interpret his profession of
faithfulness:

And thus I am constrenyt, as neir I may,
To hald his vers & go nane other way,
Les sum history, subtill word, or the ryme
Causith me make digressione sum tyme.

Yet whether or not Douglas's "digressions" are permissible, such
renderings as he illustrates involve no more latitude than is sanctioned
by the schoolboy's Latin Grammar. He is disturbed by the necessity for
using more words in English than the Latin has, and he feels it
incumbent upon him to explain,

... sum tyme of a word I mon mak thre,
In witness of this term _oppetere_.

English, he says in another place, cannot without the use of additional
words reproduce the difference between synonymous terms like _animal_
and _homo_; _genus_, _sexus_, and _species_; _objectum_ and _subjectum_;
_arbor_ and _lignum_. Such comment, interesting because definite, is
nevertheless no more significant than that which had appeared in the
Purvey preface to the Bible more than a hundred years earlier. One is
reminded that most of the material which the present-day translator
finds in grammars of foreign languages was not yet in existence in any
generally accessible form.

Such elementary aids were, however, in process of formulation during the
sixteenth century. Mr. Foster Watson quotes from an edition of Mancinus,
published as early probably as 1520, the following directions for
putting Latin into English: "Whoso will learn to turn Latin into
English, let him first take of the easiest Latin, and when he
understandeth clearly what the Latin meaneth, let him say the English of
every Latin word that way, as the sentence may appear most clearly to
his ear, and where the English of the Latin words of the text will not
make the sentence fair, let him take the English of those Latin words by
whom (which) the Latin words of the text should be expounded and if that
(they) will not be enough to make the sentence perfect, let him add more
English, and that not only words, but also when need requireth, whole
clauses such as will agree best to the sentence."[320] By the new
methods of study advocated by men like Cheke and Ascham translation as
practiced by students must have become a much more intelligent process,
and the literary man who had received such preparatory training must
have realized that variations from the original such as had troubled
Douglas needed no apology, but might be taken for granted.

Furth