use is recognised by frequent doublings of nouns and verbs, as when we "acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and iniquities ;" and the form of writing is not ill-suited to a poem that one may imagine planned for recitation. Fairfax uses it to excess, but there is so much robust vigour in his way of suiting to his own time and country the contents of each successive stanza, and his own music is so clear and tuneful, that his translation still holds high place in our literature among the books "that so did please Eliza and our James," and have not lost their pleasantness by lapse of time. His John Florio. Giovanni, or John, Florio was an Italian, born in London at the end of the reign of King Edward VI. parents had lived in the upper valley of the Adda, in the province of Valtellina. There they had joined the Reformers, and had been driven from their home by persecution. They found shelter in England till about a year after Giovanni's birth, when King Edward died, and with Queen Mary a reaction came. The Florios then quitted England, and remained in France till the accession of Elizabeth. Young Florio, then six years old, was brought to England, which became, thenceforth, his home. He studied at Oxford, and is entered as being at Magdalene College in 1581, in the service of young Barnabe Barnes. He is entered as æt. 36, but the inscription attached to his portrait made him 58 in 1611. He was teaching Barnes Italian, having obtained distinction as an Italian teacher and as a fashionable wit, in 1578, by publication of "Florio his First Fruites, which yeelde familiar Speech, merie Prouerbes, wittie Sentences, and golden Sayings." Florio's "Second Frutes, To which is annexed his Garden of Recreation, yeelding six thousand Italian Prouerbs," followed in 1591, and in 1603 appeared Florio's the first edition of Florio's chief work, his translation of the Essays of Montaigne. Those essays Montaigne had begun to write in 1571. He first published the First and Second Books of them in 1580, and with six hundred additions to the First and Second Books the fifth edition of them was for the first time enlarged by the Third Book in 1588, four years before their author's death. Florio's translation, which was enjoyed by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, will always bring us nearer to Montaigne than the best possible translation by a later hand. George George Chapman began under Elizabeth his translation. of Homer, which was completed in the reign of James I. Publication began in 1598 with "Seaven Bookes of the Iliades of Homere Prince of Poets. Translated according to the Greeke in iudgement of his best Commentaries." These seven books were not the first seven, but omitting the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, gave the other books from the first to the eleventh. In the same year Chapman published "Achilles Shield. Translated as the other seven Bookes of Homer, out of his eighteenth booke of Iliades." No more appeared till the next reign. George Chapman, who was about five years older than Shakespeare, was born at Hitchin, in Hertfordshire. William Browne, in "Britannia's Pastorals," calls him "the learned Shepheard of faire Hitching hill." There is no record of George Chapman as having matriculated or graduated at either Oxford or Cambridge. Although he has been claimed for each university and both, we must accept the fact that the first full translation of Homer was made by a scholar and poet who was not trained at an English University. George Chapman made his first appearance as a poet at the age of about thirty-five by publishing in 1594 "Exia UKTC. The Σκία νυκτός. Shadow of Night: Containing Two Poeticall Hymnes Deuised by G. C. Gent." They were dedicated to his "dear and most worthy friend, Master Matthew Roydon," and, after contemning criticism of the idlers who "take upon themselves as killing censures as if they were judgment's butchers," he said of his "poor and strange trifle," "I rest as resolute as Seneca, satisfying myself if but a few, if one, or if none, like it." The two Hymns, in rhymed couplets of ten-syllabled lines, are one to Night and one to Cynthia. Chapman shows himself in this first work, as in his later writings, a true scholar and true poet, a poet with high aims and noble thoughts. But his work is laboured till it becomes often obscure, though moving with grave dignity and rich in happy lines. The Hymn to Night represents rather a poet's mood, that is a part of truth, than a whole truth. Night is addressed as 66 Happy, thrice happy type and nurse of death, Who, breathless, feeds on nothing but our breath," who filled all when the elements lay in Chaos : "Chaos had soul without a body then, Now bodies live without the souls of men." From Chaos Order came, as day from night; but Order in man is broken, and all tends to a new and a worse Chaos, the Chaos of Sin. "A stepdame Night of Mind about us clings." "Fall, Hercules, from heaven, in tempests hurled, And cleanse this beastly stable of the world!” Men stray by day-its light serves only the body's eye, for earthly uses. "Sorrow's dear sovereign, and the queen of rest," is Night, "Day of deep students, most contentful Night." "Since mournings are preferred to banquetings, And they reach Heaven, bred under Sorrow's wings; E E VOL. X. Since Night brings terror to our frailties still, Night comes to us, "proclaiming silence, study, ease, and sleep." "Sweet Peace's richest crown is made of stars, That is not steeped in humour of the Night." Let the Night aid us with her ministry of sorrow, with the calm that frees us from the idle passions of the Day and sets us free to think and choose. "Kneel then with me, fall worm-like on the ground, And from the infectious dunghill of this round, From man's brass wits and golden foolery, Weep, weep your souls into felicity: Come to this house of mourning, serve the Night, Till virtue flourish in the light of light." So ends the Hymn. Vast as the chaos is of ills and wrongs in the daily life of men, the whole truth shows that from this chaos also the diviner life is being slowly shaped. The whole truth is infinitely greater than that part of it which is presented in a mood like this. But the mood also is true. There is a right place for the sole expression of the deepest discontent with all that vanity which breeds vexation of spirit, and caused the Preacher of old to declare that "there was no profit under the sun." That being the spirit of George Chapman's "Shadow of the Night," the Hymn to Cynthia, in her "all-ill-purging purity," continues the same theme. It includes an allegory of Dian's Hunting, in which the poet draws one simile from siege movements before Nimeguen, which he describes as if he had been present at them. Here there is ground for a conjecture that Chapman in his younger days had, like some other young poets, served in the Low Countries. In a note to this passage he suggests that poets might as well draw illustrations "from the honourable deeds of their own noble countrymen clad in comely habit of poesy" as from farther fetched grounds, "if such as be poets nowadays would use them." Another illustration in this Hymn involves Chapman's opinion of English hexameters : "Sweet poesy Will not be clad in her supremacy With those same garments, Rome's hexameters, Our native robes put on with skilful hands, In its main argument this Hymnus in Cynthiam opposes itself to "those flesh-confounded souls That cannot bear the full Castalian bowls, Which sever mounting spirits from the senses." It condemns even the souls but in their eyes. our souls our eyes." pity that moves not in men's "Eyes should guide bodies, and "Our dames well set their jewels in their minds : And in the stretching circle of her eye All things are compassed, all things present still: In the next year, 1595, George Chapman published "Ouid's Banquet of Sence. A Coronet for his Mistresse Philosophie," and his "Amorous Zodiacke. With a translation of a Latine coppie, written by a Fryer, Anno Dom. 1400." Chapman dedicated this little book also "to the truly learned and my worthy friend, Master Matthew Roydon." |