cile, but certainly not a conscientious workman.

Another fashionable form of literature, the popular religious or
didactic work, was governed by standards of translation not unlike those
which controlled the fictitious narrative. In the work of Lord Berners
the romance had not yet made way for its more sophisticated rival, the
novella. His translation from Guevara, however, marked the beginning of
a new fashion. While Barclay's _Ship of Fools_ and _Mirror of Good
Manners_ were addressed, like their medieval predecessors, to "lewd"
people, with _The Golden Book_ began the vogue of a new type of didactic
literature, similar in its moral purpose and in its frequent employment
of narrative material to the religious works of the Middle Ages, but
with new stylistic elements that made their appeal, as did the novella,
not to the rustic and unlearned, but to courtly readers. The prefaces to
_The Golden Book_ and to the translations which succeeded it throw
little light on the theory of their authors, but what comment there is
points to methods like those employed by the translators of the romance
and the novella. Though later translators like Hellowes went to the
original Spanish, Berners, Bryan, and North employ instead the
intermediary French rendering. Praise of Guevara's style becomes a
wearisome repetition of conventional phrases, a rhetorical exercise for
the English writer rather than a serious attempt to analyze the
peculiarities of the Spanish. Exaggeratedly typical is the comment of
Hellowes in the 1574 edition of Guevara's _Epistles_, where he repeats
with considerable complacency the commendation of the original work
which was "contained in my former preface, as followeth. Being furnished
so fully with sincere doctrine, so unused eloquence, so high a style, so
apt similitudes, so excellent discourses, so convenient examples, so
profound sentences, so old antiquities, so ancient histories, such
variety of matter, so pleasant recreations, so strange things alleged,
and certain parcels of Scripture with such dexterity handled, that it
may hardly be discerned, whether shall be greater, either thy pleasure
by reading, or profit by following the same."[315]

Guevara himself was perhaps responsible for the failure of his
translators to make any formal recognition of responsibility for
reproducing his style. His fictitious account of the sources of _The
Golden Book_ is medieval in tone. He has translated, not word for word