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cannot yet be exactly appraised. It will probably be found to be far less than some apparently suppose. But the result cannot possibly make a line of their poetry or prose either more or less great. It can merely throw interesting and important light on how they attained their results. On literary appreciation itself such matters have little or no direct bearing.
The truth is that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were prejudiced in favor of a good translation instead of against it-so far as I know, a very sensible view. The grammar school texts were many of them translated. Many of these translations were avowedly for use in teaching the boys Latin, and were as frankly used and recommended by pedagogues. The point of view is expressed fully as early as the Ecphrasis in 154o of .lcolastus by John Palsgrave of London, Chaplain to Henry VIII and schoolmaster to an illegitimate son.92
After all, the sixteenth century schoolmaster viewed Latin in quite a different way from the modern one. To the modern, one of the chief benefits to be derived is in the very exercise of translation. Thus to be beneficial the translation must be by the student's own efforts. But to the sixteenth century, Latin was a living language, which each person must actually speak and write. The Latin was the thing, the vernacular only an aid or a hindrance, and the benefit from "mental gymnastics" wholly unsuspected. Latin was not an exercise or an ornament, but a practical necessity. The masters forced the pupils to memorize the Latin indeed; but that they might understand it, they forced them also each time to memorize its English equivalent. Since the idiom in the two languages was different, it took considerable skill to get an exactly equivalent English idiom for the boys to memorize-too great skill for the average master. The masters thus welcomed these equivalent translations, whether Udall's of the Flaures of Terence in 1534 or Palsgrave's .lcolastus in I540, or any of the other many similar translations before and after.Î
These translations quickly primed the Latin pump by giving the boy a parrot's vocabulary of good Latin sentiments with which to start pouring forth his own vast lack of ideas. Thus Elizabethans used these vernacular translations to get for themselves a constantly better grip on the fine points of the Latin. Incidentally, we should
Î See Vol. 1, pp. x82 ff. 96 See Vol. I, pp. 745 if.
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