ses
to each other's work and of pieces of different descriptions to the
poetical miscellanies of the time. Of these miscellanies and of the chief
translations from the classics some little notice may be taken because of
the great part which both played in the poetical education of England. It
has been said that almost all the original poets were also translators.
Thus Googe Englished, among other things, the _Zodiacus Vitae_ of Marcellus
Palingenius, the _Regnum Papisticum_ of Kirchmayer, the _Four Books of
Husbandry_ of Conrad Heresbach, and the _Proverbs_ of the Marquis of
Santillana; but some of the translators were not distinguished by any
original work. Thus Jasper Heywood, followed by Neville above mentioned, by
Studley, and others, translated between 1560 and 1580 those tragedies of
Seneca which had such a vast influence on foreign literature and,
fortunately, so small an influence on English. Arthur Golding gave in 1567
a version, by no means destitute of merit, of the _Metamorphoses_ which had
a great influence on English poetry. We have already mentioned Surrey's
blank-verse translation of Virgil. This was followed up, in 1555-60, by
Thomas Phaer, who, like most of the persons mentioned in this paragraph,
used the fourteener, broken up or not, as accident or the necessities of
the printer brought it about.

It was beyond doubt this abundant translation, and perhaps also the
manifest deficiencies of the fourteener thus used, which brought about at
the close of the present period and the beginning of the next the
extraordinary attempt to reproduce classical metres in English verse, which
for a time seduced even Spenser, which was not a little countenanced by
most of the critical writers of the period, which led Gabriel Harvey and
others into such absurdities, and which was scarcely slain even by Daniel's
famous and capital _Defence of Rhyme_. The discussion of this absurd
attempt (for which rules, not now extant, came from Drant of Cambridge) in
the correspondence of Spenser and Harvey, and the sensible fashion in which
Nash laughed at it, are among the best known things in the gossiping
history of English Letters. But the coxcombry of Harvey and the felicitous
impertinence of Nash have sometimes diverted attention from the actual
state of the case. William Webbe (a very sober-minded person with taste
enough to admire the "new poet," as he calls Spenser) makes elaborate
attempts not merely at hexameters, which, t