The influence of Sylvester is easily traceable in the poems of Daniel, where he strives for enriched adjectives, balanced phrases, antithetic clauses, invocations, with suitable epithets, "care-charmer Sleep," "thunder cracks of tyrant's threats," etc., as in the following:

Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails,

And whilst distraught ambition compasses,
And is encompass'd; while as craft deceives,
And is deceived; whilst man doth ransack man, etc.

Whereas we sat and sighed

And looked upon each other, and conceived

Not what we ail'd—yet something we did ail;
And yet were well, and yet were not well,10 etc.

John Davies of Hereford thought him immortal, and in the philosophical reflective verses, where religion, poetry and science were combined and in the complex sentiment for the Queen, of which each poet was the mouthpiece, they were surely in sympathy:

Then Joshua, the Sun of thy bright praise
Shall fixéd stand in Art's faire Firmament
Til dissolutions date Times, Nights, and Days.

Jospeh Hall" would make him an angel:

and again:

Bartas was some French Angel, girt with Bayes;
And thou a Bartas art, in English Layes.

He knows the grace of that new elegance,

Which sweet Philisides fetch'd of late from France,
That well beseem'd his high styled Arcady,

Tho' others mar it with much liberty,

In epithets to join two words in one.

To the Lady Margaret.

10 Hymen's Triumph.
11 Hall's Satires, (VI: 1).

or:

Hall is not far from him in style, as the lines will show:

Till they had sated their delicious eye;

Or search'd the hopeful thicks of hedgy rows
For briery berries, or hawes, or somer sloes.

Was then no plaining of the brewer's scape,
Nor greedy vinter mixed the strained grape.
The king's pavilion was the grassy green
Under safe shelter of the shady treen."

E. G., in a poem of three stanzas, was enraptured:

R. R., after referring to the graces he found in Chaucer, Spenser and "Sweet" Daniel, saw

How Salust's English Sun [our Sylvester]
Makes moon and stars to vaile.

So much, for Matter and for Manner, too,

Hath he outgon those that the rest outgoe.

In an acrostic by R. N., Gen., the translator is styled "Sweet" Sylvester,

Ease-charming Eccho of his sacred Voice.

R. N. wrote a sonnet of gratitude to Chapman and Phaer for their translations, in which he said he was even more indebted to Sylvester, whose work was "grave, learned, deepe, delightful and divine."'14

12 Golden Age, III: 1.

18 Sylvester's Works.

14 Ibid.

15

Lodge said, in his preface to the reader:

France hath a Bartas, for her Poet rare,
Whose school breeds up great wits beyond compare
And through the world his eloquence doth spred,
Himself the Ocean, whence these springs are fed.

Todd points out resemblances between Spenser and Du Bartas, in the addresses to Dido 16 and Enoch," in the description of Despair, and says " that "the tediousness of the translation is sometimes smoothed by phrases adopted from Spenser;" as

The lilies of her brests, the rosie red

In either cheek,20

was taken from

With rosy red

The bashful blood her snowy cheekes did dye."

Ben Jonson, in 1609, wrote an epigram to him:

If to admire were to command, my praise
Might then both thee, thy work and merit raise,
But as it is (the child of ignorance,

And utter stranger to all airs of France),

How can I speak of thy great pains but err?
Since they can only judge, that can confer.

Behold! the rev'rend shade of Bartas stands
Before my thought, and in thy right, commands
That to the world, I publish for him, this:
"Bartas does wish thy English now were his,
So well in that are his inventions wrought,

15 "A Learned Summary upon the famous Poem of William of Saluste, Lord of Bartas, wherein are discovered all the excellent secrets in Metaphysical, Physical, Moral and Historical Knowledge, fitt for the learned to refresh their memories, and for younger students to abreviate and further their studies: wherein nature is discovered, art disclosed, and history laid open.”—Translated out of the French by T. L. D., M.P., printed by John Grismand. London, 1621.

16 Shepherd's Calendar, II: 195.

"Creation du Monde, ed. 1621, IV: 1.

18 Faerie Queen, 1, 9, 50; Creation, etc., 215.

19 Todd's Spenser, 7, 491.

20 Creation, etc., 1, 498.

"Faerie Queen, 2, 9, 41.

21

As his will now be the translation thought,
Thine the original, and France shall boast

No more the maiden glories she has lost."

22

However, in 1609 " he complained to Drummond of Hawthornden that the translation was not well done and that he (Jonson) wrote these verses before he knew French and could judge of the merit of Sylvester's translation. Drummond thought the translation of "Judith" and "Battle of Ivry" excellent. "His pains are much to be praised, the happy translation in sundry parts equalling the original. "'23

Michael Drayton dedicated his "Moyses in a Map of His Miracles" (1604):

Sallust, to thee and Sylvester thy friend,
Comes my high poem peaceably and chaste;
Your hallow'd labors humbly to attend,

That wreckful Time shall not have power to waste."4

25

In Drayton's power of using proper names in historical and geographical verse, in his fantastic descriptions, as in the armor of Pigwiggen, whose coat of mail was of a fish's scale, whose rapier was a hornet's sting, whose helmet was a beetle's head, whose plume was a horse's hair, etc., or in his cataloguing of flowers, using descriptive epithets as the "ague'd harebell, with luscious smell," "the crimson darnel flowers, brave carnations, oderiferous pink," etc., we see the influence.

26

In Chapman we find the pedantic love of the display of learning, in the many details of mythological and fantastic theories of contemporary science, showing the various degrees by heaping of words:

His heart, extremely straiten'd, burn'd

Beat, swell'd, and sigh'd as it would burst,27

22 Jonson's Conversations with Drummond, printed by Shaks. Soc., 1842, I: 2.

23 Ibid, I, 51.

24" Moses, His Birth and Miracles," by Michael Drayton. I: 130. Spenser Soc., 1892, No. 5.

25 Nymphidia.

26 Polyolbion, XV: 165.

27 Iliad, 18.

Without was he

Set sad ashore, where 'twas his use to view

Th' unquiet sea, sigh'd, wept, and empty drew
His heart of comfort.28

In Lord Brooke we find a similar frigidity, with all thoughts overladen with words and buried in wearisome verse:

Past Superstition! Glorious style of weakness!
Sprung from the deep disquiet of man's passion
To dissolution and despair of Nature.

Or, in speaking of humanity:

Born under one law, to another bound,
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.29

Wither and Browne, intimate co-partners, pay tributes; the first:

O Daniel, Drayton, Jonson, Chapman, how
I long to see you with your fellow peers,
Sylvester matchless, glory of these years.30

and further says that he assumes their style.

Browne," speaking of Ariosto, Petrarch and Tasso, said:

Divinest Bartas, whose enriched soul

Proclaim'd his Maker's worth, should so enroll
His happy name in brass; that Time nor Fate
That swallow all should ever ruinate;
Delightful Saluste, whose all blessed lays
The shepherds make their hymns on holy-days;
And truly say thou in one week hast penn'd
What time may ever study, ne'er amend.

The folio edition of Sylvester was published in 1621," by Humphrey Sownes on Bread-street Hill, who speaks of the translator as "that divine spirit" and "that worthy spirit," who

28 Odyssey, 5.

29 Mustapha.

30 Abuses Stript and Whipt.

31 Britannia's Pastorals, II: 1, 942.

32 Masson: Life of Milton, I: 69-78; VI: 530, 557.