find anything of the first interest in them; yet in
one way or in another there were few of them who were unworthy to be
contemporaries of Shakespere.

Joshua Sylvester is one of those men of letters whom accident rather than
property seems to have made absurd. He has existed in English literature
chiefly as an Englisher of the Frenchman Du Bartas, whom an even greater
ignorance has chosen to regard as something grotesque. Du Bartas is one of
the grandest, if also one of the most unequal, poets of Europe, and Joshua
Sylvester, his translator, succeeded in keeping some of his grandeur if he
even added to his inequality. His original work is insignificant compared
with his translation; but it is penetrated with the same qualities. He
seems to have been a little deficient in humour, and his portrait--crowned
with a singularly stiff laurel, throated with a stiffer ruff, and clothed,
as to the bust, with a doublet so stiff that it looks like textile
armour--is not calculated to diminish the popular ridicule. Yet is
Sylvester not at all ridiculous. He was certainly a Kentish man, and
probably the son of a London clothier. His birth is guessed, on good
grounds, at 1563; and he was educated at Southampton under the famous
refugee, Saravia, to whom he owed that proficiency in French which made or
helped his fame. He did not, despite his wishes, go to either university,
and was put to trade. In this he does not seem to have been prosperous;
perhaps he gave too much time to translation. He was probably patronised by
James, and by Prince Henry certainly. In the last years of his life he was
resident secretary to the English company of Merchant Venturers at
Middleburgh, where he died on the 28th September 1618. He was not a
fortunate man, but his descendants seem to have flourished both in England,
the West Indies and America. As for his literary work, it requires no doubt
a certain amount of good will to read it. It is voluminous, even in the
original part not very original, and constantly marred by that loquacity
which, especially in times of great inspiration, comes upon the uninspired
or not very strongly inspired. The point about Sylvester, as about so many
others of his time, is that, unlike the minor poets of our day and of some
others, he has constant flashes--constant hardly separable, but quite
perceivable, scraps, which show how genially heated the brain of the nation
was. Nor should it be forgotten that his Du Bartas had