erved or altered, I laid it to the touchstone, the native tongue. I
weighed it with the Chaldee Targum and the Septuaginta. I desired to
jump so nigh with the Hebrew, that it doth erewhile deform the vein of
the English, the proprieties of that language and ours being in some
speeches so much dissemblable." But with Horace Drant pursues a
different course. As a moralist it is justifiable for him to translate
Horace because the Latin poet satirizes that wickedness which Jeremiah
mourned over. Horace's satire, however, is not entirely applicable to
conditions in England; "he never saw that with the view of his eye which
his pensive translator cannot but overview with the languish of his
soul." Moreover Horace's style is capable of improvement, an improvement
which Drant is quite ready to provide. "His eloquence is sometimes too
sharp, and therefore I have blunted it, and sometimes too dull, and
therefore I have whetted it, helping him to ebb and helping him to
rise." With his reader Drant is equally high-handed. "I dare not warrant
the reader to understand him in all places," he writes, "no more than he
did me. Howbeit I have made him more lightsome well nigh by one half (a
small accomplishment for one of my continuance) and if thou canst not
now in all points perceive him (thou must bear with me) in sooth the
default is thine own." After this one is somewhat prepared for Drant's
remarkable summary of his methods. "First I have now done as the people
of God were commanded to do with their captive women that were handsome
and beautiful: I have shaved off his hair and pared off his nails, that
is, I have wiped away all his vanity and superfluity of matter. Further,
I have for the most part drawn his private carpings of this or that man
to a general moral. I have Englished things not according to the vein of
the Latin propriety, but of his own vulgar tongue. I have interfered (to
remove his obscurity and sometimes to better his matter) much of mine
own devising. I have pieced his reason, eked and mended his similitudes,
mollified his hardness, prolonged his cortall kind of speeches, changed
and much altered his words, but not his sentence, or at least (I dare
say) not his purpose."[329] Even the novella does not afford examples of
such deliberate justification of undue liberty with source.

Why such a situation existed may be partially explained. The Elizabethan
writer was almost as slow as his medieval predecessor to make
di