hough only a curiosity, are a
possible curiosity in English, but at Sapphics which could never (except as
burlesque) be tolerable. Sidney, Spenser, and others gave serious heed to
the scheme of substituting classical metres without rhyme for indigenous
metres with rhyme. And unless the two causes which brought this about are
constantly kept in mind, the reason of it will not be understood. It was
undoubtedly the weakness of contemporary English verse which reinforced the
general Renaissance admiration for the classics; nor must it be forgotten
that Wyatt takes, in vernacular metres and with rhyme, nearly as great
liberties with the intonation and prosody of the language as any of the
classicists in their unlucky hexameters and elegiacs. The majesty and grace
of the learned tongues, contrasting with the poverty of their own language,
impressed, and to a great extent rightly impressed, the early Elizabethans,
so that they naturally enough cast about for any means to improve the one,
and hesitated at any peculiarity which was not found in the other. It was
unpardonable in Milton to sneer at rhyme after the fifty years of
magnificent production which had put English on a level with Greek and
above Latin as a literary instrument. But for Harvey and Spenser, Sidney
and Webbe, with those fifty years still to come, the state of the case was
very different.

The translation mania and the classicising mania together led to the
production of perhaps the most absurd book in all literature--a book which
deserves extended notice here, partly because it has only recently become
accessible to the general reader in its original form, and partly because
it is, though a caricature, yet a very instructive caricature of the
tendencies and literary ideas of the time. This is Richard Stanyhurst's
translation of the first four books of the _AEneid_, first printed at Leyden
in the summer of 1582, and reprinted in London a year later. This wonderful
book (in which the spelling is only less marvellous than the phraseology
and verse) shows more than anything else the active throes which English
literature was undergoing, and though the result was but a false birth it
is none the less interesting.

Stanyhurst was not, as might be hastily imagined, a person of insufficient
culture or insufficient brains. He was an Irish Roman Catholic gentleman,
brother-in-law to Lord Dunsany, and uncle to Archbishop Usher, and though
he was author of the Irish part