united to offer advice and aid to the author who engaged in
this work. Henry Brome, dedicating a translation of Horace to Sir
William Backhouse, writes of his own share of the volume, "to the
translation whereof my pleasant retirement and conveniencies at your
delightsome habitation have liberally contributed."[367] Doctor Barten
Holiday includes in his preface to a version of Juvenal and Persius an
interesting list of "worthy friends" who have assisted him. "My honored
friend, Mr. John Selden (of such eminency in the studies of antiquities
and languages) and Mr. Farnaby ... procured me a fair copy from the
famous library of St. James's, and a manuscript copy from our herald of
learning, Mr. Camden. My dear friend, the patriarch of our poets, Ben
Jonson, sent in an ancient manuscript partly written in the Saxon
character." Then follow names of less note, Casaubon, Anyan, Price.[368]
Dryden tells the same story. He has been permitted to consult the Earl
of Lauderdale's manuscript translation of Virgil. "Besides this help,
which was not inconsiderable," he writes, "Mr. Congreve has done me the
favor to review the _Aeneis_, and compare my version with the
original."[369] Later comes his recognition of indebtedness of a more
material character. "Being invited by that worthy gentleman, Sir William
Bowyer, to Denham Court, I translated the First Georgic at his house,
and the greatest part of the last Aeneid. A more friendly entertainment
no man ever found.... The Seventh Aeneid was made English at Burleigh,
the magnificent abode of the Earl of Exeter."[370]

While private individuals thus rallied to the help of the translator,
the world in general regarded his work with increasing respect. The
great Dryden thought it not unworthy of his powers to engage in putting
classical verse into English garb. His successor Pope early turned to
the same pleasant and profitable task. Johnson, the literary dictator of
the next age, described Rowe's version of Lucan as "one of the greatest
productions of English poetry."[371] The comprehensive editions of the
works of British poets which began to appear towards the end of the
eighteenth century regularly included English renderings, generally
contemporaneous, of the great poetry of other countries.

The growing dignity of this department of literature and the Augustan
fondness for literary criticism combined to produce a large body of
comment on methods of translation. The more ambitious tr