Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV FROM COWLEY TO POPE Although the ardor of the Elizabethan translator as he approached the vast, almost unbroken field of foreign literature may well awaken the envy of his modern successor, in many respects the period of Dryden and Pope has more claim to be regarded as the Golden Age of the English translator. Patriotic enthusiasm had, it is true, lost something of its earlier fire, but national conditions were in general not unfavorable to translation. Though the seventeenth century, torn by civil discords, was very unlike the period which Holland had lovingly described as "this long time of peace and tranquillity, wherein ... all good literature hath had free course and flourished," l yet, despite the rise and fall of governments, the stream of translation flowed on almost uninterruptedly. Sandys' Ovid is presented by its author, after his visit to America, as "bred in the New World, of the rudeness whereof it cannot but participate; especially having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the Muses," 2 but the more ordinary translation, bred at home in England during the seventeenth century, apparently suffered little from the political strife which surrounded it, while the eighteenth century afforded a "peace and tranquillity" even greater than that which had prevailed under Elizabeth. 1 Preface to the Reader, in The Natural History of C. Plinius Secundus, London, 1601. 1 Dedication, in Ovid's Metamorphosis, Englished by G. S., London, 1640. Throughout the period translation was regarded as an important labor, deserving of every encouragement. As in the sixteenth century, friends and patrons 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... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.