f secular translation
and introduced new standards of accuracy, new definitions of the
latitude which might be accorded the translator; but much of the old
freedom in handling material, with the accompanying vagueness as to the
limits of the translator's function, persisted throughout the time of
Elizabeth.

In many cases the standards recognized by sixteenth-century translators
were little more exacting than those of the medieval period. With many
writers adequate recognition of source was a matter of choice rather
than of obligation. The English translator might make suitable
attribution of a work to its author and he might undertake to reproduce
its substance in its entirety, but he might, on the other hand, fail to
acknowledge any indebtedness to a predecessor or he might add or omit
material, since he was governed apparently only by the extent of his own
powers or by his conception of what would be most pleasing or edifying
to his readers. To the theory of his art he gave little serious
consideration. He did not attempt to analyse the style of the source
which he had chosen. If he praised his author, it was in the
conventional language of compliment, which showed no real discrimination
and which, one suspects, often disguised mere advertising. His estimate
of his own capabilities was only the repetition of the medieval formula,
with its profession of inadequacy for the task and its claim to have
used simple speech devoid of rhetorical ornament. That it was nothing
but a formula was recognized at the time and is good-naturedly pointed
out in the words of Harrington: "Certainly if I should confess or rather
profess that my verse is unartificial, the style rude, the phrase
barbarous, the metre unpleasant, many more would believe it to be so
than would imagine that I thought them so."[300]

This medieval quality, less excusable later in the century when the new
learning had declared itself, appears with more justification in the
comment of the early sixteenth century. Though the translator's field
was widening and was becoming more broadly European, the works chosen
for translation belonged largely to the types popular in the Middle Ages
and the comment attached to them was a repetition of timeworn phrases.
Alexander Barclay, who is best known as the author of _The Ship of
Fools_, published in 1508, but who also has to his credit several other
translations of contemporary moral and allegorical poems from Latin and
Fr