is
something of pedantic narrowness. His criticism of Cicero is not
illuminating and his estimate, in this connection, of his own
accomplishment is amusingly complacent. In Cicero's work "marvellous is
the matter, flowing the eloquence, rich the store of stuff, and full
artificial the enditing: but how I," he continues, "have expressed the
same, the more the book be perused, the better it may chance to appear.
None other translation in our tongue have I seen but one, which is of
all men of any learning so well liked that they repute it and consider
it as none: yet if ye list to compare this somewhat with that nothing,
peradventure this somewhat will serve somewhat the more." Yet in spite
of his limitations Grimald has some breadth of outlook. A work like his
own, he believes, can help the reader to a greater command of the
vernacular. "Here is for him occasion both to whet his wit and also to
file his tongue. For although an Englishman hath his mother tongue and
can talk apace as he learned of his dame, yet is it one thing to tittle
tattle, I wot not how, or to chatter like a jay, and another to bestow
his words wisely, orderly, pleasantly, and pithily." The writer knows
men who could speak Latin "readily and well-favoredly, who to have done
as much in our language and to have handled the same matter, would have
been half black." Careful study of this translation will help a man "as
well in the English as the Latin, to weigh well properties of words,
fashions of phrases, and the ornaments of both."

Another interesting document is the preface entitled _The Translator to
the Reader_ which appeared in 1578 in the fourth edition of Thomas
Norton's translation of Calvin's _Institution of the Christian
Religion_. The opinions which it contains took shape some years earlier,
for the author expressly states that the translation has not been
changed at all from what it was in the first impression, published in
1561, and that the considerations which he now formulates governed him
in the beginning. Norton, like Grimald, insists on extreme accuracy in
following the original, but he bases his demand on a truth largely
ignored by translators up to this time, the essential relationship
between thought and style. He makes the following surprisingly
penetrative comment on the nature and significance of Calvin's Latin
style: "I considered how the author thereof had of long time purposely
labored to write the same most exactly, and to p