rect or
frequent, as that which was made of the classical and romantic literature.

For much about the same time, the rich and fascinating stores of the Greek
and Roman mythology, and those of the romantic poetry of Spain and Italy,
were eagerly explored by the curious, and thrown open in translations to
the admiring gaze of the vulgar. This last circumstance could hardly have
afforded so much advantage to the poets of that day, who were themselves,
in fact, the translators, as it shews the general curiosity and increasing
interest in such subjects, as a prevailing feature of the times. There
were translations of Tasso by Fairfax, and of Ariosto by Harrington, of
Homer and Hesiod by Chapman, and of Virgil long before, and Ovid soon
after; there was Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, of which
Shakspeare has made such admirable use in his Coriolanus and Julius Caesar;
and Ben Jonson's tragedies of Catiline and Sejanus may themselves be
considered as almost literal translations into verse, of Tacitus,
Sallust, and Cicero's Orations in his consulship. Boccacio, the divine
Boccacio, Petrarch, Dante, the satirist Aretine, Machiavel, Castiglione,
and others, were familiar to our writers, and they make occasional mention
of some few French authors, as Ronsard and Du Bartas; for the French
literature had not at this stage arrived at its Augustan period, and it
was the imitation of their literature a century afterwards, when it had
arrived at its greatest height (itself copied from the Greek and Latin),
that enfeebled and impoverished our own. But of the time that we are
considering, it might be said, without much extravagance, that every
breath that blew, that every wave that rolled to our shores, brought with
it some accession to our knowledge, which was engrafted on the national
genius. In fact, all the disposeable materials that had been accumulating
for a long period of time, either in our own, or in foreign countries,
were now brought together, and required nothing more than to be wrought
up, polished, or arranged in striking forms, for ornament and use. To this
every inducement prompted, the novelty of the acquisition of knowledge in
many cases, the emulation of foreign wits, and of immortal works, the want
and the expectation of such works among ourselves, the opportunity and
encouragement afforded for their production by leisure and affluence; and,
above all, the insatiable desire of the mind to beget its own imag