Neo-Latin Poetry in the British Isles 9781472539946, 9781780930145

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Acknowledgements The essays included here have all been commissioned specially for this volume. Some were first aired as part of a panel at the launch conference of the Centre for Early Modern Exchanges held at University College London in September 2011; others have been presented at meetings of the Society for Neo-Latin Studies and the Cambridge Society for Neo-Latin Studies. We have not sought to impose any uniformity of approach, beyond inviting contributors to provide extracts illustrating something of the literary flavour of the works being discussed. We hope that the resulting variety will be seen as a strength, rather than as a weakness, of the collection. Spelling of Latin texts has been standardised in the case of ancient authors; in passages quoted from neo-Latin works spelling follows the original orthography or that of modern editions, where these exist. The expression ‘British Isles’ is used in our title and elsewhere in the volume as a geographical shorthand, and is not intended to carry political connotations with reference either to the present day or to the period under discussion. We are very grateful to all the contributors for their initial enthusiasm and subsequent collaboration, and to Deborah Blake for her editorial patience and good humour, and for her support of this project from its inception. Permission to reproduce the engraving which appears on p. 210 was very kindly granted by Glamorgan Archives. Glasgow & London, December 2011

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List of contributors Ceri Davies, Emeritus Professor of Classics, Swansea University. Roger P.H. Green, Emeritus Professor of Humanity, University of Glasgow. Philip Hardie, Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of Latin, University of Cambridge. Jason Harris, Lecturer in the Department of History and Director of the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies, University College Cork. Stephen Harrison, Professor of Latin Literature, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Corpus Christi College. L.B.T. Houghton, Lecturer in Classics, University of Glasgow. Sarah Knight, Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, University of Leicester. Gesine Manuwald, Professor of Latin, University College London. David Money, Director of Studies in Classics, Wolfson College, Cambridge. Victoria Moul, Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature, King’s College London. Niall Rudd, Honorary Senior Fellow, University of Liverpool. Keith Sidwell, Emeritus Professor of Greek and Latin, University College Cork, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Greek and Roman Studies, University of Calgary. Andrew Taylor, Fellow and Director of Studies in English, Churchill College, Cambridge. Angus Vine, Lecturer in English, University of Stirling.

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Introduction: Musa Britanna L.B.T. Houghton and Gesine Manuwald In the 1520s or 1530s, the English antiquarian John Leland, celebrating the revival of learning among his fellow-countrymen, observed omnes Italiam petierunt sidere fausto | et nituit Latiis musa Britanna scholis (‘they all made for Italy under a favourable star, and the British Muse shone forth in the schools of Latium’).1 The lines represent a clear acknowledgement of the international dimension of literary and intellectual activity in the early part of the sixteenth century, an activity in which the composition of Latin verse formed a highly significant element. Even as the vernacular languages became an increasingly popular medium for literary expression, the pursuit of distinction in scholarship, law, diplomacy and letters remained overwhelmingly the preserve of those equipped with a humanist education, and for many years operations in these areas continued to be conducted primarily in Latin. The language of Cicero and Caesar, of Seneca and Tacitus, retained much of its cultural authority and social cachet: a proficiency in the production of Virgilian hexameters, Horatian lyrics or Ovidian elegiacs marked the aspiring poet as a man of learning, taste and accomplishment, and the choice of the ancient tongue not only advertised an extensive education and a refined partiality for the classics, but also opened up prospects of patronage and preferment throughout the cultivated circles of Europe. For scholars with a livelihood to earn and a reputation to adorn, a practised Latin style offered a vehicle for establishing academic and literary credentials on an international stage, a passport to membership of the respublica litterarum; for polemicists with a message to promote, adopting the universal language of western Christendom improved their chances of securing a readership beyond the shores of their native land. Virgil, as his readers in the British Isles were well aware, had referred to the inhabitants of the northernmost outpost of the Roman empire as penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos (‘the Britons utterly divided from the whole world’, Eclogues 1.66);2 but British champions of humanist culture knew that, although comparatively late entrants on to the scene of the Renaissance, they were a part of broader devel-

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L.B.T. Houghton and Gesine Manuwald opments that transcended national boundaries. The great international, or supranational, institution of the Roman Church had always played a part in maintaining contact between the educated élite of the British Isles and their continental counterparts; so it is perhaps no surprise to find clerics – and clerics, moreover, with international connections – featuring prominently as the authors and recipients of neo-Latin poetry by Britons and relating to British affairs in the period prior to the English Reformation. Robert Flemming (or Flemmyng), Dean of Lincoln, wrote at Tivoli a long poem in Latin hexameters, the Lucubraciunculae Tiburtinae (1477), in praise and exculpation of Pope Sixtus IV;3 and the Portuguese composer of neo-Latin pastorals Henrique Cayado (Hermicus Caiadus) included in his bucolic collection an eclogue, dated June 1496, in which ‘Lantonus’ – Robert Langton, Archdeacon of Dorset, in Bologna at the time – sings to his companion the praises of Britain (Cayado, Ecl. 5.141-55).4 For almost forty years from 1497, the bishopric of Worcester was held by Italians, the first of whom, the scholar and diplomat Giovanni Gigli, had produced a Latin epithalamium for the wedding of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York in 1486, and a Genethliacon on the birth of Prince Arthur later that year.5 From the early sixteenth century it was the universities and courts that provided the main conduit for poetic exchange between Britons and other European scholars: most of the major Scottish neo-Latin poets, including George Buchanan (see the studies here by Roger P.H. Green and Stephen Harrison), Andrew Melville and Arthur Johnston,6 studied and/or taught abroad before returning to their own country, while scholars from the continent visited Britain, stayed at British universities or the royal courts, and wrote neo-Latin poetry on British themes, particularly panegyrics of the reigning monarch. The most distinguished of these was Erasmus, who lived at different times in both Oxford and Cambridge, and penned an ‘Ode in praise of Britain and of King Henry VII and the royal children’ (Ode  de laudibus Britanniae Regisque Henrici septimi ac regiorum liberorum, printed in his Epigrammata of 1518), celebrating the return of the Golden Age under the Tudor dynasty.7 Erasmus’ friend Ammonio (Andrea della Rena), a humanist from Lucca who became Latin secretary to Henry VIII, wrote an ‘Elegy on the death of King Henry VII and on the happy succession of Henry VIII’ (Elegia de obitu Regis Henrici VII et felici successione Henrici octavi, 1509), in which he puns on the latter’s title (Henricus octavus) to salute him as a new Augustus (formerly Octavius).8 And a little over two decades earlier, the Brescian humanist Pietro Carmeliano, Latin secretary and chaplain to Henry VII, and subsequently tutor to the young Henry VIII, had – like Gigli on the

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1. Introduction: Musa Britanna same occasion – sought royal approval with a long Suasoria Laeticiae to celebrate the birth of Henry’s elder brother Arthur.9 It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the composition of neo-Latin poetry was simply a matter of personal advancement and obsequious opportunism. More importantly, it also posed a significant artistic challenge. The writing of verse in the language and metre of the ancients provided not merely an arena for the exercise of intellectual discipline, but also a chance to aspire to the creative heights occupied by the classical models whose works had formed the bulk of their emulators’ education, and had effectively defined their conceptions of literary quality and decorum. The post-romantic notion that poetry in the vernacular is somehow inherently more ‘authentic’ than its Latin equivalent, that the medium of English afforded its practitioners the capacity for more ‘genuine’ literary self-expression, would have meant little to the poets under discussion here.10 And this point is particularly crucial in the case of authors who were active in both English and Latin – for some of the most accomplished and prolific British writers of neo-Latin poetry are also figures of the highest distinction in the field of English literature, men such as John Milton and George Herbert (see the essay in this collection by Sarah Knight), Thomas Campion (considered in Gesine Manuwald’s contribution to this volume) and Andrew Marvell.11 Some poets, indeed, attempted versions of the same work in both languages: notable examples of this phenomenon include Abraham Cowley, the first book of whose scriptural epic Davideis exists in both English and Latin editions (see Philip Hardie’s chapter here), and Walter Savage Landor, whose Arabian tale Gebir was begun in Latin, published in English in 1798, and issued in the author’s own Latin translation as Gebirus five years later.12 Although no one would claim that all surviving neo-Latin poetry achieves equal technical success or offers consistent aesthetic satisfaction, we may suppose that these poets, at least, knew what they were doing when they ventured to express themselves in the metre and vocabulary of Latin verse, as they undoubtedly did when they chose to do so in the vernacular. By the same token, it should come as no surprise to find one of the foremost literary critics of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson (see the chapter here by Niall Rudd), turning his hand to this kind of writing; evidently he saw no inevitable contradiction between the demands of poetic inspiration and the conditions imposed by classical structure and idiom. Even so, Johnson maintained that in some cases ‘by the sonorous magnificence of Roman syllables, the writer conceals penury of thought, and want of novelty, often from the reader, and often from himself’.13 His reference to ‘modern writers of Latin poetry, a class of authors  who are too generally neglected’14

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L.B.T. Houghton and Gesine Manuwald suggests a shift away from the immense popularity, both national and international, enjoyed in the seventeenth century by the Welsh epigrammatist John Owen, whose poems were reprinted in Holland and Germany as well as in England, and translated into several languages.15 But in the early part of the period, at least, publishers clearly felt that there was a market and a readership for such productions, just as men of letters seem to have felt that the composition of Latin verse was a profitable use of their time. Nor was it just men who were engaged in the cultivation of the Latin Muse: at least in England, a number of educated women, including Queen Elizabeth I, displayed their learning, taste and literary accomplishment by producing Latin verses, some – such as Elizabeth Jane Weston and Elizabeth Hoby – attaining a proficiency at least comparable to that of the more talented among their male counterparts.16 All these people had something to say, and although the motivations for their choice are likely to have been different in individual cases, their conscious choice of Latin verse as the medium for articulating what they had to say cannot be lightly dismissed. The student of British literature can no more afford to ignore the Latin output of the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish poets than the social historian can afford to overlook the important part played by the phenomenon of Latin verse composition among an influential section of British society and in the educational systems of the four nations over a period of several centuries. Beyond doubt, tastes have changed since the writing of Latin poetry enjoyed a widespread vogue among British literati; but it can scarcely enhance our appreciation of what these poets were attempting to accomplish if their achievement is judged according to critical assumptions they would not have shared. The principal criticism levelled against writers of neo-Latin poetry is their excessive adherence to the techniques and terminology of their ancient predecessors. The verdict of C.S. Lewis may be taken as representative of a wider scholarly consensus on the literary value of post-classical Latin verse during much of the twentieth century: ‘The energy of neo-Latin poets was wasted on a copying of the ancients so close as to approach forgery or conjuring. The results often please, but only as a solved puzzle pleases: we admire the ingenuity with which ancient parallels are found for modern situations, just as we admire the opposite process in Pope’s or Johnson’s imitations of Horace or Juvenal. Only rarely (for genius is sometimes unconquerable) does real poetry force its way through the doubled and trebled artifice of the masquerade .’17 But for the authors of neo-Latin poetry, the existence of classical models for their compositions constituted a large part of the attraction of this form of literary endeavour. It was precisely against the backdrop of a centuries-old

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1. Introduction: Musa Britanna poetic tradition that contemporary innovation could be most clearly manifested and most immediately appreciated, and the demonstration of mastery in forms previously wielded by such undisputed authorities as Virgil or Horace moreover cast the later poet not as a slavish dependant on the creativity of others, but rather (in theory, at least) as a consummate artist in his or her own right. That is not to say that these would-be successors to the Latin classics had no sensitivity to questions of originality, or were not aware of the risks involved in literary ‘theft’ (on the contrary, neo-Latin poets since at least the time of Petrarch display scruples over reproducing too closely particular expressions from illustrious predecessors);18 rather, their assumptions regarding the acceptable parameters for appropriation and assimilation of source material evidently differed from those of their later detractors. It might also be remembered that during certain periods in its critical history the Latin literature of antiquity itself laboured under a comparable lack of sympathy, as being mechanically parasitic upon the original genius of ancient Greece.19 At a time when understanding of the sophisticated techniques of allusion employed by the classical Latin poets has become increasingly nuanced, it is surely at least worth reconsidering whether or not the stigma now largely removed from the writers of ancient Rome should continue to adhere to their early modern counterparts – or at any rate, to all of them alike. Sufficient quantities of neo-Latin verse were issued over the years that any categorical indictment runs the risk of failing to differentiate between works of very different character, accomplishment and value. And even if much of the Latin verse produced between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, when weighed in the balance of technical competence and artistic inspiration, is nonetheless found wanting, it remains difficult to deny the continuing importance of this body of material as a resource for the study of literary and social history during the period in question. In many cases, then, far from being a frigid exercise in the dusty pedantry of the schoolroom, the composition of neo-Latin poetry represented an opportunity for international fame and literary celebrity, as well as a chance to rival the venerable authors of antiquity in their own medium.20 That is not to dismiss, however, the dominant part played by educational practices and attitudes in the entrenchment of Latin versewriting among the upper echelons of British society.21 Immersion from an early age in the mechanics of verse composition at Eton or Westminster, and the subsequent refinement of poetic style under the exacting eye of a university tutor, may well have acted for some as a lifelong deterrent from further expeditions on to the slopes of Helicon; but in

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L.B.T. Houghton and Gesine Manuwald others such training implanted a lasting facility and taste – even a mental habit – for self-expression in the language and forms of the Odes and Aeneid.22 Volumes of commemorative pieces by members of the universities were issued to mark significant national occasions (see David Money’s chapter here), or as a form of personal memorial: three volumes of poems to mark the death of Sir Philip Sidney were published in 1587, two at Oxford and one at Cambridge,23 and the collection of tributes to Edward King (Justa Edouardo King naufrago, 1638) in which Milton’s Lycidas first appeared also contains numerous items in Latin verse, and a few in Greek. In later years, individual schools whose syllabuses placed a particular emphasis on composition produced anthologies of Latin verse translations and original compositions, such as the several volumes of Musae Etonenses (first number published in 1755) and Sabrinae Corolla (1850), a compilation of poems and versions by former scholars of Shrewsbury, including the editor, Benjamin Hall Kennedy, at that time headmaster of the school.24 The status accorded to capable handling of Latin verse at such élite institutions inevitably helped to define experience of this discipline as a mark of social distinction, an indispensable element in the register of accomplishments expected of a civilised and educated gentleman. The syllogism of Dr Balston, a master at Eton in the 1840s, has long been notorious: ‘If you do not take more pains, how can you ever expect to write good longs and shorts [Latin elegiac couplets]? If you do not write good longs and shorts, how can you ever be a man of taste? If you are not a man of taste, how can you ever hope to be of use in the world?’25 By this time, however, few contemporaries professed so decided a view of the advantages conferred by initiation into the rites of Latin verse composition. Responding to the appearance of a new instalment of Musae Etonenses in 1856, the author of an essay on ‘Modern English Latin Verse’ in The Dublin University Magazine noted, with some regret, that ‘[t]he palmy days of Latin verse writing are now, it must be confessed, over. No man any longer expects to be made a bishop, a judge, or Secretary of State from his familiarity with Virgil or Statius. A false quantity is no longer the mark of the beast, denoting a miserable outsider, innocent of the mysteries enacted on the banks of the Isis and Cam’ (that is, at Oxford and Cambridge).26 Despite this decline in the prestige and prevalence of Latin verse-writing, and even as the study of versification and of the Latin language itself gradually lost its grip on the curriculum, traces of the old flame continued to smoulder into the late nineteenth century, when poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins (towards the end of his life a professor of Greek in Dublin) still occasionally ventured into the territory of Latin verse.27 The concoction of Latin lines persisted as a hobby of the scholar and the educated

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1. Introduction: Musa Britanna amateur for much of the twentieth century, during which time the journal Greece & Rome regularly featured Latin ‘Versions’, as well as reviews of recent collections of such exercises;28 and even at the start of the twenty-first century, while no one could reasonably contend that the art of verse composition is flourishing in Britain’s schools and universities, there is evidence that, at least within the academy and on its fringes, the practice is not quite extinct. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge still advertise prizes for Latin verse,29 won in the past by many students who would go on to be eminent figures in literature, politics and scholarship. Distinguished professors are still fêted by fellow-classicists with offerings of Latin hexameters or elegiacs,30 and publications such as the Classical Association News still periodically include contributions from recreational versifiers. In 2010 the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies congratulated its sister organisation in Roman Studies on its centenary with a celebratory address in Latin Sapphics by Armand D’Angour of Jesus College, Oxford;31 and the same year witnessed the launch of Vates: The Journal of New Latin Poetry, which has reached its third issue at the time of writing.32 If the production of Latin poetry in the British Isles has slowed down somewhat over the last couple of centuries, and seems unlikely ever to blossom again as it did in the time of Campion and Herbert, or of Milton and Marvell, it has not completely ground to a halt, and the final page of its history has yet to be written. The present volume takes as its subject a significant portion of that history, the era when the Latin Muse was at her most prolific in what cartographers called insulae Britannicae, as well as in Europe more generally – a context from which the study of national tendencies in this field cannot be meaningfully divorced.33 Over the course of these centuries, some features of literary activity in Latin remain constant, while others exhibit notable differences between periods and countries. This collection seeks to establish coherence by focusing on neo-Latin poetry produced in the British Isles (with the exception of Jason Harris’ chapter, which illustrates the international character of neo-Latin literature by examining the work of an Irish poet abroad), and at the same time offering breadth and variety by discussing all areas of the British Isles, exemplified by poets active at different times and in various literary genres. Nonetheless, Neo-Latin Poetry in the British Isles does not attempt to give a systematic or comprehensive account of the production of Latin verse in Britain from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Rather, it offers a series of case studies illustrating the character and range of Latin poetry composed by British authors during this period. England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland are all represented, and the essays featured here examine both well-known figures

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L.B.T. Houghton and Gesine Manuwald in British literary history (such as Johnson, Herbert and Milton) and less famous writers and collections worthy of more attention than they have hitherto received. By giving a sizeable amount of space to individual poets and works so as to allow for proper discussion and the presentation of examples and original texts (rather than opting for an encyclopaedia-style compilation of more data), it is hoped that this volume can convey something of the flavour of British neo-Latin poetry, indicate some general tendencies, and highlight characteristics of individual writers. The study of British neo-Latin literature is a truly interdisciplinary enterprise, which may require knowledge of all or several of the following areas: ancient Greek and Roman literature, contemporary English (and European) literature, British (and European) political, social, religious and intellectual history, art history, history of the book, palaeography and textual criticism. This is reflected by the expertise of the contributors, who have all been active in more than one area, while they have come from different academic backgrounds (principally Classics, English Literature and History); they therefore approach the material with different questions. This ensures that this collection of essays gives an impression not only of the range of British neo-Latin poets and poetry, but also of possible methodologies and questions to be asked. One important aspect of the study of neo-Latin poetry, which features in all contributions in one way or another, is its relationship to classical sources – that is, the creative appropriation of ancient material.34 With regard to this question of how neo-Latin writers created something new and appropriate for their own time on the basis of the classical tradition, work on neo-Latin literature finds its place in the growing field of classical reception studies.35 At the same time it occupies a unique position within the reception of the classical world, since it continues the classical linguistic conventions almost seamlessly and presents itself as a coherent entity precisely because of its linguistic unity, its consequent relationship to ancient literature, and the intellectual context shared by all writers.36 Still, neo-Latin poetry does not merely look back; equally it is closely linked to the time and circumstances of its composition. As contributors point out, classical motifs, terminology or literary conventions may be used to make comments on current political or religious developments, to talk about the author’s own country, and to engage with contemporaries. This introduction has tried to sketch some of the context and background for the poets discussed in the contributions that follow. Overall, the volume aims to provide a selective overview of British neo-Latin poetry with some breadth as well as depth, and thus to illustrate a

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1. Introduction: Musa Britanna significant thread in British literary, intellectual and cultural history.37 It is hoped that thereby more attention will be directed to this field, which is of relevance, for instance, to the study of classical literature, British literature and British history – for more work remains to be done in this area. Basic tools such as modern editions, translations and commentaries are still lacking for numerous poets and works, which affects their accessibility, and many questions regarding the interplay between classical tradition and contemporary context remain unexplored – hopefully not for much longer.38 Notes 1. Leland, Instauratio bonarum literarum, Carmen CXCVIII, lines 15-16: for the text see Perosa and Sparrow 1979: 501-2, and for discussion see Hudson 1939; Binns 1990: 21-2; and the conclusion to Andrew Taylor’s chapter in this volume. The lines appear also as the epigraph to Weiss 2009-10 (and previous editions). 2. For some early modern British receptions of the Virgilian line, see e.g. Parry 1981: 4, 46, 260 n. 7; Patterson 1987: 149-50 with n. 22. 3. For the text see Pacifici [s. a.], and for discussion IJsewijn 1985; Cairns 1990. Binns 1990: 11 calls it ‘[t]he only important Latin poem by an Englishman that survives from before 1500’. On Flemming (who was a pupil of Guarino and appears in Leland’s Instauratio as ‘Flaminius’, 10) and his contribution to English humanism, see Mann 1939: 3-7; Weiss 2009-10: esp. 150-62. 4. Text in Balavoine 1983; see also Mustard 1931. 5. See Carlson 1987: esp. 153-5, 157-9 (text at 171-3; see also epigrams on the same occasion, 169-70); Tournoy-Thoen 2000. Gigli died in Rome shortly after his consecration, and never set foot in his diocese; he was succeeded by his nephew Silvestro, who held the See until 1521. 6. On Melville’s Latin poetry, see especially Doelman 2000: 57-72; Reid 2006; Holloway 2011. On Johnston, Crawford 2006: 84-149; Manuwald 2010. 7. For text and translation of the poem and dedicatory letter, see Miller and Vredeveld 1993: 26-41. 8. See Rundle 1995: esp. 62, 64, 74; Wyatt 2005: 59-61. Full text in Pizzi 1958: 16-19. 9. On Carmeliano see Carlson 1987: 153-5, 159-62 (text at 174-83); 1993: 37-59; Wyatt 2005: 32-5, 255-6. 10. The point is well made by Sparrow 1960: 358-63 (on neo-Latin poetry in Renaissance Italy). 11. For the Latin poetry of Andrew Marvell, see Bain 1959; Money 1998: 33-7 (though Money observes that ‘[t]he majority of his Latin poetry is of no more than moderate quality, less interesting than that of some other contemporaries’, 33); Haan 2003; Simms 2008; Hardie 2011; texts in McQueen and Rockwell 1964. 12. On Landor’s Latin poetry, see especially Kelly 1974; for the text see Sutton 1999. The same phenomenon is also found with reference to prose works: on Latin versions of Hobbes’ Leviathan see Rogers and Schuhmann 2003: 1.229-58, and in general see IJsewijn 1990: 166. 13. Lonsdale 2006: 3.3, quoted by Storey 1974: 127.

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L.B.T. Houghton and Gesine Manuwald 14. Lonsdale 2006: 4.48, quoted by Storey 1974: 124. In context, the reference is at least partly concerned with Italian poets such as Poliziano, rather than specifically with British authors. 15. On Owen see especially Bradner 1940: 86-90, 272; Jones 1941; Davies 1981: 46-53; Slavitt 1997; Harries 2005; Jansen 2009. For the text of the Epigrammata, see Martyn 1976-8. Also very popular, though more so in England than on the continent, were the poems of Vincent Bourne (1695-1747): see Bradner 1940: 266-73; Storey 1974; Haan 2007. 16. See Stevenson 2005: esp. 255-75, 368-94, and examples in Stevenson and Davidson 2001; on Weston, active in Prague in the early seventeenth century, see also Cheney and Hosington 2000. 17. Lewis 1968: 21-2. An important corrective to this general climate of opinion (with reference to the Italian context) can be found in Sparrow 1960: esp. 358-67, and already in Burckhardt (1860) 1990: 167-8. 18. In general, see Pigman 1990; on Petrarch, who in a letter to Boccaccio asks him to alter a phrase in the Bucolicum Carmen on the grounds that it is too similar to an expression in Virgil (Fam. 22.2.22), see especially McLaughlin 1995: 22-48 and Witt 2000: 261-4. 19. See e.g. Vance 1997: 16-17, 134-9. 20. Cf. Bradner 1940: 5: ‘Latin verse was not an obscure, esoteric movement in England, but a recognized part of English literature, appealing to a considerable body of readers’. 21. See especially Clarke 1959: index, s.v. ‘Verse-composition, Latin’; Stray 1998: 69-71, 95; Waquet 2001: 7-40, 129-51, esp. 22-3, 27-8, 130-1, 136, 141-2, who refers to school throughout Europe as ‘the “Latin country” par excellence’ (2-3). In Scotland, Latin verse composition seems never to have enjoyed the central place in the curriculum which it held for so long south of the border: see Clarke 1959: 138-9. 22. Clarke 1959: 58 notes that ‘[t]here were indeed those who were more fluent in Latin than in their own language’. 23. See Baker-Smith 1986, who calls the three volumes ‘the most striking example of technical virtuosity in Latin writing yet published in England’ (95). 24. Sabrinae Corolla has recently been reprinted by Cambridge University Press as part of its Cambridge Library Collection series: Kennedy 2010. 25. Reported in Leslie Stephen’s biography of his brother, quoted by e.g. Clarke 1959: 56. 26. [anon.] 1856: 189. How far this movement away from verse composition had progressed a century later can be seen from R.G. Austin’s review of Clarke 1959: ‘It is fashionable nowadays to sniff at reading Latin and Greek for their mere literary value; “composition” is a wicked word, hardly decent in certain circles (and as for verses – well!). Anyone can storm at the grotesque waste of time once given to cobbling up dactyls and spondees to form some fearful metrical wildfowl’ (Austin 1959: 89, original emph.). 27. IJsewijn 1990: 167; for Hopkins’ Latin poetry, see MacKenzie 1990: 96, 97-9, 103-5, 108-9, 109-11, 129-30, 135-6, 141-2 (and for translations into Latin, 167, 187-90, 211-12); also Watt 1997. 28. For the twentieth century see generally IJsewijn 1961; 1964; Sacré 1990. 29. On these competitions see IJsewijn 1990: 164. For a collection of late twentieth-century university pieces, see D’Angour et al. 1985. 30. See e.g. McKeown 1999. 31. D’Angour and Sydenham 2010.

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1. Introduction: Musa Britanna 32. See http://pineapplepubs.snazzystuff.co.uk/vates.htm [accessed 13 June 2011]. 33. See especially IJsewijn 1990: 39-40. 34. Cf. IJsewijn 1990: 2: ‘The basic principle of nearly the whole Neo-Latin literature is the imitation and emulation of ancient predecessors’; see also Pigman 1990. 35. For general orientation see e.g. Hardwick 2003. 36. Cf. Money 1998: 7: ‘Neo-Latin is not an inferior language to ancient Latin. It is, in effect, the same language, with minor variations  and an enlarged vocabulary’. 37. For previous work on neo-Latin poetry in Britain and Ireland, see Mann 1939; Bradner 1940; Binns 1974; 1990; Davies 1981; IJsewijn 1990: 164-76; Money 1998; Burnett and Mann 2005; Harris and Sidwell 2009. Selections of texts available in Laurens and Balavoine 1975: 395-513; Nichols 1979: 462-85, 568-83, 632-51. 38. For surveys of recent scholarship on neo-Latin literature, see especially Hardin 1994; Helander 2001, with following discussion. A Cambridge Guide to Reading Neo-Latin Literature, edited by Victoria Moul, is currently in preparation.

Bibliography [anon.] (1856) ‘Modern English Latin Verse’, The Dublin University Magazine 48: 189-203. Austin, R.G. (1959) ‘Review of Clarke 1959’, British Journal of Educational Studies 8: 88-90. Bain, C.E. (1959) ‘The Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell’, Philological Quarterly 38: 436-49. Baker-Smith, D. (1986) ‘Great Expectation: Sidney’s Death and the Poets’, in J. van Dorsten, D. Baker-Smith and A.F. Kinney (eds) Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, 83-103. Leiden. Balavoine, C. (ed.) (1983) Les Éclogues d’Henrique Caiado, ou, L’humanisme portugais à la conquête de la poésie néo-latine. Lisbon and Paris. Binns, J.W. (ed.) (1974) The Latin Poetry of English Poets. London and Boston. Binns, J.W. (1990) Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age. Leeds (ARCA 24). Bradner, L. (1940) Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry 15001925. New York and London (The Modern Language Association of America, General Series X). Burckhardt, J. (1990) The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, tr. S.G.C. Middlemore. London [originally: Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basle, 1860)]. Burnett, C. and Mann, N. (eds) (2005) Britannia Latina: Latin in the Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. London and Turin. Cairns, F. (1990) ‘The Lucubratiunculae Tiburtinae of Robert Flemming (1477)’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 39: 54-66. Carlson, D.R. (1987) ‘King Arthur and Court Poems for the Birth of Arthur Tudor in 1486’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 36: 147-83. Carlson, D.R. (1993) English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475-1525. Toronto.

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L.B.T. Houghton and Gesine Manuwald Cheney, D. and Hosington, B.M. (eds & trs) (2000) Elizabeth Jane Weston: Collected Writings. Toronto and London. Clarke, M.L. (1959) Classical Education in Britain, 1500-1900. Cambridge. Crawford, R. (ed. & tr.) (2006) Apollos of the North: Selected Poems of George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston. Edinburgh. D’Angour, A., Franklin, J. and Tanfield, C. (1985) Camenae Mertonenses. Oxford. D’Angour, A. and Sydenham, C. (2010) ‘Celebratory Verses Presented to the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies on the Occasion of their Centenary by the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies’, Journal of Roman Studies 100: xii. Davies, C. (1981) Latin Writers of the Renaissance. Cardiff (Writers of Wales). Doelman, J. (2000) King James I and the Religious Culture of England. Cambridge. Haan, E. (2003) Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry: From Text to Context. Brussels. Haan, E. (2007) Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne. Philadelphia. Hardie, P.R. (2011) ‘Ovid and Virgil at the North Pole: Marvell’s A Letter to Dr Ingelo’, in J. Ingleheart (ed.) Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile after Ovid, 135-52. Oxford. Hardin, R.F. (1994) ‘Recent Studies in Neo-Latin Literature’, English Literary Renaissance 24: 660-98. Hardwick, L. (2003) Reception Studies. Oxford (Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics, No. 33). Harries, B. (2005) ‘John Owen the Epigrammatist: A Literary and Historical Context’, in C. Davies and J.E. Law (eds) The Renaissance and the Celtic Countries, 19-32. Malden and Oxford. Harris, J. and Sidwell, K. (eds) (2009) Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters. Cork. Helander, H. (2001) ‘Neo-Latin Studies: Significance and Prospects’, Symbolae Osloenses 76: 5-44. Holloway, E.R. III (2011) Andrew Melville and Humanism in Renaissance Scotland 1545-1622. Leiden. Hudson, H.H. (1939) ‘John Leland’s List of Early English Humanists’, Huntington Library Quarterly 2: 301-4. IJsewijn, J. (1961) ‘Conspectus poetarum Latinorum saeculi vicesimi’, Euphrosyne 3: 149-90. IJsewijn, J. (1964) ‘Conspectus poetarum Latinorum saeculi vicesimi – Auctarium’, Palaestra Latina 34: 384-9. IJsewijn, J. (1985) ‘Robert Flemming and Bartolomeo Platina, or the Need of Critical Editions’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 34: 76-82. IJsewijn, J. (1990) Companion to Neo-Latin Studies. Part I: History and Diffusion of Neo-Latin Literature, 2nd edn. Leuven. Jansen, J. (2009) ‘The Microcosmos of the Baroque Epigram: John Owen and Julien Waudré’, in S. de Beer, K.A.E. Enenkel and D. Rijser (eds) The Neo-Latin Epigram: A Learned and Witty Genre, 275-99. Leuven (Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia XXV). Jones, J.H. (1941) ‘John Owen, the Epigrammatist’, Greece & Rome 10: 65-73. Kelly, A. (1974) ‘The Latin Poetry of Walter Savage Landor’, in Binns 1974: 150-93. Kennedy, B.H. (2010) Sabrinae Corolla in Hortulis Regiae Scholae Salopiensis.

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1. Introduction: Musa Britanna Contexuerunt tres viri floribus legendis. Cambridge [originally published London, 1850]. Laurens, P. and Balavoine, C. (eds) (1975) Musae Reduces: Anthologie de la poésie latine dans l’Europe de la Renaissance, 2 vols. Leiden. Lewis, C.S. (1968) English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, 2nd edn. Oxford. Lonsdale, R. (ed.) (2006) Samuel Johnson: The Lives of the Poets, 4 vols. Oxford. MacKenzie, N.H. (ed.) (1990) The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Oxford. Mann, W. (1939) Lateinische Dichtung in England vom Ausgang des Frühhumanismus bis zum Regierungsantritt Elisabeths. Untersuchungen zur nationalen und religiösen Grundlegung des englischen Humanismus. Halle. Manuwald, G. (2010) ‘Two Johnstons on Glasgow: examples of Scottish NeoLatin encomia urbis’, Classical Receptions Journal 2: 44-59. Martyn, J.R.C. (ed.) (1976-8) Ioannis Audoeni Epigrammatum [libri], 2 vols. Leiden. McKeown, J.C. (1999) ‘Genethliacon EJK’, in S.M. Braund and R. Mayer (eds) Amor: Roma. Love and Latin Literature, 1-4. Cambridge (PCPS supplement 22). McLaughlin, M.L. (1995) Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo. Oxford. McQueen, W.A. and Rockwell, K.A. (eds) (1964) The Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell. Chapel Hill. Miller, C.H. and Vredeveld, H. (eds) (1993) The Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 85: Poems. Toronto. Money, D.K. (1998) The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Tradition of British Latin Verse. London. Mustard, W.P. (ed.) (1931) The Eclogues of Henrique Cayado. Baltimore. Nichols, F.J. (ed.) (1979) An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry. New Haven and London. Pacifici, V. (ed.) [s. a.] Un carme biografico di Sisto IV del 1477. Tivoli. Parry, G. (1981) The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42. Manchester. Patterson, A. (1987) Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Perosa, A. and Sparrow, J. (eds) (1979) Renaissance Latin Verse: An Anthology. London. Pigman, G.W. III (1990) ‘Neo-Latin Imitation of the Latin Classics’, in P. Godman and O. Murray (eds) Latin Poetry and the Classical Tradition. Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 199-210. Oxford. Pizzi, C. (ed.) (1958) Andreae Ammonii carmina omnia. Accedunt tres epistolae nondum editae. Florence. Reid, S.J. (2006) ‘Early Polemic by Andrew Melville: The Carmen Mosis (1574) and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacres’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 30: 63-81. Rogers, G.A.J. and Schuhmann, K. (eds) (2003) Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan, 2 vols. Bristol. Rundle, D. (1995) ‘A New Golden Age? More, Skelton and the Accession Verses of 1509’, Renaissance Studies 9: 58-76.

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L.B.T. Houghton and Gesine Manuwald Sacré, D. (1990) ‘Conspectus poetarum Latinorum 1900-1960: supplementum’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 39: 328-39. Simms, R.C. (2008) ‘Satire and Allusion in Andrew Marvell’s Dignissimo suo Amico Doctori Wittie’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 57: 245-61. Slavitt, D.R. (tr.) (1997) Epic and Epigram: Two Elizabethan Entertainments. Baton Rouge. Sparrow, J. (1960) ‘Latin Verse of the High Renaissance’, in E.F. Jacob (ed.) Italian Renaissance Studies: A Tribute to the late Cecilia M. Ady, 354-409. London. Stevenson, J. (2005) Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Oxford. Stevenson, J. and Davidson, P. (eds) (2001) Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology. Oxford. Storey, M. (1974) ‘The Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne’, in Binns 1974: 121-49. Stray, C. (1998) Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830-1960. Oxford. Sutton, D.F. (ed. & tr.) (1999) The Complete Latin Poetry of Walter Savage Landor, 2 vols. Lewiston and Lampeter. Tournoy-Thoen, G. and G. (2000) ‘Giovanni Gigli and the Renaissance of the Classical Epithalamium in England’, in D. Sacré and G. Tournoy (eds) Myricae: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Memory of Jozef IJsewijn, 13393. Leuven. Vance, N. (1997) The Victorians and Ancient Rome. Oxford and Cambridge, MA. Waquet, F. (2001) Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, tr. J. Howe. London [originally: Le latin ou l’empire d’un signe: XVIe-XXe siècle (Paris, 1998)]. Watt, W.S. (1997) ‘Notes on the Latin Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, Translation and Literature 6: 83-8. Weiss, R. (2009-10) Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, 4th [online] edn, ed. D. Rundle and A. J. Lappin: http://mediumaevum.modhist.ox.ac.uk/monographs_weiss.shtml. Witt, R.G. (2000) In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. Leiden. Wyatt, M. (2005) The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation. Cambridge.

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2

John Leland’s communities of the epigram Andrew Taylor John Leland (c. 1503-52) has long been celebrated as the author of that monumental account of British writers from antiquity to the advent of the Tudor dynasty, the Commentarii de scriptoribus Britannicis, the title used by Anthony Hall for his edition of 1709. The work derived from Leland’s surveying of the contents of monastic libraries between 1533 and 1536 – a labour commissioned by the king – although Leland continued to augment and revise his work over the following decade, before he lapsed into madness soon after Henry VIII’s death in 1547. The vast bulk of Leland’s writing, both antiquarian and poetic, remained in manuscript on his death. James Carley’s recent edition and translation, as De Viris Illustribus / On Famous Men, embodies much of his own and others’ extensive scholarship on the wide range of Leland’s writing.1 Where that edition now foregrounds the bio-bibliographical achievements of the antiquary, rightly drawing our attention towards the ways in which Leland retrieved and represented the host of figures through which to map Britain’s deep literary landscape, this essay seeks to explore further his so-called epigrammata, especially in relation to his poetic formation in the mid-to-late 1520s, when he was ‘wholeheartedly afire with love for the Muses’.2 Leland’s slow dissolving of sanity has been related to the loss of literary culture resulting from the dissolution of the monastic seats of learning and libraries following Henry’s break with Rome in the early 1530s. James Simpson has suggested that ‘Leland’s raison d’être for constructing the literary past is a part, then, of the destruction of that past on the orders of Leland’s own patron  His own act of recording the past is a part of the process that destroys, or, if you will, creates, “the past”.’3 The very possibility of Leland’s humanistic and historicising antiquarian project is thus produced by this violent rupture. As his need for patronage grew ever greater in the 1540s, this project’s ‘totalising’ mission slipped from his grasp, which may account for his poor rate of converting manuscript into print; Henry’s demise might then be seen as the last straw. Such interpretations of this elusive figure are seductive, and suggest that there may be related intimations of isola-

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Andrew Taylor tion and precariousness in his shorter poetry of this early period, a struggle not merely to secure patronage, but to ground a poetic persona within a sustaining humanistic culture. Within the epigrammata we find poems asserting and celebrating the arrival of eloquent and learned writing (Carmen VI, Commigratio bonarum literarum in Britanniam), others striving with equal zeal to display Leland’s association with learned Continental figures, where the emphasis on the French intellectual milieu is striking. His poem (Carmen LXVII) thanking his early sponsor Thomas Miles, for example, facilitates Leland’s charting of his intellectual trajectory from Lily’s St Paul’s School to Cambridge, then Oxford, a brief and unhappy sojourn. Although tradition associates Leland with All Souls College, Oxford, these poems show a significant connection with Corpus Christi College. This poem continues (13-18): Postremo Henrici Regis mihi gratia multum Profuit octavi, munificaeque manus. Hinc mihi facta domus studiosa Lutetia, ad unguem Doctos qua colui sedulus urbe viros: Budaeum, Fabrum, Paulum Aemeliumque, Ruellumque Aeternis plane nomina digna cedris.

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Afterwards I was greatly helped by the favour and bountiful hand of Henry VIII. Next I lived in Paris for the sake of my studies, in which city I eagerly courted those men who were learned down to their fingertips, Budaeus, Faber, Paulus Aemilius and Ruellus, names worthy of being preserved in immortal cedar.

These names cover the range of bonae litterae: Hellenist Guillaume Budé, the humanist theologian and biblical translator Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, the royal historian Paolo Emilio, whose first four books of De rebus gestis Francorum appeared around 1517, and the physician Jean Ruel, translator of Dioscorides (1516) and author of the handsome De natura stirpium (1536). Leland’s praise of Richard Hyrde’s ‘Attic grace’ (Carmen CXXXVI, not in Newton) is directed at enticing him to Paris: Lascaris hic fulget doctis qui natus Athenis | Caecropio miscet verba Latina favo. | Prima suae nitet hic Budaeus gloria gentis’ (‘Lascaris shines here, who, born in learned Athens, mingles Latin words with Cecropian honeycomb. Here glitters Budé, first glory of his nation’, 15-17). He was successful, and Leland introduced him to his mentor in the study of ancient texts, François Du Bois (Franciscus Sylvius, Carmen CXXXVIII), principal of the humanistic Collège de Tournai, who may, as this poem suggests, have received the dedication of a manuscript collection of poems.4 Moreover, this poem’s shift from Janus Lascaris to his pupil Budé captures the translatio studii that Leland

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2. John Leland’s communities of the epigram mirrored in those English humanists his poetry extolled; thus the even-handed Collatio Budaei et Cuthoberti Dunostalli (Carmen CXV), in which Tunstal’s scholarly, and especially Greek, achievements balance Budé’s. In Carmen CXXIII Lascaris is supplicated in more solicitous terms for entry to his poetic domain, alluding perhaps to the publication of his Greek and Latin Epigrammata in July 1527. And there are many other figures in the epigrammata who have been pursued by Leicester Bradner and James Carley5 to enrich Leland’s biography and give a stronger sense of how his scholarly and poetic ambitions were shaped by his important period in Paris as a ‘King’s Scholar’ between late 1526 (at the earliest) and perhaps as late as early November 1529.6 Although Leland’s poetry offers rich biographical information, it also projects engagement with the literary politics of an intended or imagined readership, while J.W. Binns’s suggestion of Leland’s importance to Latin poetry of sixteenth-century England in relation to that of Wyatt and Surrey in English – particularly forms and metres – remains a prompt for further work.7 Arguably, the very nature of the epigram encourages this tension between the fictional and the factual. So in considering communities of the epigram we may think of Leland constructing, or aspiring to participate in, intellectual and literary communities, often virtual and rhetorical rather than merely institutional. Karl Enenkel observes that the epigram, like the familiar epistle, was a ‘spectacular re-invention of Humanism’, their composition and circulation acts of self-definition. Epigrams and letters – with the verse epistle straddling the genres – share theoretical and interpretative concerns: despite the rhetoric of self-presentation which potentially allows for their interpretation as literary and rhetorical fictions, there is something seemingly intrinsic to their nature which encourages their use as documents expressing some kind of real context and connection. As Enenkel underscores, ‘most modern poetic theory denies the existence of close ties between poetry and historical reality or its historical and social context, whereas Neo-Latin epigrammatic poetry is characterized to a large degree by these connections’.8 However, Leland’s epigrammata, in either Stow’s manuscript copy or the printed version that derives from it, frustrate attempts at establishing order, narrative, or some other organisational principle. Carley, in his essay ‘Leland in Paris’, excised twenty-eight relatable poems from nearly three hundred ‘to simulate a narrative sequence’.9 The encouragement to explore the significance of these years comes from Leland himself, who stated, in Successus studiorum suorum (Carmen XXVIII), found early in the surviving collection, ‘The right famous Cam taught me the seven Arts, and also the school which takes its

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Andrew Taylor name from the Isis. But the Parisians convinced me that I must cultivate the Muses, and so I have sung assorted tunes in various metres’ (Artes me septem docuit celeberrima Granta, | Et schola quae clarum de Iside nomen habet. | Parrhisii at Musas mihi persuasuere colendas, | Hinc variis cecini carmina mista modis). But cecini puts Paris in Leland’s past, just as the poem to his early sponsor and adoptive father Thomas Miles (Carmen LXVII) looks back vividly across both water and time. But there are certainly others we can confidently locate on the Seine; many may be seen as Leland’s calling cards offered at the thresholds of various leading French humanists. That those poems suffer a high rate of attrition in migrating from manuscript to print may be significant: of the poems Ad Franciscum Sylvium Gallum, Ad Guinterium Andruacum, Ad Nicolaum Beroaldum Gallum, Ad Joannem Chaeradamum Gallum, and to two as-yet unidentified figures, Drogo and Ludovicus Dubringus (respectively, Carmina CXXXVIII, CLVI, CLIV, CXLI, CLXXXVI), all but Drogo are identified as ‘Gallus’, none but that to Jean Chéradame is in Newton’s printed edition of 1589.10 The fame implicitly offered to many by Leland through his verse thus faltered particularly in relation to his Paris sodality. The poem soliciting ‘Drogo’ as a translator of Galen may have addressed Dreux, son of Guillaume Budé. Dreux’s competence in Greek and the nature of his educational milieu would make this unsurprising. He was tutored by his father and also by that eminent teacher of Greek, Guillaume du Maine, with whom Guillaume corresponded extensively in that tongue, and who also taught Jacques Toussain in the mid1520s.11 Guillaume Budé continued the family’s longstanding interest in ancient Greek medical literature, including the collecting of manuscripts.12 Indeed, when we look again at the array of English and foreign scholars engaged in epigrams by Leland, whose brother was a learned physician (Carmen XLII), the strength of the medical interest is striking. Johann Winther von Andernach, addressed in diverting Sapphics (Carmen CLVI), was one such Hellenist working on the translation of ancient medical texts into Latin, including those of Galen, from the moment of his arrival in Paris shortly before Leland in 1526. ‘Adrianus Britanus’ graduated in Medicine at Padua in 1515, and may have been the ‘Augustine Peyton, physician’ addressed in another poem (Carmen CLXXVI), where Leland modestly claims that Peyton’s praises would be better sung by the learned band at Padua, recalling Thomas Linacre’s studies there.13 Padua was held in highest regard for medical humanism, and the advanced Paduan model shaped both the College of Physicians founded in 1518 by Linacre, and Fox’s humanistic Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the year before. The resulting physicians would

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2. John Leland’s communities of the epigram not suffer, as Richard Croke put it in his Cambridge oration in praise of Greek studies (c. 1519), ‘too credulous belief in the delusions of translators’.14 But Paris’ star was ascendant: Linacre, whose reputation was sealed by his series of elegant and clear translations of Galen between 1517 and 1524, worked with Thomas Lupset, Ruel, Budé, and others in Paris to challenge Venetian-Paduan dominance. Leland addresses or refers to Linacre in several poems (Carmina XVI, CV, CIX, CX, CLXXVI and CXCV), while one celebrating Lupset’s return (Carmen XCIV, Gratulatio in reditum Thomae Lupseti) opens by alluding to the younger humanist’s work at the Aldine press on the editio princeps of Galen (1525): Venisti incolumis iam mihi reddite Lupsete? Et Venetum linquere floridos Vis campos, studiis mote Britannicis, Quae sic auxilium concupiunt tuum? Have you come back to me safely, Lupset? And are you willing to abandon the flowery fields of Venice, moved by the studies of your fellow Englishmen, which so greatly desire your help?

Lupset had served alongside three other Englishmen there, Edward Wotton (Carmina LXXXIV, CLXXX), William Rose, and John Clement. All four emerged from humanist Oxford under Linacre’s sponsorship; all but Rose, a friend of More’s, who may have left Oxford in 1521 and who died in Rome in 1525, were members of Corpus, and all had or would acquire European reputations for their Greek learning.15 Carmen LXXXIV, ‘For Edward Wotton on his return from Italy’, dates from 1526, and is a long and exuberant fragment in dactylic hexameters found only in Stow. The other (Carmen CLXXX) calls Wotton medicus and traces a movement from his expert teaching of Theocritus and Homer at Corpus to (11-13) Cultor denique maximus Galeni Exercet medicas lubenter artes, Et nostris studiis favet serenus. The greatest champion, at last, of Galen, he exercises the medical arts with pleasure, and gladly fosters our endeavours.

Another of Leland’s poems from this year (Carmen XCVII) celebrates the marriage of Margaret Giggs, Thomas More’s adopted daughter, to Clement. A former pupil-servant of More and, like William Gonnell and Richard Hyrde (Carmina CXIII, CXXXVI), a tutor in his household

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Andrew Taylor academy, he devoted himself to medicine in 1519 on resigning his readership in rhetoric and humanity at Corpus to Lupset, travelling then to Louvain and Brabant, and finally to Italy, taking his MD in Siena in 1525. Leland’s poem ‘To Gonnell, that he should leave the city’ (Carmen LXX) for Cambridge most probably marks the end of More’s ‘academy’ around 1525, and deepens the sense of Leland’s engagement with the group of scholars associated with this household and humanist medicine. Examples of how the addressees of Leland’s poems belong to Erasmian circles in both England and France could be readily extended, but, as traced below, some names are particularly resonant. In Carmen XXXIV, the return of Lupset (d. 1530), a particular favourite of Erasmus, More, Wolsey, and Reginald Pole, is expressed in more expansive terms than Wotton’s: ‘commonly in the eloquent mouths of the water-logged Venetians and the learned French  As a translator you readily fashion Latin monuments out of Greek ones, and, again, you produce Greek books from Latin ones’ (aequoreis frequens in ore | Facundo Venetis et eruditis | Gallis  |  Interpres facilis Latina formas | Ex Graecis monumenta, et ex Latinis | Rursus Graeca, 2-4, 15-17). Lupset’s precise movements during Leland’s Paris years are difficult to track, and this reference to the French may stem from Lupset’s scholarly activities there between 1517 and 1519. He saw through the presses both Linacre’s translations of Galen’s De sanitate tuenda (1517) and Methodus medendi (1519), and More’s Utopia (1517), which included a letter from Budé to Lupset, closing with the recollection of Linacre having ‘made the very deepest and most favourable impression on me and on Jean Du Ruel, my friend and fellow student. His excellent learning and careful diligence I shall always especially admire and strive to imitate’.16 Following his Oxford stint, Lupset left for Padua in early 1523, before Leland arrived at Oxford, and was in Paris by early 1526, returning to Padua by the end of the summer, before setting off from there for England in the company of his patron and fellow of Corpus, Reginald Pole. They may have been there at the time of Leland’s arrival, if that was at the close of 1526, or have met in London in early 1527 if Leland’s departure was a little later. For most of 1527 onwards, then, Leland was in Paris, while Lupset only returned there in late February 1528 to be involved in the education of Cardinal Wolsey’s natural son, Thomas Winter, a burden which lasted until the end of 1529, around the time of Leland’s return to England. Winter, whose guardian Lupset had been in Padua in 1523, had been escorted to Paris by the humanist diplomat and ecclesiastic John Clerk, Bishop of Bath and Wells, in the summer of 1526. Although Thomas Winter seems not to have been addressed in verse by Leland, his household does connect two further

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2. John Leland’s communities of the epigram figures, Jean Chéradame (Carmen CLII) and John Clerk (Carmen CIII); the very next poem (Carmen CIV), to R. Crayford (or Crawford), sets Crayford’s steps at court against Leland’s by the Seine, and it may be that many of the poems at this point in both Stow and Newton are Parisian. John Clerk, Thomas Winter, Nicolas Bérault and Jean Ruel are among the nine dedicatees, one for each of the nine plays, of Chéradame’s edition of Aristophanes, Aristophanis facetissimi comoedie nouem (1528), the first French edition of the dramatist; Clerk received the dedication to Plutus (Wealth), Winter to Nebulae (Clouds).17 In both Greek letters, Chéradame praises Lupset for his learning. As McFarlane stated of George Buchanan’s formative experience and his acquisition of Greek, ‘any young humanist who had the good fortune to be in Paris during those years could hardly have remained unaffected by the new intellectual and religious climate of the colleges’.18 Leland’s versions E graeco, Epigrammate, in laudem Homeri (Carmen XXV), based loosely on a four-line epigram by Aelian,19 and the distich E Graeco (Carmen XLV) after Menander’s Sententiae 810, capture this spirit and emulate More’s and Bourbon’s epigrams e graeco. His poem to Jean Chéradame (Carmen CLII), however, expresses more than most a sense of closeness and actual connection, intimating a circulation of his Latin poetry in Paris similar to that in England (see, for example, Carmen LXXXIII, to John Barret, attorney, with its rare use of meas  epigrammata nugas for Leland’s poems): Multum magnificis diserte verbis Passim Chaeredame, et lubenter effers Lelandi tenues tui Camoenas, Qui nunc aggreditur tuas vicissim, Spirantes tragicum oppido cothurnum, Impar ter gracili sonare avena.

5

Everywhere, and eloquently with fine words, Chéradame, you gladly extol the slender Muses of your friend Leland, and he, albeit unequal, is now in turn attempting to use his thrice-thin reed to sound yours, which very much smack of the tragic buskin.

Leland would have had little reason to address Chéradame’s dedicatee John Clerk prior to his appointment as ambassador at the French court from July 1526 to September 1527, and again from March to November 1528; Clerk’s previous diplomatic postings had been almost solely to Rome. In his poem Leland asserts, ‘I know for a fact that the Parisians are wont to speak of your accomplishments’ (Sat scio Parrhisios tua dicere facta solere, Carmen CIII, line 5), which suggests that this was written while both were there, rather than the poem being a later bid

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Andrew Taylor for patronage. Greek was central to the advanced humanist learning arranged for Winter first in Padua, then in Paris. Chéradame had already collaborated with Guillaume du Maine, Budé’s former pupil, on their Lexicon Graecum (1523), an expansion of Crastone’s glossary, and had published his Grammatica isagogica in 1521; Winther’s Syntaxis Graeca came out around 1527. In addition to these locally produced pedagogical aids, there are also reports such as that from Winter to his father on 9 December 1528, on his ‘studying Greek and Latin, the rudiments of mathematics and astronomy, and scholastic questions’.20 John Tayler had earlier reported to Wolsey that ‘on the seconde daye of October [1526] I was at a lecter within him commensed in Greke, the whiche dayly shall be contynued at towe of the clocke at after none’,21 while on 16 January 1527, John Russell reported that ‘Every one praises him, for his own deserts and for Wolsey’s [sake]. He is in the face of the world, and many learned and worshipful men resort unto him, besides the English’.22 But let us also look back to the threshold of those Paris days for the entrées Leland may have had. Lupset and Leland seem to have been associated in London with the prominent London notary Andrew Smith, who drew up Linacre’s will. Lupset, in the moral epistle addressed to Edmund Withypoll (Withypool), son of London alderman Paul, The Exhortation to Yonge Men, writes of the virtues of friendship:23 So that in very dede I take to my care, as myn owne, all thynges that be in my frendes care. This mynde had I to my frende Andrewe Smithe, | whose son, Christofer your felow, I euer toke for my sonne, & nowe I thynke playnely, that he is so in very dede.

The work seems to have been composed in Paris, but dedicated from Wolsey’s residence, The More, on St Bartholomew’s Day (25 August) 1529. Gee suggests that Lupset taught Edmund Withypoll and Christopher Smith during 1527, before joining Winter’s household in early 1528. If so, as seems likely, Lupset would then have taken over tutoring the sons of these well-to-do Londoners on Leland’s departure. Leland’s ekphrasis, ‘On a portrait of Andrew Smith, holding his son Christopher’ (Carmen XII), is an early example of his sustained interest in epigrams related to specific works of visual art; slightly later poems from this period address Christopher as ten years of age and an actor of both tragedy and comedy (Carmen XXXVIII), then offering Suadente hendecasyllabos Thalia to recommend the reading of Terence and Ovid for his tender years (Carmen XLVIII). Carmen XXXVIII also gives a sense of the performance of poetry in this milieu (9-12):

22

2. John Leland’s communities of the epigram Illius hinc genitor componit Apolline dextro Carmina, perpetuos quae meruere cedros. Haec eadem argutus recitat cantatque puellus, Diffluere in labris Attica mella putes.

10

Hence his father writes verses worthy of perpetual cedar, with Apollo’s approval. These also his lively boy recites and sings, you’d imagine that Attic honey was flowing from his lips.

Adults’ voices are heard in a poem in first Asclepiadians Leland seemingly composed on arriving in Paris, where he lamented his separation from Christopher’s father, Andrew (Carmen C, lines 1-6, 9-13): Quid verbis referam iam tibi pluribus Quam sit res gravis (ah) te sine vivere? Cum quo saepe fui pectoris intima Arcani solitus pandere, et ad lyram Argutis resonam dulcia vocibus Foelix assidue fingere carmina.  Quod tantum nisi me pelleret invida Per fluctus miserum sors male concitos, Tecum perpetuo vivere molliter Quàm laetus poteram, meque beatulum Te semper socio credere candido!

5

10

Ah, why spend many words telling you what a heavy thing it is to live without you? With you I was accustomed to reveal the secrets of my inmost heart, and keep busy by happily making up sweet songs, with our high voices singing to the resonant lyre.  Had not unkind fortune driven me, a wretch, over storm-tossed waters, how happily I could have lived that easy life with you, and think myself blessed for always having such a fair friend!

The poem concludes with the promise of frequent letters to bridge the physical breach (18-23). Intimate expressions of loss also inform Leland’s hendecasyllabic poem to Laurence Sparcheford (Carmen LXXVII), another figure as yet unidentified (9-15): Manet repostum Namque imis penetralibus tenacis Constantisque animi, quibus beasti Me pridem officiis domi tuae, cum Smithum, delicias meas, venirem Visurus. Poteram et lubenter illic Tecum perpetuos dies manere.

10

15

The good offices you performed for me at your house remain fixed in the innermost recesses of my steadfast and constant mind at the time I came

23

Andrew Taylor to see my beloved Smith. I could have happily remained with you for all the days of my life.

Here Leland again complains bitterly of hostile fate (Haec sors invida, 4) exiling him from the Helicon of Sparcheford’s country house, ‘a ready hospice [hospitium] for the Muses’ (23-6):  gravis nec unquam Vitae taedia sentias amara Mi Sparcforde, vel horridum ruentis Fortunae illius impetus feroces.

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nor you feel any bitter disgust of a painful life, my Sparcheford, or, that horror, the fierce assaults of collapsing fortune.

One ‘Maister Sparcheford’ was bequeathed a Jerome and other books of Holy Scripture by Andrew Smith, who must have died shortly after Leland’s departure.24 But this may well have been a relation, Richard Sparcheford, chaplain to Cuthbert Tunstal and correspondent of Erasmus, whose ecclesiastical career certainly suits this donation.25 Nevertheless, it is clear that the Sparchefords and Smiths were close, with Leland an intimate of both families. These epigrams thus establish a community in London which embraced Lupset on his return with Reginald Pole; Carmen XCIV, Gratulatio in reditum Thomae Lupseti, may then be placed in that brief period in 1526 when Lupset and Leland were together in London. The poem’s expression of yearning and thanksgiving, if more than a gushing poeticism, implies that they were already friends. Leland’s poems convey a closeness to the Smith and Sparcheford families, which Lupset’s Exhortation then extends to the Withypolls. Given the strength of this connection between Leland and Lupset, it strengthens the case for Leland’s having been part of the humanist circle around Winter’s household in Paris. Lupset would then provide a sharpened context for poems such as the diplomatic Iudicium de Brixio et Moro (Carmen LIX), placing it not merely in these Paris years, rather than closer to the original controversy between 1518 and 1520, but within the friendship of Lupset and De Brie. Those two met in Paris in October 1526, when the Pole entourage was en route from Padua to England, with De Brie’s letter to Erasmus of August 1527 discussing Pole’s Greek manuscripts and Lupset’s love of learning. De Brie professed ‘that I in no way shun his [More’s] friendship, even if he has gravely offended me without my deserving it’, a rapprochement congruent with the balance struck in Leland’s poem:26

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2. John Leland’s communities of the epigram Brixius est nivei candoris plenus, et ille Iudicii veri libera verba ferit.27 Brixius aequavit mellito carmine Morum, Clarior ingenii nomine Morus erat. Brixius is full of spotless candour, and he strikes down unrestrained words of sound judgement. Brixius has corrected More in respect to honeyed verse, yet More was the more distinguished in terms of nature.

Other poems, however, seem more acts of recollection made sooner or later upon his return to England, than part of his poetry of participation in Paris. Nicolas Bourbon was a refugee in Boleyn circles following the Affaire des Placards in 1534, so Leland’s four epigrams addressing him (Carmina LXXI, CVI, CXXXI, CLVIII) might derive from his association with the Frenchman in England in the mid-1530s. But the occasion of the poem need not be a personal encounter but a literary one, earlier poems marking personal interventions in the world of cosmopolitan humanism in and around his Paris days, later poems seeking to maintain imaginative contact. Perhaps the most significant expression of this is to be found in Leland’s De quibusdam nostri saeculi poetis (‘On certain poets of our age’, Carmen CXCIII). Mention of Helius Eobanus Hessus’ translation of the Iliad dates the poem to the 1540s, with the poets appearing in roughly chronological order: Pontano, Marullo, Sannazaro, Mantuan, Poliziano, Vida, Eobanus. Sharpening the sense of contemporary reception, Leland continues (19-22): Aetas nostra sales ac Mori laudat acumen, Gratior haec eadem posteritasque canet. Borbonii Nugae nostri vel seria ducunt. Sunt alii quorum carmina digna cedris.

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Our age praises More’s wit and sharpness, and a more grateful posterity will laud these same things. Even our contemporaries take Bourbon’s Nugae seriously. There are others whose songs are worthy of cedar.

The slenderness of the single distich to Macrin compounds here with an absence of explicit reference to him. Thomas More is the sole Englishman, his Epigrammata (1518) having sustained his humanist credentials abroad more effectively than his Utopia, despite their having attracted the (justifiable) criticism of De Brie. Wit and sharpness – sales ac  acumen (19) – are the usual attributes of the epigram epitomised by Martial. Carmen XXIV, ‘To his muse, that she ought to greet Martial’, playfully seeks out the Roman poet’s abode next door to that of Wolsey, an important patron of Leland’s at this time, in an urbane poem of intimate solicitation; Carmen CXLVIII addresses Martial directly, arguing that,

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Andrew Taylor although his poetry alone always captures life-like sharpness (vivum acumen), More would have rivalled him on the same material, but rather, with little labour, chose only to show clear signs of his wit (3-8): Iudicio nostro sed vivum solus acumen Vates tu semper, Bilbilitane, refers. Materiam Morus si pertractasset eandem, Certasset Musis aemula Musa tuis. Ille quidem tantum voluit, parvoque labore, Monstrare ingenii lucida signa sui 

5

But this sense of sociability, as well as any argutia, is not typical of Leland’s surviving work, although he could occasionally write animated elegiac couplets against his rival historians Polydore Vergil (Carmen CLXX) and Hector Boece (Carmen CLXVIII), as well as the unlikeable Hellenist Richard Croke, calumniator (Carmen CCLX). More generally, however, the enthusiastic assertion of the arrival of humanistic learning lacks that edge (and an appreciative audience) which allowed his French contemporary Bourbon to write off Rome with a distich: Rhoma fuit. Nequeo breuius te, Rhoma, perisse | Dicere: quid breuius dicere “Rhoma fuit”? (‘Rome was. I don’t know how to say more briefly, Rome, that you have died: what’s said more briefly than “Rome was”?’).28 Yet Leland’s expansive and commendatory poem ‘On certain poets of our age’ (Carmen CXCIII) is, despite the procession of other names, finally preoccupied with Pontano. Initially associated with Ovid to suggest his Urania, Pontano’s full range of achievement is acknowledged in the poem’s closing section (29-44): Quicquid Cecropii proceres docuere, Latini Quicquid et eloquii Roma diserta tulit, Eximium quicquid dea prudentissima Pallas Praestitit, ingenii fertilitate sui, Excoluit quicquid Phoebus doctaeque sorores, Quicquid in Aoniis praenitet atque iugis, Et Veneres quicquid Charitesque, salesque, leporesque, Ac Pitho niveis exhibuere notis, Ut mittam Uranien, caeli stellasque micantes, Hesperidumque hortos, munera laeta quidem, Adde antiquarum monumenta celebria rerum, In lucem e tenebris iam revocata novam, Omnino edidicit, mente atque recondidit alta, Intentus studiis nocte dieque bonis. Haec me virtutis radiantia signa serenae, Tollere Pontanum sydera ad ipsa iubent.

30

35

40

Whatever the leading Athenians taught, and whatever Latin eloquence Rome had to offer, whatever that right prudent goddess Pallas provided

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2. John Leland’s communities of the epigram out of the fertility of her wisdom, whatever Phoebus and the learned Sisters practised, whatever shines forth on the Aonian ridges, and whatever the Loves, the Graces, witticisms, elegances, and Persuasion had to show worthy of distinction, not to speak of Urania and the glittering stars of heaven, the gardens of the Hesperides, and also the happy monuments of antiquities now rescued from darkness and brought to new light, all these things he learned thoroughly and stored up in his profound mind, being intent on his goodly studies by day and by night. These bright tokens of his serene virtue bid me extol Pontanus to high heaven itself.

Carmen VII, Ad cygnum, Ioviani Pontani cultorem, if early, signals Leland’s long exposure to Pontano’s writings, and it is to Leland’s negotiation of Catullus in relation to his greatest Renaissance imitator that I now wish to turn. The theme of fame is, of course, related implicitly or explicitly to Leland’s predominantly encomiastic mode; indeed we may think of fame as the deepening concern transferred to his De Viris Illustribus. We may start by considering Leland’s patriotism in Carmen XVII, Natale solum: Mantua Virgilium genuit, Verona Catullum, | Patria Londinum est urbs generosa mihi (‘Mantua gave birth to Virgil, Verona to Catullus. The noble city of London is home to me’). The echo of Ovid’s Amores 3.15.7-8 seems clear: Mantua Vergilio, gaudet Verona Catullo; | Paelignae dicar gloria gentis ego (‘Mantua rejoices in its Virgil, Verona in its Catullus; I will be called the glory of the Paelignian people’). However, the prompt towards a distich on these Ovidian lines may have come from Martial’s response in the same form (14.195).29 Nevertheless, this final poem of Amores acts as a sphragis or seal on the whole, and Leland’s allusive intentions may have reached across the poem to the collection’s very last line: post mea mansurum fata superstes opus (‘my work will live on when I am dead’). Yet where Ovid steps up to his ‘greater field’ (area maior) through the love poetry of Catullus to the comprehensiveness of the Virgilian achievement, Leland produces a poetic diminuendo towards his urbs which complicates Ovid’s own promotion of his obscure origins at Sulmo in the territory of the Paeligni: atque aliquis spectans  |  | ‘quae tantum’ dicat ‘potuistis ferre poetam ’ (‘some visitor will say: “To think you could produce so great a poet  ” ’, Amores 3.15.11-13). In Carmen XXXII Leland calls on Fame to grant his Muses longevity; in the next, perhaps a partner piece, he claims to be happy to give merely present pleasure. The first, Ad famam, opens with a close allusion to Martial 8.76.1: Dic verum mihi, Marce, dic amabo (‘Tell me the truth, Marcus, now please do’) (1-3, 7-16): Dic tandem mihi, fama, dic amabo, Num donare velis meas Camaenas

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Andrew Taylor Grato munere longioris aevi.  Quem si nunc dederis, novae studebunt Formae, ac purpureum induent colorem, Ut sint persimiles Catullianis, Ut sint persimiles Marullianis Pontanisque, fluentibus quidem illis Musis, nostra quibus nihil videbit Aetas pulchrius, elegantiusve. Sed cur haec ego curiosus inquam, Cum sis diva satis, tuapte sponte Propensa hymnisonum beare vatem?

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15

Tell me at last, Fame, now please do, whether you are willing to give my Muses the welcome gift of longevity.  If you grant this now, they will strive for new beauty and take on a brilliant character, to be very like those of Catullus, to be very like those fluent Muses of Marullo and Pontano, fairer and more elegant than anything our age will see. But why should I inquisitively say this when you are divine enough, and of your own volition are inclined to bless a hymn-singing bard?

In Carmen XXX, however, Leland’s recusatio throws over Catullus for Marullo and, more pointedly, Pontano: Sunt qui admirantur, sunt qui venerantur, et usque Carmina suspiciunt, docte Catulle, tua. At mihi Musa quidem sic est blandita Marulli, Amplius ut dubitem num tuus esse velim. Et mihi sic placuit Pontani Musa diserti, Hinc ego dispeream, si tuus esse velim.

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There are those who admire, those who revere and thoroughly esteem your poems, learned Catullus. But Marullo’s muse is indeed so entrancing to me that I doubt whether I wish to be yours any longer: and the muse of fluent Pontano is so pleasing to me, I’m damned if I’ll be yours.

The epithet doctus (‘learned’) registers the customary defence of Catullus’ eroticism and obscenity. Yet the prior involvement with Catullus staged by this epigram is also, in its tight formal control (Sunt qui  At mihi  Et mihi) and measured tone, indebted to Martial, even before we arrive at the closing formula execrationis. The dispeream si clause, for example, gestures towards the anaphora of Martial 1.39 – repeated si quis openings to the poem’s four elegiac couplets – and its final line, dispeream si non hic Decianus erit (‘hang me if his name be not Decianus’).30 But even if Leland, as many, saw Catullus through Martial, informing the division of Catullus from Pontano and Marullo is the neo-Catullan literary politics of the 1480s, still vital in the late 1520s. Pontano’s Pruritus (1449) and the more sophisticated and less explicitly

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2. John Leland’s communities of the epigram obscene Parthenopaeus sive Amores (c. 1457) were followed by the Hendecasyllabi or Baiae, composed in the 1490s and completed a year or so before his death in 1503. Julia Haig Gaisser discusses the attacks on Pontano’s Catullan programme by Mantuan and Marullo, who was also critical of Mantuan.31 At issue is not merely what should and should not be written about, but how this concerns the relationship between author and writing. The locus classicus is Catullus 16.5-6: nam castum esse decet pium poetam | ipsum, versiculos nihil necesse est (‘For it is right for the true poet to be chaste himself, but not necessary for his verses to be so’). We find responses to these lines in Mantuan’s poem Contra poetas impudice scribentes carmen, which preaches strict continuity between the poet and his page: Vita decet sacros et pagina casta poetas (‘A chaste life and a chaste page befit sacred poets’, Contra poetas 19). Marullo’s answer to both Mantuan and Pontano comes in his Ad Quintilianum (Epigrammata 1.62), which opens by reversing the complaint against indecency of Martial 1.35: Versus scribere me parum severos, | nec quos praelegat in schola magister | Corneli, quereris  (‘Cornelius, you grumble that I write risqué verses, not the sort a schoolmaster would dictate in class ’). Marullo’s book, conversely, is too chaste and modest (nimium castus  nimiumque pudicus). Leland’s position seems most forcefully put in his Castos esse decet poetas (‘Poets ought to be chaste’, Carmen CCXXXVII), which appears late in Stow and Newton: Lesbia lascivo placuit formosa Catullo, Lesbia fulgentes candida pexa comas. Collaudant alii teneros Varronis amores, Formosam et noto nomine Leucadiam. Qui cecinit molles elegos resonante Camoena, Calvi Quintiliam tollit ad astra sui. Delitiae Galli docti clarique poetae, Eximium nomen pulchra Lycoris habet. Lactea Peligni floret Nasonis amica, Materiem numeris sueta Corynna dare. Cynthia laudatur detersi nympha Properti, Et Cynara est Flacco nota puella suo. Talia molliculi cantabant carmina vates, Ignari vitae qui melioris erant. Christicola at castos castus decantet amores, Et sacros resonet Musa pudica thoros. Sic in siderea coeli spatiabitur aula, Laetitiaeque novos concinet ille modos.

5

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Pretty Lesbia pleased wanton Catullus, Lesbia fair with her shining tresses combed. Others praise Varro’s gentle amours, and the pretty girl who went by the name of Leucadia. He who sang tender elegies with his

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Andrew Taylor resonant Muse extolled the Quintilia of his Calvus to the stars. The delight of the famous and learned poet Gallus, fair Lycoris, has a fine name. The snow-white mistress of Ovid of Paelignum flowered, Corinna wont to give matter for his verses. Cynthia is praised, nymph of the neat Propertius, and Cynara is through her Horace a girl well known. Soft and tender poets used to sing such songs, ignorant of a better life. But the chaste Christian should sing of chaste loves, and the bashful Muse should hymn consecrated beds. Thus he will walk the starry court of heaven, and that man sing new forms of joy.

‘Soft and tender poets used to sing such songs’: here the Catullan usage of mollis is transferred from the verse of Catullus 16.8, quod sunt molliculi ac parum pudici (‘because they are a little soft and not quite modest’), to the erotic poets themselves. Where Carmen XXX, Ad Catullum, may well have been written in Paris some time between 1527 and 1529, this castos poetas poem may well be later. Yet interest in Marullo among those circles Leland wished to move in in Paris would have been stimulated in 1529 by the printing there of Beatus Rhenanus’ edition of the Epigrammata et Hymni (originally Strasbourg, 1509).32 This would have compounded with a slim volume of great significance for French neo-Latin poetry, Salmon Macrin’s Carminum liber (1528). Leland’s distich, Laus Macrini (Carmen LV) may be an early and ephemeral response to Macrin’s Horatian impulse: Barbitus arguti Macrini personat odis | Quas vel Pierides concinuisse velint (‘The lyre of lively Macrin resounds with odes which even the Muses might wish to have sung’). The poem is certainly not out of keeping with his epigram to the unidentified Robert Severs (Carmen CXLVI, Ad Robertum Severum), who, the poem states, was declaiming at Cambridge, while Leland, now happily (fato faelici), inhabited France: Condo et compono quae mox depromere possim, | Ut resono Flacci carmine Musa canat33 (‘I compose and write those pieces which I may soon utter, as my Muse sings with the resounding tune of Horace’, 9-10); and he is also rescuing ancient works from oblivion. Leland’s existing engagement with Sapphic and other more distinctive Horatian metres may have been enhanced by Macrin’s volume – note the cluster of poems in 1525-6 in first and second Asclepiadians: Carmina LXIII, ‘On the return of Richard Pace’; XCIV, ‘On the return of Thomas Lupset’; C, ‘To Andrew Smith’.34 Moreover, if the Horatian barbitus Macrini – barbitus is not found in Catullus35 – resonates with the Carminum libellus (1528), rather than later works,36 Leland would have had to have read no further than the opening page to find Macrin’s poetic programme asserted in explicitly Catullan terms (Macrin 1528: 1.9-14):

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2. John Leland’s communities of the epigram Nam legem tulit hanc Catullus olim, Princeps Hendecasyllabôn Catullus, Ut castus foret, integerque vates, Vatis carmina non item, lepore Quae tum praecipue suo placerent Si essent mollicula, et parum severa.

10

For Catullus once passed this law – Catullus, prince of hendecasyllables: that the bard be chaste and pure, but not his songs, since these please most with their charm if they be wanton and not too strict.

Leland’s castos poetas poem, however, seems to bridle at this finessing, and is closer to Mantuan’s rigid, Christian renunciation of pagan sensuousness. In Carmen CXXVIII, Leland asks Pierre Rosset, the French disciple of Mantuan, to ‘set aside his more austere Muses’ to listen to Leland singing his slender tunes (paululum Camoenas | Ponas quaeso tuas severiores, | Atque adsis tenues modos canenti | Lelando , 6-8). Yet it is the more austere works of Sannazaro and Mantuan on the Virgin that Leland celebrates in his poem ‘On certain poets of our age’ (Carmen CXCIII). That awareness of his own slenderness, moreover, seems just, if Leland’s surviving epigrams are indeed those to which he referred in the dedication to Henry VIII of his Peroratio ad candidum lectorem, the commentary to his Cygnea cantio (1545). There he recalls his youth ‘wholeheartedly afire with love for the Muses’ and the resulting three books of epigrams: ’EgkomiastikÒn, Sales, ’Epikˇdion. Encomiastic poetry dominates, with little ‘salt’ flavouring the surviving scattered limbs of this ostensible body of work. In the Peroratio Leland also confesses that he cannot meet the Virgilian and Ovidian demands of his river poem, his swansong: Agnosco quam angusta sit supplex nostra (‘I recognise how constrained my poetic equipment is’). His adherence to ‘Phaleucus’, with Catullus and Pontano as his guides, suggests a failure to advance, while the poetic range implied by these hendecasyllables is, in practice, far narrower than the imitation of these models suggests.37 If others’ studies and business are severus, with Leland’s poems being offered as a distraction, the term might finally be applied to his own verse. This attenuation may well have resulted from Leland’s resistance to that neo-Catullan imitation which, at least in part, enlarges Bourbon’s Nugae (1533) and Nugarum libri octo (1538) and Théodore de Bèze’s Iuvenilia (1548), works which would be more influential in Elizabethan England. And if Leland wrote a substantial number of nugae, rather than ‘carmina’ or ‘hendecasyllabi’, these seem not to have survived. In John Parkhurst’s Ludicra sive epigrammata iuvenilia, printed in England in 1573, but composed over the 1540s and 1550s, praise for Leland is restricted to the longer poems

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Andrew Taylor printed in the final years of Henry’s reign.38 Moreover, two poems of 1538 suggest that Leland’s cosmopolitan world was shrinking. Carmen CCXXXIX attempted to elicit a response from Eobanus Hessus, prompted by Franz Burchard (Burkhardt), a member of the ill-fated embassy to Henry’s court of the Lutheran princes of the Schmalkaldic League.39 The briefer follow-up shortly thereafter, Carmen CCLIV, complains that ‘no letter of acknowledgement has reached me from Hessus, giving thanks reciprocally’ for his impromptu elegies (Reddita nulla tamen nobis pervenit ab Hesso | Littera, quae posset grata referre vices). None seems to have been forthcoming. This essay has sought to enhance the critical density of poetic interrelation found in Leland’s formative years as he moved from London to Paris. It is perhaps not insignificant that his last entry in De Viris Illustribus was for Robert Widow, who, at Oxford, finally ‘devoted himself to the muses and to Helicon, and earned himself fame and celebrity among them.  the learned spoke and thought of him as the undoubted prince of poetry’.40 As a poet, explicitly the author of a book of epigrams, he stands alone among the early English humanists listed in Leland’s Instauratio bonarum literarum (‘The revival of learning’, Carmen CXCVIII): ‘All of them sought out Italy under a happy star  And all of them returned to their homeland as erudite men’ (Omnes Italiam petierunt sidere fausto |  | Omnes inque suam patriam rediere diserti, 15-17).41 Leland’s period in Paris stood in for Italy, with the richness of the network of humanists expressed by his epigrammata there contrasting with a relative lack of fecundity on his return. This sense of attenuation of his poetic world suggests that his more prosaic labours may have preserved Widow’s fame, but possibly at the expense of his own as the next prince of poetry. Notes 1. Carley 2010. 2. See Binns 1990: 20. Leland’s epigrams were edited and published in 1589 by Thomas Newton as the Principum virorum  encomia. This work seems to have been based primarily on a copy of Leland’s poems lent by the antiquary John Stow (now Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner 464.iv), but with omissions (27 poems from Stow fail to make it into Newton’s edition, which contains four not found in that manuscript), as well as alterations. Some emendations were almost certainly Newton’s, who commented on metrical deficiencies; some were transcription errors. Another manuscript, possibly Leland’s own, now lost, seems likely to have been in play. D.F. Sutton’s online edition (2007/11; www.philological.bham.ac.uk/lelandpoems) currently provides the best account, and this numbering is used here, as in Carley 2010. The text is based on Sutton’s (with reference to Newton and Stow), with his English translations adapted in places.

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2. John Leland’s communities of the epigram 3. Simpson 2002: 14-15. 4. Carley 2010: xxii, 402-3. 5. Bradner 1956; Carley 1986. 6. Carley 2010: xxii. 7. Binns 1990: 19, 26; Taylor 2006. 8. Enenkel 2009: 1-2. 9. Carley 1986: 6. 10. Dubringus may be Louis de Brun, who, while tutoring in England, dedicated a letter-writing treatise in French to Anne Boleyn around 1531. 11. McNeil 1975: 85-6. 12. Lavoie 1991. 13. Woolfson 1998: 80. 14. Woolfson 1998: 73-9. 15. Nutton 1987: 38-9; Woolfson 1998: 81-3. 16. Gee 1928: 121; Logan and Adams 2002: 117. 17. Pierre Danès, Jean Viole, Jean de Tartas, Antonius Lapitheus and Guillaume Quinon (Kou8noj) were the other dedicatees. See Maillard and Flamand 2011: 627-42. 18. McFarlane 1981: 28. 19. Sutton’s note directs us to Greek Anthology Appendix 111. 20. Brewer et al. (1875) L&P IV, pt. 2, no. 5019 (State Papers VI, 547-8, n. 3). 21. Quoted from Gee 1928: 126. Brewer et al. (1875), L&P IV, pt. 2, no. 2545 (State Papers VI, 547). 22. Brewer et al. (1875), L&P IV, pt. 2, no. 2805. 23. Lupset 1535: 3r-v. 24. Gee 1928: 126 n. 21. 25. CWE [= Complete Works of Erasmus] 13, ep. 1867, 293. 26. See CWE 13, ep. 1817, De Brie to Erasmus, Paris, 10 May 1527, 113, n. 11, 114. See also CWE 14, ep. 2021, De Brie to Erasmus, Gentilly, 12 August 1528, 251, where he and Lupset are presented as firm supporters of Erasmus’ Ciceronianus (1528). 27. feret in Stow becomes serit in Newton. 28. Laigneau-Fontaine 2008: 274-5, no. 45. 29. Martial 14.195: Tantum magna suo debet Verona Catullo, | quantum parva suo Mantua Vergilio (‘Great Verona owes as much to her Catullus as does little Mantua to her Virgil’). 30. See also Catullus 78 and especially 92, given the matter of devotion and dedication, here literary. 31. Gaisser 1993: 229-33. 32. Michaelis Tarchaniotae Marulli Constantinopolitani Epigrammata et Hymni, ed. Beatus Rhenanus (Paris: Christian Wechel, 1529); modern edition: Michaelis Marulli Carmina, ed. A. Perosa (Turin, 1951). 33. canit in Stow. 34. On the metres of Catullus and Horace, see McNeill 2007: 359-63. 35. For example, Ovid, Heroides 15.8, Ausonius, Epigrammata 44, as well as Horace, Odes 1.1.34, 1.32.3-4, 3.26.4. 36. Horace becomes Macrin’s privileged model from the Carminum libri quattuor (1530) onwards; see also Macrin’s Odarum libri sex (1537). 37. See Binns 1990: 23-4. 38. Binns 1990: 26; 1994: 61. For the poems, see Carley 2010: xxxvii-xlii. 39. McEntegart 2002: 94.

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Andrew Taylor 40. Carley 2010: 812-15. 41. See introduction to this volume.

Bibliography de Beer, S., Enenkel, K.A.E. and Rijser, D. (eds) (2009) The Neo-Latin Epigram: A Learned and Witty Genre. Leuven (Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia XXV). Binns, J.W. (1990) Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age. Leeds (ARCA 24). Binns, J.W. (1994) ‘John Parkhurst and the Traditions of Classical Latin in Sixteenth-Century England’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 1: 52-61. Bradner, L. (1956) ‘Unpublished Poems by John Leland’, Publications of the Modern Language Association 71: 827-36. Brewer, J.S. et al. (1862-1932) Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509-47, 21 vols and 2 vols addenda. London. Carley, J.P. (1983) ‘John Leland’s Cygnea cantio: A Neglected Tudor River Poem’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 32: 225-41. Carley, J.P. (1986) ‘John Leland in Paris: The Evidence of his Poetry’, Studies in Philology 83: 1-50. Carley, J.P. (ed.) (2010) John Leland: De Viris Illustribus / On Famous Men, with the assistance of C. Brett. Toronto and Oxford. Enenkel, K.A.E. (2009) ‘The Neo-Latin Epigram: Humanist Self-Definition in a Learned and Witty Discourse’, in de Beer et al. (2009): 1-24. Foister, S. (2004) Holbein and England. New Haven and London. Gaisser, J.H. (1993) Catullus and His Renaissance Readers. Oxford. Gee, J.A. (1928) The Life and Works of Thomas Lupset. New Haven. Hutton, J. (1961) ‘John Leland’s Laudatio pacis’, Studies in Philology 58: 616-26. Laigneau-Fontaine, S. (ed.) (2008) Nicolas Bourbon: Nugae / Bagatelles 1533. Geneva. Lamers, H. (2009) ‘Marullo’s Imitations of Catullus in the Context of his Poetical Criticism’, in de Beer et al. (2009): 191-214. Lavoie, G. (1991) ‘Guillaume Budé à son médecin: un inédit sur sa maladie’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 27: 37-56. Logan, G.M. and Adams, R.M. (eds) (2002) More: Utopia. Cambridge. Lupset, T. (1535) An Exhortation to Yonge Men. London. Macrin, J.S. (1528) Carminum Liber. Paris. Maillard, J.-F. and Flamand, J.-F. (2011) La France des Humanistes: Hellenistes II. Turnhout. McEntegart, R. (2002) Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden and the English Reformation. London. McFarlane, I.D. (1981) Buchanan. London. McNeil, D.O. (1975) Guillaume Budé and Humanism in the Reign of Francis I. Geneva. McNeill, R.L.B. (2007) ‘Catullus and Horace’, in M.B. Skinner (ed.) A Companion to Catullus, 358-76. Chichester and Malden, MA. Nutton, V. (1987) John Caius and the Manuscripts of Galen. Cambridge. Sandy, G.N. (2002) ‘Resources for the Study of Ancient Greek in France’, in G.N. Sandy (ed.) The Classical Heritage in France, 47-78. Leiden.

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2. John Leland’s communities of the epigram Simpson, J. (2002) The Oxford History of English Literary History, vol. 2: 1350-1547. Reform and Cultural Revolution. Oxford. State Papers Published under the Authority of His Majesty’s Commission, King Henry VIII (1830-52), 11 vols. London. Sutton, D.F. (ed.) (2007/11) John Leland, Epigrammata (printed 1589). A Hypertext Critical Edition (The Philological Museum). http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/lelandpoems/ Taylor, A.W. (2006) ‘Between Surrey and Marot: Nicolas Bourbon and the Artful Translation of the Epigram’, Translation and Literature 15: 1-20. Woolfson, J. (1998) Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy 1485-1603. Cambridge.

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3

Thomas Campion: a poet between the two worlds of classical and English literature Gesine Manuwald Thomas Campion (1567-1620) was a versatile and multi-faceted personality in Elizabethan England: in the course of his career he was active as a poet, a musician and a doctor; he composed works in both neo-Latin and English, in poetry and in prose; he had access to the royal court and the highest ranks of society, while he had to work hard to earn his living. Campion won recognition from his contemporaries, and he is still not completely forgotten today: in March 2010 The Guardian newspaper presented one of Campion’s pieces as the ‘Poem of the week’.1 Its title ‘My sweetest Lesbia’ (A Booke of Ayres, Part I. I) immediately indicates that this poem, though written in English, rests on the basis of classical Roman literature.2 It is this aspect of Campion’s output that this chapter will focus on: it will look at some of his works in both neo-Latin and English; it will consider differences and similarities between them with regard to the use of classical material, and try to show how ancient motifs and subject matter have been adapted to the contemporary world, since neither Campion’s Latin poetry nor his English poetry based on classical models has been studied much in this respect.3 Moreover, the fusion between classical tradition on the one hand and the vernacular language and circumstances of his time on the other hand cannot only be observed in Campion’s poetry, but also in his considerations on compositional technique, found both in treatises on literary questions and within some of the poems themselves; these will be referred to so as to illustrate the tensions underlying his poetic activity. Against this background it should become possible to arrive at some conclusions on the place of Campion’s literary works within the framework of literary developments in Elizabethan England.4 To put Campion’s poetry into context, a brief recapitulation of his biography and literary career may be in order, although a number of details remain uncertain.5

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3. Thomas Campion After the premature death of his parents, Thomas Campion was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, from 1581 to 1584, where he presumably was exposed to Latin and Greek. In 1586 he was admitted to Gray’s Inn in London; during his time at the Inn, where classical literature was available, he seems to have been mainly involved in the production of ancient dramas and classically-inspired plays, to have made contacts with a wide range of people, and to have composed his first literary works. Later (1605) he got a degree in medicine, probably from the University of Caen on the Continent, and he then ran a medical practice in London. Nevertheless, he continued to publish poetry, and he seems to have become a generally recognised poet. He also composed several Masques for the royal court and other noblemen. Yet at some point he fell under suspicion of being involved in a scandalous intrigue at the royal court (without justification); and while he was cleared of any charges, he apparently never regained his previous position and died as a rather poor man in 1620. Campion’s first literary works were published in 1591. In 1595 a volume of Latin works by him appeared (Thomæ Campiani Poemata): this collection included the short epic Ad Thamesin (a poem on the defeat of the Spanish Armada) and the piece Umbra (the beginning of a mythical love poem) as well as sixteen elegies and 129 epigrams. A second edition of the Latin works was published in 1619: it consisted of a revised and completed version of Umbra, thirteen elegies, of which eleven were revisions of earlier pieces and two were new poems, and 453 epigrams in two books, including both revised ones and a large number of new ones, mainly in the first book. After the first publication of his Latin poetry Campion primarily turned to poetry in English (and its musical accompaniment): in 1601 A Booke of Ayres was published, produced in co-operation with his friend Philip Rosseter. This was followed by four further books of Ayres and a collection of Songs of Mourning: bewailing the vntimely death of Prince Henry (1613). Campion also produced prose treatises on questions of rhyme and metre (Obseruations in the Art of English Poesie, 1602) as well as on the musicological problem of counterpoint (A New Way of making Fowre Parts in Counter-Point, c. 1613/14). Overall, Campion wrote literary works in poetry and in prose, in Latin and in English, produced musical accompaniment to some of his poems and discussed issues of musical and poetic composition in treatises, in addition to working as a doctor. Accordingly, in one of his Latin epigrams he describes himself as musicus, poeta and medicus, just like the Greek god Phoebus Apollo (Epigr. 1.167).6

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Gesine Manuwald Campion’s Latin epigrams (numbered according to the 1619 edition) consist of short, humorous or satirical poems addressed to real or fictitious characters with Latinised names, and are indebted mainly to the epigrammatist Martial and the love poetry of Catullus (cf. Epigr. 1.34; 2.27). However, Campion mentions not only Catullus and Martial, his main models, but also Virgil and Ovid as well as Homer and Plato (Epigr. 1.1; 1.103; 2.24; 2.27; 2.88). Yet he does not merely quote names, but equally displays familiarity with details from ancient poetry: for instance, he regrets (like Martial earlier; cf. Mart. 1.107; 8.55) that there is no Maecenas for poets of his age, alluding to the historical Maecenas, who had supported poets in Augustan Rome (Epigr. 1.210); or he adopts ancient poetic concepts when he talks of the Muses and Apollo as supporters of poetry or of Venus and other love gods (Epigr. 2.2; 2.8; 2.54; 2.136; 2.172). Such a framework is not surprising when Campion seems to expect that knowledge of ancient poets is the basis upon which people define their literary preferences: in a Latin epigram addressed to a certain Marinus, Campion lists the literary genres that the addressee likes or dislikes, thereby making a kind of metaliterary statement, only to end with the conclusion that Marinus thinks that Plato is the writer to be most admired because he is rich in stories (Epigr. 2.24).7 This shows that knowledge of classical writers is not used merely to display learning, but can be given an immediate function and be applied to the characterisation of contemporaries in a witty manner. The transferred use of motifs from ancient literature is often particularly obvious with respect to the metaliterary dimension. In the first epigram, addressed to ‘Prince Charles’, the first book opens with a typical recusatio after the classical model (Epigr. 1.1).8 Here the poet ‘apologises’ for this light, unpretentious and witty form of poetry and asserts that others or he himself later on will write elevated works about the prince’s achievements, while he confidently advertises his current type of poetry, supported by classical examples. The argument, whose structure has been taken over from Roman poetry written under the early Principate, has been adapted to a contemporary ruler and developed by a closing remark on the relationship between vita activa and vita contemplativa: reading a short poem does not detract from vita activa; on the contrary, it enriches it. The philosophical contrast has been applied to an engagement with literature to suit the argument. Thus it turns out that the poetry Campion currently provides will actually be more entertaining and more appropriate for the prince. Elsewhere, too, Campion uses classical terminology and concepts to characterise (and thus ennoble) his own poetry. For instance, at the beginning of the second book, Campion employs terms such as ineptiae (‘trifles’), libellus (‘little book’) and politus

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3. Thomas Campion (‘polished’) with reference to his own poetry, i.e. the core Neoteric terminology of Catullus and his contemporaries, later adopted by Martial (Epigr. 2.3; cf. also Epigr. 1.76; cf. e.g. Cat. 1; 14a; Mart. 1.1; 1.3; 1.4; 1.35; 1.113). While there is a tension between classical concepts and the modern framework in such ‘literary’ poems, other poems display a more obvious clash, since Campion, despite retaining the classical poetic form and language, adds a contemporary British relevance to many epigrams: they are addressed to or are about a great number of friends and acquaintances; they deal with notable figures like Sir Francis Drake (Epigr. 1.94; 1.97); they comment on royal events, such as the death of members of the royal family (e.g. Epigr. 1.41; 1.43; 1.96; 1.124; 1.188; 2.4); they discuss characteristics of Britain and London (e.g. Epigr. 1.69; 1.70; 1.144; 1.148; 1.187; 2.19; 2.47).9 For instance, Campion celebrates William Camden (1551-1623) because of the description of Britain in his Britannia (1st ed.: 1586), since, thanks to him, he had got to know his ‘fatherland’ well (Epigr. 1.69).10 Moreover, Campion has some epigrams in which he plays with the fact that various languages were in use at the time. For instance, the poet says that an individual called Ligo is jealous of British advocates because of their Latin (Epigr. 1.73) and that Ligo is unable to use correct Latin words himself (Epigr. 1.82).11 Campion combines the theme of languages with aspects of love poetry when he talks about languages spoken by women (Epigr. 1.168; 2.186). In one of those poems (Epigr. 2.186) the poet declares that French is the language of women and England is the country of women, giving their respective characteristics; as this poem is addressed to a Lalage, this seemingly self-contained statement about contemporary women is connected to classical love poetry, since Campion has chosen the name of a beloved who features in Horace’s Odes (cf. Hor. Carm. 1.22.10, 23; 2.5.16), including the famous poem starting with the words integer vitae, to which Campion alludes elsewhere (A Booke of Ayres. Part I. XVIII; Two Bookes of Ayres. The First Booke. II).12 While Campion’s Latin epigrams have a strongly classical flavour, connections to specific Roman poems frequently cannot be identified, and this vagueness perhaps makes it easier to include references to the contemporary world. Even when a relationship to particular classical models is obvious, the material tends to be placed in different contexts. For instance, two epigrams focus on giving kisses and giving a certain number of kisses (Epigr. 2.12; 2.136). These recall two famous poems by Catullus, the so-called basia poems, popular in Campion’s time,13 where Catullus plays with giving kisses and their numbers (Cat. 5; 7). In one of Campion’s epigrams (Epigr. 2.12), the beloved promises seven

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Gesine Manuwald kisses if the lover leaves, and he then stays precisely because of the kisses: the poem thus is no longer a game with numbers or an encouragement to enjoy life, but rather an ironic comment on the behaviour of girls in love.14 Elsewhere the effect of a poem builds on the relationship to a recognisable verse from Roman poetry: one epigram (Epigr. 1.170) starts with the words Pro patria si quis dulci se dixerit, Eure, | Velle mori, which are reminiscent of a famous line from one of Horace’s Roman Odes (Hor. Carm. 3.2.13, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori).15 At the same time the quotation itself has been given a different sense: while Horace says ‘it is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country’, Campion’s version is ‘if anyone should say that they wish to die for their sweet country’. The poem develops in an unexpected direction, commenting on people’s motives, and ends with the conclusion ‘still every courageous person will fall for their country; if it is good, it has deserved it; if, however, it is bad, it is sweet to die’, which turns the issue into a poignant and ambiguous political statement. Rather than basing himself on well-known wording, Campion may also take his starting point from well-known motifs. In one epigram he narrates how the boy Lycius approaches the girl Clytha, who is asleep; he kisses her more and more eagerly, as she does not move and he believes that she is still asleep, while she, equally deceitful, enjoys the situation, and this game then gets repeated (Epigr. 2.60).16 This alludes to a poem by Propertius, in which the lover comes home, drunk and late at night, and wishes to kiss his beloved Cynthia, but refrains from doing so because he is afraid of her anger; instead he plays with her and offers presents to her until she wakes up and reproaches him for leaving her alone (Propertius 1.3). It also recalls a poem by Ovid, in which his beloved Corinna comes upon the lover who takes a nap in the midday heat; he then removes her clothes, and they start making love to each other (Amores 1.5). While Campion’s version does not include clear references to the contemporary world and might be regarded as almost timeless, he still has changed the set-up of the ancient models by combining the two and altering the relationship between the two lovers (see also below). Throughout his poetic career Campion combined ancient and contemporary elements in contents and based himself on classical structures in form, though his later poetry moved on in several respects. Campion offers an ‘autobiographical’ explanation at the beginning of the second book of epigrams in the 1619 edition. In the second epigram (Epigr. 2.2), addressed to the reader, the poet assigns his earlier poetry to a phase governed by Venus; afterwards his Muse had fallen silent since earning

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3. Thomas Campion a living became the main concern; finally he announces that his old Muse (i.e. epigrammatic poetry) is returning, but as something greater and having learned to talk with greater seriousness. The middle of the poem includes an additional piece of information: ‘Apollo had led me into the fields of medicine and taught me to set British words to music’ (Epigr. 2.2.5-6).17 This must refer to the fact that in the meantime Campion had started to write poetry in English rather than in Latin, with the first collection of English Ayres published in 1601. It is interesting that he feels obliged to explain the move; most strikingly, although the change of language means a major step away from classical models, he refers it back to Apollo, the classical god of (medicine and) poetry, whom he follows, thereby adopting a conceit that is also found in Virgil and Propertius (cf. Virg. Ecl. 6.1-12; Prop. 3.3). So, allegedly, it was the classical god of poetry who taught Campion to compose poetry in the vernacular and to set the poetry to music as he did in his Ayres. Campion regards Ayres as the equivalent of epigrams, as he states in the introduction to the first collection (1601):18 ‘What Epigrams are in Poetrie, the same are Ayres in musicke, then in their chiefe perfection when they are short and well seasoned.’ He then goes on to derive this form of poetry from ancient models. At the same time Campion is aware of the fact that the Ayre is a modern form of poetry that exists in different forms in different countries; against this background he subscribes to writing English Ayres, as he says in another preface slightly later (c. 1613):19 ‘Short Ayres, if they be skilfully framed, and naturally exprest, are like quicke and good Epigrammes in Poesie, many of them shewing as much artifice, and breeding as great difficultie as a larger Poeme. Non omnia possumus omnes, said the Romane Epick Poet [Virg. Ecl. 8.63]. But some there are who admit onely French or Italian Ayres, as if euery Country had not his proper Ayre, which the people thereof naturally usurpe in their Musicke. Others taste nothing that comes forth in Print, as if Catullus or Martials Epigrammes were the worse for being published. In these English Ayres, I haue chiefely aymed to couple my Words and Notes louingly together, which will be much for him to doe that hath not power ouer both.’ Campion’s poems are indeed English Ayres in the sense that their wording follows the conventions of the English language, they consist of rhyming lines, and the music fits in with English sounds. Nevertheless, their subject matter and form continue to derive inspiration from classical Latin poetry. Here the fusion of ancient and contemporary material consists in the presentation of classical motifs (in adapted form) in a modern language. In some of these poems Campion starts off with a famous line from

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Gesine Manuwald a well-known classical model (in an English version) and thus activates a certain context in the minds of learned readers, but then completes the poem by moving in a different direction. This applies to the poem presented in The Guardian, ‘My sweetest Lesbia let vs liue and loue’ (A Booke of Ayres. Part I. I).20 It picks up Catullus’ ‘Let us live, my Lesbia, and love’ (Cat. 5.1, vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus),21 a poem that is also behind some of Campion’s Latin epigrams (Epigr. 2.12; 2.136; see above). Campion follows Catullus up to line six and then continues differently. He turns the last two lines adopted from the ancient model into a sort of refrain that is repeated (in slightly modified form) at the end of each of the three stanzas. While Catullus’ poem is basically an encouragement to enjoy life and frolic as long one as one can and not to be bothered by old people’s objections, Campion’s version is rather a general defence of a life devoted to love and peace, contrasting it with that of a soldier, and it also incorporates material from the works of other Roman poets.22 Moreover, it is not only that Campion starts from the same broad classical basis for both his neo-Latin and his English poetry; he may even use the same motifs and models, as for the kiss poems (cf. also Two Bookes of Ayres. The Second Booke. X; XVIII). Besides, Campion has an excluded lover’s song in both Latin and English (Epigr. 2.89; The Third Booke of Ayres. XVII); there are comments on the death of Prince Henry in both languages (Epigr. 1.124; Songs of Mourning: bewailing the vntimely death of Prince Henry); and his Descriptions of Maskes exhibit a mixture of English and Latin texts.23 A good example of the close interaction between neo-Latin and English can be found in Campion’s descriptions of an encounter between a lover and his sleeping beloved on the basis of Propertius (1.3) and Ovid (Amores 1.5). Besides the Latin epigrams (Epigr. 2.60; see above), there is an English version in the first collection of Ayres, ‘It fell on a sommers day’ (A Booke of Ayres. Part I. VIII).24 In all cases Campion’s lover is more courageous than the speaker in Propertius and moves on to kissing the beloved, who pretends to be sleeping and enjoys the deceit, herself actively deceiving, and this game then develops into a routine. In the English version there are no references to elements of classical myths (as there are in Propertius and Ovid), and there is more information on circumstantial detail, which makes it appear more like an event in contemporary everyday life. Some of these details come from Ovid’s poem, in which the lover rests at midday, when his beloved appears and they proceed to make love to each other. For in the English version, even more noticeably than in the Latin version, Campion combines elements from both Propertius and Ovid; he thus creates a

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3. Thomas Campion new version of such an incident in English, against the background of the classical versions and his own Latin poems. If one looks back over this rapid review of some examples of Thomas Campion’s short poetry, it becomes clear that he was fully at home in neo-Latin as well as English poetry and was working from a classical basis in both cases. Yet his own procedures in theory and practice are not entirely coherent: while in an early treatise (Obseruations in the Art of English Poesie, 1602) Campion argues against the modern fashion of rhymes and instead advocates a rhythmic structure based on short and long syllables – as in classical poetry – even for English verse, when actually writing poetry in English, he typically followed the common formal conventions of his time. At the same time, while he adapted to the standard in form, he continued to use classical literature as a basis for themes and motifs in all his poetry. This agrees with the fact that in Campion’s entire poetic output there is almost no reference to earlier writers in the vernacular (either in English or in other European languages) nor to other early modern neo-Latin writers.25 Only in the first Latin elegy (which was removed later) in his first collection of poetry in Latin (1595) does Campion refer to the achievements of Geoffrey Chaucer as a forerunner in producing poetry in Britain (El. 1.19-28). In the same poem Campion presents himself as the first love poet in Britain: ‘And let them celebrate the first poet from the name of Brutus to sing sweet elegies and his own love affairs’ (El. 1.7-8).26 There was apparently a feeling that his poetry, while being based on classical precedents, was bringing something new to Britain, and that this was an achievement. It was this deed that was also praised by contemporaries, for instance by his friend Charles Fitzgeffrey, who said in a Latin epigram (1601): ‘You, to whose genius Roman Elegy is indebted to the same extent to which it was earlier indebted to her Naso [i.e. Ovid]! He, albeit against his will, has led her from the coast of Latium into the region of Scythia and to the barbarian Getae. Under your leadership she has visited the ocean-blue British for the first time and the city that she can rightly call her city: (For the great conqueror far and wide and the ruler of the earth – after your strength had been broken, Cassivelanus –, Iulius, had once ordered as victor that the Ausonian people and the household gods of Latium be honoured in this city) thus you have called back the Muses, exiled by Naso’s crime, to their fatherland and returned them to their people.’27 Whether or not the remark is meant to be entirely serious, Campion is recognised as having carried out the quintessential transfer of classical Latin elegiac poetry to Britain, which is interpreted as an act of

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Gesine Manuwald bringing back the Muses, who had ended up in barbarian lands as a result of the relegation of the Augustan poet Ovid; it is even claimed that Britain was the proper home of the Muses, as established by Julius Caesar himself.28 This is an ingenious way of both asserting novelty and acknowledging a respected model, which helps to increase the value of one’s own work and is also reminiscent of the practice of classical Roman poets with respect to recreating Greek literature in Latin. This confirms that Campion’s starting point for all his works is firmly rooted in classical, mainly Latin, poetry and the connotations it evokes;29 he adopts its terminology, motifs, assessment of literary genres, styles and major figures. The use of ancient poetry as a starting point does not mean that Campion just imitates or translates. Instead, over the course of his poetic career there seems to have been a complex process at work that led to an increasingly independent treatment of ancient literature: initially Campion kept the language of the source texts and used their form and subject matter not only to discuss similar themes, but also to present contemporary events and reflections on them in this format. Within this framework he later adopted greater seriousness, creating more or less explicit moral messages. When moving to writing poetry in English as well, he managed to establish elements of ancient literature in his country’s national poetry, while sticking to the same ancient basis and keeping the same mixture of seriousness and light poetry. Setting the English poems to music contributed to developing a specific form of Ayre in England, which he regarded as a modern form based on ancient precedent. Thomas Campion not only was at the heart of such transfers and fusions of classical and vernacular literatures and languages in his time, but also reflected on it and thus contributed to developing England’s ‘new poetry’. Notes 1. Cf. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/22/poem-weeksweetest-lesbia-campion. 2. All references to and quotations from works by Campion are based on Vivian’s edition (1909), still the standard edition of Campion’s works; quotations from Campion’s Latin poetry have been checked against the original editions of 1595 and 1619 and are given with their spelling and punctuation. Vivian’s edition is supplemented by some anthologies as well as the more recent, yet less comprehensive edition by Davis (1967), which has slightly more explanatory notes (on the existing editions, none of which is regarded as completely satisfactory, cf. Bryan 1974: 408; Wilson 1989: 7). Campion’s Latin poetry, along with an English translation, is also available at: http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/campion. English translations in this paper have been

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3. Thomas Campion inspired by the English versions on this website by Dana F. Sutton (1997 / 1999) and in Davis’ edition (1967), but have all been adapted. 3. For a survey of scholarship on Campion cf. Bryan 1974 (cf. also Wilson 1989: 1-10). The period since then has seen the appearance of monographs by Lindley (1986) and Davis (1987), but little other research activity. On Campion’s Latin poetry cf. Bradner 1940: 52-4, 81-3 and esp. Binns 1974, who was the first to draw the attention of modern scholars to Campion’s Latin poetry by a dedicated study, focusing mainly on the elegies. Both authors conclude that it ‘must be acknowledged that Campion is not a great writer of Latin poetry’ (Binns 1974: 24). This view, which has been shared by many (cf. e.g. Vivian 1909: liv-lv), may be one reason for the limited attention that has been paid to Campion’s Latin poetry. 4. On the cultural context, the Latin literature of the period, literary relations between England and the Continent, as well as translations between Latin and the vernaculars cf. generally Binns 1990. McFarlane (1980: 10-11) draws attention to some characteristics of English neo-Latin poetry (peak between 1570 and 1620; popularity of epigrammatic verse; in England rather later than in the rest of Europe; bilingualism of most writers), all of which apply to Campion. 5. On Thomas Campion’s biography cf. e.g. Vivian 1909: ix-l; Davis 1967: xxix-xxx; 1987: 1-21; Lowbury et al. 1970: 14-31; Eldridge 1971: 41-3; Bickford Jorgens 1996. 6. Cf. Epigr. 1.167 (Vivian 1909: 259), Ad Labienum: Tres nouit, Labiene, Phæbus artes; | Vt narrant veteres sophi; peræquè | Quas omnes colui, colamque semper: | Nunc omnes quoque musicum, et poetam | Agnoscunt, medicumque Campianum (‘Phoebus, Labienus, knew three arts, as the ancient sages tell us; in the same way I have cultivated all those, and I will always cultivate them: Now all people acknowledge Campion as a musician and a poet and a doctor’); cf. also Epigr. 2.2, Ad Lectorem (n. 17 below). Campion further alludes to Apollo as the god of music and to his own status as a physician in the preface to the treatise A New Way of making Fowre Parts in Counter-point, by a most familiar, and infallible Rule, where he explains it by the precedent of Galen (Vivian 1909: 191). 7. Cf. Epigr. 2.24 (Vivian 1909: 275), Ad Marinum: Parui tu facis optumos poetas, | Laudas historicos, amasque laxum | Sermonem, pedibus grauis Marine, | Sparsas nec sale fabulas moraris. | Cur mirabilis omnibus, Marine, | Scriptor fit Plato? quippe fabulosus (‘You hold the best poets in small regard, you praise historians, and you love loose prose, heavy-footed Marinus. You do not stop for fables spiced with wit. Why, Marinus, was Plato the most admirable of writers? Because he was fond of telling stories’). 8. Cf. Epigr. 1.1 (Vivian 1909: 237), Ad Excelsissimum Florentissimumque Carolum Magnæ Britanniæ Principem: Ludicra qui tibi nunc dicat, olim (amplissime Princeps) | Grandior vt fueris, grandia forte canet. | Quæq; genus celebrare tuum, & tua lucida possunt | Facta, domi crescunt, siue patrata foris. | At tenues ne tu nimis (optime) despice musas, | Pondere magna valent, parua lepore juuant. | Regibus athletæ spatijs grati esse solebant | Apricis; nani, ridiculique domi. | Magnus Alexander magno plaudebat Homero, | Suspiciens inter prælia ficta deos. | Cæsar maior eo Romana epigrammata legit; | Sceptrigera quædam fecit & ipse manu. | Talia sed recitent alij tibi (maximè Princeps) | Tu facias semper maxima; parua lege. | Enecat actiuam quia contemplatio vitam | Longa; brevis, necnon ingeniosa, fouet (‘This man who now speaks these trifles for you, in the future, most distinguished Prince, when

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Gesine Manuwald you have grown greater, will perhaps sing great things. These will be able to celebrate your family and your brilliant deeds, whether occurring at home or accomplished abroad. But, oh best of men, do not overly condemn my slender Muses, for great poetry prevails by weight, small poetry pleases by wit. Athletes used to be welcome to kings in the sunny open spaces and to be ridiculous dwarfs indoors. Great Alexander applauded great Homer, admiring the gods among fictitious battles. Caesar, greater than him, read Roman epigrams; indeed he wrote a few himself with his sceptre-wielding hand. But, greatest Prince, let others recite such things to you; you should always do greatest things and read small ones. For contemplation, when long, kills active life, but supports it, when short and ingenious in particular’). 9. An approach that assesses Campion’s epigrams only in relation to classical models is therefore somewhat inappropriate (but cf. Bradner 1940: 81). 10. Cf. Epigr. 1.69 (Vivian 1909: 246), Ad Guil. Camdenum: Legi operosum iamdudum, Camdene, volumen, | Quo gens descripta, & terra Britanna tibi est. | Ingenij fœlicis opus, solidiq; laboris; | Verborum, & rerum, splendor vtrinque nitet. | Lectorem vtq; pium decet, hoc tibi reddo merenti, | Per te quod patriam tam bene nosco meam (‘A long time ago I have read, Camden, your laborious volume, in which the people and the land of Britain are described by you, a work of a fruitful mind and solid labour; the splendour of the style and the subject matter shines equally. And, as it suits a pious reader, I return my thanks to you who have earned it since I know my fatherland so well because of you’). On Camden see the chapter by Angus Vine in this volume. 11. Cf. Epigr. 1.73 (Vivian 1909: 247), In Ligonem: Inuideat quamuis sua verba Latina Britannis | Causidicis, docto nunc Ligo fertur equo. | Et medici partes agit vndique notus; Alenum | Scenarum melius vix puto posse decus (‘However much Ligo envies British lawyers their Latin words, he now rides on a learned horse. And he plays the rôle of a doctor, well-known everywhere; I hardly believe that Alenus [Edward Alleyn (1566-1626), famous actor and producer; cf. Vivian 1909: 372; Davis 1967: 413 n. 8] could be a better adornment of the stage’); 1.82 (Vivian 1909: 248), In Ligonem: Ligo Latine vulnerarium potum | Dicere volebat; vuluerarium dixit (‘Ligo wanted to say “harmful drink”; he said “fertile drink” ’). 12. Cf. Epigr. 2.186 (Vivian 1909: 300), Ad Lalagen: Lingua est Gallica lingua fœminarum; | Mollis, lubrica, blandiens labellis, | Affundens, Lalage, decus loquenti: | Terra est Anglica terra fœminarum; | Simplex, suauis, amans, locis honestans | Semper præcipuis genus tenellum (‘The French language is the language of women, soft, fluid, pleasant on their lips, Lalage, giving elegance to the speaker. The English land is the land of women, simple, sweet, loving, always making the fair sex honest with its excellent places’). 13. For an overview of adaptations of Catullus’ basia poems in the English Renaissance cf. Duckett 1925: 30-41; Braden 1979; cf. also Davis 1967: 18. 14. Cf. Epigr. 2.12 (Vivian 1909: 273), In Melleam: Mellea mî si abeam promittit basia septem; | Basia dat septem, nec minùs inde moror: | Euge licet vafras fugit hæc fraus vna puellas, | Basia maiores ingerere vsque moras (‘Mellea promises me seven kisses if I go away; she gives seven kisses, and I do not linger any less for this: excellent; obviously this one deceit escapes clever girls, that kisses create even longer stays’). This poem is a modified Latin version of Canto tertio ‘in the Poems and Sonets of Sundry Other Noblemen and Gentlemen appended to Newman’s surreptitious edition of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella [1591]’ (Vivian 1909: 349). This piece has been ascribed to Campion

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3. Thomas Campion by several scholars (Vivian 1909: li, 376-7; Davis 1967: 425 n. 3; Bickford Jorgens 1996: 40), but the attribution has been challenged by Wilson (1989: 14-15). The song’s first stanza runs as follows: ‘My Loue bound me with a kisse | That I should no longer staie: | When I felt so sweete a blisse | I had lesse power to passe away: | Alas! that women do not knowe | Kisses make men loath to go’ (Vivian 1909: 350). 15. Cf. Epigr. 1.170 (Vivian 1909: 260), Ad Eurum: Pro patria si quis dulci se dixerit, Eure, | Velle mori; ridens vt sibi viuat, ais, | Ciuis auarus; & vt seruetur Caccula rostris; | Splendeat vt picta veste rotaque Calus. | Sic tu; pro patria fortis cadet attamen omnis; | Si bona sit, merita est; sin mala, dulce mori (‘If anybody should have claimed, Eurus, that he wishes to die for his sweet fatherland, you mockingly point out that this greedy citizen lives for himself; and that Caccula saves himself for the courtrooms, and Calus so that he may shine with his embroidered suits and painted carriage. Thus say you. Still, each courageous man will die for his fatherland; if it is a good one, it deserves this; if, however, it is a bad one, it is sweet to die’). 16. Cf. Epigr. 2.60 (Vivian 1909: 281), In Lycium et Clytham: Somno compositam iacere Clytham, | Aduertens Lycius puer puellam, | Hanc furtim petit, et genas prehendens | Molli basiolum dedit labello. | Immotam vt videt, altera imprimebat | Sensim suauia, moxque duriora, | Istæc conticuit velut sepulta. | Subrisit puer, vltimumque tentat | Solamen, nec adhuc mouetur illa, | Sed cunctos patitur dolos dolosa. | Quis tandem stupor hic? cui nec anser | Olim, par nec erat vigil Sibilla; | Nunc correpta eadem nouo veterno | Ad notos redit indies sopores (‘The boy Lycius, noticing the girl Clytha stretched out in sleep, seeks her stealthily and, taking her by the cheeks, gave her a kiss with tender lip. When he saw that she was not moving, he gently gave more kisses and eventually more forceful ones. She remained quiet as if buried. The boy grinned and attempts to gain the ultimate consolation; and still she is not moving, but suffers all his deceit, herself full of deceit. What kind of numbness is this then? Formerly neither the goose nor the wakeful Sibyl was equal to her; now, the same girl, caught by fresh numbness, returns to the tested slumbers every day’). This is a revision of the epigram De Thermanio & Glaia in the 1595 edition (Somno compositam iacere vidit | Glaiam Thermanius puer puellam, | Diducit tacita manu solutas | Vestes, illa silet, femur prehendit, | Suaviumq; leui dedit labello, | Illa conticuit velut sepulta: | Subrisit puer, vltimumq; tentat | Gaudium nec adhuc mouetur illa, | Sed lubens patitur dolos dolosa. | Quis nouus stupor? ante Glaya molli | Ansere, aut vigilans magis Sybilla, | Lethargo quasi iam graui laborans | Noctes atque dies trahis sopores.; cf. Vivian 1909: 343; Davis 1967: 505). 17. Cf. Epigr. 2.2 (Vivian 1909: 270), Ad Lectorem: Lusus si mollis, iocus aut leuis hîc tibi, Lector | Occurrit, vitæ prodita vere scias | Dum regnat Cytheræa, ex illo musa quieuit | Nostra diu, Cereris curaque maior erat: | In medicos vbi me campos deduxit Apollo; | Aptare & docuit verba Britanna sonis. | Namque in honore mihi semper fuit vnicus ille, | Cuius ego monitis obsequor vsque lubens. | Quid facerem? quàmuis alieno tempore, Phæbus | En vocat, & recitat pulueris ore scelus. | Respondente cheli, metuendaque dulce sonanti, | Quo sic perfudit mentem, animumque meum, | Cogerer vt chartis, malè sed memor, illa referre | Quæ cecinit mira dexteritate deus. | Hinc redijt mihi musa vetus, sed grandior, & quæ | Nunc aliqua didicit cum grauitate loqui; | Et noua non inuita mihi, diuersaque dictat, | Omnia quæ Lector candide reddo tibi (‘If gentle playfulness or easy wit meets you here, Reader, you should know that

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Gesine Manuwald they were produced in the springtime of my life, while Venus ruled. Afterwards my Muse long stayed silent, and the concern for Ceres was greater, when Apollo had led me into the fields of medicine and taught me to set British words to music. For he alone was always held in the highest honour by me, he whose orders I continuously follow willingly. What should I do? Lo, although the moment is not convenient, Phoebus summons me and recites with his mouth the crime of my efforts, with his lyre joining in, and sweetly singing what is to fear. Thereby he overwhelms my mind and spirit to such an extent that I am compelled to fill these pages with those things the god sang with wondrous skill, though I recall them imperfectly. Hence my old Muse has returned, but she is more sublime and has now learned how to say things with some gravity. And things that are novel and diverse, not unwelcome to me, she dictates, all of which, fair-minded Reader, I pass on to you’). 18. Cf. A Booke of Ayres: To the Reader (Vivian 1909: 4). The preface, opening a collection published jointly by Campion and Philip Rosseter, does not bear a signature. But it is generally acknowledged that it reflects Campion’s thoughts and was most probably written by him (cf. e.g. Lowbury et al. 1970: 47). 19. Cf. Two Bookes of Ayres: To the Reader (Vivian 1909: 114-15). 20. Cf. A Booke of Ayres. Part I. I (Vivian 1909: 6): ‘My sweetest Lesbia let vs liue and loue, | And though the sager sort our deedes reproue, | Let vs not way them: heau’ns great lampes doe diue | Into their west, and strait againe reuiue, | But soone as once set is our little light, | Then must we sleepe one euer-during night. || If all would lead their liues in loue like mee, | Then bloudie swords and armour should not be, | No drum nor trumpet peaceful sleepes should moue, | Vnles alar’me came from the campe of loue: | But fooles do liue, and wast their little light, | And seeke with paine their euer-during night. || When timely death my life and fortune ends, | Let not my hearse be vext with mourning friends, | But let all louers rich in triumph come, | And with sweet pastimes grace my happie tombe; | And Lesbia close vp thou my little light, | And crowne with loue my euer-during night.’ 21. On this connection cf. e.g. Vivian 1909: 355; Duckett 1915: 32; Harrington 1923: 159; Emperor 1928: 22-3; Benham 1933; Cunningham 1952; Davis 1967: 18 n. 7; Wilkinson 1967: 58-9; Lowbury et al. 1970: 49; Braden 1979: 212-13; Davis 1987: 44-5; Wilson 1989: 39-40. 22. Cf. e.g. Prop. 2.13B; 2.15; Tib. 1.1; 1.10; Ov. Am. 1.9. For a more detailed discussion cf. Manuwald 2010. 23. On Campion’s English poetry as a development of his Latin works cf. also Davis 1987: 116-17. For a list of ‘parallel’ pieces in both languages and some discussion, cf. Vivian 1909: l-li. 24. Cf. A Booke of Ayres. Part I. VIII (Vivian 1909: 10): ‘It fell on a sommers day, | While sweete Bessie sleeping laie | In her bowre, on her bed, | Light with curtaines shadowed, | Iamy came: shee him spies, | Opning halfe her heauie eies. || Iamy stole in through the dore, | She lay slumbering as before; | Softly to her he drew neere, | She heard him, yet would not heare, | Bessie vow’d not to speake, | He resolu’d that dumpe to breake. || First a soft kisse he doth take, | She lay still, and would not wake; | Then his hands learn’d to woo, | She dreamp’t not what he would doo, | But still slept, while he smild | To see loue by sleepe beguild. || Iamy then began to play, | Bessie as one buried lay, | Gladly still through this sleight | Deceiu’ in her owne deceit, | And since this traunce begoon, | She sleepes eu’rie afternoone.’ On this poem’s connection to specific ancient models and an entire subgenre cf.

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3. Thomas Campion Lindley 1986: 40-1. Lindley (1986: 55) compares the epigram and the lyric from a generic point of view and notes that in ‘the epigram  the conclusion is sprung upon the reader with little preparation’. While the presentation is indeed more concise in the epigram, it is not as abrupt as Lindley seems to suggest. The connection between the Latin and the English pieces was already noted by Vivian (1909: 355, 373) and Davis (1967: 429 n. 8). On the musical structure of the English poem and its tune cf. Lowbury et al. 1970: 52-3, 65-7, 180. 25. In his treatise Obseruations in the Art of English Poesy Campion recognises the achievements of earlier humanists, who revived classical traditions (Vivian 1909: 35): ‘Learning first flourished in Greece; from thence it was deriued vnto the Romaines, both diligent obseruers of the number and quantity of sillables, not in their verses only but likewise in their prose. Learning, after the declining of the Romaine Empire and the pollution of their language through the conquest of the Barbarians, lay most pitifully deformed till the time of Erasmus, Rewcline, Sir Thomas More, and other learned men of that age, who brought the Latine toong again to light, redeeming it with much labour out of the hands of the illiterate Monks and Friers: as a scoffing booke, entituled Epistolæ obscurorum virorum, may sufficiently testifie. In those lack-learning times, and in barbarized Italy, began that vulgar and easie kind of Poesie, which is now in vse throughout most parts of Christendome, which we abusiuely call Rime, and Meeter, of Rithmus and Metrum, of which I will now discourse.’ 26. Cf. El. 1.7-8 (Vivian 1909: 336): Et vatem celebrent Bruti de nomine primum | Qui molles elegos & sua furta canat; 1.19-28, Vt taceam musas, toto quas orbe silentes | Chaucerus mira fecerat arte loqui. | Ille Palæmonios variè depixit amores, | Infidamq; viro Chressida Dardanio. | Prodigiosa illo dictante canebat arator, | Ludicra, decertans cum molitore faber. | Sic peregrinantum ritus perstringit aniles, | Riualemq; dei deuouet vsq; papam. | Quis deus ô vates magnis erepte tenebris | Admouit capiti lumina tanta tuo? (‘Let me not pass over the Muses, whom, silent the world over, Chaucer by his marvellous skill had made speak. He painted the loves of Palaemon in varied hues, and Cressida who betrayed her Dardanian husband. As he was dictating, the ploughman sang his entertaining tales, the miller vying with the carpenter. Thus he touched upon the silly rituals of the pilgrims and even cursed the bishop, the rival of god. What god, o seer rescued from the great shadows, put such great eyes into your head?’). Cf. also Vivian 1909: xxxvii, 375. 27. Cf. Caroli Fitzgeofridi Affaniae: sive Epigrammatum Libri tres: Ejusdem Cenotaphia, Oxoniæ 1601, 56 (lib. 2), ‘Ad Thomam Campianum: O Cujus genio Romana Elegia debet | Quantum Nasoni debuit ante suo! | Ille, sed invitus, Latijs deduxit ab oris | In Scythicos fines barbaricosq; Getas. | Te duce cæruleos invisit prima Britannos | Quamq; potest vrbem dicere jure suam: | (Magnus enim domitor latè, dominator et orbis | Viribus effractis Cassivelane tuis, | IVLIVS Ausonium populu Latiosq; penates | Victor in hac olim iusserat vrbe coli) | Ergo relegatas Nasonis crimine Musas | In patriam revocas restituisq; suis.’ 28. For somewhat comparable notions cf. John Leland, Carmen 6, Commigratio bonarum literarum in Britanniam (printed 1589). 29. Cf. also Bradner 1940: 53.

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Gesine Manuwald Bibliography Benham, A.R. (1933) ‘Campion and Horace’, Philological Quarterly 12.3: 306. Bickford Jorgens, E. (1996) ‘Thomas Campion (1567-1620)’, in D.A. Richardson (ed.) Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 172: Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers, 38-47. Detroit, Washington (DC) and London. Binns, J.W. (1974) ‘The Latin Poetry of Thomas Campion’, in J.W. Binns (ed.) The Latin Poetry of English Poets, 1-25. London and Boston. Binns, J.W. (1990) Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age. Leeds (ARCA 24). Braden, G. (1979) ‘Viuamus, mea Lesbia in the English Renaissance’, English Literary Renaissance 9: 199-224. Bradner, L. (1940) Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry 15001925. New York and London (The Modern Language Association of America, General Series X). Bryan, M.B. (1974) ‘Recent Studies in Campion’, English Literary Renaissance 4: 404-11. Cunningham, J.V. (1952) ‘Campian and Propertius’, Philological Quarterly 31: 96. Davis, W.R. (ed.) (1967) The Works of Thomas Campion. Complete Songs, Masques, and Treatises with a Selection of the Latin Verse. Edited with an Introduction and Notes. Garden City (NY). Davis, W.R. (1987) Thomas Campion. Boston (Twayne’s English Authors Series 450). Duckett, E.S. (1925) Catullus in English Poetry. Northampton, MA (Smith College Classical Studies 6). Eldridge, M.T. (1971) Thomas Campion: His Poetry and Music (1567-1620). New York, Washington and Hollywood 1971. Emperor, J.B. (1928) The Catullian Influence in English Lyric Poetry, c. 16001650. University of Missouri, Columbia (The University of Missouri Studies 3.3). Harrington, K.P. (s. a.: 1923?) Catullus and his Influence. London, Calcutta and Sydney (Our Debt to Greece and Rome). Lindley, D. (1986) Thomas Campion. Leiden (Medieval and Renaissance Authors 7). Lowbury, E., Salter, T. and Young, A. (1970) Thomas Campion: Poet, Composer, Physician. London. Manuwald, G. (2010) ‘Elisabethanische Poesie auf antikem Fundament: Zu zwei “römischen” Gedichten von Thomas Campion’, Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft 34: 189-207. McFarlane, I.D. (1980) Renaissance Latin Poetry. Manchester (Literature in Context series). Vivian, P. (ed.) (1909) Campion’s Works. Oxford (repr. 1967, 1990). Wilkinson, L.P. (1967) ‘Propertius and Thomas Campion’, London Magazine 7.1: 56-65. Wilson, C. (1989) Words and Notes Coupled Lovingly Together: Thomas Campion, a Critical Study. New York and London (Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities).

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4

Juvenes ornatissimi: the student writing of George Herbert and John Milton Sarah Knight ‘A bard is sacred to the gods, and the priest of the gods’ – Diis etenim sacer est vates, divumque sacerdos (line 77) – declares Milton’s speaker in Elegia Sexta, written when he had just started his M.A. at Cambridge in 1629.1 Characterising poetic composition as highly serious, even sacerdotal, Milton apparently was as busy as the most dedicated religious officiant writing verse as a student. As a Cambridge undergraduate two decades earlier, George Herbert sent his mother Magdalen an English sonnet that also aligns poetry with piety:2 My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee, Wherewith whole showls of Martyrs once did burn, Besides their other flames. Doth Poetry Wear Venus Livery? only serve her turn?

Herbert was about seventeen when he wrote this sonnet, Milton around twenty-one when he wrote Elegia Sexta: for both young men, what the poet should be and what poetry should do were clearly important questions. Through an exploration of their student writing we can learn the answers that these two juvenes ornatissimi (‘most distinguished young men’) formulated at the earliest stages of their literary careers.3 Precocious talents, Herbert and Milton first meaningfully articulated as students what they perceived to be the poet’s responsibilities, arguing for the higher aims of poetry with images of holy bards and martyrs while negotiating their way through academic curricula. Particularly significant for this study, given the humanistic emphasis of early seventeenth-century curricula, are the ways in which these two profoundly Christian poets conceptualise the classical past and consequently represent the value of their own training in Greek and Latin for their poetic careers. Each writer saw youth as a time of action, as a proverb included in Herbert’s posthumously printed collection of English aphorisms Jacula Prudentium (1652) suggests – ‘An Idle youth, a needy Age’4 – and one of

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Sarah Knight Milton’s earliest Latin poems tellingly begins with the exhortations surge, age surge (‘get up, come on, get up!’).5 Throughout their careers, both authors convey a sense that there is little time to waste: judging by his industry during his short life it is highly unlikely that Herbert’s dotage would have been ‘needy’, while despite his blindness and the privations he faced after the Restoration, Milton kept on writing until his death in 1674. Both poets were supported – and, perhaps, propelled – by parents ambitious for their clever sons, and in their Latin works addressed to parents both authors clearly see a classical education as one of the most important gifts they had received. As well as sending poems home to his mother from Cambridge, after her death Herbert wrote the sequence Memoriae Matris Sacrum (1625-8/9), in which he praises the wonderful congruence between his erudite mother’s thoughts and voice (Sententiae cum voce mirè conuenit).6 Milton’s father’s involvement was also central to his education: in his 1631-2 poem Ad Patrem, written just after he left Cambridge, Milton thanked his father for financing his learning of Romuleae  facundia linguae, | Et Latii veneres (‘the eloquence of Romulus’ language and Latium’s beauties’, lines 79-80).7 Both poets attended important humanist schools in London, where they embarked on their first literary experiments, developing their voices as they moved from school to university, shaped, inevitably, as young poets by the places where they studied and the scholars who instructed and encouraged them. Herbert was at Westminster between 1604 and 1609, Milton at St Paul’s from around 1620 until 1625. Reading their early Latin work shows us two poets interested in challenging themselves, but we also see how these poems were shaped by authorship conditions at the Stuart university, peopled by academic personnel and underpinned by the pedagogy their authors had experienced. Herbert’s earliest published work appeared in official student anthologies of occasional verse, and Milton’s first efforts in Latin were apparently classroom exercises written while still a schoolboy at St Paul’s. His earliest extant Latin prose works, the student Prolusions (1674), were typically delivered in formal institutional contexts, to fulfil the requirements of the B.A. or M.A., the equivalent of modern viva voce examinations which test rhetorical agility and confidence as well as familiarity with scholarly content. Herbert arrived at Cambridge as a student who had already excelled academically. The concerns of his Westminster tutor that he would work too hard accompanied Herbert to Cambridge; praising the industry of Herbert and his contemporary John Hacket, who rose to prominence as Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, their tutor expressed certainty that ‘if they were careful not to impair their health with too much study, they would not fail to arrive at the top of learning in any

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4. Juvenes ornatissimi Art or Science’.8 Herbert matriculated at Cambridge in 1609, and left in the mid-1620s, permanently moving away in around 1628. He took his B.A. in 1613, M.A. in 1616, won a teaching position at Trinity in 1617 and became University Orator in 1620.9 He took great pride in his appointment, which he described in a September 1619 letter to his step-father Sir John Danvers (1584/5-1655) as ‘the finest place in the University’, listing the Orator’s prominent seating at academic meetings among ‘such like Gaynesses, which will please a young man well’.10 He wrote the English sonnets to his mother during his first undergraduate year in 1610, and most likely started his long English poem The Church-porch – which eventually formed the first section of The Temple (1633) – in 1614-15 before he took his M.A.11 Herbert was even more prolific in Latin. In 1612, he contributed two poems on the death of James VI and I’s eldest son Henry, Prince of Wales, to the University anthology Epicedium Cantabrigiense (Cambridge, 1612), and in 1619 he wrote another poem on the death of James’s wife Anna of Denmark for the collection Lacrymae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1619). In about 1620, he composed a series of Latin epigrams, Musae Responsoriae, written in response to the AntiTami-Cami-Categoria by the Scottish Puritan Andrew Melville (1545-1622). Melville’s work was printed in 1620, but probably first circulated in manuscript from 1604 onwards.12 Herbert’s response begins with three dedications (to King James; the new Prince of Wales and future King Charles I; and Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester), which prefix a series of forty short poems. He also wrote the two Latin collections Passio Discerpta and Lucus in the early 1620s. During his lifetime, only Herbert’s Latin works were published: the Memoriae Matris Sacrum, some of the occasional Latin verse, and two of his Latin orations delivered at Cambridge.13 All of his contemporary literary reputation depended, therefore, on Latin works written either while he was a student or soon after leaving Cambridge. Perhaps the most relevant Latin poems he wrote as a student about poetics and the importance of the classical past are the Musae Responsoriae and the two anthology poems on the death of Prince Henry, particularly illuminating examples of how poems generated within the confines of an institution could be both creative and exploratory. The Musae Responsoriae foreground a young Protestant moderate’s efforts to attack an ideological opponent while working out at the same time what kind of poetry he wants to write. Composed, to some extent, as ‘official’ counter-attacks by the then University Orator, this sequence nonetheless constitutes something much more interesting than an orthodox defence of a theological via media. The three anthology poems, too, soon move from a lament for royal deaths to meditations on poetry.

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Sarah Knight Conservative contexts apparently stimulated questing poetics. In their early works, and particularly later in their lives, Herbert and Milton represented student experience in ambivalent, even critical terms. Milton entered Christ’s College in 1625, took his B.A. in 1629 and M.A. in 1632.14 There is considerable debate about how his first year at Cambridge unfolded: he may not have got on well with his tutor, and some scholars have argued that he was rusticated, although the passage in Elegia Prima cited as evidence – in which the speaker refers to hoc exilium (‘this exile’) – could just as easily be referring to the long university vacation.15 In and after his second year, in any case, Milton was extraordinarily productive, as his output in the single year 1629 illustrates. In Elegia Sexta, he zestfully lists his poetic activities to his friend Charles Diodati, then staying with friends in the countryside. As well as (self-evidently) completing the Elegy, over the last month or so beforehand Milton had finished what he calls the dona quidem dedimus Christi natalibus illa (‘those gifts in fact I have given for Christ’s birthday’, line 87) – otherwise known as the ode ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ – and had written some pressa  patriis meditata cicutis (‘unadorned things practised on the pipes of your [i.e. Diodati’s] homeland’, line 89), presumably the six Italian sonnets ‘Donna leggiadra’, ‘Qual in colle aspro’, ‘Ridonsi donne e giovani amorosi’, ‘Diodati, e te ’l dirò’, ‘Per certo i bei vostr’ occhi’ and ‘Giovane piano’. Even when judged against Milton’s rapid compositional habits at Cambridge, ten poems in three different languages is an impressive list. Three months previously, as well, Milton had ghost-written two Latin act verses for an oration delivered by John Forster, a Christ’s Fellow, at the disputations staged for the Cambridge Chancellor Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, one of Charles I’s leading courtiers, poems now known as Naturam non pati senium and De Idea Platonica.16 In 1628-9, Milton wrote to his St Paul’s contemporary, Alexander Gil (1596/7-1642?), to describe/boast about this Fellow’s request, emphasising his youth (and thereby hinting at his own precocity): the Fellow, Milton writes, [c]armina super quæstionibus pro more annuo componenda  forte meæ Puerilitati commisit (‘happened to entrust to my boyish self the poems on disputation questions which need to be composed according to yearly custom’).17 Milton’s self-identification as a puer (‘boy’) is interesting; more typically, he characterises his student self as a iuvenis (‘youth’), as in the poem Ad Patrem, in which he mentions his iuvenilia carmina (‘youthful poems’, line 115).18 Possibly Milton reasoned that puer more accurately reflected the developmental stage at which he had first met Gil at St Paul’s, or wants to insist on his precocity to an author he admired. In any case, Milton was keenly aware of the kudos associated with being asked to write Latin verse for

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4. Juvenes ornatissimi others, which gives us some insight into his desire to build a reputation while at Cambridge. After his arrival at Christ’s in 1625, in Latin Milton wrote another six elegies; poems on the death of Dr Nicholas Felton, Bishop of Ely, and that of the University vice-chancellor, Dr John Gostlin; and six poems on the 1605 Gunpowder Plot including In Quintum Novembris. While at Cambridge, Milton did not contribute Latin poems to university anthologies as Herbert had, although one of his most significant early English poems, the threnody Lycidas, was first printed in the anthology Justa Edouardo King naufrago (Cambridge, 1638) to commemorate the death of the young Christ’s Fellow Edward King, which occurred half a decade after Milton had received his M.A.19 The Latin elegies Milton wrote at Cambridge, as well as his two commemorative poems for Felton and Gostlin, show how he was developing his poetic voice within the university context. The elegies were, we assume, optional poems that Milton wrote in his spare time, although for a student seeking to gain recognition and praise, as John Hale has rightly observed of the ‘option’ to write funeral verse for academic dignitaries, ‘the exact measure of voluntariness would vary’.20 While some of Milton’s significant early Latin work was written to fulfil curricular requirements, as in the case of the Prolusions, the poems may have met a more nebulous, but perhaps no less pressing, need to gain attention. Herbert and Milton were by no means politically radical thinkers or writers while they were at Cambridge: on the contrary, each seems to have been rewarded by a university seeking to avert any kind of seditious thought. The assertion made by Thomas Hobbes in Behemoth (1680), his account of the civil wars, that ‘the core of rebellion  are the universities’ seems also to have been the Stuart monarchs’ fear from the moment James acceded in 1603.21 During the 1610s and 20s, administration and teaching at the English universities were closely enmeshed with the monarchy and court, and both James and his son Charles in turn monitored Oxford and Cambridge extremely closely, fearful that sedition would be bred there by those they saw as religious extremists, particularly Puritans and Catholic infiltrators. James visited Oxford and Cambridge relatively often on his progresses, controlling the University administration by making sure that his loyal courtiers were placed high in the institutional hierarchy, an approach Charles followed until the ruptures of the 1640s and 50s. In Milton’s time at Cambridge, for example, the appointment of Henry Rich as Cambridge’s Chancellor in October 1628, immediately after the assassination in August of George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, clearly showed Charles’s campaign to place his favourites in central positions of academic power. Charles’s Letter to the University for choice of ye

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Sarah Knight Channcellor (28 August 1628) unambiguously recommends Rich to the scholars as ‘a person acceptable to us, & dayly attending on our person  [w]hose hearty affection to advance Religion & learning generally in our Kingdoms and specially in the Fountains, cannot be doubted of’.22 Rich’s 1628 appointment was typical, for while early Stuart Cambridge contained, as universities have always done, an actual variety of ideological perspectives, in theory – and usually in practice – academic success depended on a certain degree of political and religious conformity. The fact that Herbert was chosen first as a praelector in Rhetoric in 1618, then as University Orator in 1620, suggests that he was seen as an exemplary student, a talented mouthpiece for the University on official occasions. As well as giving formal orations, several of which were printed, the University Orator also had to write Latin letters to various dignitaries on behalf of the University, acting as an institutional voice. Milton did not reach as prominent a position within Cambridge as Herbert. Yet although he would have to wait for the Interregnum and for employment within Cromwell’s Secretariat for Foreign Tongues to write official Latin letters, the fact that Milton’s ghost-written verses entertained Rich on an important state visit to Cambridge implies that this future Parliamentarian civil servant, and defender of regicide, was not already inhabiting these ideological positions as a student.23 Within a year of matriculation, Herbert had embarked on a lifelong process of examining the moral force of poetry, as we see in the two English sonnets to his mother. In particular, the sonnet ‘My God, where is that ancient heat’ cited at the start of this chapter works through a series of questions about love poetry versus religious poetry. Here the speaker expresses some confidence in turning language to fit his rhetorical purpose, and explores the relationship between ‘deep’ subject and ‘smooth’ verse in his address to God: ‘Or, since thy wayes are deep, and still the same, | Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name!’ (lines 10-11).24 This concern about the straight, smooth running of poetry – and its appropriateness to a godly subject – preoccupied Herbert in The Temple, too, as in ‘Jordan (I)’: ‘Is all good structure in a winding stair?’ (line 3).25 Herbert’s concerns in his Latin verse were not the same: he rarely questions the fluency of the medium, which suggests that he is more confident that Latin, or, at least, his own facility in Latin, is more apt for purpose than his use of the vernacular. Herbert often negatively defines poetry by listing what it is not: we see this technique at work in ‘The Quidditie’, for instance: ‘My God, a verse is not a crown, | No point of honour, or gay suit’ (lines 1-2).26 In the poem In Obitum Henrici Principis Walliae (1612), similarly, Herbert itemises what he will not do as a threnodic poet, and the ritual

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4. Juvenes ornatissimi sources of inspiration he rejects are explicitly pagan: Bacchic, Delphic, Orphic. His speaker will not clothe himself in ivy (hederae velatus amictu, line 2), will not summon the Muses to nocturna  vota (line 3); he will not draw rivers and mountains to him (lines 5-8).27 In fact, the poem doubts language’s power to ease grief in any way: Cur ideo verbis tristes effundere curas | Expeto, tanquam haec sit nostri medicina doloris? (‘So why do I strive to pour forth my sad concerns in words, as though this were medicine for our grief?’, lines 45-6). Questions of authentic emotion expressed, always problematic in the interpretation of poetry, become even more challenging in poems written to order, as it were, for an official state occasion like the Prince of Wales’s or the Queen’s death: we have no reason to assume that Herbert’s tristes curae were heartfelt, but the questions he poses in this poem seem to have been sufficiently pressing to remain open throughout his poetic career. Both ‘Jordan (I)’ and ‘The Quidditie’ circle back to articulations of simplicity, honesty, after a series of negative definitions of what poetry is: ‘Jordan (I)’ advocates plain speaking (‘Nor let them punish me with losse of ryme, | Who plainly say, My God, My King’, lines 14-15), while ‘The Quidditie’ ends with a direct monosyllabic statement of poetry’s symbiotic relationship with faith (‘But it [verse] is that which while I use | I am with thee, and Most take all’, lines 10-11). In the poem In Obitum Serenissimae Reginae Annae (1618-19), too, the speaker insists on his unsatisfactory fama  ingeniumque (‘reputation and talent’, line 4), and while these are fairly common articulations of the modesty topos, at the same time the insistence on the speaker’s inadequacy seems here directly related to his sense of his own youth and untried poetic voice.28 Milton also uses the commemorative poem as a means of meditating on poetry. His second elegy, In Obitum Praeconis Academici Cantabrigiensis, written on the death of Richard Ridding, the Cambridge beadle, in September 1626, stresses Ridding’s value to the Cambridge community, his remit to draw together the acies  togatas (‘toga-clad lines’, line 11) of students; Ridding’s reward for his value to the university is to be lamented by the entire ‘Academia’, by totis  scholis (‘all the schools’, line 24).29 A moving image of communal grief, perhaps, but while Milton demonstrates his classical reading, particularly Ovid and Homer, and his facility with ancient analogies (comparing Ridding to Cyllenius and Eurybates), the beadle gets somewhat lost amidst the comparisons. Unlike Herbert in In Obitum Henrici Principis Walliae, however, Milton’s speaker invokes classical ritual as a means of expressing grief, and does not distance his own voice from these rites, particularly in In Obitum Procancellarii Medici. Yet at the same time the representation of the classical past becomes ambiguous in his

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Sarah Knight student work. He often figures students as under the special protection of Apollo: Elegia Prima, for instance, suggests that the university is antipathetic to Phoebicolis (‘the devotees of Apollo’, line 14),30 while Lycidas (directly echoing Virgil’s sixth Eclogue) imagines Apollo ‘touch[ing] [the] trembling ears’ of the poem’s (recently graduated) speaker, telling him that ‘[f]ame is no plant that grows on mortal soil’ (lines 77-8), and urging him to move on.31 In his poem for the vice-chancellor John Gostlin, Milton seems at first also to be aligning Gostlin with Apollo to heighten the impression of universal and trans-historical grief (lines 29-32):32 Tuque o alumno maior Apolline, Gentis togatae cui regimen datum, Frondosa quem nunc Cirrha luget, Et mediis Helicon in undis 

30

And you, too, greater than Apollo your pupil, You who were given the leadership of the toga-clad race, For whom leafy Cirrha now mourns, And Helicon in the midst of its waters 

The speaker does not need to reject classical mourning rituals: Cirrha and Helicon (which Herbert’s speaker explicitly did not need) are involved in the mourning process. But despite the figurative involvement of these classical figures, if we look more closely, the representation of the pagan gods could be seen as somewhat dismissive: Milton figures the (Christian) Cambridge vice-chancellor as maior than the (pagan, albeit divine) Apollo. We could either read this as typical threnodic hyperbole, or we could interpret that maior as more meaningful, particularly since we see a similar implication in the invocation to Paradise Lost (1667), which simultaneously betrays its author’s profound love for Greek and Latin poetry and myth while articulating the conviction that its author’s ‘advent’rous song’ will ‘soar | Above the Aonian mount’ (Book 1, lines 14-15).33 Each poet was, of course, influenced by his classical reading, and concertedly allusive in his early writing: at the same time, even in the student poetry we see signs that another authorial model – Christian rather than pagan, in broad terms – is being formed and weighed in Herbert’s and Milton’s minds. It is predictable that these early poems should be dense with classical allusions, considering the education that both authors received, and while each perpetually reaches for Greek and Roman analogies, at the same time he often seems sharply conscious of the value of having learned Greek and Latin to such a high level as an Anglophone student. A mediating layer of classical study lying between ancient author and

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4. Juvenes ornatissimi seventeenth-century learner is acknowledged, making a discussion of pedagogical access to the classical languages often as prominent in these poems as an exploration of those languages’ literary fruits. In Ad Patrem, as we have seen, Milton acknowledges his father’s investment in language-learning, not just Romuleae  facundia linguae, | Et Latii veneres (lines 79-80) but also the [g]randia magniloquis elata vocabula Graiis (‘the lofty words of the grand-sounding Greeks’, line 81): these gifts prompt him to call his father pater optime.34 Unambiguously, here, the speaker articulates gratitude for the learning he has received. In the Musae Responsoriae sequence, too, Herbert’s speaker defends Latin and Greek against the imaginary Puritan’s objections, asking Cur Latiam linguam reris nimis esse profanam (‘Why do you think that the Latin language is too profane?’, XVI: In Catharum, line 1). The speaker also initially appears to be claiming the rhetorical and poetic force of facility in Greek and Latin for himself in the poem Ad Melvinum (XXXVII), claiming that he could invoke igneis Camoenis (‘fiery [Latin] Muses’) and a Musâ crepitante (‘crackling [Greek] Muse’, lines 19-20) for himself if he wanted to.35 I interpret Herbert’s use of the term Camoenis as referring to Latin Muses, and Musâ as deliberately transliterated Greek, implying poetic antecedents from each of the classical languages. But he uses a subjunctive to show that the invocation of Latin and Greek Muses was only ever a hypothetical possibility – te funditus  subruissem (‘I could have completely demolished you’, lines 19-20) – not the approach he eventually chooses, and again, further implying that he will forge a poetic mode less dependent on ancient precedents, the speaker again figures pagan ritual – this time, the rites of Cybele in Thessaly – as a poetic mode he rejects, arguing that he is [t]innitus Berecynthios omittens (‘leaving aside Cybele’s cymbals’, line 39) to write his poem.36 Here, perhaps, we see an anticipation of the speaker of ‘Jordan (I)’ and his strongly stated wish to be among those who ‘plainly say’, not those who ritually, mystically invoke. Herbert’s associative relationship with Greek and Latin precedents is tangled, certainly – admiring, like Milton’s, but also ambivalent – and even in poems as early as the Musae Responsoriae we can detect an effort to step away from the tangle and move towards ‘plain’ saying. Weaving together youthful poetics, emerging theological consciousness and deference towards one of the best-known scholars of the day, Herbert’s and Milton’s markedly different poems for the famous high church preacher and Bishop of Winchester, Lancelot Andrewes (15551626), offer a useful point of comparison. An alumnus of Merchant Taylors’ School, where he was taught by the influential humanist schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster (1531/2-1611), Andrewes had enjoyed a distinguished career at late Elizabethan Cambridge, where his lin-

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Sarah Knight guistic gifts not only in Greek and Latin, but also in Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac and Arabic, singled him out. A remarkable preacher, in 1597 Andrewes became twelfth prebend of Westminster Abbey, and went on to become Dean in 1601, the same year Herbert entered Westminster School.37 In the Musae Responsoriae, Herbert addressed a six-line dedicatory poem to him, and just before he became University Orator, he wrote Andrewes a letter written in Latin, which makes clear Herbert’s regard. Even if we take the necessarily complimentary rhetorical register of both works into account, Herbert’s modes of address still seem uncommonly warm: sancte Pater (‘holy father’) in the poem; sanctissime pater (‘most holy father’) and Heros illustrissime (‘most distinguished hero’) in the letter. In the dedicatory poem, Herbert juxtaposes his own poetic inexperience against Andrewes’ learning and sanctity (lines 1-4):38 Sancte Pater, coeli custos, quo doctius vno Terra nihil, nec quo sanctius astra vident; Cùm mea futilibus numeris se verba viderent Claudi, penè tuas praeteriêre fores. Holy father, guardian of heaven: earth witnesses nothing more learned, nor the stars anything more holy; when my words saw that they were enclosed by worthless metre, they could hardly get past your doors.

The tone here is of the schoolboy still wanting to impress the erudite teacher, and while pater is of course the appropriate ecclesiastical mode of address, Herbert may also have had the familial meaning in mind, conveying the impression of a clever son seeking to impress an academic father. The speaker offers ‘worthless’ quantitative poetry to the most learned man on earth: is he apologising for writing poetry, rather than translating the words of scripture? Andrewes had been centrally involved in the preparation of the new authorised ‘King James Version’ of the Bible for the best part of a decade, and was a well-known linguistic scholar. The letter certainly defers to the excellence of Andrewes’ prose style and classical learning, particularly in what Peter McCullough has aptly called its ‘self-conscious postscript’:39 Quare malui seruire auribus Tuis, creberrimâ Antiquitatis lectione tersis atque expolitis, quàm luxuriae saeculi, ambitionísque strumae, non adeò sanatae ab optimo Rege nostro quin turgescat indies, atque efferat se, indulgere. So I preferred to render service to your ears, which are smoothed and polished by most frequent reading of antiquity, rather than to indulge in the voluptuousness of the age, and the swelling of ambition which is not

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4. Juvenes ornatissimi so remedied by our excellent King that it does not become more engorged daily, and gets carried away.

McCullough argues that Herbert’s emphasis on the polished ‘could hardly have been better chosen to compliment – and complement – Andrewes’s style’, but this postscript also calls attention to Herbert’s style, his insistence on avoiding luxuria, pre-empting The Temple’s emphasis on plainness, which we have already explored. Metaphors of servitude pervade The Temple, most famously, the baroque form poem ‘The Altar’, which begins ‘A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant reares’ (line 1).40 Herbert’s phrase seruire auribus Tuis (‘to render service to your ears’) captures the former pupil’s deference to the master, suggests the embryonic preacher’s invocation of aural power as well as linguistic skill, and anticipates the speaker of The Temple’s stance of humility and service. At the same time, Herbert, the University Orator, establishes his own strong, if somewhat imitative, voice echoing his teacher. Milton’s poem to Andrewes is very different. We have no evidence that Milton ever met Andrewes or heard him speak as a student, so the poem is inevitably less personal than Herbert’s. John Hale reads Milton’s individual commemorative poems as a form of ‘self-display, a means to attract notice and reputation, even preferment’.41 He notes, too, the fact that Elegia Tertia is ‘syncretistic’ in its ‘scope’, with an absence of ‘local rituals’;42 this lack of local Cambridge colour might be explained by the fact that though he had once been a Cambridge scholar, by the mid-1620s Andrewes was far more strongly associated with London. Milton’s poem starts with its speaker’s declaration of sorrow – Moestus eram (‘I was grieving’, line 1) – and his identification of the animo tristia plura meo (‘many sad things in my mind’, line 2).43 The poet’s animus is central to this poem, which charts the vivid appearance of two visions in that mind: the first is a terrifying funestae cladis imago (‘image of mortal disaster’, line 3), a series of Protestant deaths which occurred in the early stages of the Thirty Years War (1618-48); the second is a dream-vision of Andrewes in apparent apotheosis: [s]ydereum nitido fulsit in ore iubar (‘a starry brightness shone on his radiant face’, line 54). As we saw, in his Latin letter Herbert addressed Andrewes as Heros illustrissime, but Milton represents the clergyman in somewhat different terms: the ‘heroes’, for him, are the ones who have fallen in battle – Et memini heroum  ad aethera raptos (‘And I remember the heroes snatched up to heaven’, line 11) – and although his speaker insists that his priority in mourning is for the bishop – At te praecipue luxi dignissime praesul (‘But chiefly I grieved for you, most worthy bishop’, line

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Sarah Knight 13) – the poem still foregrounds the multiple military dead rather than the single dead bishop. The speaker then harangues Death itself, falls asleep and imagines Andrewes in a highly exotic, lush environment suffused by punicea  luce (‘ruddy light’, 39), carpeted by the [v]estitu multicolore (‘multi-coloured covering’, 42) of many flowers, scented by [a]ura sub innumeris humida nata rosis (‘the warm breath born from countless roses’, line 48). The brilliant linguist, biblical translator and fêted preacher Andrewes floats into this sensuous world somewhat incongruously and quickly: Ecce mihi subito praesul Wintonius astat (‘Behold, suddenly the Bishop of Winchester stands by me’, 53). Within the dream, Andrewes the senex  venerandus (‘revered old man’, 57) is rendered due homage by agmina  caelestia (‘the heavenly hosts’, 59). But this veneration is undercut by the speaker’s irritation at his sleep being disturbed by the dream: the poem for Nicholas Felton begins with the speaker’s description of his madentes rore  genae (‘cheeks dripping with moisture’, line 1) for Andrewes’ death, but by the time he comes to comment on that same death more fully in Elegia Tertia, the speaker ends by stating that flebam (‘I was weeping’) because of turbatos  somnos (‘disturbed sleep’, line 67), not for grief at Andrewes’ death. Finally, exemplifying the hardly fluent progressions that characterise Milton’s poem, the last line – Talia contingant somnia saepe mihi (‘May such dreams often befall me’, line 69) – twists together lines from two Roman elegists in another strikingly incongruous evocation. In Amores 1.5, Ovid’s speaker has just spent a sultry afternoon with his mistress, and ends with a heartfelt wish proveniant medii sic mihi saepe dies! (‘May many mid-days happen like this!’, 1.5.26). In Tibullus’ Elegiae 1.1.48, the speaker also expresses a wish for sleep – hoc mihi contingat – when in bed or sleeping while a storm rages outside.44 The final line of Elegia Tertia is a well-balanced union of Ovid and Tibullus, but for such a sophisticated reader of Roman love elegy as Milton undoubtedly was, these allusions seem extraordinarily odd choices with which to end a threnody on the death of a clergyman, and we have seen how harrowing the two somnia of death in battle and sleep-disturbing apotheosis have been – why does the speaker wish for more? I do not think that Milton deliberately intended the poem to jar; but compared with other defter and decorous poems on similar subjects, particularly his more adept threnody for Felton and 1639’s Epitaphium Damonis, the extended Latin lament for Milton’s friend Charles Diodati, Elegia Tertia seems tonally uneven. We could attribute its unsatisfactoriness to a gap between tone and subject, and an effort to cram too much – references to the Thirty Years War; two visions; a rosy-tinted evocation of Andrewes’ apotheosis – into too few lines and a fixed form (the institutional threnody), which will not quite take the weight.

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4. Juvenes ornatissimi Milton would return to Andrewes again a decade after he left Cambridge, and his characterisation of Andrewes in 1642’s English tract The Reason of Church Government differs strongly from how the bishop appears in Elegia Tertia. The tract is an attack on apologists for episcopacy, including Andrewes; Milton’s fifth chapter deals with ‘the Arguments of B. Andrews and the Primat’, i.e. the Primate of Armagh, James Ussher (1581-1656). The venerandus senex from Elegia Tertia is now criticised for his ideological stance, as Milton attacks the compendium Certain Briefe Treatises  Concerning the Ancient and Moderne Government of the Church (Oxford, 1641), part of which was, Milton states, ‘in the title said to be out of the rude draughts of Bishop Andrews’:45 And surely they bee rude draughts indeed, in so much that it is marvell to think what his friends meant to let come abroad such shallow reasonings with the name of a man so much bruited for learning.

Campbell and Corns argue that Milton’s ‘engagement [with Andrewes]  is neither close nor vehement’,46 and it is true that in comparison with his next anti-prelatical treatise, An Apology against a Pamphlet, printed in April 1642, Milton’s criticism of Andrewes in the earlier work does not seem personal. An Apology attacks Joseph Hall, who had suggested – among other calumnies – that Milton was rumoured ‘after an inordinat and riotous youth spent at the Vniversity, to have bin at length vomited out thence’,47 and even a decade after he had left Cambridge, Milton was clearly furious at Hall’s assertion that he had been a bad student. But while An Apology’s attack on Hall is undoubtedly more concertedly ad hominem than the critique of Andrewes in The Reason of Church Government, the latter still engages much more specifically with Andrewes intellectually and personally than Elegia Tertia does, especially when we compare Milton’s Latin elegy with Herbert’s dedication and letter. Milton’s odd poem does not convince his reader that he had a particularly detailed idea of Andrewes’ scholarship and beliefs: both came later as an adult polemicist, but as a student Latinist he was perhaps more eager to exercise his threnodic voice and make a literary mark commemorating such a high-profile death. Milton’s two anti-prelatical tracts offer some autobiographical insight into his years at Cambridge, as does his 1644 pedagogical work Of Education. Herbert, similarly, considers his student career in vernacular retrospect as parish vicar at Bemerton, Wiltshire, where he ended his life. In the English poem ‘Affliction’, Herbert weaves his Cambridge years into an account of the tribulations the speaker has faced as he moves towards mature faith; in the prose narrative A Priest

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Sarah Knight to the Temple, or The Countrey Parson (1632) two chapters on ‘Knowledg’ make scant provision for poetic composition or classical learning. We remember the 1619 letter to John Danvers in which Herbert wrote of the ‘Gaynesses, which will please a young man well’ associated with the University Oratorship, and Milton’s letter to Alexander Gil, boasting of his growing university reputation as a Latinist. By the time they came to reflect on student life as more mature men, each had changed his attitudes. For Herbert, especially, most of the classical allusions we see in his student Latin verse have disappeared, and although the undertow pulling Milton towards Greek and Latin authors would always remain strong, in Of Education, at least, he prioritises other forms of learning over classical study. Herbert probably wrote ‘Affliction’ before 1626, when he was ordained as a deacon and became a canon of Lincoln Cathedral.48 In the poem, his Cambridge career is represented as a kind of temporary cushion against spiritual strife, and he sees his success at the University as part of a divine plan for him: ‘Thou didst betray me to a lingring book, | And wrap me in a gown’ (lines 39-40); ‘Thou often didst with Academick praise | Melt and dissolve my rage’ (45-6).49 Yet these are just early stages in a lifelong process: the speaker characterises ‘Academick praise’ as a ‘sweetned pill’, restorative yet artificially enhanced, distinct from the simplicity of faith, which cannot be taught by reading (‘Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me | None of my books will show’, 55-6). Education, therefore, is shown to be formatively significant but secondary to faith. When he came to write A Priest to the Temple a few years later in the early 1630s, the Greek and Latin Muses marshalled in the Musae Reponsoriae are nowhere to be found in the parson’s library: Chapter Four, which details ‘The Parsons Knowledg’, only mentions one book, ‘the book of books, the storehouse and magazene of life and comfort, the holy Scriptures’.50 The following chapter, ‘The Parsons Accessary Knowledg’, recommends a determinedly postclassical reading list:51 The Countrey Parson hath read the Fathers also, and the Schoolmen, and all the later Writers, or a good proportion of all, out of all which he hath compiled a book, and body of Divinity 

Humanist learning is replaced by religious learning; the student’s pride in his facility in the Greek and Latin languages has become simply an adjunct to scriptural hermeneutic expertise. Herbert is not sharply critical of his Cambridge education, although he does imply that ‘Academick praise’ perhaps mattered more to him as a young man than it should have done, and towards the end of his

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4. Juvenes ornatissimi life he prioritises knowledge that has no space for classical authors. In Of Education, written on the suggestion of the educational reformer Samuel Hartlib, Milton adopts a related but distinctive perspective on contemporary higher education.52 Like Herbert, he posits religious knowledge as the most important element of any educational process:53 The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.

Imitation here becomes imitation not of Ovid or Virgil but of God; ‘knowledge’ – as in The Countrey Parson – becomes knowledge of God rather than secular knowledge. Having stated what he now thinks ‘the end of learning’ should be, in terms that mirror the subject of Paradise Lost (‘to repair the ruins of our first parents’), Milton goes on to propose various practical means of how the young male mind should properly be shaped. Tellingly, he suggests that the pedagogical training he had himself received is not the best way to educate young men. When we think back to the fulsome thanks he extended to John Milton the elder in Ad Patrem for investing so heavily in his classical training, Milton’s educational about-turn, his identification of ‘the many mistakes which have made learning generally so unpleasing and so unsuccessfull’, is particularly surprising.54 Too much time is spent on the classical languages: ‘we do amisse to spend seven or eight yeers meerly in scraping together so much miserable Latin, and Greek, as might be learnt otherwise easily and delightfully in one yeer’. Too much time is spent on holiday: ‘And that which casts our proficiency therein so much behinde, is our time lost partly in too oft idle vacancies given both to schools and Universities’. We might contrast this sentiment with the hectic social delights detailed in Elegia Prima, in which the student speaker lists everything he is enjoying about London life during the Cambridge vacation, and his reluctance to return to university: Iam nec arundiferum mihi cura revisere Camum (‘I am not now concerned about revisiting the reedy River Cam’, line 11).55 Youth regards the span of the vacation very differently from age. Of Education also argues against the use of getting the young to work on literary exercises – we think of Milton’s Latin poems, his boast to Gil that an older scholar has trusted his puerilitas, the Prolusiones he delivered as an undergraduate and postgraduate – and laments ‘forcing the empty wits of children to compose Theams, verses, and Orations, which are the acts of ripest judgement and the finall work

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Sarah Knight fill’d by long reading, and observing, with elegant maxims, and copious invention’.56 Ultimately, the pedagogue concludes that ‘these are not matters to be wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of the nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit’.57 By the 1630s and 40s, we are in a very different place from where we began this study, but there are still some continuities between student and adult poets. The postgraduate Milton could declare in 1629’s Elegia Sexta that a poet (vates) is divumque sacerdos, and the undergraduate Herbert in 1610 could write of expressing towards God in poetry ‘that ancient heat towards thee | Wherewith whole showls of Martyrs once did burn’, and both writers continued to insist on the interrelation of theology and poetics. As mature writers, both Herbert and Milton continued to think about verse composition, humanist pedagogy and, particularly, classical learning, even though their perspectives diverged from how they had perceived those topics as precocious student poets, rejoicing in the intellectual approval of a university that each would later go on to question. Notes 1. Carey 1997: 116-22. All translations are my own unless another translator is named. 2. Wilcox 2011: 3-4, lines 1-4. Wilcox states that these sonnets are ‘probably H.’s earliest poems’ (p. 3). 3. Milton uses the term in his third Prolusio (1628-9). See Clark 1936: 162. 4. Hutchinson 1964: 356, line 37. 5. Carey 1997: 10. Carey dates the poem to ‘1624?’, Milton’s last year at St Paul’s; see also Campbell and Corns 2010: 24. 6. Hutchinson 1964: 423 (poem II). 7. Carey 1997: 157. 8. John Hacket, A Century of sermons upon remarkable subjects (1675), cited by Wilcox 2004. 9. Wilcox 2004. 10. Hutchinson 1964: 369-70. 11. Wilcox 2011: 47. 12. Hutchinson 1964: 587. 13. Hutchinson 1964: xxxix. 14. Campbell and Corns 2010: 26-63. 15. Carey 1997: 20; Jones 2009: 9-11. 16. Knight 2010: 37-9. 17. Clark 1936 (Epistolae Familiares): 10-11. 18. Carey 1997: 158. 19. See the introduction to this volume. 20. Hale 2005: 127. 21. Molesworth 1860: 236. 22. Charles I’s letter is contained in the collection of manuscripts bequeathed to the British Library and Cambridge University Library by the

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4. Juvenes ornatissimi antiquary Thomas Baker (1656-1740). This letter can be found in British Library Harley 7037 (the re-catalogued reference for Baker Manuscript X), p. 362. 23. Knight 2012: 143. 24. Wilcox 2011: 4. 25. Wilcox 2011: 200. 26. Wilcox 2011: 253. 27. Hutchinson 1964: 432-3. 28. Wilcox 2011: 200, 254; Hutchinson 1964: 435. 29. Carey 1997: 25-6. 30. Carey 1997: 20. 31. Carey 1997: 248. 32. Carey 1997: 32. 33. Fowler 1998: 59. 34. Carey 1997: 157. 35. Hutchinson 1964: 391, 400. 36. Hutchinson 1964: 400-1. 37. For a detailed chronology of Andrewes’ life and a useful introduction to his career and writings, see McCullough 2005: xi-lx. 38. Hutchinson 1964: 385. 39. McCullough 2005: xlii; for the text see Hutchinson 1964: 473. 40. Wilcox 2011: 92. 41. Hale 2005: 128-9. 42. Hale 2005: 144. 43. Carey 1997: 51. 44. I would like to thank Gordon Campbell for bringing the Tibullus elegy to my attention. 45. Haug 1953: 768. 46. Campbell and Corns 2010: 148-9. 47. Taft 1953: 884. See also Knight 2012: 145-7. 48. Wilcox 2004. 49. Wilcox 2011: 163. 50. Hutchinson 1964: 228. 51. Hutchinson 1964: 229-30. 52. Raylor 1993: 19-31. 53. Dorian 1959: 366-7. 54. Dorian 1959: 370. 55. Carey 1997: 20. 56. Dorian 1959: 372. 57. Dorian 1959: 372-3.

Bibliography Campbell, G. and Corns, T.N. (2008, paperback 2010) John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought. Oxford. Carey, J. (ed.) (1968, rev. 1997) John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems. Harlow. Clark, D.L. (ed.) (1936) Works of John Milton, vol. 12. New York. Dorian, D.C. (ed.) (1959) Of Education, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2 (1643-1648). New Haven and London. Fowler, A. (ed.) (1968, rev. 1998) John Milton: Paradise Lost. Harlow.

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Sarah Knight Haan, E. (2009) ‘The “Adorning of my Native Tongue”: Latin Poetry and Linguistic Metamorphosis’, in McDowell and Smith 2009: 51-65. Hale, J. (2005) Milton’s Cambridge Latin. Tempe, AZ (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies). Haug, R. (ed.) (1953) Reason of Church-Government, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 1 (1624-1642). New Haven and London. Hutchinson, F.E. (ed.) (1941, repr. 1964) The Works of George Herbert. Oxford. Jones, E. (2009) ‘ “Ere half my days”: Milton’s Life, 1608-1640’, in McDowell and Smith 2009: 3-25. Knight, S. (2010) ‘Milton’s Student Verses of 1629’, Notes and Queries 57.1: 37-9. Knight, S. (2012) ‘Milton and the Idea of the University’, in E. Jones (ed.) Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-1642, 135-58. Oxford. McCullough, P. (ed.) (2005) Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures. Oxford. McDowell, N. and Smith, N. (eds) (2009, paperback 2011) The Oxford Handbook of Milton. Oxford. Molesworth, W. (ed.) (1860) English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, vol. 6. London. Raylor, T. (1993) ‘New Light on Milton and Hartlib’, Milton Quarterly 27.1: 19-31. Taft, F.L. (ed.) (1953) An Apology, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 1 (1624-1642). New Haven and London. Wilcox, H. (2004) ‘Herbert, George (1593-1633)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13025]. Wilcox, H. (ed.) (2007, paperback 2011) The English Poems of George Herbert. Cambridge.

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5

Abraham Cowley, Davideis. Sacri poematis operis imperfecti liber unus Philip Hardie Samuel Johnson in the Life of Cowley speaks of ‘Cowley and Milton  concurring in the cultivation of Latin poetry, in which the English, till their works and [Thomas] May’s poem [a Latin continuation of Lucan] appeared, seemed unable to contest the palm with any other of the lettered nations. If the Latin performances of Cowley and Milton be compared, for May I hold to be superior to both, the advantage seems to lie on the side of Cowley. Milton is generally content to express the thoughts of the ancients in their language; Cowley, without much loss of purity or elegance, accommodates the diction of Rome to his own conceptions.’1 Milton’s 1645 Poems, his first major appearance as a poet before his public, is divided between poems in English and poems in Latin. The two parts (sandwiching the masque Comus) conclude with two pastoral elegies, respectively Lycidas, written to commemorate Edward King, with whom Milton had no very close personal connection, but a poem today regarded as a landmark in the history of English lyric, and the Epitaphium Damonis, written on the death of Milton’s closest boyhood friend, Charles Diodati, and today read by few. In the Latin of the latter poem, and in a passage full of allusion to the Latin poets, Milton announces his plan to write an epic on British history (from Brute to Arthur) in English, even though his slender pastoral reed may be able to do no more than screech in his native tongue (aut patriis mutata camoenis | Brittonicum strides, 170-1), and the poet may have to abandon ambitions for a lasting and extensive poetic fame (sim ignotus in aevum | tum licet, externo penitusque inglorius orbi, 173-4). The great monuments of Milton’s later poetic career are the two English epics, and Samson Agonistes (assuming a late date of composition). The pattern of Cowley’s output in English and Latin is very different. There are early academic Latin poems written for collections on the occasions of royal births and the return of the king from Scotland,2 and a Latin comedy Naufragium Ioculare, written when he was an under-

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Philip Hardie graduate and performed in Trinity College, Cambridge (publ. 1638), but Cowley continued to compose in Latin throughout his career. After his death in 1667, his executor and biographer Thomas Sprat published his works in two volumes (1668), one in English and one in Latin (Poemata Latina). The bulk of the latter is taken up by the major work of his later years, the Latin Plantarum Libri Sex,3 together with unus liber Miscellaneorum, the greater part of which is occupied by Cowley’s own Latin translation of the first book of his epic Davideis, of which four of a projected twelve were completed in English. The English four books and the Latin one were first published in the 1656 Poems. The date of the Davideis is uncertain. Thomas Sprat assigned it to Cowley’s Cambridge student days, c. 1639, but Frank Kermode (1949) makes a good case for composition in the early 1650s, with a deliberate attempt on Sprat’s part to cover up Cowley’s (apparent) apostasy to the Commonwealth cause on his return from the Continent to England in 1654. The Latin translation of Book 1 cannot be closely dated either, but that the Latin is dependent on the English, rather than the other way round, seems to be the implication of one of the notes (5) on Book 1, which refers to ‘the Latin Translation’. But, as seems to be the case with some other poets who produced Latin and English versions of the same work, one might think of a more dynamic process of dialogue and exchange between the two versions. Cowley’s Latin version of his own English composition is the product of a society of writers and readers able to switch easily between the vernacular and the ancient languages. The notes on the four books of the English version cite copiously in Latin and Greek (but not in Hebrew), constructing a readership expert in judging Cowley’s attempt to write a properly neoclassical epic. The self-translation of liber unus should be seen against the wider background of Cowley’s theory of translation and his own practice as a translator. He is known perhaps best today for his Pindarique Odes, in which translations of two odes of Pindar himself (Olympian 2, Nemean 1) are followed by ‘The Praise of Pindar’, ‘in imitation’ of Horace, Odes 4.2, in which Horace gives his own sample in Latin of Pindar’s manner: Cowley’s imitation is thus an imitation of an imitation, a knowing exercise in a multi-layered translational/imitative practice. Finally there are twelve free ‘Pindaric’ compositions, among which is a paraphrase of the thirty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, based on the Authorised Version: an adaptation of an English translation of a Hebrew text to the style of a Greek poet. The title page to the Pindarique Odes makes no distinction between these different kinds of exercise, subtitling all of them ‘Written in imitation of the style and manner of the Odes of Pindar’. Taken as a whole, the Pindarique Odes are an essay in Dryden’s ‘imitation’, the freest of his three catego-

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5. Abraham Cowley, Davideis ries of translation, after paraphrase and metaphrase (‘Preface to Ovid’s Epistles’). ‘Paraphrase’ is the term used by Cowley of his other exercise in imitating a Greek lyric poet, ‘Anacreontiques: or, Some copies of verses translated paraphrastically out of Anacreon’.4 The Latin translation of Book 1 of the Davideis is just one manifestation within Cowley’s epic venture of his interest in translation: Book 1 contains two biblical paraphrases, a version of Psalm 114 put in the mouth of its original composer, David, and, to conclude the book, a version of Balaam’s prophecy at Numbers 24:5-9 (Balaam’s several prophecies in the original take the form of Hebrew poems). The Latin versions of these are thus translations of translations, in the case of Psalm 114 a lyric inset, in Alcaics, within the hexameter narrative, corresponding to the Pindaric numbers of the English version. So, assuming for the sake of argument the priority of the English Davideis, we have: adaptations of the Authorised Version, that most famous monument of English Renaissance translation, into Cowley’s own English epic and lyric verse, and from there into Latin Alcaics and hexameters respectively. Cowley also translated shorter English poems of his own into Latin, the ‘Hymn to light’ and ‘Upon the Chair made out of Sir Francis Drake’s Ship’. Cowley is not the only major English poet of the period to practise self-translation into or from Latin. Some of Marvell’s major poems appear in both languages, for example ‘On a Drop of Dew’ (Ros) and ‘The Garden’ (Hortus). Phineas Fletcher’s epic on the Gunpowder Plot appeared in 1627 both as the Locustae vel Pietas Iesuitica in Latin hexameters, and as an English expansion in Spenserian stanzas, The Locusts, or, Apollyonists. Thomas May, the English translator of Lucan (1627), wrote a seven-book Continuation of the Bellum Civile in English (1630, rev. edn 1650), translated by May as the Latin Supplementum (1640). Self-translation into Latin is a special case of the wider phenomenon of Latin translations from English and other European vernaculars in early modern England,5 although according to James Binns ‘Latin translations of English poetry are not common’ in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period: they include Thomas Murray’s Naupactiados (London, 1604), a translation of James I’s Lepanto (Edinburgh, 1591; London, 1603).6 Later, however, there was a spate of Latin translations of parts or all of Milton’s Paradise Lost.7 An assessment of the relationship between the Latin liber unus and its English counterpart needs to be prefaced with an account of how Cowley saw the (English) Davideis within the tradition of epic. In ‘The Preface of the Author’ (1656, reprinted in 1668) Cowley zealously proclaims the need to rescue poetry from the lying fables of the ancients and to practise a Christian poetry: ‘It is time to recover it out of the tyrant’s [the Devil’s] hands, and to restore it to the kingdom of God, who

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Philip Hardie is the father of it.’ But only the ‘good artist’ will know how to compose a good ‘sacred poem’ out of the materials provided by the Bible. ‘For if any man design to compose a sacred poem, by only turning a story of the Scripture, like Mr. Quarles’s,8 or some other godly matter, like Mr. Heywood of Angels,9 into rhyme, he is so far from elevating of poesy, that he only abases divinity.’ Cowley’s idea of elevating biblical matter is to bring it to the height of classical epic. The English Davideis is a fragment, four books of a projected twelve, ‘after the pattern of our master Virgil’, as Cowley says. The Davideis is the first fully neoclassical epic in English on a biblical subject, and in this much, at least, a precursor of Paradise Lost.10 There is some truth, then, in Cowley’s own claim to be travelling ‘In these untrodden paths to sacred fame’ (1.28; liber unus 30, sacrae non trita per avia famae), anticipating Milton’s statement that his adventurous song ‘pursues | Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme’ (Paradise Lost 1.15-16). Milton’s claim to originality archly alludes to Harington’s translation of Ariosto’s use of the novelty-topos; with equal self-consciousness Cowley, in his own note, defends himself against the charge of immodesty by stating that he has been taught this kind of boast ‘by almost all the old poets’, of whom he cites no fewer than five: Virgil, Georgics 3.291-3; Horace, Epistles 1.19.21-2; Lucretius 1.926-8 (avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante | trita solo ); Nemesianus, Cynegetica 8-9; Oppian, Cynegetica 20-1.11 Biblical matter is combined with classical topos: Cowley concludes this note by saying of the invocation of Christ, ‘Guide my bold steps with thine old travelling flame, | In these untrodden paths ’ (1.27-8): ‘My own allusion here is to the passage of the Israelites through the wilderness, in which they were guided by a pillar of flame.’ In Cowley’s own extensive notes on the text he explains and justifies points in the poem, with reference to both biblical and classical texts. Poem and notes taken together constitute a kind of manifesto for what Cowley calls a ‘sacred poem’, i.e. a classical epic on a biblical theme. Virgil is frequently cited, and sometimes appealed to directly as an authority for particular features – thus the use of half-lines and aposiopesis, in successive notes (I, nn. 14-15).12 But Cowley also quotes from a wide range of classical epic: Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, Ovid, Lucan and Statius, as well as Seneca tragicus, and there is a strong sense of the Aeneid as the central text in a classical epic tradition: passages from the Aeneid are often quoted together with their models in Homer (and Apollonius) or imitations in later Latin epics. The Bible is cited from the Authorised Version. However, ‘it is a remarkable fact, that though Cowley is always ready to quote from the classic poets, though he never hesitates to give the source of a simile or of a metaphor

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5. Abraham Cowley, Davideis if taken from Latin or Greek, he never refers to contemporaries or to preceding English poets.’13 Virgil is the dominant model, as is immediately clear from the opening ‘Proposition’ (see below). In terms of plot, Cowley launches in medias res at a point where a temporary lessening of Saul’s hostility to David is suddenly reversed by the intervention of the Devil and his agent, the personification of Envy. Compare the opening of the Aeneid, where the Trojans, temporarily in a cheerful mood on setting sail from Sicily, are confronted with the sudden violence of the storm unleashed by their divine enemy, Juno. The ultimate model for Envy’s mission from the Council of Devils to inspire the sleeping Saul with renewed enmity against David is the Juno and Allecto sequence at the beginning of the second half of the Aeneid. While the manner of Envy’s approach to Saul is closely modelled on Allecto’s assault on the sleeping Turnus, the preceding Council of Devils, a feature of many Renaissance epics vernacular and Latin, is in the line descending from the council of Furies at the beginning of Claudian’s In Rufinum, itself a development of the Virgilian Allecto episode.14 Cowley, in his description of Hell and Envy, draws on ‘almost all Latin and Greek poets’.15 At the beginning of his epic the scholar-poet flexes his muscles and shows that he is in effortless command of one of the central set pieces of the epic tradition. As to the further limit of the plot, Cowley tells the reader in his ‘Preface’ that he ‘had no mind to carry [David] quite on to his anointing at Hebron, because it is the custom of heroic poets (as we see by the examples of Homer and Virgil ) never to come to the full end of their story; but only so near, that every one may see it’. The intended stopping-point was ‘that most poetical and excellent elegy of David’s on the death of Saul and Jonathan’. In general the decision to narrate only a discrete section of the life of David is in keeping with Virgilian (and Homeric) practice. Beyond that it is clear that Cowley would not have succeeded in moulding the plot into an Aristotelian unity. One overarching pattern to the career is suggested by the opening lines: ‘I sing the man who Judah’s sceptre bore | In that right hand which held the crook before’: a generic progression from pastoral to epic, and, in Cowley’s own words in the ‘Preface’, a movement ‘from so small beginnings’ to become ‘the greatest monarch that ever sat on the most famous throne of the whole earth’. This, broadly, is also the plot of the Aeneid, from the virtual extinction of Troy to the world-rule of Rome, or, from Evander’s quasi-pastoral huts to the sky-scraping temples of Augustan Rome. But otherwise the career of the Virgilian Aeneas is replicated only in fragments in the existing four books of the Davideis. So in Books 2 and 3 David is a hero in flight, but flight, fuga, will not have been a major theme of the

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Philip Hardie Davideis as a whole as it is of the Aeneid. The only explicit – and extended – comparison of David to Aeneas is at 3.125-38, with reference to the piety of both heroes in taking their parents to a place of safety. What in the Aeneid is the central icon of pius Aeneas is here only an incidental action on the part of David. In fact, in the primary narrative of the completed four books David does not do all that much, and what action there is, is interrupted by a plethora of digressions of one kind or another: set pieces on music and love; description; ekphrasis of works of art; inset songs; analeptic and proleptic narratives. The resulting episodic quality of the poem has often been criticised. But the apparent disorganisation is the result of a drive to write an epic that, ostensibly about a section of the life of a single biblical hero, in fact covers the whole of sacred history, from Creation (the hexaemeral song of the prophets in their college at the end of Book 1) to the birth of Christ. This universal reach, culminating in the beginning of a new age with the coming of a saviour who is the lineal descendant of the eponymous hero of the epic, acknowledges the similar strategy of Virgil in the Aeneid.16 The epic expands to cover the whole of sacred space as well as sacred time: after the opening sequence of the Council of Devils in Hell and Envy’s assault on Saul, the action switches to Heaven, in a description that pointedly counterbalances the description of Hell: Hell (1.71-90), ‘Beneath the silent chambers of the earth,  Beneath the dens where unfledged tempests lie,  Beneath the mighty Ocean’s wealthy caves, | Beneath th’eternal fountain of all waves  There is a place deep, wondrous deep below, | Which genuine night and horror does o’erflow ’ (81-103, Subter ubi in matris secreta cubilia terrae  | subter ubi implumis nido iacet aura profundo  | subter ubi aeterna longe sub mole reposti | thesauri ingentes magnarum arcentur aquarum  | est locus immensum in spatium, immensumque profundum | porrectus, quam nox genuinusque obruit horror); Heaven (1.347-62), ‘Above the subtle foldings of the sky, | Above the well-set orbs’ soft harmony, | Above those petty lamps that guild the night; | There is a place o’erflown with hallowed light’ (392-409, Palantes nubes supra implicitosque labores | aetheris, atque volumen inextricabile coeli, | gaudia sphaerarum supra et modulamina certa | supra orbem, qui perpetuo bene pervigil igne | exiguis splendet gemmis, numerumque requirit, | est locus immensa qui exhaustus luce fatiscit). These balanced descriptions are an example of self-imitation twice over, even before Cowley sets to the Latin translation, since the description of Hell is repeated almost verbatim from Civil War 2.365-96 (~ Davideis 1.71-100). The contrast between Hell and Heaven is broadly comparable to that at the beginning of the Aeneid between the Cave of the Winds, a place

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5. Abraham Cowley, Davideis of elemental turmoil with hints of an Underworld setting, and the appearance of Jupiter, the god of bright air and calmer of storms, ‘at the summit of heaven’ (aethere summo, Aen. 1.223). And Cowley has the Virgilian Cave of the Winds in mind in his location of Hell ‘Beneath the dens where unfledged tempests lie’, as his note (I, n. 9) on the line reveals: he quotes Aeneid 1.52-4 (hic vasto rex Aeolus antro ), and explains his use of the epithet ‘unfledged’ as a response to Seneca’s criticism of the Virgilian passage, on the grounds that what is shut up cannot yet be a wind, while a wind cannot be shut up (Natural Questions 6.18.5). Cowley’s schematic contrast between Hell and Heaven is also replicated on a much grander scale in the contrast in Paradise Lost between the first two books, set in the darkness visible of Hell, and the ascent in the third book with the poet to the ‘pure Empyrean’, the seat of God the Father and God the Son. David rises from being a shepherd to being a king; his progression is also from poet to king, ‘Who from best poet, best of kings did grow; | The two chief gifts heav’n could on man bestow’ (1.3-4).17 The equivalence of poet and ruler is one that Virgil uses to make grand claims for his poetic art at the beginning of the third Georgic, and there are ways in which the paths of the poet and of the hero Aeneas cross in the Aeneid. But having a hero who is a poet, or rather the poet, the biblical Orpheus, allows Cowley to give poetry and music a more overtly starring rôle in his epic. Virgil in the fourth Georgic tactfully avoids giving a direct sample of Orpheus’ songs – music of such power is not to be heard in our world, although doubtless in the Aristaeus epyllion Virgil aspires to something approaching an Orphic magic. Cowley is not shy of ‘quoting’ directly two examples of David’s music-making, both of them in a genre and metre distinct from the epic heroic couplets (and in a note Cowley proudly asserts his right to generic innovation, but innovation itself based on classical authority18). In Book 1 the song with which he ‘tuned the harsh disorders of [Saul’s] soul’ (1.482) is a verse paraphrase of Psalm 114 (‘When Israel went out of Egypt’). The psalm paraphrase is an established form in which the modern poet can emulate the great biblical poet. More daring is the serenade, in the form of an ode to his lyre, put into the mouth of David in Book 3, as he woos Michol, the daughter of Saul (3.785-812). David’s musical calming of Saul’s rage is the first action of the hero in the narrative, and would presumably have formed some kind of ring with David’s elegy for Saul and Jonathan at the end of the twelfth book. The programmatic importance of David’s musical performance, and the identification with his musical hero on the part of Cowley himself, is emphasised by the first of the non-narrative episodes in the poem, an invocation to the Muse introducing a digression concerning music,

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Philip Hardie which develops an analogy between the creation of poetic order by the ‘god-like’ human poet, and the creation of the world in ‘God’s poem, this world’s new essay’ (1.451). Music has an innate affinity with the secrets of nature. The song of the poet Melchor (whose relationship to Virgil’s Iopas and Apollonius’ Orpheus is footnoted by Cowley) at the court of Moab in Book 3 takes as its subject ‘nature’s secrets’ (3.277, 301). Melchor is clearly a heathen version of the kind of poet that Cowley himself wanted to be, as he indicates in the motto to the Davideis, Georgics 2.475-7: Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musae, | quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus amore, | accipiant caelique vias et sidera monstrent (‘Firstly, may the Muses, sweet above all things, whose sacred objects I bear, smitten with a great love, receive me and reveal to me the paths of the heavens and the stars’). There is much of the Georgics in the Davideis, both in moralising passages on the life of simple contentment, and in the essays in scientific poetry.19 Since the English text of the Davideis is so thoroughly classicising, the Latin translation is under no pressure ‘to cut and polish diamonds’, as Cowley describes the artist’s task in making elevated poetry out of the materials of the Bible. As self-translator Cowley does not practise the ‘libertinism’ that he advocates in his theoretical pronouncements on translating from Greek and Hebrew authors.20 Introducing the Pindarique Odes, Cowley sneers at the ‘faithful translator’ (fidus interpres, Hor. Ars poet. 133-4); exact imitation is ‘a vile and unworthy kind of servitude  incapable of producing anything good or noble’. ‘If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one mad man had translated another ’ ‘It does not at all trouble me that the grammarians perhaps will not suffer this libertine way of rendering foreign authors, to be called translation; for I am not so much enamoured of the name translator, as not to wish rather to be something better, though it want yet a name.’ Between the English Davideis and its Latin translator there is of course no ‘great difference between his age and ours’, such as might prompt translational libertinism. Furthermore the English version is itself close to the classical Latin models, into which the Latin liber unus might almost be thought of as a back-translation. An index of this closeness is the tribute paid to Cowley by Dryden in borrowing phrasings from the English Davideis in his own translation of the Aeneid21 (with the more ambiguous tribute of extensive allusion in Dryden’s mock epic MacFlecknoe).22 The Latin of the liber unus runs mostly close to the English, often very close, and details of the Latin and Greek texts that are constantly in Cowley’s mind as he composes in English often surface in the Latin. But in regard to the English there are omissions, expansions, and reorderings in the Latin. There are 1084 lines of Latin to the 934 of the

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5. Abraham Cowley, Davideis first book in English: Cowley’s Latin hexameter is often more expansive than the compressed wit of the English pentameter couplet. The translation is in no mere subaltern relationship to the English, but tests the linguistic resources of Latin against those of English, and at times functions almost as commentary on the English, as in the passage in the invocation to Christ which in his note (n. 5) Cowley says ‘is more fully explained in the Latin translation’: 1.39-40, ‘But Thou, eternal Word, hast called forth me | Th’ apostle, to convert that world to Thee’ – Cowley notes ‘To be made an apostle for the conversion of poetry to Christianity, as S. Paul was for the conversion of the gentiles; which was done not only by the Word, as Christ was the eternal Word of his Father; but by his becoming a particular word or call to him.’ The fuller Latin version runs (42-5): sed tu me, verbum aeternum, tu voce vocasti, | et novus insolito percussus lumine Paulus, | prodeo Musarum immensos convertere mundos, | et coelum seris ignotum aperire poetis (‘But, eternal Word, you have called me with your voice, and a new Paul, struck with unaccustomed light, I step forth to convert the boundless worlds of the Muses and to open up an unknown heaven to poets of later ages’). The enigmatic ‘apostle’ is named as Paul, with further allusion to what happened on the road to Damascus, and the way in which the eternal word has issued a particular word or call to Paul and Cowley is emphasised by the use of the Latin figura etymologica, in voce vocasti. The ‘Proposition’ advertises that this is a Virgilian epic (1-12 / 1-11): I sing the man who Judah’s sceptre bore In that right hand which held the crook before; Who from best poet, best of kings did grow; The two chief gifts heav’n could on man bestow. Much danger first, much toil did he sustain, Whilst Saul and Hell crossed his strong fate in vain. Nor did his crown less painful work afford; Less exercise his patience, or his sword; So long her conqu’ror fortune’s spight pursued; Till with unwearied virtue he subdued All homebred malice, and all foreign boasts; Their strength was armies, his the Lord of Hosts. Bella cano, fatique vices, regemque potentem mutato qui sceptra pedo Solymaeia gessit, rex olim vatum, duo maxima munera coeli. multa prius tulit immota discrimina mente, et Sauli et barathri furiis imbellibus actus, multa quoque et regno. tam longa exercuit ira victorem fortuna suum, nec pulsa quievit. ast illam virtus tandem indefessa domavit et populos late fudit, gentesque rebelles

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5

10

5

Philip Hardie nequiquam numeris et magno milite saevas. hi bello, hic ipso bellorum numine fretus.

10

Bella is a synonym for the first word, arma, of the Aeneid, whose second word virum is the object of the English’s ‘I sing’; the English and Latin versions divide up the two objects of Virgil’s cano. Bella is also the first word of Lucan’s epic, and Cowley may hint at the relevance for contemporary England of the themes of civil dissension in the Davideis.23 The Latin reduces the 12 lines of the English to 11, the same number as the first verse paragraph of the Aeneid. Both English and Latin replicate the anaphora of Virgil’s multum ille et terris iactatus et alto  multa quoque et bello passus, ‘the man much buffeted on land and sea  who also suffered much in war’ (Aen. 1.3, 5), but the Latin is closer both in the spacing of multa  multa over three lines (while ‘Much danger first, much toil’ is confined within one line) and in replicating the sequence multa quoque et. In the English Davideis Cowley frequently constructs balanced antitheses over a couplet, or within a line: here for example ‘sceptre’/‘crook’ in 1-2; ‘best poet’/‘best of kings’ in 3. In the Latin the contrast in the first English couplet is conveyed through the opposition at the centre of the line of sceptra/pedo (2). Although the Latin is one line shorter than the English, it takes four lines for the last three of the English, which ends punchily with two lines of antithesis. The home/abroad opposition of ‘All homebred malice, and all foreign boasts’ is lost in et populos late fudit, gentesque rebelles, which seems rather to be an example of a typically Virgilian theme and variation. It is easy to multiply instances where the point of the English is lost or diminished in the Latin, or where the Latin version is obscure until one looks at the English, evidence it would seem of the priority of the English: 1.105-6 (the fallen angels) ‘Unable to corrupt, seek to destroy; | And where their poisons miss, the sword employ’, comes out as 122, et male tentatis succedunt arma venenis, with only the contrast of the last two words in the line. The play, dear to Milton, on Hell as a place and Hell as a state of mind at 1.120 (Satan’s foreknowledge of Christ’s descent from David), ‘A knowledge which new Hells to Hell did bring!’, is at best muted in 135, et nimium vigiles Erebi sufflaverat ignes (‘it had puffed up the already too wakeful fires of Hell’). The point about the moon’s borrowed light might indeed be murky at 404, Non hic luna suis vestitur pallida furtis, without reference to the English ‘No pale-faced Moon does in stolen beams appear’ (1.357); and God’s warning that he is not deaf to Saul’s threats against David is arguably compressed to the point of obscurity (or is it Lucanian pregnancy?) at 447, surdine effecimus aures?, until we look at the English ‘and have we made the ear | To be accounted deaf?’ (1.392-3).

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5. Abraham Cowley, Davideis The colour conceit at 1.426, ‘He swore thy blood should paint this rising morn’, is replaced by a sacrificial image, nempe tuo iam mane cruore litabit (‘For sure his sacrifice this morning will be in your blood’, 483). A more complex and vividly sensuous play on the colour red in the opening invocation to Christ in English is only partly realised in the Latin (1.19-24/19-24): Who Heav’ns glad burden now, and justest pride, Sitt’st high enthron’d next thy great Father’s side, (Where hallowed flames help to adorn that head Which once the blushing thorns environed, Till crimson drops of precious blood hung down Like rubies to enrich thine humble crown.) qui nunc ipse sedes placidi leve pondus Olympi ad dextram patris, et gaudentia sidera calcas, frontem ibi (quam cinxit merito suffusa rubore spina ferox, carus de qua cruor undique fluxit, ut pretiosa humilem decoraret gemma coronam) frontem illam innocuae redimitus sidere flammae.

20

20

Who now yourself sit at your Father’s right hand, a light burden to the tranquil heaven, and trample on the joyful stars, with rays of harmless fire wreathing that forehead once encircled by the cruel thorn, which coloured red deservedly, the forehead from which your dear blood flowed on all sides, so that a costly jewel adorned your humble crown.

The diminution is compensated for in the first two lines, 19-20, where ‘trample on the joyful stars’ makes for a more striking contrast with the humble Man of Sorrows than does the language of elevation in the English (‘pride’, ‘high enthron’d’). The physicality of the choice of phrase in sidera calcas is perhaps influenced by a Lucanian intertext, the opening prayer to Nero not to unbalance the heavens by placing his great weight as a god at either end of the sky, but librati pondera caeli | orbe tene medio (‘choosing the centre of the universe keep the scales of heaven in balance’, 1.57-8; Cowley refers to Lucan’s prayer to Nero together with other classical examples of opening prayers to princes, in note 1 to the English text). The contrast of ‘worst’ and ‘good’ at 1.167-8, ‘Envy, the worst of fiends, herself presents, | Envy, good only when she herself torments’, disappears at 184-5, Invidia, o barathro Furiarum maxima toto | Invidia! o nunquam, nisi cum se punit, amanda! – although both the Latin and the English distort the logic of Ovid’s statement (Met. 2.782) that Envy is her own punishment (suppliciumque suum est), in the sense that finding fault with others is also the source of her own (evil) self-torture. Elsewhere the Latin is more interesting in its dealings

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Philip Hardie with Saul’s envy and the personification Envy. Saul ‘feared his [sc. David’s] mastering Fate, | And envied him a king’s unpowerful hate’ (1.47-8); in the Latin (53-4) et famam tantae sine viribus invidet illi | invidiae, ‘and envied him the fame that such great envy was powerless’, with the repetition of invid- and the paradoxical formulation famam invidiae, since envy is usually the enemy of fame rather than the source of fame. In the Latin the words spoken to the sleeping Saul by Envy disguised as the patriarch Benjamin are invigorated by allusion to the words of envious characters in Virgil: Envy/Benjamin misrepresents Samuel’s announcement of David’s future reign (315-18), talem tibi pestem | molitur, cum dicta Dei crudelia spargit | per populos passim, cum vana oracula mendax | quaeque optat fingit (‘such is the destruction he plots against you, when he spreads God’s harsh words throughout the people, when the liar invents empty oracles to serve his whim’; in English, 1.274-7, ‘Wert thou not told | This by proud Samuel, when at Gilgal he | With bold false threats from God affronted thee? | The dotard lied’). Samuel, according to the duplicitous Envy, does what, according to the feigning Sinon, envious Ulysses (Aen. 2.90, invidia  pellacis Vlixi) does to Palamedes (Aen. 2.98-9, hinc spargere voces | in vulgum ambiguas, ‘from then on he spread doubtful rumours among the crowd’), followed by Sinon’s lying account of Calchas’ interpretation of oracula Phoebi (2.114). Cowley’s Invidia goes on to impersonate the envious Drances (Aen. 11.336-7, quem gloria Turni | obliqua invidia stimulisque agitabat amaris): with 325-7, quid tempore ab illo | ipse Deus populusque Dei tibi debeat, ulli | haud reor obscurum (‘what God and God’s people owe you since that time is, I think, clear to all’), compare Aen. 11.343-4, rem nulli obscuram nostrae nec vocis egentem | consulis, o bone rex (‘my good king, you consult on a matter clear to all and which needs no words from myself’). I turn to examples where the Latin activates details of the Latin and Greek texts on which the English is based. Saul’s anger and jealousy motivates the opening action of the Davideis in a manner parallel to the anger of Juno in Aeneid 1 (and 7). The first line of the main narrative in the Latin activates a specific allusion to Juno’s resentment, Iam paene obductum est Saulo sub pectore vulnus (‘Now the wound in Saul’s breast had almost healed up’, 49; in English, 1.43, ‘The malice now of jealous Saul grew less’): cf. Aen. 1.36, cum Iuno aeternum servans sub pectore vulnus (‘Juno nursing the eternal wound in her breast’). When Saul wakes up from his dream, his first words in English are ‘Oh ’tis confessed | I have been a pious fool, a woman-king’ (1.318-19). Cowley’s note (22) on ‘woman-king’ reads: ‘So Homer ’Acai9dej oÙk2t’ ’Acaio8 [‘Achaean women, no longer Achaean men’, Iliad 2.235, 7.96]; and Virgil o vere Phrygiae, neque enim Phryges [Aen. 9.617].’ Non-

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5. Abraham Cowley, Davideis inflecting English cannot replicate the switch between masculine and feminine endings, but Cowley’s Latin does: verum est, oravit vera, fuique | Israelitis adhuc, pietas me stulta fefellit (‘it is true, he spoke the truth, and until now I have been an Israelite woman, my foolish piety was my undoing’, 364-5). In this case the note would have been better cued to the Latin than to the English. At the end of the long description of the prophets’ college at Naioth in Ramah, the English concludes with further reflections on envy (1.881-4): Thus these wise saints enjoy’d their little all; Free from the spight of much-mistaken Saul: For if man’s life we in just balance weigh, David deserv’d his envy less than they.

The passage has been full of Georgics-style moralising on the virtues and pleasures of the simple life, and this triggers heavy-handed allusion to a famous line in the Georgics in the Latin (1028-30): o fortunatos nimium et bona qui sua norunt! o quam praecelso despectant culmine mundum, et nubes rerum, et iactatum turbine Saulum!

The correction of Geo. 2.458-9, O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint | agricolas! (‘O too happy farmers, if only they knew their good fortune’) (the prophets do know)24 is followed by a view from the summit of wisdom down on the storms of the world reminiscent of the opening of Lucretius 2, with a parallel in one of Cowley’s own English poems, the closing lines of ‘The Motto’, addressing the ‘mighty three’, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil: ‘But you have climb’d the mountain’s top, there sit | On the calm flourishing head of it, | And, whilst with wearied steps we upward go, | See us, and clouds below.’25 In the digression on the power of music in both macrocosm and microcosm that prefaces David’s calming of Saul’s fury with his performance of Psalm 114 to the lyre, the respective strengths of Cowley’s Latin and English are both on display. The divine creation of the world, ‘God’s poem, this world’s new essay’ (1.451), is introduced with the analogy of the human poet (1.447-50): As first a various unform’d hint we find Rise in some god-like poet’s fertile mind, Till all the parts and words their places take, And with just marches verse and music make.

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450

Philip Hardie The Latin already includes language that works the reverse comparison, of a poem to the cosmos (503-7): ut sacri primum foecundo in pectore vatis indigesta operis surgunt elementa futuri, materies donec paulatim sumere formas incipiat, iussoque incedant ordine verba, ac bene dispositus leni fluat agmine versus.

505

Just as in the fertile breast of the sacred poet the confused elements arise of the work to be, until the matter begins gradually to take on shape, and the words march to order at command, and the well-ordered verse flows in gentle procession.

elementa are both the letters that form the words of the poem and the elements of the universe. indigesta points to Ovid’s primeval Chaos, rudis indigestaque moles (Met. 1.7), at the start of a cosmogony which modern critics have read as an image of the poet’s own makings. paulatim sumere formas is taken from the cosmogony at the beginning of the Song of Silenus, Eclogue 6.36, and the well-ordered line 507 flows to the rhythm of a part of the natural world, the river Tiber (Aen. 2.781-2, ubi Lydius arva | inter opima virum leni fluit agmine Thybris). Line 506 translates the military image of ‘just marches’ (with an auditory echo of ‘just’ in iusso?); compare the procession of conquered peoples in the newly formed Augustan cosmos on the Shield of Aeneas at Aen. 8.722, incedunt victae longo ordine gentes. But when it comes to the harmonious disposition of the natural elements, the English deploys a technical musical vocabulary that is not reproduced in the Latin (1.455-60/516-21): Till they to number and fixed rules were brought By the eternal mind’s poetic thought. Water and air he for the tenor chose, Earth made the base, the treble flame arose, To th’ active moon a quick brisk stroke he gave, To Saturn’s string a touch more soft and grave. et vincula dulcia victis imposuit, numerosque pios, facilemque tenorem elicuit. medios aer atque unda sonores concentu referunt muto, levis ignis acutos, terra graves. rapido lunam diverberat ictu, at lentam Saturni operoso pollice chordam.

455

460

520

medios, acutos, graves are not technical Latin terms for musical parts, and tenor is used in a different sense.

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5. Abraham Cowley, Davideis In the justification of his ‘libertine’ practice of translating Pindar in the ‘Preface’ to the Pindarique Odes, Cowley appeals to the analogy of translating the Psalms: ‘The Psalms of David, (which I believe to have been in their original, to the Hebrews of his time  the most exalted pieces of poesy) are a great example of what I have said; all the translators of which  for this very reason, that they have not sought to supply the lost excellencies of another language with new ones in their own, are so far from doing honour, or at least justice to that divine poet, that, methinks, they revile him worse than Shimei. And Buchanan himself  comes in my opinion no less short of David, than his country does of Judaea.’ David calms Saul with a free paraphrase of Psalm 114 in three eleven-line ‘Pindaric’ stanzas in the English Davideis (1.483-515), which is elaborated in ten Alcaic stanzas in the Latin (555-94).26 A skilled Horatian, both in his other Latin Alcaics and Sapphics,27 and in English imitations and paraphrases of various lyric and hexameter pieces of Horace, Cowley’s most sustained allusion to Horace is in stanza 9 (without corresponding lines in the English): aequare summis ima valet Deus. discent in altum plana tumescere, vallesque turgescent, ferentque attonito capita alta coelo. God has power to bring the lowest level with the highest. The flat places will learn to swell up on high, and the valleys will swell and carry their heads high in the astonished heavens.

This draws on an ode in which Horace reacts to a miraculous event in nature, Odes 1.34.12-14, valet ima summis | mutare et insignem attenuat deus, | obscura promens. Cowley replaces Horace’s contrast of ‘humble the great, and bring forth the obscure’ with a biblical allusion, Isaiah 40:4, ‘Every valley shall be exalted’, clothed in classical language: the last words of the stanza echo Aeneid 3.678, caelo capita alta ferentes (the Cyclopes). This may serve as a final example of what Samuel Johnson referred to as Cowley’s ‘accommodation of the diction of Rome to his own conceptions’. Notes 1. Lonsdale 2006: 1.196-7. 2. Loiseau 1931: 648-51. 3. See Victoria Moul’s chapter in this volume. 4. On the Anacreontiques see Scodel 2010: 235; on the Pindarique Odes, ibid. 236. 5. See Binns 1990: ch. 14.

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Philip Hardie 6. Binns 1990: 251. 7. Binns 1990: 269; Hunter et al. 1978-80, s.vv. ‘Translation, poetic’. 8. On paraphrases of Old Testament stories by Quarles and others see Lewalski 1966: 381 n. 38. 9. Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635; a didactic poem in nine books). 10. For some parallels with, and possible echoes of, the Davideis in Paradise Lost see McBryde 1898: 500, concluding however ‘Paradise Lost  owes directly little or nothing to the Davideis’, a judgement that should perhaps be questioned. See also Starke 2006 on ‘Miltonic premonitions’ in the Davideis. 11. Cowley uses Virgil’s proemial announcement of his wish to embark on a new flight of poetry at Geo. 3.8-9, temptanda via est, qua me quoque possim | tollere humo victorque virum volitare per ora, on the title-page of the 1656 Poems, and the motto is the text for the opening (also in the 1668 Works) poem, the manifesto for his assault on the mountain of Fame, ‘What shall I do to be for ever known, | And make the age to come my own?’ Victoria Moul points out another programmatic allusion to Georgics 3.8-9 at Plantarum Libri Sex 6.4, per saltus tentanda via, nemorum invia, restat. 12. On Cowley’s use of half-lines see Power 2007. 13. McBryde 1898: 514. 14. On the Infernal Council motif in Renaissance epic see Schaar 1971: 13-15. 15. McBryde 1898: 525. 16. For a sympathetic understanding of Cowley’s plan to write a ‘universal history’ see Kurth 1966: 76-9. 17. Victoria Moul points out a close parallel – and model? – in Ben Jonson’s ‘To King James’, ‘How best of kings, dost thou a sceptre bear! | How, best of poets, dost thou laurel wear! | But two things rare the fates had in their store, | And gave thee both, to show they could no more.’ 18. I, n. 41: ‘For this liberty of inserting an ode into an heroic poem, I have no authority or example; and therefore like men who venture upon a new coast, I must run the hazard of it. We must sometimes be bold to innovate, nec minimum meruere decus vestigia Graeca | ausi deserere – Hor. [Ars poet. 286-7].’ 19. On the cosmic background to the human actions in the Davideis see Hinman 1960: ch. 7. Nature’s secrets are very much the theme of Cowley’s longest Latin poem, the Plantarum Libri Sex. 20. See Braden, Cummings and Gillespie 2010: Index s.vv. ‘translation: theoretical formulations, Cowley’. 21. McBryde 1898: 517-18: 75-6 ‘Beneath the dens where unfledged tempests lie, | And infant winds their tender voices try’ is adapted by Dryden for his translation of Aen. 10.97-9, ceu flamina prima | cum deprensa fremunt silvis et caeca volutant | murmura, venturos nautis prodentia ventos, as ‘So winds, when yet unfledg’d in woods they lie, | In whispers first their tender voices try.’ McBryde points out that Cowley is closer to Statius, Theb. 2.37, illic exhausti posuere cubilia venti; 7.625, ventus uti primas struit inter nubila vires. Cowley’s Latin in fact is close neither to Virgil nor to Statius: subter ubi implumis nido iacet aura profundo, | et tener innocuo vagit cum murmure ventus (86-7). 22. Korn 1951. 23. On the possible political messages of the poem, vexed by the uncertainty

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5. Abraham Cowley, Davideis as to the date of composition, see Ram 1969/70. Political readings would be hard to exclude: David was frequently used as a model for the ruler by both sides in the English Civil War: Radzinowicz 1994. On Lucan and the English Civil War, see also L.B.T. Houghton’s chapter in this volume. 24. Cowley provides a translation of Geo. 2.458ff. in ‘Of Agriculture’, one of his Essays in Verse and Prose, together with translations of other Latin praises of life in the countryside, including one of the opening lines of Plantarum Libri Sex 4, itself an imitation in Latin of the Virgilian makarismos. 25. Cowley has a personal interest in the values of the Prophets’ College, and in the idea of such an institution: there is a striking similarity between the description of the Prophets’ College and the college for the pursuit of experiments, together with a school providing scientifically oriented education for boys, that Cowley sketched out in his 1661 pamphlet A Proposition for the Advancement of Learning. 26. On Psalm paraphrase see Mackenzie 2010. 27. On these see Moul in this volume.

Bibliography Binns, J. W. (1990) Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age. Leeds (ARCA 24). Braden, G., Cummings, R. and Gillespie, S. (eds) (2010) The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2: 1550-1660. Oxford. Bradner, L. (1940) Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry 15001925. New York and London (The Modern Language Association of America, General Series X). Dykstal, T. (1991) ‘The Epic Reticence of Abraham Cowley’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 31: 95-115. Hinman, R. (1960) Abraham Cowley’s World of Order. Cambridge, MA. Hunter, W.B. et al. (eds) (1978-80) A Milton Encyclopedia. Lewisburg and London. Kermode, F. (1949) ‘The Date of Cowley’s Davideis’, Review of English Studies 25: 154-8. Korn, A.L. (1951) ‘Mac Flecknoe and Cowley’s Davideis’, Huntington Library Quarterly 14: 99-127. Kurth, B.O. (1966) Milton and Christian Heroism: Biblical Epic Themes and Forms in Seventeenth-Century England. Hamden, CT. Lewalski, B.K. (1966) Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained. Providence and London. Loiseau, J. (1931) Abraham Cowley: sa vie et son œuvre. Paris. Lonsdale, R. (ed.) (2006) Samuel Johnson: The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 4 vols. Oxford. Mackenzie, D. (2010) ‘The Psalms’, in Braden, Cummings and Gillespie (2010): 141-54. Martin, L.C. (ed.) (1949) Abraham Cowley: Poetry and Prose. Oxford. McBryde, J. McL. (1898) ‘A Study of Cowley’s Davideis’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 2: 454-527. Nethercot, A. (1931, repr. 1967) Abraham Cowley: The Muse’s Hannibal. London. Power, H. (2007) ‘ “Teares breake off my Verse”: The Virgilian Incompleteness of Abraham Cowley’s The Civil War’, Translation & Literature 16.2: 141-59.

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Philip Hardie Radzinowicz, M.A. (1994) ‘Forced Allusions. Avatars of King David in the Seventeenth Century’, in D.T. Benet and M. Lieb (eds) Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context, 45-66. Pittsburgh. Ram, T. (1969/70) ‘Cowley and the Epic Poem: The Failure of the Davideis’, The Calcutta Review n.s. 1: 565-71. Revard, S. (1991) ‘Cowley’s Anacreontiques and the Translation of the Greek Anacreontea’, in A. Dalzell, C. Fantazzi and R.J. Schoeck (eds) Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis, 595-609. Binghamton. Schaar, C. (1971) Marino and Crashaw. Sospetto d’Herode. A Commentary. Lund. Scodel, J. (2010) ‘Lyric’, in Braden, Cummings and Gillespie (2010): 212-47. Shadduck, G. (1987) A Critical Edition of Abraham Cowley’s Davideis. New York and London. Starke, S. (2006) ‘“The Eternal Now”: Virgilian Echoes and Miltonic Premonitions in Cowley’s Davideis’, Christianity and Literature 55: 195-219. Sutton, D. (ed.) Abraham Cowley, Davideos Liber I. Hypercritical text at: http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/david/ Waller, A.R. (ed.) (1905) The English Writings of Abraham Cowley, 2 vols. Cambridge.

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6

Horatian odes in Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex (1668) Victoria Moul Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex, published posthumously in 1668, is an extraordinary showcase of Latin poetic form. Although popular in its own day – a complete translation into English verse, including contributions by Nahum Tate and Aphra Behn, was published in 1689 – the work has been almost entirely neglected in modern scholarship, and what little attention it has attracted has focused upon the most overtly political passages of the fifth and sixth books.1 The six books are divided by genre into three groups of two: first, two books of Latin elegiacs (first published separately in 1662) describe herbs; the middle books, devoted to flowers, use elegiacs to link inset odes and epigrams; and the final books, on trees, are written in hexameters, and shade generically from the didactic to the frankly epic.2 As well as this generic ambition, the work has a serious didactic purpose (to reveal the uses, especially medical and pharmaceutical, of herbs, flowers and trees) and a marked political dimension, with sections concerned with the conquest of America, the English Civil War and the Restoration. In the Plantarum, Latin is the language of classical allusion, put to emotive and often political purpose; but it is also the medium of scientific progress. In this essay I would like to consider the rôle played in this complex set of concerns by the range of Horatian lyric forms on display in Books 3 and 4. Linked by narrative passages in elegiac couplets, each poem belongs to a different (usually female) flower, who speaks in propria persona of their characteristic myth and their natural properties. The combination of female speaking voices and Horatian metres with both Ovidian myth and modern science is a startling one. Focusing upon three of these unusual poems in some detail, I will examine how Cowley uses Horatian form and tone to negotiate between these disparate elements, while also contributing to the artistic structure of his work as a whole. Books 3 and 4 of Cowley’s work are not purely lyric. Book 3, 1123

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Victoria Moul lines long, begins with 482 lines that continue the elegiac couplets of Books 1 and 2 (devoted to herbs). The dramatic setting is the court of Flora, the goddess of flowers, who, we are told, has returned to England at the Restoration. Presiding over her assembly on the banks of the Thames, she proposes a contest to appoint a queen of the flowers.3 The first lyric piece, at lines 483-538, belongs to the Violet, and from that point on, individual flowers speak a series of ‘their’ odes, in a variety of (mostly Horatian) lyric forms.4 Book 4 has a similar format, and continues the competition with Flora presiding, although the opening section of the book is devoted to a series of epigrams in elegiac couplets, allowing a long sequence of flowers to be introduced only briefly. Regular Latin footnotes, often of considerable length, point the reader to relevant passages of classical literature and botanical reference works, both ancient and modern, with a particular focus upon the medicinal uses of the plants described.5 Cowley’s (unfinished) English epic, the four books of the Davideis, shares to a lesser extent in this metrical and generic variety: the first book of the Davideis, in both its English and Latin versions, incorporates an inset lyric – a translation of Psalm 114 into English Pindarics and Latin Alcaics respectively.6 Similarly, the 1668 collected Poemata Latina ends with two free-standing Latin odes (Solitudo, pp. 415-17, and Ode, pp. 418-19), both of which are in fact accomplished – and in some respects interestingly independent – Latin versions of English poems.7 Throughout his career, then, Cowley produced not only major freestanding odes or sequences of odes but also showed an interest in incorporating major Latin or English odes, especially of panegyric, political or moralising force, within larger works; this latter category includes pieces set against the backdrop of another genre, including prose (in the Essays), hexameter epic (in the Davideis) and elegiac couplets or epigrams (in the Plantarum Libri Sex). This procedure is not of course Horatian: although Horace demonstrates great metrical versatility – a feature imitated by Cowley – his works confine lyric metres to the Odes and hexameter verse to the Satires and Epistles. There is no ancient model for this kind of lyric interruption in an epic poem, as Cowley himself remarks in a note to the Davideis.8 Both Seneca (in his tragedies) and Boethius (in the Consolation of Philosophy), however, offer ancient examples of lyric pieces closely indebted to Horace set within a non-lyric genre – as lyric choruses in Seneca’s verse drama, and set against prose in the Consolation of Philosophy.

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6. Horatian odes in Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex Lyric in the Plantarum Libri Sex Taken together, Books 3 and 4 of the Plantarum Libri Sex contain thirteen odes, employing eight different metres, and varying in length between twenty-four (Narcissus) and ninety-three (Rose) lines long.9 Each of these odes is spoken by a different flower: Violet, Bear’s Ear, Narcissus, Anemone, Crown Imperial, Tulip, Iris, Peony, Rose, White Lily, Poppy, Crocus and finally Amaranthus. Eight different lyric metres are used, one (Sapphics) on three occasions (Violet, Rose and Poppy) and three twice (Alcaics, hendecasyllables and the third Asclepiad). All but two of these metres are Horatian, and Cowley’s odes are in close conversation with Horatian lyric. Of Horace’s 103 odes, thirty-seven are in Alcaics and twenty-five (plus the Carmen saeculare) in Sapphics. (Catullus also wrote two extant Sapphic poems, 11 and 51.) Most of Horace’s serious political and panegyric odes are in these two metres, with the various Asclepiad forms restricted largely to lighter pieces, including well-known odes of love, seduction, celebration and the passing of time. Cowley generally reproduces these patterns, using Sapphics (three times) and Alcaics (twice) for the longer poems, of more overt literary and political ambition. It is not then surprising that Cowley’s flowers employ Horatian diction and extensive allusions to Horatian lyric in conjunction with their Horatian metres.10 My aim in this chapter is, first, to give some sense of the texture and distinctive stylistic features of Cowley’s Latin poetry – that is, to attend to it as poetry; secondly, to map briefly some of the patterns of allusive interaction between Cowley and Horace (an element which is, as we shall see, often closely related to the distinctive features of Cowley’s poetic style); and thirdly, to relate both of these aspects to the overarching didactic theme and purpose of the work. For the reader familiar with Horace, there are many surprises here, and that sense of surprise is essential to the rhetorical force, humour and didactic purpose of Cowley’s project. Violet The first ode of Book 3 belongs to Viola, the Violet. Consisting of fourteen Sapphic stanzas, the poem is marked by a pattern of allusions to Horace’s odes of political praise, especially those for Octavian/Augustus.11 Cowley’s violet begins with enthusiastic praise (Viola 1-8):12 Aureus portis Aries superne Exit auratis quadriformis Anni,

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Victoria Moul Verque formosum radiante portat (Plaudite) dorso. Verque dum procedit (Io Triumphe!) Floreo procedit (Io!) Triumpho, Ferculum primum venio superbae Nobile pompae.

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The Golden Ram on high leaves via the golden gates of the four-formed year, and bears the beautiful spring on his glowing back (applaud!). And while the spring comes on (Io triumph!), comes on (Io!) with flowery triumph, I come, the first fine exhibit of the proud procession.

Here we find a markedly Horatian metre (and, as we shall see, some specific Horatian allusions) deployed to strikingly unHoratian effect. The ode begins with a flurry of alliteration, assonance, consonance and even rhyme: aureus, portis, Aries, superne, auratis, quadriformis, Anni all contain similar sounds, creating a closely-woven opening couplet. These first lines also demonstrate Cowley’s preference for the patterned repetition of related words – notice aureus and auratis in the first two lines, and the shift from Triumphe! to Triumpho in lines 5-6. Effects of this sort continue throughout the poem, and are in general characteristic of Cowley’s Latin (though not his English) odes.13 Combined with his generally end-stopped stanzas, the effect is quite different from Horatian lyric, even where the theme, diction and even combination of words or phrases are closely indebted to Horace. The debt to Horace in this case is hard to miss. Io Triumphe! is a direct quotation from Odes 4.2 (line 49); like Odes 1.2 and Cowley’s poem under discussion, 4.2 is a long ode (fifteen stanzas) in Sapphic stanzas.14 When the phrase is repeated in the next line, however, both grammar and punctuation are slightly different: (Io!) Triumpho. The noun now has an adjective – floreo – with which it agrees. Very often, as here, this kind of shift from one word to a closely related one is used to draw attention to a significant addition or development. The variation here marks the departure from the model both literally and conceptually – in Horace the phrase io Triumphe, occurring in the same metrical position as in Cowley’s poem, is simply repeated (Odes 4.2.49-52):15 teque, dum procedis, io Triumphe, non semel dicemus, io Triumphe, civitas omnis, dabimusque divis tura benignis.

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And as you lead the way, the entire state shall cry, ‘io Triumph!’, three times, not just once, ‘io Triumph!’; and we shall offer incense to the kindly gods.

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6. Horatian odes in Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex These lines come close to the end of Horace’s ode which, after disclaiming Pindaric style (albeit in a strikingly Pindaric mode), turns to a description of the kind of verse – panegyric of Augustus – that Horace suggests his addressee, Iulus, should write. (The poet himself, in a subtle gesture of recusatio, suggests he will simply join in with the general chorus of praise.) The cry of triumph in this stanza is in honour of Augustus and specifically of his military victories and the peace they have brought. As in many of Horace’s major panegyric pieces, the relationship between the praise and the poet’s own voice is ambiguous: Augustus both is, and is not, the quasi-royal object of Horace’s Pindaric acclamation. Cowley’s appropriation of Horatian political lyric – around which the whole of this ode is structured – responds to this ambiguity with a set of transformations and alterations of his own. These lines relocate the climactic cry of triumph near the end of Horace’s poem to the beginning of Cowley’s ode – and also a generic ‘beginning’, since this is the first Horatian ode of the entire work. They incorporate, too, a kind of pun: a ‘flowery triumph’ might mean merely a triumph marked by garlands of celebratory flowers; but in this context, as will become clear, it denotes in fact the triumph of the flowers. The object of praise in Cowley’s poem is also significantly different from that of its model. For the reader approaching Cowley’s ode for the first time, the grammatical subject of this sentence comes as a surprise. Spring is proceeding in its flowery triumph – appropriately enough given the comparison between Augustus and the sun at Odes 4.2.45 and 4.5.6. But the subject of the sentence is the violet herself: ferculum primum venio superbae | nobile pompae (7-8). The self-important characterisation of the violet here is humorous, and the humour works partly by comparison with Horace’s poem – in her strident self-aggrandising, the Violet has no hesitation in playing the rôle that Horace defers to Iulus; or even (as we read on) that of Augustus himself. The association with Horatian odes of political praise is further strengthened by an echo of Odes 4.14, a poem addressed directly to Augustus, and one of the plainest pieces of panegyric that Horace wrote. Cowley’s ode continues (9-16, stanzas 3 and 4): Ut decet Veris sobolem decori, Maximam natu sobolem decoram, Purpurâ involvor, viridísque gesto Insignia regni. Regio quamvìs veneranda cultu, Regios odi tumidósque fastus, Nec sinum amplexúmque humilis Parentis Impia sperno.

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10

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Victoria Moul As befits the offspring of the beautiful Spring, the eldest of her offspring, and a beautiful one, I am wrapped in purple, and I carry the insignia of the green realm. Although deserving of royal veneration,16 I loathe those royal and self-important rituals, and I do not reject the lap and embrace of my humble Parent in an impious fashion.

Here the purple trappings of royalty refer, of course, to the colour of the violet’s flower; and sinum amplexumque humilis Parentis to the fact that for all her purple attire, she grows in the ground. But these lines also incorporate an allusion to Horace which is close to a correction. Cowley’s regios odi tumidosque fastus (14) is based upon the phrase virtutes in aevum | per titulos memoresque fastus from the first stanza of Horace, Odes 4.14 (Odes 4.14.1-6): Quae cura patrum quaeve Quiritium plenis honorum muneribus tuas, Auguste, virtutes in aevum per titulos memoresque fastus aeternet, o, qua sol habitabilis inlustrat oras, maxime principum?

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What sort of attentions and honourable gifts of the Senate and the Quirites could immortalise your virtues, Augustus, through the ages in inscriptions and memorial rites – o greatest of leaders wherever the sun shines upon habitable shores?

The poem that follows is in some sense the answer to the question: the ode itself commemorates the military victories of Augustus, and of his adopted sons. In Cowley’s version of the motif, however, the violet, though she is deserving of veneration, rejects and disdains exactly the fastus immortalised by Horace’s ode, and remains piously unashamed of her earthly origin. Next, she offers an Ovidian account of the origin of her purple colouring: Venus, she says, is so delighted by the promise of spring that the violet represents, that she kisses her as she opens, staining the flower with purple nectar (21-4): Ergo nascenti mihi multa raptim Millia impingit Venus osculorum, Et sacro labrum mihi purpurascens17 Nectare tingit. So at the moment of my birth Venus presses many thousands of kisses rapidly upon me, and stains my lip, turning it purple with her holy nectar.18

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6. Horatian odes in Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex The eroticism of the image derives partly from Catullus’ thousands of kisses (Catullus 5 and 7) and partly from a play on words: violet’s ‘lip’ (her labrum) is presumably the pursed ‘mouth’ of a flower bud as it begins to open. But once again a political register overlays the playful or erotic. The image of a mouth stained with purple nectar, upon which this stanza focuses so intently, reminds us once again of Horace’s Augustus, this time in Odes 3.3. Another of Horace’s major political odes, that poem imagines Augustus in heaven, alongside Pollux and Hercules, recumbens | purpureo bibit ore nectar (‘reclining as he drinks nectar with a purple mouth’, 11-12 – that is, one stained purple by his drinking). As in 4.2 and 4.14, Augustus in 3.3 is praised for his military victories (for instance over the Medes, named at line 44). At this point, after six stanzas of Cowley’s violet poem, a strong link has been established between the Horatian Augustus and the Cowleian violet, but the terms of her praise – and her triumph – are not yet clear. At the seventh stanza, however, the flower begins to outline the form of her glory: first her sweet smell, taste and appearance (25-32) and then her medicinal uses (33-44). This is the heart of the poem, corresponding to the description of the victory in a major Horatian (or indeed, Pindaric) ode (37-44): Fervidos hostes minimo tumultu Exigo sensim sine clade victrix Corpus haud sentit placidè peracti Vulnera belli.

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Cedit, & cessisse rubescit Herbae Ad coronamenta epulásque natae, Virium atque irae nimiùm potentis Conscia Febris. I drive out the feverish enemy with the least possible disturbance – plainly a victor without a rout; the body scarcely feels the wounds of this war that is carried out so calmly. Guilty Fever gives way, and blushes to have given ground to a herb born for crowns and banquets – but give way she does, aware of the herb’s power and the force of her anger.

The striking expression sine clade victrix is once again borrowed from Horace: stravit humum sine clade victor (Odes 4.14.32) describes Tiberius’ victory over the Rhaetii (although the poem as a whole is addressed to Augustus, to whom the victories of both Drusus and Tiberius are ultimately attributed). The subject peoples on the borders of the Roman empire have become in Cowley’s version marauding fever, driven from the body by the violet’s antipyretic powers.19

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Victoria Moul In the closing movement of the ode, the bodily calm after a fever abates is compared to the settling of the ocean after a storm, in an image indebted in particular to Neptune’s calming of seas in Aeneid 1.124-30. Neptune’s divine intervention in support of Aeneas and the eventual foundation of Rome is in this way associated with the violet’s ability to expel fever (45-8): Ponit ut ventus timidéque mussat, Ipse Neptunus simul atque laetum Increpans ventos caput aestuosis Extulit undis.

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So the wind settles and falls silent in fear, when Neptune himself lifts his fine head, reproaching the winds, above the seething waves.20

The cumulative force of this series of (largely Horatian) references is didactic in effect: the enemy routed by the violet, an enemy much mightier even than the various conquered opponents of Augustan Rome, is disease itself – and specifically fever. The sequence of allusions places this pharmaceutical battle on a political and even epic footing. The appropriation of poems addressed directly to Augustus or his adopted children is forceful in itself, and made more so by the transferral of that triumphant and unequivocally male voice (of Horace to Augustus or his children; of Virgil in Aeneid 1; even as we have seen of Augustus himself, as described by Horace) to a small female flower. Rose We find a similar pattern of Horatian interaction, though with a slightly different set of Horatian odes, in the song of the Rose. The last free-standing ode of Book 3 – and the longest of all the odes, at twenty-three stanzas or ninety-two lines – the Rose ode is one of the most ambitious portions of this section of the work, anticipating in some respects the increased artistic and political seriousness of the final two books. In common with the longest of Horace’s odes – including the Roman Odes, 3.1-6 – the ode approaches the themes and moral seriousness of epic. It is followed immediately by a narrative passage of elegiacs that is frankly epic in tone and form; it describes the ranks of roses of various colours as a mustering of troops, and gives a brief account of the Wars of the Roses. The ode begins gently, with the association between the rose and Venus, as the flower claims Cupid as her brother (1-12):

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6. Horatian odes in Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex Esse me quisquam dubitare possit Sanguinem verum Veneris beatae? Ipse Germanum sine fraude vultus Pingit Amorem. Dulcis, & Mollis, Iuvenisque semper Sic meus ridet, lacrymátque quondam Mane vel Frater; similique nobis Purpurat ore Frater alatus; foliorum & Alas Ipsa distendo; Facibus relucet Frater, ardentes Apices & ipsa Vertice tollo.

5

10

Who could doubt that I am truly born of the blood of blessed Venus? My face itself depicts my brother Love without deception. Sweet, and soft, and always young – so my brother laughs and weeps, sometimes, early in the morning; with a mouth like mine my winged brother glows beautifully. I too spread out wings – of leaves; my brother shines with his torches, I too raise blazing points with my head.

A play upon the various meanings of several words creates the association here between the flower and the deity. Purpuro for instance can mean both ‘be purple’ (appropriate for the flower) and ‘to shine; or be beautifully adorned’ (more fitting for Cupid). Similarly, the apices of the final line refer both to the ‘points’ of Cupid’s notorious arrows, and the topmost point (or perhaps the thorns) of the rose. The final lines of the third stanza incorporate too an allusion to something more ambitious and significant than love – & ipsa | Vertice tollo (11-12) alludes to Horace’s ambitious, if mildly ironic, promise at the end of the first ode that, if ranked among the lyric canon, sublimi feriam sidera vertice, ‘I shall strike the stars with my uplifted head’ (Odes 1.1.36). This hint of poetic ambition is developed by the mounting seriousness of the poem. After recounting the universal pleasure and suffering of love, the flower turns from her romantic to her medicinal associations, with a marked shift of register (49-56): Quid quod & Morbos fugo delicata, Efficax virtute, modóque suavis? Ipsa tormento resoluta leni Corpora purgo. Phoebus ut nubes reserans aquosas Solvit in rorem placidè salubrem, Non Iovis ritu, rapido exprimentis Fulmine Nimbos.

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Victoria Moul But I also put to flight diseases, delicate as I am, both effective in my power and sweet in my method. I purge the body, relieved by a gentle torment. As Phoebus, unlocking the watery clouds, dissolves them gently into health-giving dew – not in the fashion of Jupiter, wringing out the clouds with his swift thunderbolt.

The striking phrase tormento  leni (a ‘gentle torment’) is derived from Horace, Odes 3.21.13-14, tu lene tormentum ingenio admoves | plerumque duro, ‘you apply a gentle torment to wits that are, for the most part, dull’. In Horace’s ode to a wine jar, it is wine itself that effects this ‘gentle torment’, a phrase transferred here by Cowley to the medicinal use of rose as a purgative. By this point the rose has associated herself with Apollo, the god of poetry and medicine, in addition to Cupid; and also to wine, an agent of poetic inspiration as well as pleasure; and to a bold claim to lasting literary status. She then turns to confront a possible vulnerability in her bid to be queen of the flowers – namely, her short life: ‘Why do they level the brief time of my life against me?’ (57). The rest of the poem pursues this theme, and in doing so returns once more to Horace, this time to Horace’s treatment of literary immortality in Odes 4.8 and 4.9 (73-6): Fama sed Fortes vetat interire: Et mihi abruptum properante Parcâ Non fugax Virtus, odor & superstes Prorogat aevum.

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But Fame does not allow the brave to die: nor can flighty virtue or the scent that remains behind extend my life when it is cut short by Fate in her haste.

The Fortes come from Odes 4.9, vixere fortes ante Agamemnona | multi (4.9.25-6); many brave men, Horace points out, lived before Agamemnon, but have no lasting fame because they lacked a poet to confer glory upon them. In Cowley it is fama itself that extends their life, and the form of the statement is borrowed from the corresponding passage on the same theme in Odes 4.8, dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori: | caelo Musa beat (‘The Muse forbids the death of a man worthy of praise: | the Muse exalts him to heaven’, 4.8.28-9). In Horace it is virtus et favor et lingua potentium | vatum, ‘virtue, approval and the tongue of powerful poets’ (4.8.25-6), which destine the great to the isles of the blessed after death. Accordingly we expect this stanza to continue with the claim that the glory and courage of great men make them – perhaps via the agency of a major poet – effectively immortal. In a witty version of this motif, the rose speaks instead about

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6. Horatian odes in Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex the extension of her own short life (mihi abruptum properante Parcâ  aevum) and pairs ‘fleeting Virtue’ not with courage or renown, as in Horace, but rather odor & superstes – her lingering scent. The expression prorogat aevum is also Horatian, and derived from a related passage in the Ars Poetica, concerned this time solely with the immortality conferred by literary fame and dissemination (Ars poet. 343-6): omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, lectorem delectando pariterque monendo; hic meret aera liber Sosiis; hic et mare transit et longum noto scriptori prorogat aevum.

345

The poet who blends what is sweet with what is useful hits the mark, by pleasing his reader and at the same time instructing him. His book earns money for the Sosii [booksellers in Rome]; it crosses the sea and obtains a long life for the famous author.

Cowley’s Rose appropriates Horatian language of literary and political immortality – of both the poet and his addressee – to describe her own enduring scent, that lingers even after the flower has faded and the plant died (77-84): Infimus Vermis remanente vitâ Mortuo fertur melior Leone; Ipsa viventes validósque Flores Mortua vinco.

80

Mortuam si me reputare fas est, Cuius insignum vel adhuc Cadaver (Corporis functi quasi vivus Haeres) Spirat odorem. The lowest worm – as long as life remains – is considered better than a dead lion; but I, when dead, defeat all the living and mighty Flowers. If it is right to consider me dead, whose Body still breathes out such a marked scent (as if it were the living heir of the dead body).

The Rose speaks as if she were a great poet; but the work she leaves behind is simply her scent. Amaranthus The odes of the Rose and the Violet, as we have seen, exploit some of the most ambitious portions of Horatian lyric to memorable didactic effect – Roman political panegyric is outdone by the violet’s destruction

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Victoria Moul of fever, and the lasting scent of the rose, used even to bury kings, claims an even more powerful brand of immortality than the poet himself. In a variation of this motif, the poem of the Amaranthus – the last of the Odes in Book 4 and so the last ode of the Plantarum as a whole – also appropriates and subverts Horatian lyric tropes, but mocks too the literary and political seriousness of the Rose and Violet themselves, flowers he dismisses in his opening lines for the brevity of their beauty. The Amaranth poem, like the Horatian erotic odes on which it is modelled, is fairly short, at seven stanzas (28 lines). It begins as follows (1-8):21 Imbelles Violae, futilis & Rosa, Eheu, purpureâ praecipites fugâ, Formosos pueros atque puellulas Ornent Hemerocallidas. Nos aeterna Deum tempora cingimus, Aeternis comites semper honoribus, Et nunquam Capiti vel Coma decidit, Vel nos decidimus comis.

5

Feeble Violets and the futile Rose, alas, so swift in their purple flight, let them adorn beautiful boys and those little girls, the lilies of the day. But I wreath the immortal brows of the gods, a permanent companion to their eternal glory; no hair ever falls from my head, nor do I fall from hair.

Rather like the Violet poem, this piece uses a patchwork of Horatian elements to make a rather unHoratian point. The opening two stanzas of the ode incorporate several Horatian echoes, of both sense and phraseology. The ‘weak violets’ and the ‘futile rose’ are feeble because they do not live long; repeatedly, Horace reminds his young addressees – both boys and girls – that they too will be at their youthful best only briefly. This idea is summarised by the striking form Hemerocallidas – an adjective of Greek derivation meaning ‘of or related to the lily-of-theday’; or simply ‘beautiful only for a day’, and markedly unHoratian in both its ostentatious form and its metrical effect.22 Cowley has drawn the emotive features of these lines from several sources. Eheu reminds us of Odes 2.14.1-2, eheu, fugaces, Postume, Postume, | labuntur anni, ‘Alas, Postumus, Postumus, the fleeting years are sliding past’; especially as the sense of fugaces  anni – the fleeting years – is closely paralleled by the phrase purpurea praecipites fuga (‘swift in their purple flight’, the bold transferred adjective typical of Cowley’s style). The wreathed garlands in the second stanza (tempora cingimus, 5) evoke the scenes of drinking and celebration so often

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6. Horatian odes in Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex connected, in Horatian lyric, with the passing pleasures of love; and both boys and girls are objects of erotic attention in the Odes. Finally, lines 7-8 work a subtle variation upon a memorable Horatian image. Addressing Ligurinus with one long sentence, Odes 4.10 exclaims (4.10.3-5): et quae nunc umeris involitant, deciderint comae, nunc et qui color est puniceae flore prior rosae, mutatus Ligurinum in faciem verterit hispidam 

5

Those locks that now skim your shoulders will fall; and your complexion which is now finer than the pink flower of the rose will be changed and transform Ligurinus into a face rough with hair 

Ligurinus’ hair, now luxuriant, will begin to fall (deciderint comae), the rose-bloom fade from his face, and his skin roughen as he begins to grow a beard. His moment of youth and beauty – and, by implication, his erotic popularity – will not, that is, last long. By contrast, the coma of the Amaranthus – his ‘hair’, or, rather, ‘flower’ – never falls from his head: et nunquam Capiti vel Coma decidit (7). Playing in a characteristic fashion upon the various meanings of comae – as both (human) hair and flowers of foliage – Cowley continues: vel nos decidimus comis (8), ‘and [neither] do we [the Amaranth flower] fall from hair’ – that is, garlands made from Amaranthus do not slip off or fade.23 But as well as working a variation upon the Horatian allusion of the previous line (deciderint comae of Odes 4.10), line 8 also echoes closely another line of Horace, again on the inevitability of age and death, this time from Odes 4.7 (4.7.13-16): damna tamen celeres reparant caelestia lunae: nos ubi decidimus quo pater Aeneas, quo Tullus dives et Ancus, pulvis et umbra sumus.

15

Swift moons recoup their losses in the heavens: but as for us, once we have fallen there where father Aeneas, where Tullus and rich Ancus fell – we are dust and shade.

The ‘we’ of Odes 4.7 – that is, everyone, even Aeneas and Ancus – must die, and be reduced to mere ‘dust and shade’. But Cowley’s Amaranthus cites Horace here only to contradict him: this is the flower that does not die. Unlike the young men and women of Horatian erotic lyric, who are characterised by the brevity of their youth and beauty, the Amaranthus never fades. The contrast is further pointed by the humorous effect of

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Victoria Moul this plant – which has none of the conventional beauty of the rose or violet – not only adopting but outdoing the tropes of erotic verse. The Amaranthus himself mentions his appearance, which is described further in a footnote (17-18): Sunt, Floris titulum qui mihi denegant, Et spicam vocitant Floream, Ineptuli. There are some who refuse to grant me the title of a flower, and call me instead a flowery tuft, fools that they are!

Here it is as if the Amaranthus has overheard the voice of the commentator, as a note affixed to the first line of the poem states: Est autem Spica purpurea verius quam flos aliquis, et ipse sine odore (‘it is however more truly a purple tuft than some sort of flower, and it is without scent’). In fact, it is not only the poetry that makes witty play of the expectations of erotic lyric. Cowley’s note also seems to allude to the conventional association between the plucking of a flower and the loss of a girl’s virginity. In this respect too the Amaranthus is unusual, since Mirum in eo gaudere decerpi, et laetius renasci (‘It is remarkable in that it likes to be plucked, and regrows more healthily’). Throughout the ode the Amaranthus – aided by the voice of the commentator in the notes – evokes Horatian erotic to humorous effect; and once again the force of the transformation is didactic. This rare male flower is cleverly associated with one of the relatively few male addressees of Horatian erotic lyric (in Odes 4.10); and in every other respect he refuses to adhere to the conventions of the genre, since he is unattractive, unfading and loses none of his power when plucked. Conclusion The Horatianism of Cowley’s flower odes is essentially and in some ways simply didactic: for readers well versed in Horatian lyric at school, the striking redeployment of phrases from Horace is a straightforward aid to memory: the Violet can rout fever as Augustus put to flight the enemies of the Roman empire; the Amaranthus, a male flower, unlike Ligurinus, whose poem his ode echoes, will never fade; the Rose leaves behind her scent which is like fame; and like fame, she acts as a preservative. The effect is often funny, which adds to the didactic force. To downplay the didactic purpose of Cowley’s Horatianism would be to miss the scientific and educational seriousness of his project. But that is not to say that these entertaining and sometimes moving poems are without literary interest. On the contrary, the systematic rereading

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6. Horatian odes in Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex of classical Latin poetry that they entail is often provocative, not least in the transferral of a markedly male authorial voice to mostly female plants. This essay has explored only one particularly dominant element – the Horatian imitation – of just three of these poems. Even so, I hope it has gone some way to demonstrate the literary as well as historical interest of this material. For Cowley, the beauty and utility of the natural world deserved to be described in the finest language: a witty, surprising and often beautiful version of the language of Virgil, Horace and Ovid: ardentes Apices & ipsa | Vertice tollo. Notes 1. Modern scholarship on Cowley (1618-67) has been interested principally in his English Pindaric odes, published in the 1656 Poems; these are often discussed without any reference to his Latin lyric. (See for example the final chapter of Trotter 1979.) On Cowley as a Latin poet in general, see Bradner 1940: 118-22; Hinman 1960: 227-96. On the Plantarum Libri Sex in particular, see Hinman 1960: 267-96; Monreal 2009; and Moul online and forthcoming. Discussions of individual passages (though not of any of the odes) can be found in Ludwig 1982, Hofmann 1994 and Monreal 2005. To my knowledge, there is currently no substantial discussion specifically of Cowley’s Latin Horatian odes, or of Books 3 and 4 of the Plantarum (in which they appear), though Monreal 2005 discusses the opening of Book 4. An edition of the Plantarum Libri Sex, edited by Daniel Kinney with introduction, notes and facing translation, is in progress (Kinney forthcoming). 2. The earlier publication of Books 1 and 2 is Cowley 1662. 3. Hinman (1960: 279) comments that ‘[Cowley] links [the flowers’] vernal beauty with the springtime restoration of political order and beauty at Charles’s return’. 4. The only metres used in these books that are not derived directly from Horace are hendecasyllables (for Iris in Book 3 and Crocus in Book 4) and a single piece in iambic strophes (for Peony in Book 3). 5. The footnotes were excluded from the seventeenth-century translation (where they are reduced to occasional marginal glosses). They are reproduced (but not translated) on Daniel Kinney’s web archive, usefully keyed to Sutton’s text: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/kinney/works/notes.htm. 6. Latin psalm paraphrases in a Horatian style are a recurrent feature of neo-Latin literature: see, for interest, accomplished examples by Buchanan (discussed in Green 2000, and by Stephen Harrison in this volume). On the genre in general, see Gärtner 1956; and on the Davideis, see Philip Hardie’s chapter in this volume. 7. The English version of Solitudo is printed in Cowley’s essay ‘Of Solitude’ (Cowley 1668: 93-5) and the English version of the Ode (‘Why dost thou heape up Wealth’), a strongly Horatian poem, is printed in the essay on The shortnesse of Life and uncertainty of Riches (Cowley 1668: 138-9). 8. See n. 18 to Philip Hardie’s essay in this volume. 9. This excludes linking narrative passages and speeches by Flora in elegiac couplets; a series of epigrams in the opening part of Book 4; and several inset poems by individual flowers, also in elegiac couplets.

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Victoria Moul 10. This is not to say that Horace is the only significant source of intertextual interest. Although this essay is focused upon the interaction with Horace, useful further work might consider the relationship between Horatian and Catullan elements in these poems, and the importance of neo-Latin lyric models. 11. Compare for instance Horace, Odes 1.2 (thirteen Sapphic stanzas, in praise of Octavian) and 4.2 (fifteen Sapphic stanzas, also with praise of [now] Augustus). 12. As there is no modern edition of the Plantarum yet published, the text is cited directly from the 1668 Poemata Latina, which is available on Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). I have retained the orthography and typographical details of the original. No line numbers are included in any of the seventeenth-century editions of the work. The line numbers given in this article have been added for ease of reference, and relate only to the individual ode (not to the book as a whole from which it is taken). A transcription of the Latin text of the Plantarum is also available on Dana Sutton’s website (http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/plants), though the transcription is not always reliable, and the translation to which it is keyed is the seventeenth-century published translation, which is often very free. Translations in this essay are my own. 13. Compare for instance the forceful repetition of forms of relinquo in the opening of the Ode: ‘Quid relinquendos, Moriture, nummos, | Sarcinas Vitae Fugiture, quaeris? | Si relinquendos; Dominum relinquunt | Saepè priores’ (Ode 1-4, Poemata Latina, p. 418). The English version has no equivalent form of repetition. 14. Here Cowley alludes to the latter part of Odes 4.2, in praise of Augustus; elsewhere he refers to the opening section on Pindaric imitation and poetic ambition. The poem as a whole is imitated in the Pindarique Odes. 15. The text of Horace is Wickham 1901. 16. There is a kind of pun here: cultus can mean both ‘worship’ or ‘veneration’ and ‘clothing’ or ‘decoration’ – so Violet states both that she deserves a royal style of veneration, and that she deserves veneration for her royal attire (that is, the purple of her petals). 17. The striking inceptive form of the verb, meaning ‘becomes purple’ (cf. nigresco; albesco) is classical, though rare, and is found in Cicero. 18. Throughout the Plantarum, Cowley offers unusually ‘positive’ versions of typically Ovidian myths. Nymphea (Water lily), for instance, transformed into a flower after her seduction by Hercules, is not trapped in grief by her transformation, but rather redeemed by it; since as a water lily she relieves others of exactly the affliction she suffered from herself – the passionate heat of love. Some further discussion of this poem, and of Cowley’s elegiacs more generally, can be found in Moul forthcoming. 19. The association implied here between royal authority, military victory and medicine is central to the sixth book of the Plantarum, in which Charles II, at the Restoration, is depicted as a kind of doctor, curing the wounds inflicted upon England by the Civil War. 20. The particular use of musso, to mean ‘to be afraid to speak or act’, and therefore ‘to remain silent’, also seems to be indebted to the Aeneid in particular, in this case the end of the poem. Musso appears with this meaning twice in Aeneid 12 (lines 657 and 718) (see Lewis and Short 1879: s.v. musso II). 21. The metre is the third Asclepiad – two Asclepiads followed by a phere-

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6. Horatian odes in Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex cratean and a glyconic. It is used by Horace in several well-known odes, including 1.5 and 4.13. In general, the Asclepiad metres in Horatian lyric are associated with poems of love and desire. Marginal numbers at lines 1 and 25 of this poem are keyed to notes on the Amaranthus in ancient works of reference (citing Pliny, and also giving English and French common names for the plant) and to a note on Epicurean beliefs about the gods. 22. The noun form hemerocalles, -is is found in Pliny, one of Cowley’s most frequently cited sources in the Plantarum Libri Sex. He may have formed the adjective himself, or found it in a contemporary author. The ‘lily of the day’ is also a familiar emblem of seventeenth-century poetry – see for instance the widely anthologised extract of Jonson’s Cary-Morison ode: ‘A Lily of a day, | Is fairer far in May, | Although it fall and die that night; | It was the plant, and flower of Light’ (UW 70, ‘To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’, 69-72). 23. Indeed, they can actually be revived to full beauty long after picking, according to Pliny, as detailed in Cowley’s footnote on the topic attached to the first line of this poem. The use of comae in reference to plants is also found in Odes 4.7, redeunt iam gramina campis | arboribusque comae (1-2).

Bibliography Binns, J.W. (ed.) (1974) The Latin Poetry of English Poets. London and Boston. Bradner, L. (1940) Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry, 15001925. New York and London (The Modern Language Association of America, General Series X). Cowley, A. (1662) A. Covleii plantarum libri duo. London. Cowley, A. (1668) The Works of Mr Abraham Cowley. London. Cowley, A. (1668) Abraham Couleij Angli, Poemata latina in quibus continentur, sex libri plantarum, viz. duo Herbarum, Florum, Sylvarum, et unus miscellaneorum. London. Gärtner, J.A. (1956) ‘Latin Verse Translations of the Psalms’, Harvard Theological Review 49: 271-305. Green, R.P.H. (2000) ‘Davidic Psalm and Horatian Ode: Five Poems of George Buchanan’, Renaissance Studies 14: 91-111. Hinman, R.B. (1960) Abraham Cowley’s World of Order. Cambridge, MA. Hofmann, H. (1994) ‘Adveniat Tandem Typhis Qui Detegat Orbes: Columbus in Neo-Latin Epic Poetry (15th-18th Centuries)’, in W. Haase and M. Reinhold (eds) The Classical Tradition and the Americas: European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition, 420-656. Berlin and New York. Kinney, D. (forthcoming) The Complete Works of Abraham Cowley: Plantarum Libri Sex. Newark, DE. Lewis, C.T. and Short, C. (eds) (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary. Oxford. Ludwig, W. (1982) ‘Neulateinische Lehrgedichte und Vergils Georgica,’ in D.H. Green, L.P. Johnson and D. Wuttke (eds) From Wolfram and Petrarch to Goethe and Grass: Studies in Literature in Honour of Leonard Forster, 151-80. Baden-Baden. Monreal, R. (2005) ‘Vergils Vermächtnis: Die Gartenpraeteritio in den Georgica und Typen ihrer Rezeption im neulateinischen Lehrgedicht’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 54: 1-47. Monreal, R. (2009) Flora Neolatina. Die Hortorum libri IV von René Rapin S.J.

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Victoria Moul und die Plantarum libri VI von Abraham Cowley. Zwei lateinische Dichtungen des 17. Jahrhunderts. Berlin. Moul, V. ‘Introduction to Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex’, EEBO Introductions: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/intros/htxview?template=basic.htx&content=in dex.htm. Moul, V. (forthcoming) ‘Latin and English elegies in the seventeenth century’, in T.S. Thorsen (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy. Cambridge. Sutton, D.F. (ed.) (2006/7) Abraham Cowley, De Plantis Libri VI (1668). A Hypertext Critical Edition (The Philological Museum). http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/plants/. Trotter, D. (1979) The Poetry of Abraham Cowley. London. Wickham, E.C. (ed.) (1901) Q. Horati Flacci Opera. Oxford.

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7

Samuel Johnson’s Latin poetry1 Niall Rudd In spite of various afflictions (one eye, scrofula, asthma, dropsy, a convulsive tic, and ‘the struggling gait of one in fetters’2), Samuel Johnson grew into a large and powerful adult who is known to have knocked a man down. He had long periods of idleness, and was plagued by melancholia;3 yet, among much else, he wrote essays, a novel, biographies, editions, translations, legal studies, and also a huge twovolume Dictionary of the English Language (for which he was awarded a doctorate by Dublin in 1765 and by Oxford in 1775). A passionate opponent of slavery, he nevertheless defended the English class system. And though he believed in a loving God, he lived (especially in his later years) in dread of hell fire. No doubt it was partly because of these paradoxes that a gifted young Scot was inspired to write our greatest biography. On its flyleaf we find the following quotation: quo fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis.

‘Hence the whole of the old man’s life is laid before us, as if painted on a votive tablet’ – i.e. Horace on the self-revelatory Lucilius (Sat. 2.1.32-4). But here the words refer to Boswell’s own work, and they represent the kind of text or motto which Johnson himself prefixed to his essays. In the Rambler no. 4, for instance, Martial is cited five times, Virgil ten, Ovid twelve, and Horace thirty-three – including his declaration of independence on the flyleaf: nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri (Epist. 1.1.14) – ‘not bound to swear allegiance to any master’. All this had implications beyond the interests of individual readers. To an expanding middle class, Latin enhanced people’s awareness of Britain’s place in the European tradition; it also imparted certain attitudes and values which accompanied the acquisition of an empire: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (‘you, Roman, remember to rule the peoples beneath your sway’: Virgil, Aeneid 6.851). More particularly, I hope the following

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Niall Rudd remarks will underline the importance of Latin in Johnson’s own poetic achievement. People Ad Lauram Parituram Epigramma (1743) Angliacas inter pulcherrima, Laura, puellas, Mox uteri pondus depositura grave, Adsit, Laura, tibi facilis Lucina dolenti; Neve tibi noceat praenituisse Deae. Metre: Elegiac couplets An Epigram to Laura When About to Give Birth Laura, most beautiful among the girls of England, soon to lay down the heavy burden of your womb, may Lucina be present, Laura, giving ease to your pain, and may it do you no harm that you outshone the Goddess.

Johnson’s school-fellow, Dr Robert James, apparently produced the first couplet.4 One notes how the structure of the first line parallels its meaning, pulcherrima Laura coming ‘among’ Angliacas and puellas, an effect impossible in English. The tenderness of the piece points to Ovid rather than Martial, and in fact it may owe something specifically to Fasti 2.451-2: Parce, precor, gravidis, facilis Lucina, puellis, Maturumque utero molliter aufer onus. Have mercy, I pray thee, easeful Lucina, on pregnant girls, and at the right time gently bring forth the burden from their womb.

Facilis Lucina is the obvious link. Lucina was the goddess of childbirth; facilis here means ‘facilitating’, hence ‘helpful’. Presumably the name was connected with lux (‘light’); cf. Lygdamus (‘Tibullus’) 3.4.13, efficiat vanos noctis Lucina timores (‘let Lucina render empty the terrors of night’), which has nothing to do with childbirth, and Johnson’s praenituisse (‘outshone’, 4). Mea Nec Falernae etc. (1728-9) Quid mirum Maro quod digne canit ‘Arma virumque’? Quid quod putidulum nostra Camoena sonat? Limosum nobis promus dat callidus haustum, Virgilio vires uva Falerna dedit. Carmina vis nostri scribant meliora poetae? Ingenium jubeas purior haustus alat.

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7. Samuel Johnson’s Latin poetry

My (Cups) Are Not (Mellowed) By Falernian (Vines) What wonder that Maro sings worthily of ‘Arms and the man’? What wonder that our Muse sounds a bit rotten? The cunning steward gives us a muddy drink; the Falernian grape gave Virgil his power. Do you want our poets to write better songs? Order a purer draught to nourish their talent.

The plea is directed to the authorities of Pembroke College, Oxford. The title, however, is not entirely apposite; for in his invitation to Maecenas (Odes 1.20.10-12) Horace promises him wine from his Sabine estate, which, though cheap in comparison with Virgil’s Falernian, is perfectly adequate; nor does it lead Horace to compose inferior verse. But the slightly imperfect fit is disguised by shifting the name to Virgil (i.e. Publius Vergilius Maro). If anyone had objected to Maro with a short ‘o’, the mature Johnson would doubtless have answered ‘Why Sir, the licence was taken by Martial’ (11.67): Nil mihi das vivus; dicis post fata daturum. | si non es stultus, scis, Maro, quid cupiam (‘You give me nothing during your lifetime; you say that you will make a gift after your death. If you’re not stupid, Maro, you know what I wish for’). In Theatro (1771) Tertii verso quater orbe lustri, Quid theatrales tibi, Crispe, pompae? Quam decet canos male literatos Sera voluptas! Tene mulceri fidibus canoris? Tene cantorum modulis stupere? Tene per pictas oculo elegante Currere formas? Inter equales, sine felle liber, Codices, veri studiosus, inter Rectius vives, sua quisque carpat Gaudia gratus. Lusibus gaudet puer otiosis, Luxus oblectat juvenem theatri, At seni fluxo sapienter uti Tempore restat. Metre: Sapphics

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5

10

15

Niall Rudd

In the Theatre Now that the circle of your third half-decade has turned four times, what are theatrical extravaganzas to you, Crisp? How unseemly for greyhaired men of letters is such a pleasure so late in life! You, beguiled by tuneful strings! You, entranced by the ditties of singers! You, running a discriminating eye over painted figures! Better to live among men of your own age, detached and without rancour, searching for the truth in ancient volumes. Everyone should gratefully seize the pleasures that are proper for him. A boy enjoys carefree games, a young man is charmed by the lavishness of the theatre, but it remains for an old man to use his time wisely as it passes.

In Odes 2.2.3, also in Sapphics, Horace addresses a certain Crispus, but there the similarity ends. More relevant is Odes 1.29, where the recipient is addressed in a tone of shocked disapproval for joining a military campaign – a tone not common in Johnson. The theme of the different ages occurred in a famous passage of Horace’s Ars poetica (156-78). Johnson’s friend (Samuel Crisp) was a playwright.5 To Dr Thomas Lawrence (1778) So, like the mob, you admit that wisdom is useless and that erudition lets us down. You neither conquer adversity nor endure it, and with all your medicines you have no cure for the mind (1-8). Then: Per caeca noctis taedia turbidae, Pigrae per horas lucis inutiles, Torpesque languescesque curis Sollicitus nimis, heu! paternis.

10

Through the weary darkness of a restless night, through the futile hours of the torpid day you are numb and exhausted, over-anxious, alas, with a father’s worries. Come now, stand up and be brave. The wisdom of your years and your work as a doctor call you back (13-16). Then: Permitte summo res hominum Patri; Permitte fidens, ac muliebribus Amice, majorem querelis, Redde tuis, tibi redde, mentem.

20

Leave men’s affairs to the Father in heaven; leave them to him in confidence, and restore to you and yours, my friend, a mind that can rise above womanish wailing. Metre: Alcaics

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7. Samuel Johnson’s Latin poetry We are told that Dr Lawrence was worried about his son, who was overseas.6 Johnson calls for a stiff upper lip, though he did not always take his own advice. Lawrence wrote some medical treatises in Latin, and in other ways he oddly resembled Johnson, having an unprepossessing appearance, a recurrent convulsive tic, and even suffering a stroke. Nugae Anapaesticae In Lecto Lusae, Medico Aeger S. (1782) Nunc mihi facilis Liberiori Cursu spiritus Itque reditque; Nunc minus acris Seu thoracem Sive abdomen Laniat tussis; Tantum prodest

Tempore justo Secare venam; Tantum prodest Potente succo Dulce papaver.  Cras abiturus Quo revocarit Thralia suavis.

Hoc quoque superest Ut tibi, gentis Medicae Princeps, Habeam grates, Votaque fundam Ne, quae prosunt Omnibus, artes Domino desint. Vive valeque.

A Game with Anapaestic Trifles Played in Bed, Patient Sends Greetings to Doctor. Now my breathing is easy, coming and going with a freer flow; now my cough tears less roughly at my chest and stomach; such is the benefit of cutting a vein at the right time; such the benefit of the mild poppy with its powerful juice (1-14). (Now I need a relaxing bath.) Tomorrow I am due to go wherever the charming Thrale wants me. There is also this: that I should express my thanks to you, the foremost member of the medical profession, and offer a prayer that those arts which assist everyone else should not fail the Master. Live long and stay well (20-31).

Strictly, an anapaest is two short syllables followed by a long. The S stands for Salutem – a greeting. Two complaints (chest and stomach) yield to two treatments (bleeding and opium). The future perfect revocarit (‘wants me’, 21) seems to be indefinite. The conventional leavetaking (vale), often no more than ‘goodbye’, is here also literal (‘stay well’). Places The most novel and exciting episode in Johnson’s life was the trip to the Hebrides organised by Boswell. His reception by Boswell’s friends on Skye made it clear that their circle was as civilised as any group in Johnson’s London. ‘I never was in any house of the Islands, where I did not find books in more languages than one.’7 At Mr MacKinnon’s they were treated ‘with very liberal hospitality’.8 ‘Their suppers were, like

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Niall Rudd their dinners, various and plentiful.’9 We hear of Dr John MacPherson’s library and his Sapphics,10 and of Sir Alexander Macdonald’s Alcaics.11 And at Auchinleck there was Boswell’s ancestral home, which had this inscription written across its front: Quod petis hic est. | Est Ulubris, animus si te non deficit aequus (‘The thing you are searching for is here – and at Ulubrae, if you preserve a balanced mind’, Horace, Epist. 1.11.29-30; Ulubrae was a ghost town on the marshes of Latium).12 All this must be kept in view as we read the next three poems. Skia (1773) Ponti profundis clausa recessibus, Strepens procellis, rupibus obsita, Quam grata defesso virentem Skia sinum nebulosa pandis! His cura credo sedibus exulat; His blanda certe pax habitat locis: Non ira, non maeror quietis Insidias meditatur horis. At non cavata rupe latescere, Menti nec aegrae montibus aviis Prodest vagari, nec frementes E scopulo numerare fluctus. Humana virtus non sibi sufficit, Datur nec aequum cuique animum sibi Parare posse, ut Stoicorum Secta crepat nimis alta fallax. Exaestuantis pectoris impetum, Rex summe, solus tu regis arbiter, Mentisque, te tollente, surgunt, Te recidunt moderante fluctus.

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Closed in by the deep recesses of the ocean, howling with gales, hemmed in by rocks, how welcome a sight you are, misty Skye, as you open your green bay to the weary traveller! From this haven, I do believe, worry is banished; certainly a delightful peace dwells in this place. No anger, no grief devises an attack against its quiet hours. For the sick mind, however, it is of no avail to hide in hollow caves, or to wander over pathless mountains, or to count the roaring waves from a cliff. Human virtue is not sufficient unto itself; nor is every person granted the ability to obtain for himself a calm mind, as the overweening Stoic sect falsely babbles. Almighty King, thou alone art the judge who governs the impulse of our turbulent hearts; the waves of our mind mount up when raised by thee, and sink down when thou dost still them.

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7. Samuel Johnson’s Latin poetry The five Alcaic stanzas explore outer and inner storm and calm. No inhabitants are mentioned. For aequum  animum (‘a calm mind’, 14) see Horace, Epist. 1.11.30, quoted above. Johnson insists that such serenity cannot be supplied by the Stoics; it comes only from God. I have restored crepat for crepet (16). Oda (1773) Permeo terras, ubi nuda rupes Saxeas miscet nebulis ruinas, Torva ubi rident steriles coloni Rura labores. Pervagor gentes, hominum ferorum Vita ubi nullo decorata cultu Squallet informis, tugurique fumis Foeda latescit. Inter erroris salebrosa longi, Inter ignotae strepitus loquelae, Quot modis mecum, quid agat, requiro, Thralia dulcis! Seu viri curas, pia nupta, mulcet, Seu fovet mater subolem, benigna, Sive cum libris novitate pascit Sedula mentem; Sit memor nostri, fideique merces Stet fides constans, meritoque blandum Thraliae discant resonare nomen Littora Sciae.

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Metre: Sapphics Oda: a non-classical term The final a of littora (20) is short in spite of the following Sc-. See Fordyce on Catullus 64.357. I am travelling through a country where bare rocks and stony ruins alike are shrouded in mists, where the grim countryside mocks the crofter’s barren labours. I am wandering through clans where the life of wild men, enhanced by no culture, is marred by squalor and skulks in ugliness behind the smoke of a hovel. Amid the rough surroundings of my long rambles, amid the noisy chatter of a strange language, in how many ways do I ask myself what sweet Thrale is doing! Whether as a devoted wife she soothes the worries of her husband, or whether as a loving mother she looks after her child, or whether with books she diligently feeds her mind with new knowledge, may she think of me, and may her loyalty

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Niall Rudd stand fast, rewarding the loyalty of another, and may the shores of Skye deservedly learn to re-echo to the charming name of Thrale.

Here there are human inhabitants – savage people jabbering in a strange language. From verse 12 there is a contrast, as Mrs Hester Thrale takes over the poem. Noting the train of thought, we turn as usual to Horace (Odes 1.22.17-20, 23-4): Pone me pigris ubi nulla campis arbor aestiva recreatur aura, quod latus mundi nebulae malusque Iuppiter urget.  dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo dulce loquentem.

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Set me down in a wild land without trees and enveloped with mists; I shall love Lalage with her sweet laughter and sweet talk.

It matters not at all, as we learn from Johnson’s next stanza, that Mrs Thrale is a sophisticated wife and mother (nor that she is more than thirty years younger than Johnson). For him the central point, as we know already, is that she is dulcis (‘sweet’, 12). He trusts she will think of her devotee, and that the shores of Skye will re-echo to her name (19-20). It would have spoilt the effect if Johnson had mentioned that, as we learn from Boswell, these desolate scenes were described from the comfort of Mr MacKinnon’s house.13 As it is, we can imagine the kindly Mrs Thrale exclaiming ‘Poor lamb!’ As she figures three times in these Latin poems, I add a little about Hester Thrale. A Welsh girl, she was something of a prodigy, reading French at the age of seven, and later learning Latin, Greek, Italian and Spanish. Though small in stature, she was vivacious and warmhearted. Yet she also had a satirical wit, as Johnson points out:14 Hostem odit tacite, sed amicum ridet aperte Thralia. Quid mavis? Tutius hostis eris. Thrale gives no sign when she hates a foe, but laughs openly at a friend. Which do you prefer? You’ll be on safer ground as a foe!

Hester’s husband was an MP and also a prosperous brewer. He gave Johnson lodgings in both his houses, and was the only man whom Johnson addressed as ‘My Master’. Hester idolised Johnson, looked after his comforts, and sometimes sat up till the small hours listening to him talk. When Mr Thrale died, the press (and doubtless many

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7. Samuel Johnson’s Latin poetry others) maliciously assumed that Hester and Johnson would marry. But she became attached to an Italian singer called Gabriel Piozzi, and married him in 1784. This evoked a passionate and cruel letter from Johnson beginning ‘If I interpret your letter aright, you are ignominiously married  If you have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness!’ This outburst seems to have given away the true nature of his feelings, even though he was over thirty years her senior. (He may have recalled that he himself had married someone twenty years older.) Hester replied with magnificent dignity and restraint, and Johnson at once retracted, concluding ‘Whatever I can contribute to your happiness I am very ready to repay for that kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched.’ But the relationship was never the same again. Sadly, contradicting her many affectionate remarks and acts of kindness, Hester now alleged that Johnson had never meant anything to her; the friendship had been solely between Johnson and her husband. Insula Sancti Kennethi (1773) Parva quidem regio, sed relligione priorum Nota, Caledonias panditur inter aquas; Voce ubi Cennethus populos domuisse feroces Dicitur, et vanos dedocuisse deos. Huc ego delatus placido per coerula cursu Scire locum volui quid daret ille novi. Illic Leniades humili regnabat in aula, Leniades magnis nobilitatus avis: Una duas habuit casa cum genitore puellas, Quas Amor undarum fingeret esse deas: Non tamen inculti gelidis latuere sub antris, Accola Danubii qualia saevus habet; Mollia non deerant vacuae solatia vitae, Sive libros poscant otia, sive lyram. Luxerat ille dies, legis gens docta supernae Spes hominum ac curas cum procul esse jubet. Ponti inter strepitus sacri non munera cultus Cessarunt, pietas hic quoque cura fuit: Quid quod sacrifici versavit femina libros, Legitimas faciunt pectora pura preces. Quo vagor ulterius? Quod ubique requiritur hic est; Hic secura quies, hic et honestus amor.

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Metre: Elegiac couplets The Island of Saint Kenneth A small place to be sure, but one famous for the religion of earlier men, lies open amid Caledonian waters, where Saint Kenneth is said to have

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Niall Rudd tamed the savage people by his voice and to have taught them to abandon their false gods. After sailing here in a calm voyage across a blue sea, I wanted to find what new information the place had to offer. There Maclean held sway in a humble hall – Maclean, who held a noble rank in virtue of his mighty ancestors. One cottage housed the father along with his two daughters, whom Love would have imagined to be goddesses of the waves. Yet these were no boorish people, lurking in chilly caves like those inhabited by the savage beside the Danube; the soft comforts of a life of leisure were not lacking, whether their hours of ease called for books or for a harp. That day had dawned on which a community well versed in the law of God bids earthly hopes and worries to be gone. Amid the roar of the sea the offices of sacred worship did not cease; here too, religious observance was a matter of importance. What did it matter if a woman turned the priest’s pages? It is pure hearts that give legitimacy to prayers. Why should I wander any further? All that is required anywhere is here: here is serene repose, and here is honourable love.

In the third of these memorable poems the title and opening words reveal something new – the people have been long converted to religion. In particular we hear of a cultured family, deriving its goodness from Christianity. Johnson, we notice, is in a tolerant mood, willing to overlook improprieties like the girl turning the Bible’s pages. As Boswell hoped, the tour did something to modify Johnson’s prejudice against the Scots. Their conversation ‘grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away  in splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old lady’.15 So before long, one assumes, the Scot will merit the ultimate accolade: being indistinguishable from the Englishman. Yet apparently Johnson’s own accent was not perfect. One recalls Garrick’s imitation of him serving ‘poonch’. Johnson’s final words on the tour contain something quite unexpected: ‘Having passed my time almost wholly in cities, I may have been surprised by modes of life and appearances of nature that are familiar to men of wider survey and more varied conversation.  I cannot but be conscious that my thoughts on national manners are the thoughts of one who has seen but little.’16 In Rivum A Mola Stoana Lichfeldiae Diffluentem (1784?) Errat adhuc vitreus per prata virentia rivus Quo toties lavi membra tenella puer; Hic delusa rudi frustrabar brachia motu, Dum docuit blanda voce natare pater. Fecerunt rami latebras, tenebrisque diurnis Pendula secretas abdidit arbor aquas. Nunc veteres duris periere securibus umbrae, Longinquisque oculis nuda lavacra patent.

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7. Samuel Johnson’s Latin poetry Lympha tamen cursus agit indefessa perennis, Tectaque qua fluxit, nunc et aperta fluit. Quid ferat externi velox, quid deterat aetas, Tu quoque securus res age, Nise, tuas.

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On The Stream Flowing from Stowe Mill, Lichfield The river, still glassy, flows through the green meadows in which as a boy I so often bathed my young limbs. Here I would vainly thrash my arms, which got nowhere with their inexpert movements, while my father with his calm voice taught me to swim. The branches made a hiding place, and an overhanging tree covered the hidden waters in darkness even by day. Now the shadows of old have fallen victim to cruel axes; and the bathing place lies exposed to distant eyes. The water, however, continues unwearyingly on its course from year to year, and where it once flowed unseen it still flows now, though in the open. You too, Nisus, continue your daily course, indifferent to what swift time may bring from the world outside, and what it may wear away.

I offer just three points on this exquisite piece of nostalgia. First one notices how features of the natural world often have human overtones – errat  rivus (‘the river wanders’, 1), fecerunt rami latebras (‘the branches made a hiding place’, 5), abdidit arbor aquas (‘a tree covered the waters’, 6) etc. Second, as the addressee is called Nisus, Johnson must see himself as the younger Euryalus – a pair who feature in Aeneid 5 and 9 for their love and impulsive daring (for Virgil’s own striking tribute see 9.446-9, where he abandons the anonymity of epic). Unlike Venturo (1999: 139), however, I do not think Johnson makes any reference to their violent deaths. Third, Nisus is urged to remain securus (‘indifferent’, 12) – an Epicurean idea exploited by Lucretius in connection with the indifference of the gods (5.82) and also by Horace (Sat. 1.5.101), but without theological implications, of course, for Johnson. The old harmony of man and nature, then, has been spoilt. Yet all is not lost. Some features remain. Dictionaries

Gnîqi seautÒn (1772) In 1746, from the attic of no. 17, Gough Square, Johnson began work on his epoch-making dictionary, which nine years later filled two folio-size volumes, with three columns on every page. Later, after preparing the fourth edition in 1772, he thinks of Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609), who, after completing an Arabic lexicon, wrote a bitter epigram, ending ‘This labour alone includes every form of punishment’.17 Johnson’s powerful piece of sardonic introspection, which is

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Niall Rudd entitled ‘Know thyself’, after the famous Delphic maxim, is too long to quote in full. But, while sharing Scaliger’s emotion, he disclaims any attempt at rivalry. Moreover, Scaliger had then moved happily into human society and enjoyed his success, Me, pensi immunis cum jam mihi reddor, inertis Desidiae sors dura manet, graviorque labore Tristis et atra quies, et tardae taedia vitae. Nascuntur curis curae, vexatque dolorum Importuna cohors, vacuae mala somnia mentis.

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As for me, now that I am restored to myself, having discharged my duty, the harsh lot of sluggish indolence awaits me, a black and gloomy leisure that is worse than labour, and the tedium of a slowly passing life. Worries beget worries, a persistent troop of troubles plagues me, the evil dreams of an empty mind. Non operum serie, seriem dum computat aevi Praeteriti, fruitur, laetos aut sumit honores Ipse sui judex, actae bene munera vitae; Sed sua regna videns, loca nocte silentia late Horret, ubi vanae species, umbraeque fugaces, Et rerum volitant rarae per inane figurae. Quid faciam? Tenebrisne pigram damnare senectam Restat? An accingar studiis gravioribus audax? Aut, hoc si nimium est, tandem nova lexica poscam?

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[Praeteriti (47) is my conjecture for Praeteritis.] His own judge (i.e. his mind), when he reckons up the roll of time past, takes no pleasure in the roll of his achievements, nor does he joyfully accept honours, the rewards of a well-spent life; but as he contemplates his kingdom, he shudders at the silent regions stretching far and wide in the darkness, where insubstantial shapes, fleeting shadows, and flimsy shapes of things flit through the void. What shall I do? Is the only course left to condemn my sluggish old age to darkness? Or shall I bravely gird myself for more serious studies? Or [finishing with a sardonic joke] if that is too much, shall I end up by demanding another dictionary to work on?

The piece was finished in December 1772, and we know that Johnson had regained his happy mood by the following May.18 But one would like to think that the main recovery had come sooner than that. After all, since the first edition had appeared some seventeen years before, the author had acquired a doctorate and been celebrated as ‘Dictionary Johnson’. The poem’s fifty-four verses contain numerous allusions to Latin poets (see Baldwin’s commentary), though I doubt whether the Virgilian instances are so prominent as to support Venturo’s idea that

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7. Samuel Johnson’s Latin poetry Johnson sees himself as a toiling Aeneas.19 But I note one interesting parallel from Horace, who was not always the contented stereotype (Epist. 1.8.7-11):  mente minus validus quam corpore toto nil audire velim, nil discere, quod levet aegrum; fidis offendar medicis, irascar amicis, cur me funesto properent arcere veterno; quae nocuere sequar, fugiam quae profore credam 

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 while physically fit, I’m mentally ill. And yet I don’t want to hear or know of possible treatments. I’m rude to the doctors who wish me well, and can’t think why my friends are fussing to rid me of this accursed depression. I go for things that are bad, and avoid what I think would help.

Translations Messia (1728) In Oxford Dr Adams thought Johnson was the best-qualified entrant he had known, and before long, Mr Jorden urged him to translate Pope’s Messiah into Latin.20 Unlike Dryden in his version of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, Pope had reached back to Isaiah and produced a Judaeo-Christian rhapsody running to 108 verses. Johnson took the subject further in 119 hexameters – an astonishing achievement, but too long to quote here. Nevertheless, since in an influential article by M.J. O’Sullivan,21 Johnson has been seen as intent on correcting or improving his predecessor’s style, I shall try to even things up by arguing, on the basis of a few early examples, that when Johnson did alter Pope, he wasn’t always right. Pope is rising to ‘sublimer Strains’ (2): ‘The Mossie Fountains and the Sylvan Shades, | The Dreams of Pindus and th’ Aonian Maids | Delight no more’ (3-5). Johnson writes Muscosi fontes, silvestria tecta, valete, | Aonidesque Deae, et mendacis somnia Pindi (4-5). Here O’Sullivan takes valete as suggesting scorn (1976: 586), and he gives mendacis ‘a denunciatory force’ (1976: 583). But valete need not be scornful, and just because Pope is now rising higher there is no reason to think that he actually despises his former pleasures. The word mendacis, which looks like a filler, could mean no more than ‘deceptive’ (OLD 3). In Johnson’s Immatura calens rapitur per saecula vates (8) one has to translate immatura  per saecula as something like ‘through ages that are yet to come’; but that is hard to defend. Again, in translating ‘A Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son’ (Isaiah 7:14, so familiar from

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Niall Rudd Handel) Pope gives the two stages: ‘A Virgin shall conceive! A Virgin bear a Son!’ (8). Johnson (10) omits the Son. He also produces a highly dubious metrical effect: Virgō! Virgŏ parit! I am aware of no case of this licence with nouns.22 Such examples indicate that no one could take on a figure like Pope and expect to win all the points. Yet Johnson’s Messia remains an astonishing achievement for a young student working at great speed, and it won ‘strong approbation’ from Pope himself.23 Verses On A Grotto By The River Thames At Twickenham. Composed Of Marbles, Spars, And Minerals By Mr Pope. Latine Redditum (1743). Thou who shalt stop, where Thames’ translucent Wave Shines a broad Mirrour thro’ the shadowy Cave; Where lingering Drops from Mineral Roofs distill, And pointed Crystals break the sparkling Rill, Unpolish’d Gemms no Ray on Pride bestow, And latent Metals innocently glow: Approach. Great Nature studiously behold! And eye the Mine without a Wish for Gold. Approach: but aweful! Lo th’ Aegerian Grott, Where, nobly pensive, St. John sate and thought; Where British Sighs from dying Wyndham stole, And the bright Flame was shot thro’ Marchmont’s Soul. Let such, such only, tread this sacred Floor, Who dare to love their Country, and be poor. Quisquis iter tendis, vitreas qua lucidus undas Speluncae late Thamesis praetendit opacae, Marmoreo trepidant qua lentae in fornice guttae, Crystallisque latex fractus scintillat acutis, Gemmaque luxuriae nondum famulata nitenti Splendet, et incoquitur tectum sine fraude metallum: Ingredere O! – Magnam pura cole mente parentem, Auriferasque, auri metuens, scrutare cavernas. Ingredere! Egeriae sacrum en tibi panditur antrum! Hic, in se totum longe per opaca futuri Temporis Henricum rapuit vis vivida mentis; Hic pia Vindamius traxit suspiria, in ipsa Morte memor patriae; hic Marcmonti pectore prima Coelestis fido caluerunt semina flammae. Temnere opes pretium sceleris, patriamque tueri Fortis, ades, solus tangas venerabile limen.

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[See Mack 1985: 362, 365; illustrations on pp. 363-4. ‘Spars’ are crystalline minerals. Egeria (9), a nymph, who advised King Numa, had a grotto near the Porta Capena (Livy 1.19; Juvenal 3.12).]

Henry St John (Lord Bolingbroke), Sir William Wyndham, and Hugh

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7. Samuel Johnson’s Latin poetry Hume (Earl Marchmont), disappointed Jacobites, were united in their opposition to Walpole. Johnson himself in his early days was hostile to Walpole, but later acknowledged his merit, calling him ‘a fixed star’.24 Bolingbroke suggested Pope’s Imitations of Horace, and Pope dedicated to him the Essay on Man. For Wyndham see Pope’s note to Epilogue to the Satires 2.88-9, in which he speaks of Wyndham’s ability, eloquence, judgement and temper. The younger Marchmont supplied Johnson with material about Pope. This poem, with its tensions and ambiguities, is of special interest to the modern reader. The title is mostly in English, but finishes in Latin. The form, with its fourteen lines (divisible into octave and sestet) might suggest a sonnet, but this is contradicted by the rhyming couplets. At Twickenham, in front of the villa, the ground slopes down to the busy Thames, but behind it the grotto stands in a quiet five-acre garden. The presiding figure, Egeria, is a very untypical nymph, who was once an advisor to old King Numa. And the grotto itself is an elaborate structure, containing precious gems, but they are for contemplation, not for profit. The friends are wealthy aristocrats, and Pope himself is now a rich man, having made the equivalent of £130,000 for his translation of the Iliad. So the final emphasis on poverty turns out to be no more than a challenge (‘dare to  be poor’) – a challenge unlikely to be taken up. From the Greek Anthology (1783-4) These epigrams were composed at night during bouts of insomnia. The collection as a whole represents a wide variety of topics, and sometimes shows Johnson’s willingness to give the poems a new thrust toward moralising or satire. 7.538 Anyte Qui iacet hic, servus vixit, nunc, lumine cassus, Dario magno non minus ille potest. The man who lies here was a slave in life; now, bereft of the light, he has no less power than Darius the Great.

The Greek gives the slave’s name as Manes. One would like to think that Johnson was equally specific; so I suggest that servus (‘slave’) is a gloss, written above and explaining the slave-name Davus, found six times in Horace (and elsewhere); it was then mistaken for a correction. Others believe that Johnson simply omitted the name. Darius the Great was King of the Persians. In sound, Darius and Davus make a good pair.

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9.133 Anon Quisquis adit lectos elata uxore secundos, Naufragus iratas ille retentat aquas. He who, after burying his wife, enters a second marriage bed, is a ship-wrecked sailor who risks once more the angry sea. 9.577 Ptolemaeus Aevi sat novi quam sim brevis; astra tuenti Per certas stabili lege voluta vices, Tangitur haud pedibus tellus; conviva Deorum Expleor ambrosiis exhilarorque cibis. I know well enough how short-lived a creature I am; but when I gaze at the stars as they revolve through their regular courses in obedience to a fixed law, my feet no longer touch the ground; I am a guest of the gods, feasting and regaling myself on dishes of ambrosia. 11.391 Lucilius Murem Asclepiades sub tecto ut vidit avarus, Quid tibi, mus, mecum, dixit, amice, tibi? Mus blandum ridens, respondit, pelle timorem; Hic, bone vir, sedem, non alimenta, peto. Seeing a mouse under his roof, the miser Asclepiades said: ‘What do you want with me, dear mouse, for you?’ With a charming smile the mouse replied: ‘Don’t worry, good sir, I am looking for bed here, not board.’

The second tibi in verse 2 is clearly corrupt. Professor William Watt did the sensible thing and looked at the Greek, which is par’ emoi, like chez moi; so he restored the original domi (‘in my home’). It is nice to think that the wakeful and painful Johnson found some relief in the ingenuity of a mouse. Prayers On Losing the Power of Speech Summe Pater, quodcumque tuum de corpore Numen Hoc statuat, Christus adesse velit; Ingenio parcas, nec sit mihi culpa rogasse, Qua solum potero parte, placere tibi.

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7. Samuel Johnson’s Latin poetry Almighty Father, whatever thy holy power may decide about this body, may Christ consent to attend to my prayer: spare my mind, and may it not count as a fault to have asked to please thee with the only part by which I can do so.

On the night of 16 June 1783 a terrifying stroke deprived the poet temporarily of speech. On Recovering The Use Of His Eyes (1773) Vitae qui varias vices Rerum perpetuus temperat arbiter, Laeto cedere lumini Noctis tristitiam qui gelidae iubet, Acri sanguine turgidos Obductosque oculos nubibus humidis Sanari voluit meos, Et me, cuncta beans cui nocuit dies, Luci reddidit et mihi, Qua te laude, Deus, qua prece prosequar? Sacri discipulus Libri Te semper studiis utilibus colam. Grates, summe Pater, tuis Recte qui fruitur muneribus, dedit.

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Metre: Glyconics alternating with lesser Asclepiads Eternal governor of the universe, who dost control the varying phases of life, who biddest the gloom of chilly night give way to the joyful light of day, who hast consented that my eyes, which were swollen with aching blood and obscured with cloudy moisture, should be healed, and restored me, who was hurt by the day that gladdens everything, to the light and to myself – with what praise, O God, with what prayer shall I honour thee? As a disciple of the Holy Bible I will always worship thee with useful studies. One who takes proper advantage of thy gifts, Almighty Father, has thereby offered thanks. Prayer on Christmas Day (1779) Nunc dies Christo memoranda nato Fulsit, in pectus mihi fonte purum Gaudium sacrum fluat, et benigni Gratia Coeli! Christe da tutam trepido quietem, Christe, spem praesta stabilem timenti; Da fidem certam, precibusque fidis Annue, Christe. Metre: Sapphics

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Niall Rudd Now the day that is made memorable by the birth of Christ has dawned; let pure joy from the sacred spring flow into my breast, and the grace of kindly Heaven! Christ grant me a safe repose when fearful; Christ vouchsafe me a firm hope when anxious, grant me a sure faith, O Christ, and answer my faithful prayers.

In verse 6 the second syllable of Christe is short in spite of the following sp-. See note on Oda verse 20 above. (No title or date) Aeterne rerum conditor, Salutis aeternae dator; Felicitatis sedibus Qui nec scelestos exigis, Quoscumque scelerum poenitet; Da, Christe, poenitentiam, Veniamque, Christe, da mihi; Aegrum trahenti spiritum Succurre praesens corpori. Multo gravatam crimine Mentem benignus alleva.

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Metre: Iambic dimeters Eternal creator of the world, giver of eternal salvation, who dost not expel the sinful from the abodes of blessedness if they repent of their sins; grant me penitence, O Christ, and grant me forgiveness; come swiftly with aid to a body that is drawing breath in pain; of thy kindness bring relief to a mind oppressed with a great burden of sin.

Line 1 is from a piece in iambic dimeters by St Ambrose at the very beginning of Christian Latin poetry (see Raby 1953: 34). [New Year’s Day, 1784] Summe Dator vitae, naturae aeterne Magister, Causarum series quo moderante fluit, Respice quem subigit senium morbique seniles, Quem terret vitae meta propinqua suae, Respice inutiliter lapsi quem poenitet aevi, Recte ut poeniteat respice, magne Parens.

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O highest giver of life, eternal Lord of nature, under whose control the chain of causes flows, look kindly upon one oppressed by age and the illnesses of age, who is terrified by the fast-approaching end of his life; look kindly on one who is repentant for the time that has so uselessly drifted by; look kindly upon him, great Parent, and make him truly penitent.

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7. Samuel Johnson’s Latin poetry In 1784, about four days before the end, Dr Brocklesby, according to Boswell, ‘repeated from Juvenal [10.356] Orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano,

and so on to the end of the tenth satire; but in running it quickly over, he happened in the line [10.358] Qui spatium vitae extremum inter munera ponat

to pronounce supremum for extremum, at which Johnson’s critical ear instantly took offence, and discoursing vehemently on the unmetrical effect,  he showed himself as full as ever of the spirit of the grammarian.’25 Bravo! That was his last comment on Juvenal (one recalls his famous imitations of Satires 3 and 10). He passed away on 13 December. I add just one remark from a friend of Boswell’s: ‘Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best – there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.’26 Notes 1. The poems in question can be located from the Indices (First Lines and Titles) of McAdam 1964, Smith and McAdam 1974, Baldwin 1996 and Rudd 2005. 2. Boswell, Life of Johnson (LJ) 1.41; 1.94-5; 1.143-4. 3. Boswell, LJ 1.63-4. 4. Boswell, LJ 1.157. 5. Boswell, LJ 4.239, n. 3; Rudd 2005: 42, note on verse 2. Samuel Crisp wrote a tragedy, Virginia, on the tale of Appius and Virginia (found in Livy, Cicero and Dionysius). Appius falsely claims Virginia as his slave, but is frustrated by her father who stabs her to death. 6. See Smith and McAdam 1974: 215. 7. Chapman, Tour (J), p. 48. 8. Tour (J), p. 48. 9. Tour (J), p. 51. 10. Tour (B), p. 339. 11. Tour (B), p. 446. 12. Tour (B), p. 418. 13. Tour (B), p. 261. 14. Smith and McAdam 1974: 229. 15. Tour (J), p. 147. 16. Tour (J), p. 149; cf. Boswell, LJ 5.405. 17. Text and translation in Baldwin 1996: 82; text in Smith and McAdam 1974: 187; translation in Rudd 2005: 47. 18. On 24 May 1773, according to James Beattie’s diary, Johnson was in ‘exceedingly good humour’ and showed him this poem. Further details in Baldwin 1996: 80. 19. Venturo 2000: 75.

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Niall Rudd 20. Boswell, LJ 1.59, 61. 21. O’Sullivan 1976: 579-91. 22. See Hopkinson 1982: 174 (reference provided by Prof. E.J. Kenney). 23. Boswell, LJ 1.61. 24. For Johnson’s change of heart see Wain 1980: 86-92, which includes an account of his years as a reporter of Parliamentary Debates. His view of Walpole as ‘a fixed star’ is referred to by Boswell, LJ 1.131. When, and how far, Johnson was a Jacobite is a delicate question, which a Latinist is not qualified to discuss. See Weinbrot 1986: 163-211. 25. Boswell, LJ 4.401. 26. Boswell, LJ 4.421.

Bibliography Baldwin, B. (ed.) (1996) The Latin & Greek Poems of Samuel Johnson. London. Bate, W.J. (1977) Samuel Johnson. New York and London. Butt, J. (ed.) (1996) The Poems of Alexander Pope. London. Chapman, R.W. (ed.) (1952) The Letters of Samuel Johnson, vol. 1. Oxford. Chapman, R.W. (1961) Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson. London. Grafton, A. (1985) Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. Oxford. Hill, G.B. and Powell, L.F. (eds) (1950) Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 6 vols. Oxford. Hopkinson, N. (1982) ‘Juxtaposed Prosodic Variants in Greek and Latin Poetry’, Glotta 60: 162-77. Krutch, J.W. (1948) Samuel Johnson. London. Mack, M. (1985) Alexander Pope: A Life. New Haven. McAdam, E.L. with Milne, G. (eds) (1964) Samuel Johnson: Poems. New Haven. O’Sullivan, M.J. (1976) ‘Johnson’s Translation of Pope’s Messiah’, Philological Quarterly 54: 579-91. Raby, F.J.E. (1953) A History of Christian Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages. Oxford. Rogers, P. (1995) Johnson and Boswell: The Tour of Caledonia. Oxford. Rogers, P. (2004) ‘Samuel Johnson’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 30: 310-23. Rudd, N. (1996) ‘Review of Baldwin’, Translation and Literature 5: 127-32. Rudd, N. (ed.) (2005) Samuel Johnson: The Latin Poems. Lewisburg. Smith, D.N. and McAdam, E.L. (eds) (1974) The Poems of Samuel Johnson. Oxford. Venturo, D. (1999) Johnson the Poet. London. Venturo, D. (2000) ‘Formal Verse Imitation and the Rhetorical Principles of Imitation in the Neo-Latin Poetry of Samuel Johnson’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 33.2: 71-86. Wain, J. (1980) Samuel Johnson. London. Weinbrot, H.D. (1996) ‘Johnson, Jacobitism, and the Historiography of Nostalgia’, The Age of Johnson 7: 163-211. Wiltshire, J. (1991) Samuel Johnson in the Medical World. Cambridge.

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8

The Latin poetry of English gentlemen David Money What place did neo-Latin really have in the culture of the British Isles, during the centuries covered by the present volume? It is not always an easy question to answer – but one that deserves to be asked, as we consider the works of better-known writers, whether or not their reputation rests primarily on neo-Latin poetry. For major authors do not spring from nowhere, and our understanding of their achievement can be enhanced by considering what was produced by more ordinary, less talented or committed, participants in the republic of letters. Ordinary poets, perhaps: but not necessarily ordinary people. The number who published small amounts of neo-Latin verse is very considerable, and even the very tiny selection whose lives are considered below throws up a wide range of human ambition, achievement, folly and frailty. My title alludes to the influential collection of essays on The Latin Poetry of English Poets, edited by J.W. Binns and published by Routledge in 1974; while that collection, naturally enough, focuses on individual poets who had nearly all achieved varying degrees of fame for their English writings, but who also wrote significant works in Latin, this essay takes a different, complementary approach, examining the place of original Latin poetry in the ‘polite’ gentlemanly culture of eighteenth-century England. Each of those words perhaps deserves explanation. I mention England specifically, rather than the whole of the British Isles, not to exclude the other nations, but because my material on this occasion is from an English university, and while Scotland and Ireland do have some comparable sources, they are less frequent and less compendious. Individuals, however, from Scotland, Wales and Ireland do appear below, alongside the Englishmen. I mean ‘gentlemen’ in two senses: in gender, because universities were then exclusively male; and ‘gentlemen’ in terms of their social position. The social question is key to my concerns here. By examining what sort of people attached their names to printed neo-Latin poetry, one may gain some insight into its social functions. The English universities excluded many potential participants in a neo-Latin cultural milieu; these exclusions should be borne in mind,

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David Money although I am not proposing to explore them deeply in this essay. The ‘gentlemen’ about whom I will be presenting some evidence are, I hope, representative of their type: but they are only a part of the story of neo-Latin among the learned portion of the population in the British Isles. The most obvious exclusion is that of women; far fewer women than men engaged with neo-Latin, whether as writers or readers, but there were nevertheless a good number of women for whom the bilingualism of intellectual culture in the period could form an opportunity rather than a barrier. Elizabeth Tollet, who composed poetry in Latin as well as in English, is a good eighteenth-century example.1 Besides the female half of the population, English universities also excluded many men, on religious grounds: Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters, and even some non-juring Anglicans whose membership might be cut short by an unwillingness to take oaths. It has been a matter of debate among Johnsonian scholars whether this was a major factor in Samuel Johnson’s career.2 This does not mean that the universities lacked Jacobites: far from it. There were many academics, especially at Oxford, whose sympathies lay with the exiled Stuart dynasty, and who were willing to compromise their consciences by taking oaths as necessary, while often making little secret of their real political hopes. Such tensions were an inescapable part of life in the British Isles in the earlier half of the eighteenth century, and neo-Latin is to be found on both sides of the political divide. The story of neo-Latin among the wider educated population is not confined to the eighteenth century; rather, it is one of continuity, through changing political and educational circumstances, from the sixteenth century through to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, the eighteenth century provides a good moment to examine it, in the context of the present volume. The widespread use of Latin in the seventeenth century is perhaps familiar enough, at least to specialists in neo-Latin and to the many scholars of English literature who are aware of its significance. More surprising is the vigour of its survival into the following century, when the vernacular has more obviously taken over some of Latin’s functions (in scientific and technical writing, for example) and neo-Latin poetry might be perceived as less central to the concerns of a ‘polite and commercial’ nation.3 Yet it was both ‘polite’, in the sense of being suited to gentlemanly readers and writers, seeking cultured entertainment, and to an extent ‘commercial’, at least in as much as it was distributed both for hard-headed promotional purposes and for commercial sale, and widely understood by people at the heart of the commercial and political life of the country. My main source material for studying the neo-Latin writings of English gentlemen is the collections of commemorative verse produced

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8. The Latin poetry of English gentlemen by the two English universities of Oxford and Cambridge, on a very regular basis, for about two hundred years, from the mid-sixteenth century through to the 1760s. Some of the very earliest volumes are small, essentially private initiatives, collecting a number of contributors, sometimes even from a single college, to write on a particular occasion. Such private collections are in line with what we might expect as a normal part of European neo-Latin culture, as so-called ‘occasional’ poetry forms such a significant part of the overall picture. The bilingual collection on the death of Edward King that appeared in Cambridge in 1638, and in which Milton’s English Lycidas first appeared, is a notable example of the more private, unofficial approach.4 ‘As this happened almost everywhere in Europe, the number of such occasional poems is simply countless.’5 What is distinctive about the English experience, as far as I can see, is the presence of so many official, and very substantial, university verse collections. That is not to say that universities in other countries, including Scotland and Ireland, did not do something similar, though usually on a smaller scale, from time to time. It is the regularity, size and official status of neo-Latin collections at Oxford and Cambridge that seem unparalleled.6 I have looked at these commemorative poems before in a number of places, without exhausting their potential.7 On this occasion I will adopt a different approach, and focus closely on a single volume, the Oxford Gratulatio of 1736 for the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Many others could have been selected: I do not suggest that this volume is outstanding, rather that it is typical of the tradition, at both universities, in its mid-eighteenth-century form. Since the 1690s, the volumes had been physically impressive, with pages measuring about 1312 by 812 inches (34 by 21 cm). This 1736 book, with eighty-six contributors, is shorter than most. Some earlier volumes from both universities included well over a hundred poets, as did the Oxford volumes of the early 1760s, just before this tradition of large, official volumes came to what, in retrospect, appears a rather abrupt end. The reason for stopping is unclear: I do not think it was a sudden collapse in interest in neo-Latin, although the vernacular is becoming more popular within the collections. The collections from the first years of George III are full of vigour. It may be that a temporary lull in events worth commemorating, in the years after 1763, imperceptibly led to the idea falling out of favour. Individually, most contributions to these many verse collections might appear rather slight, compared to the œuvre of Binns’ ‘English poets’ or those discussed elsewhere in the present volume. Collectively, though, they form a very large corpus of neo-Latin material, involving several thousand authors. Even the single collection I will examine (by

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David Money no means the longest) has far more than I can discuss in the space available here; one might conceivably explore the stories of its contributors not in a mere chapter, but a whole book – a very dull one, the cynic might reply: but I am not so sure that our gentlemen, mediocre poets though most of them may be, could not retain our attention. They stand here as representatives for thousands of others. I would like to think about the cultural significance of their writings, and to ask what these Englishmen were trying to achieve by venturing, albeit often tentatively, into the world of neo-Latin literature. Were these poems of more than the most trivial or passing significance to their largely youthful authors? Perhaps not. Why should a youthful composition, certainly hurried and perhaps produced unwillingly, on a tutor’s instructions, matter at all to an author’s later, fully adult self? Their lives were defined by other things. They would not have thought of themselves as poets, and I consider them as such only in a restricted sense: to have poetry printed under a person’s name does make that person a participant in a wider poetic culture. In a few cases (though I think only a few) we may even question the authorship of the poems, where a particularly lazy but socially prominent undergraduate may have entrusted the entire task, rather than just some polishing or correction, to a tutor or better-qualified fellow-student.8 Nevertheless, the ostensible author, or his advisers, thought it worthwhile to make a show of learning. If that display did not matter, and nobody noticed or remembered the books, they are unlikely to have bothered. We know that the books were read carefully, sometimes with a keen sense of rivalry, by some interested parties.9 The university undoubtedly considered them important, lavishing expense on fine bindings for presentation copies. For the Oxford 1736 volume, the binding cost £43 and 15 shillings, with a further £11 and 14 shillings for the velvet for special copies (not inconsiderable sums in the eighteenth century). The correctors of the verses – who must have edited and proof-read the volume rapidly, catching any glaring errors there may have been in the Latin of some less skilful writers – received twelve guineas (£12 and 12 shillings) for their pains.10 Verse collections normally open with the vice-chancellor, then other figures of social or academic distinction. In the 1736 Oxford book, seven young men came directly after the vice-chancellor: three as sons or grandsons of English peers, three as baronets in their own right, one as an Irish peer. Then three more heads of house: why not others, one may ask? Enthusiasm for the Hanoverian dynasty was limited in Oxford, and the suspicion was reciprocated in court and government circles. There may have been many other reasons, however; and the normal number in more loyal Cambridge is similar. Then came two professors

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8. The Latin poetry of English gentlemen and the two proctors: the latter being ordinary college fellows who were expected to make a contribution, if their year of office saw a collection published. Seven sons of bishops (including three pairs of brothers) and a son of a baronet came next, before the remainder of the university, in no particular order of seniority: fellows of colleges, graduates and undergraduates, privileged students (‘gentleman-commoners’) and more ordinary ones, are mixed together. At the very end, another position of honour, we find Joseph Spence, Professor of Poetry. The original book provides certain clear indications of status (naturally, reflecting only their position in 1736, not later). But beyond the obvious nobles and academic dignitaries, it is less immediately apparent what kind of gentlemen we are dealing with. The university welcomed both students training for the Anglican priesthood, who might be from quite modest backgrounds, but who had a motive for self-advancement through displays of their learning; and also young men of good family, who might not even trouble to take a degree. Further attention, then, both to their parentage and to their later careers, when they are recorded, might help us to fix the social position of some users of neo-Latin. For present purposes, I have investigated these matters through Foster’s biographical register of Oxonians; and, where relevant, The History of Parliament.11 Those methods are far from exhaustive; Foster is well known to contain (mostly minor) inaccuracies, and may not list schools, another obviously relevant factor.12 But they should be sufficient to give a general picture. One striking result, from the brief records of parentage reproduced by Foster, is the very high proportion listed as armigerous, that is to say, bearing a family coat of arms, a sign of gentility. Other fathers are listed as ‘gentlemen’ – no coat of arms, but a certain status; there are the children of professional men, doctors and clerics; and a smaller number of ‘plebeians’ – a loose category covering everything else: possibly, but not necessarily, poor. None of this is very precise: but an armiger, more often than not, would be a person of some substance in a local area, whose Latin-writing son might obtain a good living in the church or succeed him in a modest country estate. In a few cases, these young men inherited great wealth. Most, though, are of a more middling sort, representative of the gentry at large. They are also representative of the wider university community in the period, which is hardly a surprise;13 yet it is perhaps worth stressing the point that this kind of public association with neo-Latin was not confined to academic stars, pushy clergy, dedicated poets, prospective classical scholars or specialists of any kind. It was a quite normal thing for a moderately clever son of a country squire to do. The topic in 1736, a royal marriage, was one of the standard themes

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David Money – birth and death being the others, with rejoicing or lamentation respectively. There was the added twist that the death of a monarch required both grief and joy, since the successor had to be celebrated. Marriage-poetry (epithalamia) formed an established neo-Latin genre with classical precedents (Catullus, Statius, Claudian); borrowings from other types of classical poetry, such as familiar Horatian odes, also came naturally. The royal father could get as much attention as the bridegroom.14 It would be unreasonable to expect great originality or brilliance from the university poets. What they did produce is generally very proficient in technique and at least competent in invention. They may not find something really new to say, but they can fill a page with pertinent hexameters. A surprising number, in 1736, chose the more challenging form of the Latin lyric. The particular circumstances of 1736 added a few complications, some more obvious than others to Oxford poets. The king authorised Frederick’s marriage only with reluctance, a fact quite widely known.15 The prince himself was usually on very bad terms with his parents; he had been abruptly brought from Hanover to Britain in 1728, after unwisely messing around in German marital diplomacy. He took offence at his sister’s marriage in 1734 (which both universities had celebrated), for the assumption that she rather than he might secure the Protestant succession. He may have been unmarried, but he was ‘sufficiently certain of his fatherhood’ of Cornwall Fitz-Frederick, born 1732, despite its being disputed by the sexually ambiguous Lord Hervey and another nobleman, to set the boy’s mother, Anne Vane, up in ‘a series of impressive town houses’.16 While he waited for his father to find him a suitable princess, his resentment of his parents surfaced in a satire, Histoire du Prince Titi, probably at least co-written by Frederick (Paris 1736, with two English versions the same year), in which the prince, a hero of the people, replaces his narrow-minded father. The king’s selection of a suitable young bride, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha (1719-72), ‘provided Frederick with a reason finally to repudiate Anne Vane, whom he had neglected following the birth of their short-lived daughter Amelia in 1733 and who (apparently without Frederick’s knowledge) had renewed her old affair with Hervey. Both FitzFrederick and Vane were dead by the end of March 1736’.17 By that time Frederick had acquired another relationship, more discreet (if sexual at all), with Lady Jane Hamilton. Augusta landed on 25 April, and their marriage two days later was ‘a public relations triumph for Frederick’. The couple appeared devoted.18 It did not take long for king and prince to fall out disastrously; when the princess was in labour, on 31 July 1737, the prince moved her to London and away from his parents (to

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8. The Latin poetry of English gentlemen make a political point), an act ‘that seemed as brutal to his wife as it was offensive to his mother’;19 in November Queen Caroline died, ‘confirming her hatred of her son on her deathbed’.20 Frederick himself was to die young, in 1751 (lamented in a flood of verses, naturally), his bride surviving him for two decades. The task of opening Oxford’s celebration of the marriage fell on Stephen Niblett of All Souls, a vice-chancellor only about ten years older than the bridegroom. He addressed the king in twenty-four lines of elegiacs, as bringer of peace to Europe; Quamque foves, plaudit fida, canora Cohors (‘And the faithful, melodious cohort which you foster applauds’).21 Not terribly loyal and not much fostered by the king, was the (accurate) public perception of Oxford. The melodious cohort could play their part in redressing the balance. Even if the favour of George II was alienated, there was all to play for in gaining the attention of the prince. Whether or not he was inclined to pay much notice to this particular book, Frederick – or perhaps we should think of him as ‘Prince Titi’ – liked to present himself as a patron of culture. He was to gather around him a group of politicians, anticipating his succession and leading opposition to the king’s government, who saw themselves as ‘patriots’: this so-called patriot opposition generated much literature.22 The ministry too had its literary defenders. Sir Robert Walpole, the long-serving prime minister, though cynical about his poets, had himself contributed Latin verse on Cambridge’s behalf a generation back, and understood the genre well enough.23 His cynical fourth son, Horace, was writing for Cambridge in 1736. Rough vernacular satire may have been the chief meeting-place for politics and literature, but neo-Latin too had its more refined rôle. At least a dozen contributors entered the British House of Commons, some quite shortly afterwards, others much later. I will look at most of them, as particularly good examples of literary ‘gentlemen’. John Wallop came straight after the vice-chancellor. From an old Hampshire family, eldest son of Viscount Lymington (later created Earl of Portsmouth), Wallop served as an MP for Andover from 1741, only five years after this poem, supporting the government, until his early death in 1749; in 1739 he became page of honour to the king and mayor of Lymington. He offered a full page of very competent hexameters, touching on the blessings of peace, Frederick’s excitement at his bride’s arrival and the popular reaction: videt studiosa Juventus | Dumque videt, Batavis nostram minus invidet Annam (‘zealous youth see her, and as they do so, begrudge our Anne less to the Dutch’, remembering the princess’ marriage to the Prince of Orange in 1734). The couple have a duty to procreate: jam debita solves | Anglis, aeternamque dabis per saecula Prolem (‘Now you will pay your debts to the English, and you

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David Money will give an eternal series of descendants through the centuries’),24 who are already queuing up in the Elysian fields, in a neat reminiscence of Aeneid 6, demanding to be born and complaining of delay. The Protestant succession was indeed the only reason for the Hanoverians to be there; the point can be made in Latin both tactfully and forcefully. Sir Edward Turner (Balliol) became a Tory MP in 1741, sitting for three seats until his death in 1766 (for Oxfordshire, 1754-61; an unsuccessful candidate for the university, 1751); ‘a pert, warm little man’, he ‘acted with a good deal of violence’ in opposition. His ten-stanza Alcaic ode urges Augusta: Tu Castitatis nubilis ardua | Infructuosae desere (‘Being ready for marriage, abandon the hardships of unfruitful chastity’) – a nice lyric use of an impressively long (largely prosaic, post-classical) adjective. In Turner’s ending, there may be echoes of Statius’ epithalamium: Stella, the prince’s star guiding her boat, is also the name of Statius’ bridegroom, while Leander swimming, Abydeno natanti, may pick up on Abydeni iuvenis ‘the youth of Abydos’ (Statius, Silvae 1.2.87; natanti, 88) as well as Ovid’s Heroides. John Fitzpatrick, Baron Gowran (1719-58) was an Irish peer, son of a sea-captain ennobled for successes against the French; he was created Earl of Upper Ossory in 1751 and sat for Bedfordshire in the British Commons (1753-6). His eight-stanza Sapphic ode mentions the recent wedding of Princess Anne, when the Muse had roused up lyric poets: Cura tum Risum vitiosa fletu | Miscuit (‘troubled concern then mixed laughter with lamentation’),25 because the princess was forced to leave her homeland. Thomas Potter, son of the Bishop of Oxford (in 1737 promoted to Archbishop of Canterbury), wrote twenty-two short, neat lines of Greek Anacreontics, ending with the hope that a fruitful marriage will please parents and Britons.26 ‘A handsome, clever youth, Thomas Potter, while still under his father’s roof at Lambeth Palace, started on a life of dissipation’. He married on 17 February 1740; two days later he wrote to Charles Lyttleton, later Bishop of Carlisle: ‘Oh, my dear Charles, I am no more what I was  [but now] unhappy, miserable beyond remedy. In short, I am – married, and married to a woman I despise and detest.’27 His father had forced him to go through with a promise he denied having made. An MP in 1747, with a huge inheritance, he joined the Prince of Wales’ party; he was secretary to the Princess in 1748 – perhaps closest of our poets to the couple he had celebrated. Initially, he impressed Horace Walpole as a ‘very able’ speaker who ‘promises very greatly’.28 Potter was present in 1749 at a meeting between the Prince’s party and Jacobites, after threats of ‘chastisement for Oxford, where, besides the late riots, the famous Dr King, the Pretender’s great agent, made a

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8. The Latin poetry of English gentlemen most violent speech at the opening of the Ratcliffe [sic] Library’. (The speech was in Latin; and William King was also a notable neo-Latin poet.)29 When 112 of these awkward potential allies met in London, ‘Potter with great humour, and to the great abashment of the Jacobites, said he was very glad to see this union, and from thence hoped, that if another attack like the last Rebellion should be made on the Royal Family, they would all stand by them’.30 Walpole, acute and waspish, was biased against the meeting; but his account suggests both wit and clarity of thought in Potter. It was unlikely to work: the two parties had irreconcilable ultimate aims, despite their shared opposition to government. George Howard’s hexameters have Frederick entranced by Augusta’s picture: Ilicet ex Animo cunctas abolere Puellas | Incipit; illam absens absentem auditque videtque (‘Then he begins to wipe all other girls from his mind, he hears and sees her, though they are apart’).31 This borrows directly from Virgil, Aen. 4.83, illum absens absentem auditque videtque (with illum, ‘him’, referring to the growth of Dido’s passion). He is afflicted like Dido with an amatory vulnus, ‘wound’. There is an intrinsic absurdity in the situation, of which Howard seems well aware, presenting the scene with charming lightness of touch. When putti fly, again rather absurdly (circum gens errat Amorum | Ludicra, ‘the sportive race of Loves wanders around’), he may have borrowed his phrasing from one of the earlier commemorative poems anthologised in the popular Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta (several editions from 1698), Philip Fell’s on the arrival of another princess, Catharine of Braganza in 1662, who has the words in a slightly different order, gens circum ludicra Amorum | Errat.32 Howard was a soldier, as well as a gentleman-commoner of Christ Church; on the books of the 24th regiment of foot from childhood, he became lieutenant and captain-lieutenant in 1736, captain in 1737. As a lieutenant-colonel, he commanded the 3rd foot (‘Buffs’) at the battle of Fontenoy, 1745, and against the Jacobites at Falkirk and Culloden in 1746. In parliament from 1761, he supported government, though speaking against the use of force in America. Later in his life, in 1786, Fanny Burney found him ‘pompous  yet good humoured’;33 the good humour may have been apparent in his early Latin. He died in 1796, a recently-created field-marshal. Norreys Bertie wrote a short poem in English, not without point. He addresses ‘royal Merit’: ‘Let meaner Souls attempt to raise | To undeserving Monarchs praise’ – he does not actually call George II undeserving, but it would have been easy for the prince to see the implication. ‘See, Isis’ Sons admire your Choice! | (No hireling Muse! no venal Voice!)’.34 Bertie was an MP for Oxfordshire from 1743 until

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David Money standing down in 1754; a Tory, perhaps with Jacobite sympathies, he refused to offer support to the Hanoverians in 1745. A sarcastic Whig writer in Jackson’s Oxford Journal called him ‘an implacable enemy to Hanover  [who] served his country faithfully in many parliaments by opposing all taxes, abusing all ministers, and franking the letters of his party.’35 Directly after Bertie came Alexander Thistlethwayte, who was to become a Whig MP for Hampshire, 1751-61. Horace Walpole thought him and his brother (‘a country-squire-parson’) brutish for slow payment of their younger brother’s legacy to his illegitimate daughter in Florence. He described Alexander as an archetypal country squire (his correspondent abroad may have forgotten how ghastly they were), ‘and a bankrupt to boot’.36 In 1736 Thistlethwayte (son of a Dorset armiger) could produce an effective set of thirty-one hexameters that addressed the king as keeper of the peace in Europe: Galli bellis concurrere sueti | Victoresque pavent: saevi defendere naves | Hispani trepidant (‘The French, accustomed to engage in warfare and be victorious, are afraid, and the savage Spanish fear to defend their ships’). The bride naturally shines brightest, nitidissima, among nymphs, Sed Tu, Magne, parum forma, specieque moveris | Tu propius dotes animi, moresque venustos | Inspicis, et casta Fredericum conjuge donas (‘But you, great [king], are little moved by outward appearance, you inspect more closely the endowments of the mind, and beauty in morals, and give Frederick a chaste consort’). The contrast in emphasis and implication between Bertie and Thistlethwayte is immense; for the latter, it is all George’s doing, not Frederick’s choice; the prince’s only rôle is to accept his carefully-chosen, chaste bride gratefully. He does not spell out the need for Frederick’s morals to improve – but that too is something readers more sympathetic to the king and queen than to their son might be thinking. (Though notoriously unfaithful, the king was also very fond of his queen; the moral emphasis is not wholly hypocritical.) Saddest, perhaps, of the parliamentarians is John Trevor, aged nineteen in 1736, probably the same as the youth recalled from the Grand Tour in 1738 as MP for Lewes, a government supporter, and in 1742 a Lord of Admiralty. In 1743 he began to show signs of insanity, doing nothing but dance and sing and write challenges; he attempted suicide in July, dying the same year. His English poem of 1736 makes vigorous comparisons with legendary lovers (chiefly Rinaldo, with Achilles and Mark Antony mentioned); the princess ‘only needs the Magic of her eyes’, her charms ‘more engaging, less perfidious’ than Armida’s.37 Richard Mill sees only peace and happiness, in a short (twelve-line) elegiac poem: O! vestros mores vultusque imitata serenos | Tempora, perpetuo candida sole fluant! (‘Ah, may the times, imitating

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8. The Latin poetry of English gentlemen your manners and serene faces, flow on brightly with endless sunshine!’).38 He was suggested as a candidate for Hampshire in 1765 because of his ‘noble property and ancient Whig family’, and after election was listed as a country gentleman of doubtful political allegiance.39 Thomas Best, gentleman-commoner of University College, was a ‘gentleman of immense fortune’, eldest son of Mawdistly Best, armiger of Boxley, Kent – and brewer, who married a surgeon’s daughter and whose father had founded a brewery in Chatham High Street. Thomas’ younger brother was to carry on the family business, while Thomas, connected by his marriage in 1743 to leading local families, served as a Tory MP for Canterbury (1741-54 and 1762-8).40 Like Wallop at the head of the volume, he was in parliament – though on the opposite side of the house – within five years of the printing of the volume. His Asclepiadic ode, in five stanzas, imagines the union of Augusta’s local German river (Lina) with the Thames, as a metaphor for their love, joined placida compede (‘with a quiet bond’).41 We have seen a good cross-section of gentlemen who later reached the Commons. Among the others, too, any number could attract a reader’s attention. Swayne Harbin (gentleman-commoner of Corpus Christi) extols love and duty; Francis Jones of Jesus, liberty and commerce. Like many, John Newey, MA, fellow of Merton (and son of the Dean of Chichester), took inspiration from the river. He develops the idea well, in a thirteen-stanza Sapphic ode; the Isis changes its name to Thames as it flows, Osculans navem liquidis labellis (‘kissing [the prince’s] boat with watery little lips’),42 down to Greenwich, where the prince welcomed his bride. Theede Heywood, BA (Merton), son of a local armiger, called to the bar in 1740, offered the longest ode, seventeen Alcaic stanzas, calling for a large tankard (Ergo capaces, prome, Puer, Scyphos, ‘So, boy, bring capacious cups’) and conjuring up a prophecy of Britannia with various neat Horatian echoes. George Talbot, son of the recently ennobled Lord Chancellor, later a vicar (he declined the see of St David’s), and clerk of the custodies of idiots and lunatics, offered a stimulating Alcaic ode:43 Te, Turba mollis, semper amabilem Nymphae fatentur; plurima Te petit Matura Virgo, Te morantem Increpitat tacita querela. The gentle crowd, the nymphs, confess that you are always loveable; many a marriageable maiden seeks you, chides your delay with quiet complaint.

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David Money The description of Lavinia at Virgil, Aeneid 7.53, iam matura viro, iam plenis nubilis annis (‘now ready for a man, now of full age for marriage’), may strike a chord. Was the tragic, discarded Anne Vane a kind of Dido? Semper amabilem meanwhile recalls Horace, Odes 1.5.10 – here transferred to the man, who may indeed have combined his amiability with vacant flirtation. Talbot’s ode ends with purple flowers and fruits, hyacinth and nubile vine. David Gregory was himself – in a manner of speaking – the offspring of a neo-Latin epithalamium, Anthony Alsop’s ode 1.11, an extraordinarily powerful poem, blatantly Jacobite in manuscript form.44 Son of a Scottish Jacobite (Oxford’s astronomy professor), his own ‘stout adherence to Whig principles’ won him the new chair of modern history and languages in 1724; he was tireless in daily correspondence with the Duke of Newcastle, and in promoting the Whig cause at Oxford.45 He ‘occupied his spare time in writing Latin verse’, and his long Oxford career saw him contributing to volumes from the start of George II’s reign through to the birth of George’s great-grandson in 1762. His 1736 poem seems well calculated to please Frederick’s father: Sis magno similis Patri, ‘may you be similar to your great father’.46 He has military hopes for the prince, who may go to Gibraltar or to Germany, deprived of Eugene (died in 1736), alongside whom the young George II had fought.47 Another scion of a ‘neo-Latin family’ was William Freind, son of Robert, headmaster of Westminster School, nephew of John (16751728), physician, Jacobite, and recipient of Latin odes.48 He neatly adapts the famous passage at Aeneid 6.847-53 to apply to George:49 Exultent alii ferro raptisque Trophaeis Saevire, et populis imponere jura coactis; Tu leni regere imperio, Tu foedere mundum Complecti  Let others boast of raging with iron and snatched trophies, and of imposing laws on unfree peoples; you [can boast] of ruling with gentle power, of embracing the world in an alliance.

This turns round Augustus’ imposition of the pax Romana (regere imperio, 851) into a subtler diplomatic victory, while playing on excudent alii (847), ‘others will hammer out’ great works of Grecian art. Freind ends with a return to Aeneid 6, comparing Anchises’ prophecy to the expected Hanoverian descendants. His late Jacobite uncle might have appreciated the skilful verse, if not the ostensible loyalty. Richard West, son of a London armiger, was a close friend of Thomas Gray and of Horace Walpole, both contributors to the Cambridge vol-

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8. The Latin poetry of English gentlemen ume.50 Walpole wrote: ‘I believe the Princess will have more beauties bestowed on her by the occasional poets, than even a painter would afford her. They will cook up a new Pandora, and in the bottom of the box enclose Hope, that all they have said is true. A good many, out of excess of good breeding, having heard it was rude to talk Latin before women, propose complimenting her in English; which she will be much the better for. I doubt most of them, instead of fearing their compositions should not be understood, should fear they should: they write they don’t know what, to be read by they don’t know who.’51 This sounds like a cynical youth, polishing his own Latin, but affecting to despise others; true only up to a point. Would a young German girl really have preferred English? Johannes Seidel, son of a cleric from Halberstadt in Prussia, was in a position to address the king (and the happy couple) in their native German, and did so in three closely-printed black-letter pages.52 One of at least five Welsh contributors, John Lloyd (fellow-commoner of Jesus: one of several possible namesakes, but probably the son of a Cardigan armiger) makes good use of ancient British examples in an Alcaic ode. William Wynn wrote in Welsh, imitating Taliesin.53 William Fletcher, fellow of New College, was not Welsh (son of a Winchester doctor; later Dean of Kildare, Ireland), but he strikes an amusing Welsh note, with a leaping stag of Plynlimmon in a small-scale imitation of Catullus 61, after the personified Wales speaks in Horatian Asclepiadic lines.54 The one Scot I have identified, William Forbes (son of an Aberdeenshire armiger) has Venus see Frederick as another Adonis, in an amusing little seven-stanza Sapphic ode; Cupid is instructed to enflame him and the German nymph by the Elbe, like George and Caroline before them.55 We have seen that many poets chose English (about a fifth; this rises to a third in the 1760s):56 a free choice, probably not for the reason Walpole suggests, with Latin remaining predominant. William Dobson, fellow of New College, son of a Yorkshire parson, may stand as an exemplar for this bilingual culture. He chose English in 1736 and in 1751, but wrote Latin odes in 1734 and 1738 (the former of eighteen Alcaic stanzas). He also undertook the substantial labour of making a new Latin version of Milton’s Paradise Lost, by now accepted as an English classic. For what purpose? An international audience, still largely unfamiliar with English, might indeed read it. But I suspect that Dobson’s focus was primarily domestic: readers like his fellow poets. Here is one gentleman’s response to Dobson, from the 1780s: ‘As no Genius but the comprehensive one of Milton could have pervaded the Extensive, the Illimitable Subject, which he has selected for the labors of his Epick Muse, so cannot the Force of his Language be equal’d

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David Money by the Transfusion of his Thoughts into any other. Mr Dobson has supplyd Verses truly Classical, when compard [sic] with the most celebrated of the Augustan Writers; yet is he at best an Icarus by the side of his Father Daedalus, soaring the Flight of an Eagle upon waxen Wings, giving indeed to Himself a Name from the arduousness of his Attempt.’57 The Icarus comparison puts the translator in good company, for few translators or imitators of verse can match their original’s heroic flight. The comment was seemingly penned by Edward Burnaby Greene (died 1788), himself a poet, critic and translator (of Gray’s Latin verse, as well as numerous ancient poems, some very long), and failed brewer. Greene would doubtless have remembered Horace, Odes 4.2.1-4: in the popular eighteenth-century version of Philip Francis, ‘He, who to Pindar’s Height attempts to rise, | Like Icarus, with waxen Pinions tries | His pathless Way, and from the venturous Theme | Shall leave to azure Seas his falling Name.’58 We may perhaps apply the idea to other exponents of British neo-Latin, besides Dobson; they could still make something of a splash, albeit in more limited waters. In the case of the verse collections, the genre’s limitations were clear, but within those limitations our gentlemen do quite well. We have sampled a good range of contributions, with emphasis on social background and prospects. A typical Oxford poet of 1736 might be from the southern counties of England and boast a family coat of arms: a person of substance, as likely to be a squire as a scholar or clergyman. They provide, I think, sufficient evidence to conclude that real practical experience of neo-Latin (as young adults, not just schoolboys) was not a rare thing among eighteenth-century gentlemen. I have preferred to cover a wide selection of authors, rather than to scrutinise fewer complete poems; but virtually all the poems are respectable efforts, maybe not the most brilliant neo-Latin, but far from thoughtless, in spite of Horace Walpole’s doubts. Some conceits of love poetry or panegyric may seem extravagant, but they tend to be lightly handled, and surely no sillier than some of Johannes Secundus’ Basia, a highlyrespected neo-Latin text. On such occasions, the ordinary gentleman did his best, producing work of which there would be no need to be ashamed, by the standards of contemporary polite culture or of wider European neo-Latin literature. Notes 1. On Tollet, see Londry 2006. 2. Clark and Erskine-Hill 2002: passim, especially Clark 2002; Money 2002 on Johnson’s Latin. On Johnson see also Niall Rudd’s chapter in this volume.

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8. The Latin poetry of English gentlemen 3. Langford 1989 borrows the phrase from Sir William Blackstone (1723-80). 4. See the introduction to this volume, and the chapter by Sarah Knight. 5. IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 100. 6. This is something on which I would be very interested to be proved partly, or entirely, wrong by comparable evidence from other countries; but I am not, as yet, aware of any such long-standing traditions of large, official volumes elsewhere. 7. Hence what might appear an unfortunately narcissistic set of bibliographical references. I am not aware of recent studies by others of the tradition (as opposed to passing mentions, when individual major authors contribute): apologies if I have missed them. Earlier studies are referenced at Money 1998: 229. Note particularly Forster 1982 on Cambridge, Binns 1990 on the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 8. Money 1998: 232. 9. Examples at Money 1998: 230-1, 246-7. 10. Money 2000: 52. 11. Foster 1888; 1891-2; Sedgwick 1970; Namier and Brooke 1985. As these works list names in alphabetical order, I dispense with page references for entries on individuals. 12. Westminster School trained many, especially for Christ Church, always the dominant college. 13. On the social and political situation at Oxford, see Sutherland and Mitchell 1986. 14. IJsewijn and Sacré 1998: 100, citing an Austrian example from 1736; 86-91 on Horace; for more detail on Horatian imitation in verse collections, see Money 2007: 326-7. 15. Langford 1989: 36. 16. Kilburn 2004: 904-5. 17. Kilburn 2004: 906. 18. Kilburn 2004: 906. 19. Langford 1989: 37. 20. Kilburn 2004: 907. 21. Oxford 1736: sig. A2r. 22. Gerrard 1994. 23. Money 2003; 2009. 24. Oxford 1736: sig. B1r. 25. Oxford 1736: sig. C1r. 26. Oxford 1736: sig. E2v. 27. Sedgwick 1970. 28. Toynbee 1903-5: 2.296-7. 29. Money 1998: 205-8. 30. Toynbee 1903-5: 2.372-3. 31. Oxford 1736: sig. G2r. 32. Addison 1721: 1.54. 33. Namier and Brooke 1985: 2.646. 34. Oxford 1736: sig. H1r-v. 35. Sedgwick 1970. 36. 20 December 1764, to H. Mann: Toynbee 1903-5: 6.159; Sedgwick 1970. 37. Oxford 1736: sig. U2r. 38. Oxford 1736: sig. G1r. 39. Namier and Brooke 1985.

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David Money 40. Sedgwick 1970. 41. Oxford 1736: sig. 2H2v. 42. Oxford 1736: sig. Q1v-2r (Harbin), Aa1v-2r (Jones), K2v (Newey), Y1v-2r (Heywood). 43. Oxford 1736: sig. B1v. 44. Money 1998: 135-42, 284-6. 45. Matthew and Harrison 2004: 23.664. 46. Oxford 1736: sig. D2r. 47. MacKenzie 2008. 48. Money 1998: 149-57. 49. Oxford 1736: sig. L2r. 50. On West, Money 2006; on Gray, Mack 2000: 205-8. 51. Horace Walpole to George Montagu, 2 May 1736: Toynbee 1903-5: 1.10-11. 52. Oxford 1736: sig. I1r-I2r. 53. Oxford 1736: sig. Z1v (Lloyd), H2r-v (Wynn). 54. Oxford 1736: sig. Aa2r-v. 55. Oxford 1736: sig. M1r-v. 56. Money 1997. 57. MS note on the flyleaf of a copy of Dobson 1750-3 (in an eighteenth-century binding, both volumes bound together) in collection of D.K. Money, signed ‘E.B.G. Sept: 10: 1786: Sunday’, with armorial bookplate of Edward Burnaby Greene, Esq. (on whom see Matthew and Harrison 2004). 58. Francis 1753: 2.161.

Bibliography Addison, J. (ed.) (1721) Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta, 2 vols. London. Binns, J.W. (1990) Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age. Leeds (ARCA 24). Clark, J.C.D. (2002) ‘Religion and Political Identity: Samuel Johnson as a Nonjuror’, in Clark and Erskine-Hill 2002: 79-145. Clark, J. and Erskine-Hill, H. (eds) (2002) Samuel Johnson in Historical Context. Basingstoke. Dobson, W. (1750-3) Paradisus Amissus, vol. 1, Oxford; vol. 2, London. Forster, H. (1982) ‘The Rise and Fall of the Cambridge Muses (1603-1763)’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8: 141-72. Foster, J. (1888) Alumni Oxonienses, 1715-1886, 4 vols. Oxford. Foster, J. (1891-2) Alumni Oxonienses, 1500-1714, 4 vols. Oxford. Francis, P. (1753) A Poetical Translation of the Works of Horace. 5th edn, 4 vols. London. Gerrard, C. (1994) The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725-1742. Oxford. IJsewijn, J. and Sacré, D. (1998) Companion to Neo-Latin Studies. Part II: Literary, Linguistic, Philological and Editorial Questions. Second entirely rewritten edition. Leuven (Suppl. Hum. Lov. XIV). Kilburn, M. (2004) ‘Frederick Lewis, 1707-51’, in Matthew and Harrison 2004, vol. 20: 902-11. Langford, P. (1989) A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783. Oxford.

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8. The Latin poetry of English gentlemen Londry, M. (2006) The Poems of Elizabeth Tollet: A Critical Edition. D.Phil. thesis, Oxford. Mack, R.L. (2000) Thomas Gray: A Life. New Haven. MacKenzie, N. (2008) ‘ “Elected King” versus “Native King” ’, in D.K. Money (ed.) 1708: Oudenarde and Lille, 110-21. Cambridge. Matthew, H.C.G. and Harrison, B. (eds) (2004) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols. Oxford. Money, D.K. (1997) ‘A Diff’rent-Sounding Lyre: Oxford Commemorative Verse in English, 1613-1834’, Bodleian Library Record 16: 42-92. Money, D.K. (1998) The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Tradition of British Latin Verse. Oxford. Money, D.K. (2000) ‘Free Flattery or Servile Tribute? Oxford and Cambridge Commemorative Poetry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in J. Raven (ed.) Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing since 1700, 48-66. Aldershot. Money, D.K. (2002) ‘Samuel Johnson and the neo-Latin Tradition’, in Clark and Erskine-Hill 2002: 199-221. Money, D.K. (2003) ‘The Politics of Poetry: A Quick Look at Robert Walpole, and 2,000 Other Cambridge Poets’, in R. Schnur et al. (eds) Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Cantabrigiensis, 361-9. Tempe. Money, D.K. (2006) ‘Eclogues in the English Universities’, in P. Ford and A. Taylor (eds) Neo-Latin and the Pastoral: Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 33: 172-93. Money, D.K. (2007) ‘The Reception of Horace in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in S.J. Harrison (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Horace, 318-33. Cambridge. Money, D.K. (2009) ‘Neo-Latin and University Politics: The Case of Henry Sacheverell’, in D. Sacré and J. Papy (eds) Syntagmatia, 723-39. Leuven. Namier, L. and Brooke, J. (1985) The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754-90, 3 vols. London. [Oxford University] (1736) Gratulatio Academiae Oxoniensis in Nuptias Auspicatissimas Illustrissimorum Principum Frederici Principis Walliae et Augustae Principissae de Saxo-Gotha. Oxford. Sedgwick, R. (1970) The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 171554, 2 vols. London. Sutherland, L.S. and Mitchell, L.G. (eds) (1986) The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 5: The Eighteenth Century. Oxford. Toynbee, P. (ed.) (1903-5) The Letters of Horace Walpole, 16 vols. Oxford.

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George Buchanan, chieftain of neo-Latin poets Roger P.H. Green George Buchanan was born early in the year 1506 in The Moss, a small house near Killearn, a village on the edge of the Scottish Highlands and some ten miles north of Glasgow, which in his time may have been the ‘small green place’ that we are told the name connotes, or as he put it in his short but indispensable Vita,1 ‘in the region of Lennox near the river Blane’. The house was carefully preserved (though rebuilt) well into the nineteenth century,2 but by then Buchanan’s fame had been exalted to the skies above Killearn in an obelisk, among Scotland’s tallest, erected by private subscription.3 The inscription on one side of it, fortunately nearer the base than the summit, praises him as inter fortes fortis, inter doctos doctus (‘brave among brave men, learned among the learned’), and although the inscription as a whole inclines more to Buchanan the politician and Presbyterian than Buchanan the poet, it encapsulates at least some characteristics of his enormous range of verse. In the realm of poetry the best-known tribute is the fulsome description of him as poetarum nostri saeculi facile principe (‘easily the chief among the poets of our age’),4 a tribute that shows genuine admiration as well as commercial shrewdness in the days before dust-jackets and press releases. Many who became his opponents in other ways were evidently happy with this estimate of his poetry.5 Whether he did indeed tower over Europe’s other big names from the mid-sixteenth century could be debated – constructing an agreed league table of neo-Latin poets has not been done, even in the twenty-first century, with its passion for such things – but he is certainly up there in the top division. To move from vertical modes of appreciation to horizontal ones, his fame extended, and did so quite quickly, from the countryside of Strathblane to the cosmopolitan cultural hub of Paris, and from the University of St Andrews to Bordeaux and thence Portugal. There were some precarious months in the England of Henry VIII, and some more pleasant and secure times in Italy. His range of contacts and friends

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9. George Buchanan, chieftain of neo-Latin poets was to become very wide, and outside Scotland and France, his main bases, he knew scholars and printers from the Low Countries, used the work of Swiss theologians, moved among German Lutherans, and had a broad range of correspondents, including the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. He had dealings of various kinds with kings of Scotland, England, France and Portugal. Many of his works were adapted or translated into French, including his Pro Lena ‘In defence of the brothel keeper’ (Elegy III), and poets of the Pléiade and later dramatists were influenced by him. In general, he left a poetic cornucopia of remarkable variety, versatility and vigour, encompassing diverse genres and registers and showing immense knowledge of the Latin writers of antiquity and their language. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, no Opera Omnia appeared in his lifetime, though it was not for want of trying.6 The categories into which his many poems were divided – in some cases metrical (hendecasyllables, iambs, elegies), in others less clear and very varied baskets such as epigrams, Silvae and ‘miscellaneous works’ (Miscellanea: the plain title belies their great interest)7 – are, though essential, in themselves a poor guide to what lies within them. As for anthologies, these have tended to stick (with some reason) to the same few poems,8 but there is also a recent collection, with texts, translations and some notes, which gives some idea of the baffling breadth of topics, situations and personalities that we find in Buchanan, as well as seeking out data for the political historian.9 But now, three centuries after the valuable critical editions of Ruddiman and Burman (the latter amounts almost to a reprint), thorough treatments of what might be called the ‘secular’ (not the best word, perhaps, but better than ‘profane’) works are under way, following the recent publication of a work that offers a full critical edition and fresh translation of the Poetic Psalm Paraphrases.10 For the early education of this fluent and expert Latinist Scotland certainly deserves some credit, but it is not known which school or schools he attended there. He has almost nothing to say about the earliest phase, not even complaining, as the famous sometimes do in retrospect, of a sore backside. In one of his prose works he says that he learnt Latin with much toil,11 but the point is actually polemical, implying that his adversary was not up to it, but stayed with Gaelic.12 Looking back, one may reasonably assume that after a firm grounding in his early days he was able to imbibe Latin with ease, and by teaching himself through constant reading achieve his remarkable assimilation of the classical writers. In his mid-teens he was sent to Paris to study. The fact that instances of the proverbial ‘Scot abroad’ are so numerous in the sixteenth century should not obscure the fact that student funding, then as now, was a problem; in the case of Buchanan’s poor

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Roger P.H. Green and struggling family, it seems that the necessary support came from an uncle. To judge from the Vita Buchanan himself thought, and one must agree, that Paris was a more formative influence on his career. Here he found, or certainly developed, a ‘natural impulse’ to write Latin verse (though he also remarks that there was little else to study there). If Scotland equipped him for reading Latin, Paris launched him into writing it.13 When soon afterwards his uncle died, funds ran out, and he suffered a nasty bout of illness, made worse by time spent in very cold weather resisting the English in what is now known as the Battle of Wark (1523).14 More congenial than warfare was a spell at the University of St Andrews, where he was sent next, to be registered as a poor student and have his fees paid. The attraction there was the Scottish philosopher and polymath John Major, to whom the University of Glasgow, by then more than fifty years old, and indeed most other universities or colleges of the time, had no equal. Subsequently Buchanan followed Major back to Paris. He was incorporated as Bachelor of Arts in the University of Paris, in 1527, and this was followed by his Master’s degree, giving him licence to teach. He taught in the Collège SainteBarbe for some years,15 but the five-year appointment as private tutor to Gilbert Kennedy, Earl of Cassilis (for whom he made a Latin translation of Linacre’s Rudiments) must have been more rewarding – even if we do not take too literally the frankly titled lament Quam misera sit condicio docentium litteras humaniores Lutetiae (‘How wretched is the state of those who teach humane letters in Paris’), a typically vivid and vehement piece of verse satire reminiscent of Juvenal.16 This is a genre in which he will excel. In the mid 1530s Buchanan returned home with his Scottish pupil. He implies in the Vita that he was keen to return to his ‘previous interests’ (pristina studia) in France, but was kept in Scotland by the king, in circumstances which involve two of his most famous poems. The details are not entirely clear, but the unusually long account in the Vita will be followed here.17 The first poem, known as the Somnium, an expansion and adaptation of a vernacular poem by William Dunbar,18 had annoyed the Franciscans ‘because of one or two offensive words’, as Buchanan says disingenuously; on hearing of this, the king decided to exploit Buchanan’s acrimony against the order and demanded that he write something else against them. But the king found the first version insufficiently fierce and required something more biting, whereupon Buchanan sent him the poem which, much expanded, saw print some thirty years later under the title Franciscanus. To this remarkable, but believable, story of his activity in Scotland we may add, conjecturally, that he could have met two Scottish neo-

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9. George Buchanan, chieftain of neo-Latin poets Latin poets, James Foulis and Roderick MacLean. Foulis had lived in France for many years, and produced a small book of varied poetry in 1512.19 MacLean, a younger man, and apparently a graduate of Lutheran Wittenberg, was to be the author of a very rare book of 1549 containing poetic renderings in various metres of episodes from Adamnan’s Life of Columba, and, on the last page, a poetic paraphrase of Psalm 1. It is not impossible that MacLean had written all these already, in which case he could have influenced Buchanan to some extent (at least by his use of metres of classical lyric).20 To return to the Franciscanus, the authority of James V did not make Buchanan immune from the power of Cardinal Beaton, who had put a price on his head; he was in hot water, and, being no boiling frog, escaped to England. He arrived there in the critical year 1539, when, in Buchanan’s own words, the elderly and insecure Henry VIII was burning Protestants and Catholics on the same day and indeed on the same fire. Clearly, Buchanan’s future lay with France, so familiar to him and a haven of humanitas. Buchanan’s poetry includes two poems for Henry VIII (Miscellanea 15 and Fratres 5), but only the first of these was actually sent, the other being later recycled for his daughter Elizabeth when she became queen. He was learning that panegyric poetry, for which he had a great gift (and doubtless received others), had dangers as well as rewards. A typically neat and complimentary poem (Miscellanea 13) addressed to Henry’s Vice-Gerent Thomas Cromwell, who was to be executed in 1540, appears, in retrospect, ill-timed. But it was safe enough to praise the emperor Charles V when in December 1539 he came to Bordeaux (Silvae 1), which is where we find Buchanan next, after hopping back to Paris and then choosing to take a teaching post in the Collège de Guyenne, where he would be for some years. Some of the poetry from this fertile period stems from his duties and opportunities in the Collège, such as (if the dating is correct) Maiae Calendae (Elegy 2), a poem linked with holidays – and not to be confused with the later poem Calendae Maiae (Miscellanea 11). Philip Ford has carefully analysed Buchanan’s Elegy 5, an official poem from the Collège to François Olivier, French Chancellor, showing how it carefully blends familiarity and dignity.21 A formal poetic letter of another kind, one that has received high praise, is addressed to his friend Ptolomée de La Taste, showing with all the milk and honey, or indeed cream and syrup, of Renaissance Pastoral how much he misses his friend (Silvae 2).22 In a different but no less typical vein are various poems that form part of Fratres Fraterrimi, a collection akin in spirit and content to the Franciscanus. (In his dedication of this Buchanan explains the nonce-word fraterrimi as id est malos / crassos, ineptos,

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Roger P.H. Green garrulos, ‘that is [brothers who are] evil, stupid, fools, chatterboxes’.) Then there are, as from most periods of his life, plenty of epigrams, some of them skoptic squibs, some serious compliments or dignified memorialisations. But of especial interest in the Bordeaux teaching context are Buchanan’s dramas, Alcestis, Medea (these are close translations from the Greek of Euripides), Baptistes and Jephthes.23 It was the practice of the college to produce a play every year, and Buchanan tells us that he wrote – or in the case of Medea, which he had written earlier in order to improve his Greek, polished – these with the intention of moving away from fashionable allegories to the ancient models (meaning Euripides and Seneca).24 Later Jephthes, in particular, and Baptistes would have considerable influence on French drama in the vernacular. When a friend, André Gouvea, instructed by the Portuguese king to set up a college of Arts in Coimbra, requested his help, Buchanan gladly accepted, relishing the challenge, and also glad of the prospect of retreating from wars and rumours of wars in the rest of Europe. Buchanan’s years in Portugal are perhaps the most dramatic period of his career, and certainly the most dramatised. After some uneventful, and perhaps poetically infertile, years teaching, Buchanan was arraigned and tried by the Portuguese Inquisition in the summer of 1550.25 We do not know what the charges were, or their relative weight, or who instigated the accusation, or what lay behind it; neither did Buchanan, whose two speeches in defence had to include whatever he thought fit for the purpose.26 In his Vita Buchanan suggests he was victimised as a foreigner and because he lacked influential friends; this is possible, and the relative lack of networking letters and poems from this period of his life lends this some plausibility. The trial was lengthy and stressful, but the outcome less severe than he might have feared. He was confined in a monastery, where, it was hoped, he would be instructed more accurately by the monks (exactius erudiretur a monachis). Given the abbot’s awe of Buchanan, and the ignorance and unspirituality for which Buchanan would later condemn the monks, not to mention his apparent life-long contempt for monks, this was never likely to happen. Buchanan was probably left to his own devices, and as he later says in the Vita, ‘at this time, especially, he composed several’ (or perhaps ‘many’) ‘of David’s psalms in various metres’.27 From this careful statement misunderstandings have proliferated. These poetic paraphrases were not set as a penance; and there is evidence that he had begun them, voluntarily and with enthusiasm, much earlier. Neither did he complete them then; the point of what he says is that this was the time at which, more than any other time in his life, he was enabled to work

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9. George Buchanan, chieftain of neo-Latin poets on them. Taking into account his qualities of resilience and resolve, and the speed with which he could write, he could have written fifty or even more.28 Which of the Psalm poems in particular were written then cannot even be conjectured: some have pointed to poems that seem to be the result of great dejection, forgetting that this is true of many a Psalm, and that of course paraphrases of such psalms made by free men were likewise gloomy.29 It is likely that it was then that he conceived the idea of rendering the whole Psalter in verse and of using a variety of classical metres. It is not only, of course, the abundance of his metres and the fact that he eventually rendered the whole Psalter that arouse admiration, and have done over the centuries, but the sustained engagement with each and every Psalm and the ingenuity and stylishness with which sense and expression are blended in this devotional endeavour, which matches the Psalms in its variety of emotion and consolation. After five months Buchanan was allowed to travel outside the monastery walls as far as nearby Lisbon; soon afterwards, in February 1552, he was set at liberty. The short poem Adventus in Galliam (‘On coming to France’, Fratres 28) testifies to his displeasure with Portugal and the joy of returning to France. In the same year he wrote two poems (Miscellanea 3 and 23) of some length, with the form and spirit of Horatian panegyric odes, praising Charles de Cossé, Count of Brissac, the first an allegory on ‘the love of Cossé and Virtue’, the second an encomium or epinicion after his capture of Vercelli;30 as Ford has pointed out, he could well have been wooing Charles as a future patron. (The aforementioned Jephthes was also dedicated to him, in 1554.) Certainly Brissac did become his patron, valuing Buchanan’s services as tutor to his son Timoléon, and it was with Timoléon that Buchanan would visit Italy, where Charles was busy campaigning. Buchanan, in return, gained a more secure footing in French society, and indeed some years later was presented with a canonry. Mention of Timoléon brings us to Buchanan’s great work De Sphaera (which is addressed to Timoléon), a work which because of its length, its incompleteness at the time of Buchanan’s death, and the fact that its thrust, combating Copernicus, soon proved incorrect, has been rather neglected in modern times.31 But it does show the appetite of Buchanan for yet another genre – Lucretian didactic – and for tackling complex issues. He was not afraid of writing big books (as the prose Rerum Scoticarum Historia abundantly indicates) or tackling controversial issues (the prime witness here would be De Iure Regni, also in prose). Two other significant poems, both of 1558, are the one congratulating the French king Henri II on the recent capture of Calais from the English (Miscellanea 1), and what is perhaps now Buchanan’s most famous poem, the Epitha-

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Roger P.H. Green lamium for the wedding of Mary Stuart (best known as Mary Queen of Scots) and François the Dauphin, its interest enhanced for many by the unhappy sequels for both parties. Soon after the Dauphin’s death two years later Mary decided to return to Scotland; Buchanan also returned, in circumstances that are unclear – his Vita is by now very sketchy, though it records a period when he devoted himself to the serious study of doctrinal issues – and from being a Catholic canon becomes a member of the new Church of Scotland. Mary was soon to be added to his distinguished list of pupils, and Buchanan’s dedication of the Psalms to her, remembering their study together, has justly been seen as a happy memory of these years. But with the notable exception of his epicedion on the death of John Calvin (1564; Miscellanea 24), a poem of strong feeling, and one which might well reflect Buchanan’s new religious orientation, and the Genethliacon on the birth of the future James VI in 1566, the rest of his life is not notable for new poetry. The torrent subsides. But his ‘final years’ (actually more than twenty) should not be written off, nor should we completely leave them to scholars of the complex political scene, or still less with Naiden construct a picture of Buchanan in despair as death approaches. The 1560s were the decade when so much of his varied poetry – which we have analysed in terms of the time when he put pen to paper – actually appeared in print, thanks to the work of friends and agents, and various continental printers. In mid-decade there emerged first his Poetic Psalm Paraphrases, in 1565 or 1566, with four more editions before the end of 1567; then, soon afterwards, the poetry that he had described as scattered all over the place like possessions after a shipwreck, now compartmentalised but with the Franciscanus prominent. Not everything is there: the Miscellanea and the incomplete Sphaera would first be printed after his death.32 Even without them, the educated world, both Scots and European, is now seeing what is, in terms of volume, as much as two Aeneids or twice the whole of Lucretius, and it overtops the whole of Scotland’s Latin verse printed up to that point by as much as a skyscraper overtops a chapel – or the Killearn obelisk a bus stop. Nor did he leave it at that, but there is considerable evidence that Buchanan continues to be much concerned with revision, not in the sense of correcting faults that he had noticed, but by way of touching up, stylistically fine-tuning, and even in some ways reappraising his work, especially perhaps in the case of the Poetic Psalm Paraphrases and De Sphaera.33 To the end he remains a perfectionist. This is not the place to consider the reception of Buchanan’s poetry, but a few final words may be usefully addressed to one judgement of his writing that has had considerable effect on his reputation, and indeed

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9. George Buchanan, chieftain of neo-Latin poets on our understanding of the character of neo-Latin poetry as a whole. Criticism of Buchanan’s verse was not new,34 but there was a new turn when, on the four hundredth anniversary of his birth, Buchanan as it were entered the conference era. In a contribution to the academic celebrations held in the University of St Andrews its Professor of Humanity, W.M. Lindsay, in a paper entitled ‘Buchanan as a Latin Scholar’, not only pronounced that Buchanan was no such thing (he discovered no manuscripts, edited no classical works, wrote no relevant monographs), but went on to denounce his use of metrics and prosody, in a somewhat muddled and indeed careless paper.35 Compared with the older attacks, Lindsay followed a new method – generalise, give almost no examples, and exaggerate (‘page after page ’) – and did so so vehemently that the unwary might assume that there was no smoke without a fire. His judgement cast a shadow over twentieth-century perceptions of Buchanan the poet. Naiden takes Lindsay’s verdict as given, and Ford’s valuable study also seems influenced by it.36 But one must ask certain questions of Lindsay. Was he aware that printers, like the medieval scribes of whom he had considerable acquaintance, make errors, and that, as it were in compensation, the diagnosis of shared errors may be a tool for diagnosing testimony that can be eliminated, as happens with manuscripts? Was he using the best editions of whatever works he was referring to? Did he give more than lip-service to the possibility that knowledge of classical metrics and prosody was less advanced in the sixteenth century than in the early twentieth? He allows that for his models Buchanan may be ranging further afield than the classical period in the strict sense, but takes insufficient note of that possibility and of the nature of the choices raised thereby. Examples of choices to be made in prosody are, first, the treatment of final ‘o’ of words in certain grammatical forms:37 Buchanan may shorten the vowel when Virgil or Horace would always treat it as long. Secondly, Buchanan often allows a short vowel to stand before the combination of ‘s’ and another consonant; this is never done by Virgil or by Horace in the Odes, and Buchanan chooses to follow the practice of other poets, for example Lucretius (as Naiden saw), rather than theirs, assuming that he was aware of their abstention.38 In matters of metre, one may find Buchanan imitating a feature of Catullus rather than what seems a rule of Horace, allowing a short fifth syllable in the third line of the Alcaic stanza.39 Finally, there is the use of anapaests in the fourth foot of iambic verse, pointed out by Ruddiman in his edition in the section De metris Buchananaeis as without classical precedent. It may be this detail that underlay Lindsay’s strictures on Buchanan’s composition of iambic verse, but he does not ask whether Buchanan might have had some early text of Seneca as his authority.

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Roger P.H. Green These are small points, and examples in some cases occur rarely, but much has been built upon them, and they have unduly influenced perceptions of Buchanan’s competence and his aims. With careful attention to the appropriate detail, the number of flaws in Buchanan’s large œuvre might be reduced to almost zero, as may well be true of the Poetic Psalm Paraphrases.40 The supposed gap between Buchanan’s practice and classical standards would then virtually disappear. It is reasonable to assume that Buchanan seeks to imitate the classics (in this wider sense) all the time, and apparent anomalies must be given careful thought, without rushing to judgement or taking advantage of his alleged laxity. A few examples will now be given. At Psalm 10.37 a casual reader (but one who knew about Latin prosody and metrics) might be surprised to find the line occupatos multimodis nexibus (‘caught in many ways in nets’). The word multimodis (‘in many ways’) is actually read in nine editions up to 1582 and gives tolerable sense, but the scansion is faulty; or rather, if the word is scanned correctly, it does not fit the metre. The reading of the other witnesses, multinodis (‘many-knotted’), scans perfectly and does fit the iambic metre. Even without the evidence of the two partial editions of the Psalms in 1556 and 1560,41 it would be clear that there was a slip in the editio princeps; this was repeated in the immediately following editions, and not only by Rihel in 1566, but in all the editions from his press. A word that seemed more familiar ousted a less familiar one (probably derived by Buchanan from the late antique poet Prudentius). In Iusta 29.1-2 we read the couplet Quamvis flere nefas, te caelo, Iacobe, receptum | tot populis numquam mors fuit una dolor (‘Although it is wrong to weep for you, James, now that you have been received into heaven, never was the death of one man so painful to so many peoples’: so Catellani-Dufrêne 2009: 62). The first line, a hexameter, is faulty, having one syllable too many. The word Iacobe is not responsible; the first two syllables of this name are regularly treated as long, and even if they were not so treated here, that would not bring a remedy. In fact it is a word that seems at first sight ideally fitted to the context that is the culprit; te seems to be required by Iacobe, addresses to the deceased in this way being so common in epitaphs and similar poems. Without te, the sense is ‘it is wrong to weep for any person received into heaven’, and this generalisation matches the wider focus of the second line. Unless one can accept that Buchanan was capable of writing a line with six and a half feet – and he has never been charged with this – it must surely be put down to a scribe or printer, misled by the form of other epigrams in the series. Three of the immediately preceding six use the word tu or tuus.

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9. George Buchanan, chieftain of neo-Latin poets The first stanza of Miscellanea 11, Calendae Maiae, reads as follows: Salvete sacris deliciis sacrae Maiae Calendae, laetitiae et mero ludisque dicatae iocisque et teneris Charitum choreis. Hail, May Day, sacred to sacred delights, dedicated to joy and wine, games, jesting, and the delicate dances of the Graces.42

It is often supposed without further ado that Buchanan has made an error here, and Lindsay certainly supposes it; that in the fourth syllable of the third line, where the metre needs a long syllable, he has placed a short one, evidently confusing the words dico, dicare, and the word dico, dicere, of which the former has a short ‘i’, the latter a long ‘i’. If he had written sacratae and not dicatae, all would be well, and the play on the word sacer would also have been neatly repeated. Perhaps he did write it; McFarlane mentions ‘an earlier état’, and inspection has shown that sacratae is read in Par. Lat. 8141 (page 21 recto), a manuscript containing many of Buchanan’s poems.43 Without further editorial work the presence of the word dicatae cannot be explained, as ideally it should be; it is hardly a misreading of sacratae, but alternative words are often added in our manuscript versions, and do not necessarily originate with Buchanan. Lindsay has been pursued enough, but to enable this paper to end on a more cheerful note, let us consider an area included in his fulminations but one in which he has not been accorded such deferential, and detrimental, respect. We need not pursue his obsession with denigrating the public school practice of verse composition, but what he has to say about ‘tags’ has some historical interest. He quotes a short passage from the Sphaera, noting how there are ‘tags’ from Lucretius, from Virgil (in fact he means Catullus [64.7]), and from Horace. ‘An unkind critic’, he says (and of course he is such a critic), ‘might describe this as a patchwork of “tags”.’44 Though he cannot censure ‘Lucretius’ noble phrase’ flammantia moenia mundi (1.73) when it appears in another poem, he complains that such things are ‘transferred bodily’ into new poems, and the verbs by which he further describes the process leave his argument in no doubt. Of course Lindsay was not alone in such attitudes. But in this field in the past hundred years there has been immense progress: in the understanding of patterns of allusion, of writers’ subtlety of imitation, of the workings of intertextuality. This has certainly not passed neo-Latin by; and on Buchanan much has been done, and much remains to be done, to illuminate the aims and skills of such a fascinating poet.

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Roger P.H. Green Notes 1. This is a short autobiography (the note of his death in 1582 was added by another), an important and trustworthy account which will be used in what follows. See McFarlane 1981: 541-3. 2. McFarlane 1981: 19, quoting Irving 1817: 2. 3. Details in Millar 1906: 236. 4. These words, placed on the title page of the first full edition of his Poetic Psalm Paraphrases (Estienne and Estienne 1565/6) are cited in slightly different ways in different contexts, and of course translations differ. 5. Green 2011: 83-90. 6. McFarlane 1981: 301-7. 7. There is a commentary on these, prepared in collaboration with W.S. Watt, in Ford 1982: 180-204. 8. Green and Ford 2009: xx-xxi. 9. McGinnis and Williamson 1995. 10. Green 2011. 11.  multo cum labore puer didici (Rerum Scoticarum Historia 1.8; Burman [1725]: 7). See Green 2011: 17. 12. Buchanan himself may have known and used Gaelic: McFarlane 1981: 19. 13. Ford 1982: 16-23 has a useful analysis of textbooks then available. 14. McFarlane 1981: 23. 15. Probably 1528-31. On the atmosphere and activities of the college, see McFarlane 1981: 28-33. 16. Elegy 1. 17. McFarlane 1981: 51-77 discusses the various problems, as well as giving a literary analysis of the Franciscanus (necessarily, in its later form) and discussing Buchanan’s religious views. 18. Ford 1982: 49-54 and Jack 2009 discuss its relationship to Dunbar’s poem. 19. IJsewijn and Thomson 1975. For a possible meeting with Foulis, see Durkan 1986: 31-2. 20. On MacLean in general, see Sharpe 1991; for a possible meeting of poetic minds, Green 2010. 21. Ford 1982: 63-5. 22. McFarlane 1981: 116. There is an interesting analysis of the poem by Cummings 2009, which takes in the stylistically similar Desiderium Lutetiae (Silvae 3), which some have dated to this period (see McFarlane 1981: 156-8). 23. Sharratt and Walsh 1983. 24. Sharratt and Walsh 1983: 2-4; Cardinali 2009. 25. On this episode see Aitken 1939 and McFarlane 1981: 131-51. 26. These are printed with translation and commentary in Aitken 1939: 1-112. 27. Hoc maxime tempore Psalmorum Davidicorum complures vario carminum genere in numeros redegit. On the Psalm Paraphrases see also the chapter by Stephen Harrison in this volume. 28. Green 2011: 15-16. 29. Wall 1977 picks out the three paraphrases in elegiac metre and dismisses the other 147 for mere ‘technical display’ before drawing a graphic picture of an ailing and wailing Buchanan.

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9. George Buchanan, chieftain of neo-Latin poets 30. See Stephen Harrison’s chapter in this volume. 31. Exceptions are Naiden 1952 and Gee 2009. 32. Details of all these in Durkan 1994. 33. Green 2011: 29-33; Naiden 1952: 27-31. 34. Ruddiman 1745. 35. Green 2009. 36. Ford 1982: 12 and 32 n. 37. But otio, which Burman (1725) has at Fratres 18.9, is simply a misprint, obvious in various ways. 38. Green 2011: 63. It is possible, of course, that he did not consider their practice to be deliberate, or even overlooked it. 39. Green 2011: 63 (once only in the psalm paraphrases). 40. Green 2011: 63, where the word ‘almost’ takes into consideration the possibility that the correct text might not actually be from Buchanan’s hand or mind. 41. Durkan 1994: 71-2; Green 2011: 24-5. 42. The translation is from Ford 1982: 152-3. 43. McFarlane 1981: 114. 44. A comparison between this and, for example, Gee 2009, would eloquently sum up the point of this paragraph.

Bibliography Primary sources Burman, P. (ed.) (1725) Georgii Buchanani  Opera Omnia, 2 vols. Leiden. Estienne, H. and Estienne, R. (eds) (1565/6) Psalmorum Davidis paraphrasis poetica  auctore Georgio Buchanano. s. l. Hart, A. (ed.) (1615) Georgii Buchanani Poemata. Edinburgh. Rihel, J. (ed.) (1566) Psalmorum Davidis paraphrasis poetica  auctore Georgio Buchanano. Strasburg. Ruddiman, T. (ed.) (1714 / 1715) Georgii Buchanani  Opera omnia , 2 vols. Edinburgh.

Secondary sources Aitken, J.M. (1939) The Trial of George Buchanan before the Lisbon Inquisition. Edinburgh. Cardinali, G. (2009) ‘George Buchanan’s Tragedies and Contemporary Dramatic Theory’, in Ford and Green 2009: 163-82. Catellani-Dufrêne, N. (2009) ‘Memorialisation in George Buchanan’s Iusta’, in Ford and Green 2009: 59-71. Cummings, R. (2009) ‘ “Redundant” Epithets in Buchanan’s Pastorals’, in Ford and Green 2009: 19-34. Durkan, J. (1953) ‘The Beginnings of Humanism in Scotland’, Innes Review 4: 5-17. Durkan, J. (1986) ‘Native Influences on George Buchanan’, in I.D. McFarlane (ed.) Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandreani: Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, 31-42. Binghamton and New York.

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Roger P.H. Green Durkan, J. (1994) Bibliography of George Buchanan. Glasgow. Ford, P.J. (1982) George Buchanan, Prince of Poets, with an edition (ed. with W.S. Watt) of the Miscellaneorum Liber. Aberdeen. Ford, P.J. and Green, R.P.H. (eds) (2009) George Buchanan: Poet and Dramatist. Swansea. Gee, E. (2009) ‘Borrowed Plumage: literary metamorphosis in George Buchanan’s De Sphaera’, in Ford and Green 2009: 35-57. Green, R.P.H. (2009) ‘Dry Bones of Contention? Picking apart Buchanan’s Psalms’, in Ford and Green 2009: 253-66. Green, R.P.H. (ed. & tr.) (2011) George Buchanan: Poetic Paraphrase of the Psalms of David. Geneva. Green, R.P.H. (2010) ‘Poetic Psalm Paraphrases: Two Versions of Psalm 1 Compared’, in R. Schnur et al. (eds) Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Budapestensis: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, 261-70. Tempe, AZ (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 386). Green, R.P.H. and Ford, P.J. (2009) ‘Introduction: George Buchanan, Poet and Dramatist’, in Ford and Green 2009: xix-xxxiii. IJsewijn, J. and Thomson, D.F.S. (1975) ‘The Latin Poems of Jacobus Follisius or James Foullis of Edinburgh’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 24: 102-60. Irving, D. (1817) Memoirs of the Life and Writings of George Buchanan. Edinburgh. Jack, R.D.S. (2009) ‘ “Translating” Buchanan’, in Ford and Green 2009: 217-36. Lindsay, W.M. (1906) ‘Buchanan as Latin Scholar’, in Millar 1906: 204-11. McFarlane, I.D. (1981) Buchanan. London. McGinnis, P.J. and Williamson, A.H. (eds) (1995) George Buchanan: The Political Poetry. Edinburgh (Scottish Historical Society, Fifth Series, vol. 8). Millar, D.A. (ed.) (1906) George Buchanan: A Memorial 1506-1906. St Andrews and London. Millar, D.A. (1906) ‘Buchanan Memorials’, in Millar 1906: 235-44. Munro, R. (1906) ‘Early Surroundings and Associations’, in Millar 1906: 7-18. Naiden, J.R. (1952) The Sphaera of George Buchanan. Privately printed. Ruddiman, T. (1745) A Vindication of  George Buchanan’s Paraphrase of the Psalms from the Objections rais’d  by William Benson. Edinburgh. Sharpe, R. (1991) ‘Roderick MacLean’s Life of St. Columba in Latin Verse (1549)’, Innes Review 42: 111-32. Sharratt, P. and Walsh, P.G. (eds) (1983) George Buchanan: The Tragedies. Edinburgh. Wall, J. (1977) ‘The Latin Elegiacs of George Buchanan (1506-1582)’, in A.J. Aitken, M.P. McDiarmid and D.S. Thomson (eds) Bards and Makars: Scottish Language and Literature: Medieval and Renaissance, 184-93. Glasgow.

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10

George Buchanan: the Scottish Horace Stephen Harrison Introduction George Buchanan (1506-82) had a remarkable career, the first part of which is admirably delineated by Roger Green in the preceding chapter: studies in St Andrews and Paris were followed by a series of posts as teacher and private tutor in both France (where he lived for many years) and Scotland, a spell of imprisonment in Portugal for suspected heresy, and (on his return to Scotland in 1561) rôles as tutor to both Mary Queen of Scots and her son James VI as well as important public appointments: Principal of St Leonard’s College in St Andrews (156670), Moderator of the Church of Scotland and Keeper of the Privy Seal.1 This career, combining leading teaching rôles, high-level politics and general humanistic activity, saw the production of a fine range of literary work in Latin, from early treatises on grammar and metre aimed at students, through a massive history of Scotland (1582) and an important work on the limits on the rights of kings (1579), both dedicated to his pupil James VI (who would have objected to the principles of the second and the description of his mother Mary Queen of Scots in the first), to a series of major poetic works, a number of which have already been discussed in the previous chapter. In 1566 Henri Estienne, no mean judge, famously declared that Buchanan was poetarum nostri saeculi facile princeps (‘easily the first of the poets of our age’), and his output is indeed hard to match in his time for quality and range. His satirical poems against monks (Somnium, Franciscanus, Fratres Fraterrimi) draw much on Juvenal and Martial, his collections of erotic Elegiae on Ovid, his Silvae on Statius, his Epigrammata on Martial again, his Iambi on Horace’s Epodes, and his Hendecasyllabi on Catullus and Martial. Alongside his two Latin versions of Euripides’ Medea and Alcestis, his Senecan-style tragedies on the death of John the Baptist (Baptistes) and the Old Testament story of Jephtha, and his didactic De Sphaera in the style of Virgil’s Georgics show him attempting an impressive variety of Latin poetic genres. But his best-known works in his lifetime and thereafter were

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Stephen Harrison his metrical Psalm Paraphrases, done in the metre and style of Horace; it is these, and the highly Horatian lyric odes originally intended to form a collection of Lyrica but in fact included in the posthumous Miscellaneorum Liber, which can cast Buchanan as the Scottish Horace. Psalm Paraphrases – Psalms 8 and 23 Buchanan’s Psalm Paraphrases (Psalmorum Davidis Paraphrasis Poetica), published in full in 1565/6, but composed from the 1540s and especially during the poet’s confinement in Portugal in 1550-2,2 were extraordinarily popular, achieving more than twenty editions during the last fifteen years of Buchanan’s lifetime and more than a hundred in their first two hundred years.3 The composition of vernacular metrical paraphrases of the psalms for liturgical purposes was popularised by Luther and Calvin in the first half of the sixteenth century, a tradition later followed in England.4 By doing the same in Latin, Buchanan was following a recent tendency among both Catholics and Protestants, seeking to clothe the poetic centrepiece of the Bible in contemporary and fashionable humanistic dress, i.e. the lyric metres of Horace;5 he was the first to produce a complete collection almost all in Horatian metres.6 In what follows I look in detail at two well-known psalms to demonstrate Buchanan’s technique in adapting Horace and other classical poets: this focused approach is, I hope, a useful supplement to the notes in editions of Buchanan and to previous investigations.7 Psalm 8 Here I give the Latin text from the Vulgate, together with Coverdale’s contemporary English translation (1535), followed by Buchanan’s paraphrase in Green’s text with his prose translation (segmented for convenience to match the Latin poetic lines as far as possible): 1 Domine, Dominus noster, quam admirabile est nomen tuum in universa terra! quoniam elevata est magnificentia tua super caelos. 2 Ex ore infantium et lactentium perfecisti laudem propter inimicos tuos, ut destruas inimicum et ultorem. 3 Quoniam videbo caelos tuos, opera digitorum tuorum, lunam et stellas quae tu fundasti. 4 Quid est homo, quod memor es eius? aut filius hominis, quoniam visitas eum? 5 Minuisti eum paulo minus ab angelis; gloria et honore coronasti eum; 6 et constituisti eum super opera manuum tuarum.

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10. George Buchanan: the Scottish Horace 7 Omnia subiecisti sub pedibus eius, oves et boves universas, insuper et pecora campi, 8 volucres caeli, et pisces maris qui perambulant semitas maris. 9 Domine, Dominus noster, quam admirabile est nomen tuum in universa terra! 1 O Lord our Governor, how excellent is thy Name in all the world: thou that hast set thy glory above the heavens. 2 Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies: that thou mightest still the enemy, and the avenger. 3 For I will consider thy heavens, even the works of thy fingers; the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained. 4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him: and the son of man, that thou visitest him? 5 Thou madest him lower than the angels: to crown him with glory and worship. 6 Thou madest him to have dominion of the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet; 7 All sheep and oxen: yea, and the beasts of the field; 8 The fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea; and whatsoever walketh through the paths of the seas. 9 O Lord our Governor, how excellent is thy Name in all the world! Gentis humanae pater atque custos, quam sancta maiestas tui nominis terras stupefecit omnes, Sol quas recurrens adspicit! Et super caeli radiantis orbes tua magnitudo se extulit. quam pia mundum tueare cura, lactentis aevi infantia prodit, ut linguas temere obstrepentum tibi refutes hostium, hostium, quorum vomit os furorem in te, sititque sanguinem. Luce quum caelos vitrea sereno pollentis opera dexterae cerno, cum lunam, nitidasque stellas per te creatas conspicor, quantulus (mecum tacitus revolvo) homo est, ut eius sis memor! Quantula humanae est subolis propago, dignere ut illam visere!

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Stephen Harrison Hunc Deo aequalem prope reddidisti, ornasti honore et gloria, et tuae dextrae super universa opera creasti principem. Cuncta vitalis quibus haustus aurae est, illi dedisti sub pedes. Huic boves parent et oves, pecusque quodcumque campis pascitur, quique pennarum celeri volatu metitur ales aera, quique pinnarum celeri natatu piscis pererrat aequora.

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Gentis humanae pater atque custos, quam sancta maiestas tui nominis terras stupefecit omnes, Sol quas recurrens adspicit!

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Father and guardian of the human race, how the holy majesty of your name has astounded all lands which the busy sun beholds, and how your greatness has raised itself above the circles of the shining sky! With what holy concern you watch over the world the infancy of unweaned children reveals; so that you may refute the tongues of enemies who clamour against you, enemies whose mouth belches fury against you and thirsts for blood. When I see the heavens serene with glittering light, the work of your mighty hand, when I behold the moon and the sparkling stars created by you, how small a thing is man, I think quietly to myself that you are mindful of him! How small a thing is the stock of human offspring, that you deign to visit it! You have made him almost equal to God; you have adorned him with honour and glory, and over all the works of your hand you have made him sovereign.

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10. George Buchanan: the Scottish Horace All things which enjoy the intake of life-giving air you have set beneath his feet. To him sheep and oxen are obedient, and all the herds which graze on the plains: and the bird which traverses the air with swift flight and the fish which roams the waters with swift fin. Father and guardian of the human race, how the holy majesty of your name has astounded all lands which the busy sun beholds!

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The Horatian character of the poem is immediately clear from its opening verse, a quotation of a whole line from Horace, Odes 1.12.49 (a Sapphic hendecasyllable);8 but its second line is an iambic dimeter, and the resulting couplet is an epodic metre not actually found in Horace, though the Sapphic hendecasyllable is the key line of Horace’s Sapphic stanza, and the iambic dimeter is found as the second line of an epodic metre in twelve of Horace’s seventeen Epodes. Whether the metre is felt to divide the poem into couplets or quatrain stanzas is a moot point;9 I have printed it as the latter since six of the nine stanzas are endstopped, a Horatian-style proportion (cf. e.g. Odes 1.3, where six of ten likely quatrain stanzas in a similar epodic metre end similarly). The containing of the identical opening and closing refrain in a quatrain stanza is perhaps another indicator of this division. The first stanza provides a blend of Horace, other classical elements and Christianity typical of Buchanan. The opening Horatian line refers in its original context to Jupiter, who is neatly translated into the Christian deity, and we see some elements of classical hymn-style: the idea that the deity has power over the creatures of the land, air and sea recalls the account of the cosmic influence of Venus at Lucretius 1.3-20. The personification of the Sun’s gaze and the suggestion of his chariot in recurrens evokes standard classical ideas and (as commentators note) 8.4, Sol quas recurrens adspicit, echoes Virgil, Aeneid 7.100-1 (qua sol utrumque recurrens | aspicit Oceanum, ‘where the circling sun looks upon each ocean’), nicely translating the future earthly dominion of the Romans into the present rule of the world by God. Likewise, the idea that God deigns to visit man in 8.20, dignere ut illam visere, picks up and Christianises the end of Catullus 64, where the poet regrets that gods no longer deign to visit humans (quare non talis dignantur visere coetus, 64.407). The third stanza expands the original considerably, a general feature: the 118 words of the Vulgate text become 161 words in Buchanan’s

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Stephen Harrison version. Here Buchanan plays up the element of violence and vengeance, showing the influence of Seneca as well as perhaps some natural inclination for a man who never shirked controversy: 8.12, sititque sanguinem, recalls Seneca, Troades 958, cinis ipse nostrum sanguinem ac tumulus sitit (‘the ash itself and the tomb thirsts for our blood’), perhaps characterising God’s enemies as pagans who engage in sacrificing human victims, and we remember Buchanan’s dramas from the 1540s, Baptistes and Jephthes, which show a close reading of Senecan tragedy.10 In hostium, | hostium, quorum (8.10-11) we find an element from the musical style of Virgil’s Eclogues, a type of anadiplosis which repeats a word from the previous clause and then continues the sentence with a relative pronoun (cf. Ecl. 9.47-8, Caesaris astrum, | astrum quo segetes gauderent frugibus, ‘the star of Caesar, the star by which the cornfields may rejoice in their produce’; 10.72-3, vos haec facietis maxima Gallo, | Gallo, cuius amor , ‘you will make this very great for Gallus, Gallus, love for whom ’). Occasionally we find elements alien to classical Latin poetry. In the eighth stanza the balanced repetition/variation of quique pennarum celeri volatu | metitur ales aera, | quique pinnarum celeri natatu | piscis pererrat aequora, together with the quasi-rhyme of aera / aequora, looks more to the richly euphonious prose style of Apuleius (cf. e.g. Met. 11.5.1, quae caeli luminosa culmina, maris salubria flamina, inferum deplorata silentia nutibus meis dispenso, ‘who order with my divine nods the luminous peaks of the sky, the health-giving breeze of the sea, the lamented silences of those below’). The text of the Vulgate is naturally influential: hence the collective plural caelos for ‘heaven’ in 8.13 and the rhyme boves/oves in 8.27; it is notable that Buchanan avoids the unattractive repetition of maris in 8.8. How Horatian, then, is Buchanan’s poem? Its metre certainly stresses this connection in a fundamental way; the use of a Horatian line as an opening ‘motto’, a clear index of relationship, even recalls the way in which Horace can treat Greek lyric by closely translating an opening line from a source poem.11 The use of a wide range of other classical texts and genres other than Horace in the poem’s texture itself recalls a key feature of Horace’s Odes.12 The recasting of a Hebrew psalm as a densely allusive classical hymn, itself a form common in the Odes, is a deft Horatianising of the Bible. Psalm 23 Here again I give the text of the Vulgate with Coverdale’s translation, with Buchanan’s Latin following accompanied by Green’s translation (again segmented).

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10. George Buchanan: the Scottish Horace 1 Dominus pascit me; nihil mihi deerit. 2 In pascuis herbarum adclinavit me; super aquas refectionis enutrivit me. 3 Animam meam refecit; duxit me per semitas iustitiae propter nomen suum. 4 Sed et si ambulavero in valle mortis, non timebo malum, quoniam tu mecum es virga tua et baculus tuus ipsa consolabuntur me. 5 Pones coram me mensam ex adverso hostium meorum; inpinguasti oleo caput meum calix meus inebrians. 6 Sed et benignitas et misericordia subsequetur me omnibus diebus vitae meae et habitabo in domo Domini in longitudine dierum. 1 The Lord is my shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing. 2 He shall feed me in a green pasture: and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort. 3 He shall convert my soul: and bring me forth in the paths of righteousness, for his Name’s sake. 4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me. 5 Thou shalt prepare a table before me against them that trouble me: thou hast anointed my head with oil, and my cup shall be full. 6 But thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. Quid frustra rabidi me petitis canes? Livor propositum cur premis improbum? Sicut pastor ovem, me Dominus regit, nil deerit penitus mihi. Per campi viridis mitia pabula, quae veris teneri pingit amoenitas, nunc pascor placide, nunc saturum latus fessus molliter explico. Purae rivus aquae leniter astrepens membris restituit robora languidis, et blando recreat fomite spiritus solis sub face torrida. Saltus cum peteret mens vaga devios, errorum teneras illecebras sequens, retraxit miserans denuo me bonus pastor iustitiae in viam. Nec, si per trepidas luctifica manu intentet tenebras mors mihi vulnera, formidem, duce te pergere; me pedo securum facies tuo.

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Stephen Harrison Tu mensas epulis accumulas, merum tu plenis pateris sufficis, et caput unguento exhilaras; conficit aemulos, dum spectant, dolor anxius. Me nunquam bonitas destituet tua, profususque bonis perpetuo favor; et non sollicitae longa domi tuae vitae tempora transigam.

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Why, in vain, do you attack me, mad dogs? Envy, why do you pursue your wicked purpose? As a shepherd guides his sheep, so the Lord guides me; nothing at all will be lacking to me. Through the gentle pastures of the green plain, embroidered by the beauty of tender spring, now I feed quietly, now in weariness I softly lay down my well-fed body. A stream of pure water, gently babbling, restores strength to my tired limbs, and with its pleasing encouragement the wind refreshes me beneath the sun’s roasting heat. Whenever my errant mind sought the pathless glens, following the tender inducements of error, the good shepherd, pitying me, brought me back at last to the way of justice. Not even if death, in the fearsome darkness, were to direct blows at me with its grievous hand, would I fear to go on with you as my leader; with your staff you will make me free from anxiety,

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you pile tables high with feasts, you provide wine in full bowls, and make my head radiant with perfume; painful resentment afflicts my enemies as they look on. Your goodness will never desert me, nor will your favour that is poured out continually on good people; and I shall pass the long span of an unworried life in your house.

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Here the metre is again clearly Horatian, the Second Asclepiad stanza used nine times in Horace’s 103 odes; each stanza is end-stopped at sentence-end, as sometimes in Horace’s shorter odes (e.g. 1.21; 1.23). But the most immediately striking element is the interrogative open-

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10. George Buchanan: the Scottish Horace ing, which is a bold addition to one of the most famous of psalms: it too is Horatian, but derived not from the lyric Odes, Buchanan’s principal model in the paraphrases, but from the iambic Epodes, which he knew equally well (see below), echoing Epode 6.1, quid immerentis hospites vexas canis ? (‘Why do you, you dog, harass undeserving strangers?’). This is then followed by a question to personified Livor (Envy), which recalls the well-known opening of the closing poem of Ovid’s first book of Amores, Am. 1.15.1, Quid mihi, Livor edax, ignavos obicis annos? (‘Why, keen-toothed Envy, do you criticise my years of inertia?’). The invective Epodes and erotic Amores might seem unlikely sources for a psalm version, but both the depiction of one’s enemies as dogs (Psalms 22:16; 59:6) and a concern with envy (Job 5:2; Proverbs 14:30) are familiar biblical themes, and the interrogative opening is a common psalmic move (e.g. Psalms 2; 10; 13). As in Psalm 8, Seneca’s dramas are invoked in 23.17 luctifica manu, the ‘grievous hand’ of Death, picked up from Seneca, Hercules Furens 102, where it is appropriately used of the chthonic Fury Megaera. More strictly Horatian is the description of the locus amoenus in 23.6-7: here the combination of the anaphora of nunc with idyllic landscape takes us back to Odes 1.1.21-2, nunc viridi membra sub arbuto | stratus, nunc ad aquae lene caput sacrae (‘now laid out with my limbs under the green arbutus, now at the gentle fount of sacred water’), and the pure stream of 23.9 picks up Odes 3.16.29, purae rivos aquae (in a similar pleasant landscape). This link of Christian paradise and pagan locus amoenus is a common one.13 Finally, the initial anaphora of tu in 23.21-2 recalls in both style and theme Odes 1.12.58-60, repeating the already familiar identification of Jupiter with the Christian deity: tu gravi curru quaties Olympum, | tu parum castis inimica mittes | fulmina lucis (‘you will shake Olympus with your fearsome chariot, you will launch hostile thunderbolts against groves which are insufficiently pure’). Naturally signs of the Vulgate remain: the non-classical abstract bonitas, though it does not in fact occur in the Vulgate version of Psalm 23, is found eight times in other Vulgate psalms. Once again Horatian metre plus an Horatian opening makes clear the poem’s fundamental relation to the ancient poet, and the neat Christianising of the locus amoenus and the supreme pagan deity shows Buchanan’s deft capacity to appropriate classical material for his own purposes. Again we see the use of a range of classical intertexts – the Epodes as well as the Odes of Horace, and the Amores of Ovid playing their part. Given the limits imposed by the task of paraphrasing scriptural material, Buchanan shows considerable artistic freedom and flexibility.

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Stephen Harrison Imitations of Odes and Epodes Buchanan clearly intended to publish a collection of his Latin lyrics (Lyrica) to stand alongside the other generic collections published in his lifetime (Elegiae, Silvae, Epigrammata, Iambi and Hendecasyllabi).14 Horatian lyrics can occasionally be found in Buchanan’s non-generic collections,15 but the main gathering of his Horatian lyrics (in single figures, sadly) was first published in a miscellaneous compilation (Miscellaneorum Liber) as part of the 1615 complete poetic works.16 Most can be dated to the 1540s or 1550s and are thus roughly contemporary with the Horatianising psalm paraphrases. They include several poems for important individuals – two long pieces in Alcaics celebrating the victories of Henri II of France at Calais (1558, Misc. 1) and Metz (1553, Misc. 8), an Alcaic poem of thanks to François Olivier, the king’s chancellor (Misc. 4), and another Alcaic poem to Buchanan’s patron Cossé-Brissac, marshal of France (Misc. 3), which wittily celebrates the love-affair of Brissac and the lady Virtue. Alongside these we find a briefer Sapphic hymn to Chastity (Misc. 2), another Sapphic poem to the youth of Bordeaux (from the 1540s, Misc. 9), an Alcaic poem celebrating the May Day festival (from the 1550s, Misc. 11) and a short charming Alcaic poem to the precocious student Camille de Morel (Misc. 28).17 Substantial encomiastic poems dominate this list, and in terms of Horace’s Odes the models are the great Alcaic poems of the third book dealing with political and moral topics (3.1-6, the ‘Roman Odes’) and (especially) the poems of the fourth book that celebrate the deeds of great individuals, usually from the imperial family (4.4; 4.9; 4.14; 4.15). Here we will look at the longest of Buchanan’s Horatian odes, at 108 lines surpassing even the 76 lines of Odes 4.4 and the 80 lines of Odes 3.4, the Alcaic ode to Henri II on the capture of Calais (1558).18 This was of course a historic moment, marking the recovery of the last English outpost in France. It opens with a grand invocation of divine providence: Non Parca fati conscia, lubricae non sortis axis sistere nescius, non siderum lapsus, sed unus rerum opifex moderatur orbem, qui terram inertem stare loco iubet, aequor perennes volvere vertices, caelumque nunc lucem tenebris, nunc tenebras variare luce;

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10. George Buchanan: the Scottish Horace qui temperatae sceptra modestiae dat et protervae frena superbiae, qui lacrimis foedat triumphos, et lacrimas hilarat triumphis.

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It is not the Parca, Destiny’s accomplice, nor is it the slippery wheel of fate, that knows not how to stop, or the paths of the stars, but the sole Architect of nature who governs the world, who commands the inert land to stand in its place, the sea to churn its endless eddies, the sky now to vary its light with shadows, and now its shadows with light who grants sceptres to temperate Modesty, and bridles to arrogant Pride, who besmirches triumphs with tears, and gladdens tears with triumphs.

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Once again, the poem in Horace’s best-known metre opens on an evidently Horatian note with the line-initial triple non: a line-initial double non is deployed in the opening of Odes 2.18.1-4: Non ebur neque aureum mea renidet in domo lacunar, non trabes Hymettiae premunt columnas  No ivory or golden ceiling shines in my house, no beams from Mt Hymettus press down on columns 

And triple non is found almost line-initially in Odes 1.31.5-8 (in the same Alcaic metre): non aestuosae grata Calabriae armenta, non aurum aut ebur Indicum, non rura, quae Liris quieta mordet aqua taciturnus amnis.

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not the pleasant flocks of sultry Calabria, not gold or Indian ivory, not the countryside which the Liris bites into with its quiet waters, a river of silence.

As is now familiar, the description of the Christian deity in lines 3-5 draws on characterisations of Jupiter in Latin poetry – Ovid, Met. 1.79 (of the demiurge), opifex rerum, Horace, Odes 1.12.57 (of Jupiter), te minor latum reget aequos orbem, and Odes 3.4.45 (of Jupiter), qui

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Stephen Harrison terram inertem, qui mare temperat (a poem in the same metre), though stare loco recalls the future god Julius Caesar from Lucan’s famous description (nescia virtus | stare loco, BC 1.144-5). God’s command over the cosmos (aequor perennes volvere vertices, 6) nicely echoes Horace’s presentation of Augustus’ conquest of rival races at Odes 2.9.21-2, flumen gentibus additum | victis minores volvere vertices (‘that the river added to conquered peoples rolls its eddies in lesser volume’, again from a poem in the same metre), and his bridling of excess (protervae frena superbiae, 10) picks up Horatian praise of Augustus at Odes 4.15.10-11, evaganti frena licentiae | iniecit (‘threw reins on extravagant licence’); while the power of God to change human fortunes naturally echoes that of Horace’s divinity Fortuna at Odes 1.35.2-4, praesens vel imo tollere de gradu | mortale corpus vel superbos | vertere funeribus triumphos (‘present in power to raise a mortal body from the lowest rank, or to change proud triumphs for funerals’). The schematic battle-narrative of the poem recalls the technique of Odes 4.4 and 4.14, where battles are turned into symbolic struggles of good (France, Henri, his general the Duc de Guise) and evil (Spain/England, Charles V, Philip and Mary). Lines 25-36 again point in detail to Horace: Te, qui minorem te superis geris, culpamque fletu diluis agnitam, mitis Parens placatus audit et solitum cumulat favorem, redintegratae nec tibi gratiae obscura promit signa. Sub algido nox Capricorno longa terras perpetuis tenebris premebat, rigebat auris bruma nivalibus, amnes acuto consisterant gelu, deformis horror incubabat iugeribus viduis colono.

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A kindly Father hearkens to you, who bear yourself as lesser than the gods, and atone with tears for your acknowledged fault, and heaps up His wonted favour, Nor does He give you uncertain signs of His renewed grace. Under chill Capricorn the lengthy night oppressed the earth with perpetual shadows,

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The opening line of this section stressing Henri’s proper humility before the gods appropriates Horace’s famous claim of Roman right to rule on the same basis at Odes 3.6.5, dis te minorem quod geris, imperas, while the description of the wintry campaign conditions (the capture took place on 1 January) draws on the famous Soracte ode, Odes 1.9.3-4 (geluque | flumina constiterint acuto). Perhaps most interesting is the poem’s closure, which attacks the English and Mary I (89-108): Ferox Britannus, viribus antehac Gallisque semper cladibus imminens, vix se putat securum ab hoste, fluctibus Oceani diremptus. Regina, pacem nescia perpeti, iam spreta maeret foedera, iam Dei iram pavet sibi imminentem, vindicis et furiae flagellum. Cives et hostes iam pariter suos odit pavetque, et civium et hostium hirudo communis, cruorem aeque avide sitiens utrumque.

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Huic luce terror Martius assonat diraeque caedis mens sibi conscia. umbraeque nocturnae quietem terrificis agitant figuris. Sic laesa poenas Iustitia expetit, fastus superbos sic Nemesis premit, sic mitibus iustisque praebet mitis opem Deus aeque iustus. The savage Briton, hitherto menacing with his powers and with his French massacres, scarce thinks himself secure from his enemy, separated by the ocean’s waves. Their Queen, knowing not how to endure peace, now laments the treaties she scorned, now she dreads the wrath of God that overhangs her, and the avenging Fury’s flail.

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Stephen Harrison Now she equally fears and loathes her subjects and her foemen, and, a common leech upon subjects and foemen, with equal greed she thirsts after the blood of both.

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For her, by day the terror of Mars roars at her, and a mind guilty of dire slaughter, and nocturnal spectres disturb her repose with their fearful shapes. Thus it is that Justice when injured seeks punishment, thus it is that Nemesis suppresses arrogant pride, thus it is that an equally just and kindly God provides aid to the gentle and kindly.

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Here the English are given the epithet ferox, deployed by Horace for Rome’s barbarian enemies (Parthos ferocis, Odes 3.2.3; feroces  Sygambros, Odes 4.2.34-6), and Mary is presented with clear traces of Horace’s Cleopatra. This seems logical: in the poem she is the crazed queen of an enemy country (like Cleopatra at Odes 1.37.7 she can be named simply as regina), allied with an evil husband (cf. Antony) and defeated by the poet’s party (cf. Horace and Augustus). She is also a version of Virgil’s Helen, a bane to her own people (cf. Aeneid 2.573, Troiae et patriae communis Erinys), and of Dido: her torments in sleep recall the doomed Carthaginian queen (cf. Aeneid 4.465-6, agit ipse furentem | in somnis ferus Aeneas, ‘a fierce figure of Aeneas himself pursues her raving in her dreams’), and her mind conscious of murder (caedis mens sibi conscia, 102) is a neat inversion of Aeneas’ mind conscious of virtue (cf. mens sibi conscia recti, Aeneid 1.604). Most wittily, her rôle as leech drawing blood from friend and foe (et civium et hostium | hirudo communis, cruorem | aeque avide sitiens utrumque, 98-100) ironically reworks the leech full of blood from the final image of the mad poet at the end of Horace’s Ars poetica (plena cruoris hirudo, 476), who will not release his recitation audience until he has his fill of blood (i.e. attention); this time the blood is the more literal gore of Protestant martyrs. I turn in conclusion to a brief consideration of Buchanan’s use of Horace’s iambic Epodes; we have already seen an interest in the Epodes in the added beginning of the paraphrase of Psalm 23. The Miscellaneorum Liber contains a long poem (Misc. 23) in the epodic metre of Horace, Epodes 1-10, which celebrates Cossé-Brissac’s capture of Vercelli (1553); the main overall model would seem to be the metrically identical Epode 9, Horace’s account of the battle of Actium, similarly addressed to a patron-figure (Maecenas), and the sympotic ending plainly reprises Horace’s Actium-poem (23.93-6):

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10. George Buchanan: the Scottish Horace haustusque dulcis Liberi libabimus heroas inter sospites: canetque victor pariter et victus tuum hic robur, hic clementiam. and we will pour as libations draughts of sweet wine amongst the heroes returned safe; and victor and vanquished will both hymn you, the one for your strength, the other for your mercy.

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Buchanan’s ending reworks and combines the future victory symposium envisaged at the opening of Epode 9 (1-4): Quando repostum Caecubum ad festas dapes victore laetus Caesare tecum sub alta – sic Iovi gratum – domo, beate Maecenas, bibam ? When shall I, happy at Caesar’s victory, drink the Caecuban laid down for the victory feast with you, blessed Maecenas (so please Jupiter) under the roof of your high home ?

with the similarly sympotic ending of Horace’s poem (9.37-8): curam metumque Caesaris rerum iuvat dulci Lyaeo solvere.  and it is a pleasure to relax our care and fear for Caesar’s fortunes with sweet wine.

In both Horace and Buchanan the adjective dulcis is used with a title of Bacchus meaning ‘wine’ by the common ‘god for thing’ metonymy. Buchanan imitates the attack poems of the Epodes as well as its political centrepiece. In the Liber Iamborum from the 1550s we find Buchanan employing the full range of Horatian iambic invective. There are two main targets, Belchior Beleago, Buchanan’s former colleague at Coimbra, who (he thought) had informed on him to the Inquisition,19 and ‘Leonora’, a low-life woman of disgraceful habits whose historicity is unclear,20 but who similarly belongs as a character to his Portuguese period. In the first invective against Leonora (Iambi 2), like Misc. 23 using the metre of Epodes 1-10, we find a version of the attacks on ageing women and their lusts in Epodes 8 and 12, combined with some of the vigour of Catullan attack poetry (Iambi 2.1-6): Matre impudica filia impudicior lena mater filiæ,

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Stephen Harrison vos me putatis esse ludumque et iocum, o scorta triobolaria sacrificulorum pauperum fastidia relicta mendicabulis? Daughter less chaste than your unchaste mother and mother of the daughter, you bawd, do you think that I am an object of play and jokes, you pair of threepenny tarts, scorned by those poor sacrificing priests, left behind by those wretched beggars?

5

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It becomes clear from this and other poems that Leonora and her mother are associates of disreputable monks (hence the references to priestly activities and mendicancy); indeed, they seem to be more significant as a means to attack corrupt monasticism than as real characters, something supported by their evident literary origins in Horace. The poem begins not with an allusion to Horace’s Epodes but with picking up the ironic Odes 1.16.1, O matre pulchra filia pulchrior, another attack on a woman; the notion that the target of invective has got the wrong idea about the poet comes from Catullus (cf. 16.13, male me marem putatis? ‘do you think me not a proper man?’). Later on in this substantial poem of sixty-eight lines, we find more Horatian allusions: Leonora and her mother are said to be barathrum populi, busta famae, opprobrium | et dedecus viciniae (‘the pit of the people, the tomb of good reputation, a reproach and shame to the neighbourhood’, 31-2), recalling the characterisation of the parasite at Epist. 1.15.31, pernicies et tempestas barathrumque macelli (‘destruction, tempest and pit of the meat-market’), and the curse on the tree at Odes 2.13.3-4 as nepotum | perniciem opprobriumque pagi (‘destruction of descendants and a reproach to the village’), while the graphic description of Leonora’s ageing body at 49-54 recalls the similar grotesqueries of Epodes 8.1-10.21 Likewise, the final satirical advice to Leonora is couched in a gerund phrase similar to the parting shot of the same poem against Horace’s unnamed female (eo revertendum est tibi, 66 ‘you must go back there [to your monks]’ ~ ore adlaborandum est tibi, ‘you must go to work with your mouth’, Epodes 8.20). Conclusion It has become clear that Buchanan deployed his intimate, indeed virtuoso knowledge of Horatian metre, style and topics to impressive effect in several poetic genres. Primary amongst these are his lyric imitations of Horace’s Odes, the Roman poet’s most prestigious and

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10. George Buchanan: the Scottish Horace celebrated work, both in the famous psalm paraphrases and in the less well-known original lyric; but it is also clear that Horace’s iambic Epodes also played a significant rôle in his output, not surprising for a poet who relished literary attack. The only major strand of Horatian poetry missing as a key model for Buchanan’s output is Horatian satire and sermo: when Buchanan takes on hexameter satire in the Franciscanus, it is the loftier style of Juvenal which he favours overall, rather than the more colloquial approach of Horace.22 Likewise, the hexameter letters and literary criticism of Horace’s Epistles and Ars poetica clearly appealed little to him, though he did write some fine occasional hexameter poems in the Silvae in imitation of Statius. It has also become clear that we are not dealing simply with the quarrying of material from antiquity. We have repeatedly seen how Buchanan engages not just with the words but also with the context of his originals, often reusing elements of their original scenarios for his own poetic purposes and cultural context; we have also seen how Horatian allusion, while firmly delineating the Horatian genres in which Buchanan works, is part of a larger texture of interaction with an impressive range of major classical Latin poets. When we add in Buchanan’s engagement in other works with Virgil’s didactic hexameters, with Ovidian elegy and Martial’s epigrams, the level of his achievement emerges in truly impressive colours; but the primacy of the psalm paraphrases in the larger reception of Buchanan the Latin poet, and his capacity to move across more than one Horatian genre, perhaps justifies the title of ‘The Scottish Horace’. Notes I am most grateful to audiences in Liverpool and London for discussion of earlier versions of this paper, and especially to Tony Woodman for his detailed comments. My warm thanks too to Roger Green for the kind gift of his two recent books on Buchanan (Ford and Green 2009 and Green 2011). 1. See further the magisterial biography of McFarlane 1981. 2. See preceding chapter, pp. 146-7 above. 3. For a splendid new edition with substantial introduction and literature see Green 2011. 4. Cf. Daniell 2003: 320-37. 5. Cf. Green 2011: 17-20. 6. For the metrical details see Green 2011: 627-8. 7. For Buchanan’s use of Horace see briefly McFarlane 1981: 296; Ford and Watt 1982: 77-95. I am following in the footsteps of Green 2000, whose treatment of Psalm 23 I supplement here, and Green 2009, which offers an extended analysis of Horatian and other allusions in a single psalm (19). 8. Psalm 82 even begins with two lines lifted from Horace: cf. McFarlane 1981: 296 (82.1-2 = Odes 3.1.5-6). 9. Green 2011 prints it without division.

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Stephen Harrison 10. See the edition of Sharratt and Walsh 1983. 11. For this technique see Cavarzere 1996. 12. See e.g. Harrison 2007: 168-206. 13. Curtius 1953: 200. 14. Buchanan seems to have envisaged either Lyrica or Carmina (cf. Horace) as the title: cf. McFarlane 1981: 297, 302, 305. 15. E.g. the two Alcaic odes in Fratres Fraterrimi 5 (to Elizabeth of England) and 30 (attack on colonisation of Brazil). 16. See the good edition of Ford and Watt 1982. 17. On Misc. 3 and 11 see Roger Green’s chapter in this collection. 18. Text and translation are taken for convenience (with minor orthographical changes) from Dana F. Sutton’s electronic versions at http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/calais/trans.html; for further texts and translations with some notes, see Ford and Watt 1982: 132-7, 180-2; McGinnis and Williamson 1995: 107-8, 309-10. 19. So McFarlane 1981: 153. 20. McFarlane 1981: 154-6 inclines to the view that Leonora is based on a real character, but it is equally possible to see her as a type or stock figure. 21. Cf. Ford and Watt 1982: 89-90. 22. Though the Franciscanus does take a few elements from Horace’s Satires: cf. McFarlane 1981: 62-3.

Bibliography Cavarzere, A. (1996) Sul limitare: Il ‘motto’ e la poesia di Orazio. Bologna. Curtius, E.R. (1953) European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. London. Daniell, D. (2003) The Bible in English. New Haven. Ford, P.J. and Green, R.P.H. (eds) (2009) George Buchanan: Poet and Dramatist. Swansea. Ford, P.J. and Watt, W.S. (1982) George Buchanan: Prince of Poets. Aberdeen. Green, R.P.H. (2000) ‘Davidic Psalm and Horatian Ode: Five Poems of George Buchanan’, Renaissance Studies 14: 91-111. Green, R.P.H. (2009) ‘The Heavens are Telling: A Psalm-Paraphrase-Poem Analysed’, in Ford and Green (2009): 75-94. Green, R.P.H. (ed. & tr.) (2011) George Buchanan: Poetic Paraphrase of the Psalms of David. Geneva. Harrison, S.J. (2007) Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace. Oxford. McFarlane, I.D. (1981) Buchanan. London. McGinnis, P.J. and Williamson, A.H. (1995) George Buchanan: The Political Poetry. Edinburgh (Scottish Historical Society, Fifth Series, vol. 8). Sharratt, P. and Walsh, P.G. (eds) (1983) George Buchanan: The Tragedies. Edinburgh.

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Spectacles from Scotland: Camden, Johnston and the Urbes Britanniae Angus Vine In the printed catalogue of William Drummond of Hawthornden’s donation of books to Edinburgh University in November 1626, there is the following curious sounding title: ‘Nuntius Scoto-Britannus, Or, a paire of Spectacles for W. Camden, to looke vpon North-Britain’.1 This work is now lost, but from the entry itself we can surmise certain things about it.2 First of all, the work is listed under its own title, suggesting that it was either anonymous, or that Drummond wished to keep the identity of its author hidden. Second, the work is categorised as ‘M.S.’, indicating that it circulated in manuscript rather than print. The title itself also tells us a certain amount. The work evidently took a swipe at what it perceived as William Camden’s blindness towards Scotland in his monumental antiquarian work Britannia, sive florentissimorvm regnorvm, Angliæ, Scotiæ, Hiberniæ, et insvlarvm adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio (1586). This perception was widely held in Scotland at the time, and a number of contemporary writers, including the political theorist and poet David Hume of Godscroft and the jurist Thomas Craig, similarly took exception at what they saw as Camden’s neglect and even ignorance of Scottish history.3 Many also took pleasure in pointing out what they saw as his historical errors. Hume, for example, compiled a lengthy refutation in manuscript of Camden’s work in 1608, which he titled CAMDENEA. Id est Examen nonnullorum à Gul: Camdeno, in Britaniâ suâ positorum: præcipuè quæ ad irrisionem Scoticæ gentis pertinent, et eorum ac Pictorum falsam originem (‘Camdenea. That is, an examination of some of the things stated by Will: Camden in his Britannia; especially those which make a mockery of the Scottish people, and the false origin that he gives for them and the Picts’).4 The book in Drummond’s library was evidently another such volume, albeit one that, on the basis of its title, seems to have been written in a more satirical and less historical vein. To a certain extent, this criticism of Camden was fair. The section of the Britannia on Scotland is much shorter than those on either Eng-

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Angus Vine land or Wales, and unlike for much of the rest of Britain, Camden never travelled north of the border. However, Camden himself seems to have been aware of these deficiencies, and in later editions of the Britannia, at least, he took steps to remedy them. Unsurprisingly, this was especially the case after the accession of James VI and I in 1603. We know that, following James’s accession, Camden wrote to friends in Scotland and sought their contributions for a new edition of the Britannia that he had under way. That edition eventually appeared in 1607, and it contained a great deal of additional material relating to both Scotland and the new Scottish king. Camden does not name many of his Scottish correspondents, but they included the likes of the cartographer and chorographer Timothy Pont, whose mapmaking he seems to allude to in a new preface to the Scottish section of the work.5 One correspondent, though, whom he does name, and names over and over again, is the Scottish neo-Latin poet and humanist scholar John Johnston. For Johnston supplied him not only with sundry antiquarian information, but also with the manuscript of an entirely new work, the Urbes Britanniae, which Camden, in turn, incorporated into the 1607 Britannia.6 Johnston’s name and contributions, therefore, recur throughout that edition. The work itself consists of a series of thirty-three encomiastic poems mostly on cities in Scotland, but also a few in England. Johnston’s friendship with Camden was, in fact, of long standing. By the time of the new edition of the Britannia, Johnston was professor of theology at St Mary’s College in St Andrews, but in the 1580s and early 1590s he had travelled extensively on the continent and also in England, and his friendship with Camden dated back to that time.7 In April 1590, for instance, he wrote to Camden, perhaps for the first time, from Heidelberg to congratulate him on the publication of the Britannia. In this letter he tells Camden that he had been able to read the book because a young Sir Henry Wotton, who had come to the city the previous year to study law, brought a copy with him.8 A year later, Johnston may have met Camden for the first time. Travelling back to Scotland from Germany, Johnston ended up spending a year in London, as he was delayed by a bout of the ill health that plagued him for the rest of his life.9 At this time, Camden was also living in London, working as a master at Westminster School.10 But in any event, even if they did not meet in London, their friendship was significant enough for Johnston to answer Camden’s call a decade later and to send him a manuscript that was intended, in part, to fill the Scottish gaps in Camden’s work. Johnston also invited his friend to correct any errors in the manuscript and offered to send him additional material in the future.11

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11. Spectacles from Scotland Of the thirty-three poems in the manuscript, Camden ended up publishing twenty.12 These – and the same goes for those poems that in the end he chose not to include – are of a piece with all Johnston’s poetic output. They are, that is to say, historically inflected epigrams: something that is the single most distinctive quality of his poetry.13 The Urbes Britanniae, however, also develop that inflection, taking Johnston’s poetry in a new direction, as they shift from a strictly historical perspective to one that is also topographical. Written in imitation of Ausonius’ Ordo urbium nobilium, the Urbes Britanniae praise the thirty-three cities not only for their glorious histories, but also for such topics as their location, their climate, their trade, and their virtuous and industrious citizens.14 While Johnston does not name Ausonius as his source here, elsewhere he does explicitly invoke the Roman poet as a model. In the prefatory epistle to his Inscriptiones historicæ regvm Scotorvm (1602), for example, a series of short epitaphs on Scottish kings from the mythical Fergus onwards, he mentions Ausonius by name.15 In the case of the Urbes Britanniae, Ausonius provides Johnston with a model for both his genre, the city poem, and for his organisation, by geography rather than history. This combination of a historical bent with a geographical progression also, of course, lends itself perfectly to the antiquarian context in which Johnston’s poems were eventually published and read. For antiquarian works, too, were typically organised geographically rather than historically. (In the case of the Britannia the two, in fact, overlap, as Camden’s work presents a county-by-county survey organised according to the ancient tribal divisions of Britain as found in the works of classical geographers.16) Johnston inherits other things from Ausonius too: perhaps most notably that localism, that sense of regional pride or identity, which is a hallmark of the Ordo urbium nobilium. In Ausonius’ collection this seems to be reflected in the structure of the work, culminating as it does with poems that celebrate the French cities of Toulouse, Narbonne, and finally his home city of Bordeaux. It may also be reflected in the relative, and sometimes surprising, emphasis that he gives to different cities.17 In Johnston’s poem, by contrast, that localism is reflected in its voice, a voice that articulates a set of distinctively Scottish religious and political concerns. The Scottishness of that voice, too, perhaps explains why Camden gives such space to what are, on the face of it, not always the most inspired poems.18 At first, however, the poems do seem to coincide with Camden’s project and also with the particular political context of his new edition. Camden revised his text in 1607 to align it with James’s own policies and, in particular, with his plans for the union of England and Scotland.19 Most obviously, he did this with a new dedication to

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Angus Vine James, which not only adopts the king’s changes to the royal style, but also pronounces boldly that he was born to the eternisation of the British name and the pacification of the two kingdoms.20 On the face of it, Johnston’s poems appear to suggest something similar. They, too, seem to share the unionist position of Camden, heralding the peace that currently reigns in cities across the island and contrasting this with past conflicts and wars. Although Johnston never explicitly attributes this to the accession of the Scottish king in 1603, many of his poems leave the reader in little doubt as to the cause of the present prosperity. The poem on the city of York is a case in point. As a description of the city, the poem is in some ways deficient. Unlike many of the other poems in the Urbes Britanniae, it gives little sense of either the city’s climate or its citizens. It also gives only a hazy idea of the city’s position, locating it inexactly somewhere in the distant north. On the other hand, though, Johnston is alive to the city’s antiquity and history, as the second half of the poem makes clear:21 Præsidet extremis Arctoæ finibus oræ Vrbs vetus, in veteri facta subinde noua. Romanis Aquilis quondam Ducibusque superba. Quam post barbaricæ diripuere manus. Pictus atrox, Scotus, Danus, Normannus, & Anglus Fulmina in hanc Martis detonuere sui. Post diras rerum clades, totque aspera fata, Blandiùs aspirans aura serena subit. LONDINVM caput est, & regni vrbs prima Britanni: EBORACVM à prima iure secunda venit.

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In parts remote of Northren tract, there stands as soveraine, A Citie old, but yet of old eftsoones made new againe. Whilom of Romaine legions and Captaines proud it was: But since by forces barbarous sacked and spoiled, alasse. The Picts so fierce, the Scots and Danes, Normans and Englishmen, Gainst it their bolts of dreadfull warre have thunderd now and then Yet after sundry bitter blasts, and many a cursed clap, A milder gale of peacefull daies, hath brought it better hap. Of British kingdome LONDON is chiefe seat and principall, And unto it there goes by right Yorke Citie next of all.

Throughout, Johnston’s comparison is between the city’s bloody past and its peaceful present. The poem also charts, in brief, the city’s descent from the splendour of its classical heyday, when it played host to Roman legions and their eagles, to the dark days of its later history. These are characterised by rape and pillage, as successive waves of barbarian invaders sacked and spoiled it. The history, then, is one of decline and fall, a classical heritage brought to naught by seemingly

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11. Spectacles from Scotland endless war. All the conquerors of Britain, familiar from early modern antiquarian books – the Romans, the Picts, the Scots, the Angles, the Danes, and the Normans – are listed, and only the Romans escape Johnston’s censure. But in the last four lines of the poem the perspective shifts away from this cruel destructive past to a more serene present. That Johnston connects this shift with the accession of James, with the union of the two kingdoms, is apparent from the final couplet. For he speaks there not of the English or the Scots individually, but of the Britons collectively. This term, in a Jacobean context, is one that incorporates both peoples and both nations. It denotes both the English and the Scots. The poem thus appears to be a pretty straightforward iteration of the orthodox Jacobean position. Johnston’s support for the union seems even clearer in his poem on Berwick-upon-Tweed, the last of his poems on English cities. Indeed, this poem appears to be an explicit defence of the Jacobean policy. Again, the poem contrasts a violent and contested past with a peaceful and prosperous present, here figured through the history and fate of England’s northernmost town. In this case, though, Johnston’s narrative is not just one of decline:22 Mille vices rerum, quæ mille est passa ruinas, Mirum, quî potuit tot superesse malis! Quin superest, quin extremis exhausta ruinis, Funere sic creuit firmior vsque suo.

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Now wonne, then lost, a thousand turnes it felt of fortunes will, After so many miseries, wonder, it standeth still. And still it stands: although laid wast it were and desolate, Yet alwaies after every fall it rose to firmer state.

There is a shift here from the ubi sunt theme of the previous poem, reminding us that Johnston is not simply heir to the well-established Renaissance tradition of lamenting ruins. Other poems in the Urbes Britanniae that do belong more straightforwardly to that tradition include the last one, Innernessvs, & Innerlothea. That poem is an extended meditation on the fall of cities and the destructiveness of time.23 This poem, on the other hand, is more complex, as it seems to acknowledge the inevitability of ruin, but also to articulate a sense of history that is cyclical rather than linear. Cities do fall, Johnston suggests, but they can also rise again – and, in the case of Berwickupon-Tweed, a thousand times over, and each time stronger than before.24 But the poem also sees an end to this history, to the cycle of rise and fall, and it attributes this squarely to the accession of James I. What is only suggested in the poem on York is here made explicit:25

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Angus Vine Postquàm seruitio durisque est functa periclis, Effert letitiæ signa serena suæ: Et nunc antiquo felix se iactat honore, Cùm reddit Domino debita iura suo: Cuius ab auspicijs vnita Britannia tandem Excelsum tollit libera in astra caput.

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But after service long perform’d and hard adventures past, Of joy and mirth the gladsome signes it putteth forth at last. And now her ancient honor she doth vaunt in happy plight, When to her Sovereigne Lord she yeelds all service due by right. Whose blessed Crowne united hath great Britain now at last, Whereby her head she lifts on high, since quarels all be past.

As in the previous example, the new prosperity is associated with serenity (signa serena), a word that perhaps not coincidentally echoes the first word of the royal style. And if this is a hint that that prosperity is due to the king, Johnston confirms the impression in the last four lines of the poem. These are an unambiguous celebration of a united Britain and also of the man who has made that possible, whose head has brought about the union of the two crowns. These poems therefore correspond with the widespread tendency at the time, amongst English panegyrists in particular, to portray James as rex pacificus, as the peacemaker who had united the two kingdoms and would thus restore Britain to its former glory.26 In one of his contributions to the pageants written for James’s entry into the city of London in March 1604, Ben Jonson, for example, observes that the king’s ‘strong and potent virtues haue defac’d | Sterne MARS his statues’, and that ‘[s]weete Peace  hath forc’d hence | All tumults, feares or other darke portents’.27 From this perspective, then, Johnston’s poems seem to be utterly conventional, giving voice to one of the mainstays of official Jacobean policy. Importantly, they also seem to reflect a predominantly English set of concerns. As spectacles from Scotland, as a means of redressing the perceived imbalance in Camden’s work, they might therefore seem to be not very effective. However, if we look more closely, we see that Johnston’s poems are neither quite so Anglocentric as they initially seem nor so reflective of Jacobean policy. For one thing, the poem on Berwick-upon-Tweed speaks of the union explicitly in terms of the crown. (Caput there is used synecdochically: the king’s head substitutes for the symbolic crown that he wears on it.) But James’s own plans for the union were always more profound than just a union of the two crowns. His first public statement on the matter, a royal proclamation issued on 19 May 1603, just two months after his accession, makes this clear. The proclamation announces that ‘as his Majesty hath found in the hearts of all the best

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11. Spectacles from Scotland disposed Subjects of both the Realmes of all qualities, a most earnest desire, that the sayd happy Union should bee perfected, the memory of all preterite Discontentments abolished, and the Inhabitants of both the Realmes to be the Subjects of one Kingdome: so his Highnes will with all convenient diligence with the advice of the Estates and Parliament of both the Kingdomes make the same to be perfited’.28 Johnston’s emphasis on caput suggests that he envisaged something altogether more circumscribed and less ‘perfited’. For another thing, Johnston’s Scottish poems, which, after all, form the larger part of the Urbes Britanniae, have little to say about the newfound peace and even less about the union. In fact, the only Scottish poem that follows the model of contrasting past conflict with present peace is the one on Haddington. As in the poems on York and Berwickupon-Tweed, Johnston speaks of that city’s grievous and bloody misfortunes: Vulcani & Martis quæ passa incendia, fati | Ingemit alterno vulnere fracta vices (‘Which having suffered grievous smart of fire and sword by turnes, | Grones under these misfortunes much, and for her losses mournes’). However, unlike in those poems, he does not attribute the present peace to the king, but instead to the good grace of God: Nunc tandem sapit icta. Dei præcepta sequuta | Præsidio gaudet iam potiore Poli (‘But now at length selfe-harmes have made it wise, and by Gods lore | Directed, helpe it hath, from heaven which steedeth it much more’).29 One explanation for this may simply be that in a Scottish context James’s policies needed less in the way of either panegyric or defence. But another explanation may be that in the Scottish poems in the Urbes Britanniae Johnston raises a different set of concerns, which had more to do with Scottish identity than with the union and any corporate British identity consequent upon it. In this respect, he may also have been reflecting what was the most common Scottish concern after the accession of James to the English throne: that he would pursue an Anglocentric agenda and neglect matters north of the border. And it is in raising these specifically Scottish concerns that Johnston does provide Camden with an effective pair of spectacles. The poem on Haddington suggests that, for Johnston, religion, and in particular the reformed religion, lay at the heart of these concerns. Where there was previously strife, there is now harmony, as the citizens of the town have become wiser and follow the precepts of God (Dei præcepta) more closely. In this reference, it is hard not to hear an allusion to the Reformation and the new emphasis on the divine word. Reformation and Protestant politics, in fact, loom large in Johnston’s poetry as a whole. His final work, for example, Per< stef£nwn Sive De Coronis Martyrum in Britannia, Lib. II, consists of two books of epigrams written in honour respectively of English and Scottish

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Angus Vine Protestant martyrs. In between the two books, there is a further section of verses commemorating such obviously Protestant heroes as Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and the Marian exile and Calvinist minister, Christopher Goodman.30 Within the Urbes Britanniae itself, other poems too speak of the Reformation. As Gesine Manuwald has shown elsewhere, the poem on Glasgow, for example, with its unflattering reference to the bishops in the city, ‘turns out to be a topical statement on the religious situation in Scotland’.31 It is, as she suggests, an intervention in the struggles between Presbyterianism and Episcopacy that were central to Reformation politics in Scotland. The poem on Glasgow leaves the reader in little doubt as to where Johnston’s sympathies lie. Elsewhere in the sequence, he is more guarded, but a number of the poems do share its concern with Reformation politics. The poem on Edinburgh, which praises that city as a microcosm for Scotland and the seat of all virtues, is perhaps the best example. Like many of the other poems, this one begins with admiration for the city’s topography and then moves on to the valour and virtue of its inhabitants. Next, we learn that the city is rich in both the arts and wealth. Then, at last, and as the culmination of his panegyric of the city, Johnston praises the people for their holiness, civility, and religion: Compositum hîc populum videas, sanctumque Senatum | Sanctáque cum puro lumine iura Dei (‘A civill people here a man may see, a Senate graue, | Gods holy lawes with purest light of preachers here yee haue’).32 It is clear from the first line after the caesura and also the second line that Johnston connects that orderliness and good governance directly to the Edinburghians’ religion. He describes both the city’s senate and its laws as holy, and also speaks of the pure light of God descending upon the city.33 Given what he says elsewhere in the Urbes Britanniae about religion, and specifically the reformed religion, this praise doubtless reflects the same set of Reformation debates. The poem then ends with Johnston moving away from this specifically religious context to a broader outpouring of Scottish national pride. In an apostrophe to an imaginary traveller from abroad, who is surprised to find such virtue and purity in the frozen north, Johnston asks:34 An quisquam Arctoi extremo in limite mundi Aut hæc, aut paria his cernere posse putet? Dic hospes postquam externas lustraueris vrbes, Hæc cernens oculis credis an ipse tuis? In parts remote of Northren clime would any person ween, That ever these or such like things might possibly be seene? Say Travailer, now after that thou forraine towne hast knowne, Beholding this, beleevest thou these eies that are thine owne?

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11. Spectacles from Scotland The broader implication to the reader, and given the context of the 1607 Britannia perhaps especially to the English reader, is that Scotland is every bit the equal of England. Just as much virtue, just as much true religion, can be found north of the border as south of it. We can perhaps also hear echoes of Johnston’s religious politics in his poem on St Andrews. For this one, too, seems to reflect the anti-episcopal vein that runs through much of the Scottish section of the Urbes Britanniae. Here, once again, Johnston contrasts the city’s past with its present, and this time that contrast centres on the question of episcopacy:35 Magnificis opibus staret dum gloria prisca Pontificum, hîc fulsit Pontificalis apex. Musarum ostentat surrecta palatia cœlo, Delicias hominum, deliciásque Deûm.

5

Whilom, when prelats state was great and glorious withall, There flourish’d heere in sumpteous port a See pontificall. Now Schooles it shew’s and Colledges, both Gods and mans delight, To Muses which be dedicate and built to stately height.

The city’s magnificence, Johnston admits, originally came from its site as an episcopal see. But this, as the second couplet makes clear, has been superseded, and a greater glory now shines upon the city. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his own position as a professor in St Andrews, Johnston locates that glory in the university and its precincts. Equally, though, he also seems to associate this new splendour with the reformed religion. For taken together, the two couplets seem to invite the reader to contrast the city’s former magnificence with its more sober, but also more pleasing to God, present. Where the city was previously known for its magnificence and riches, words that in some ways recall those episcopal luxuries berated in the poem on Glasgow, it is now celebrated for the flourishing of poetry, learning, and, by implication, religion. Johnston’s anti-episcopal views were, in fact, widely known at the time. At St Andrews he was closely associated with the principal and Presbyterian divine Andrew Melville, and his ecclesiastical views were, broadly speaking, the same as those of Melville. On his deathbed, for example, he was quoted by Melville’s nephew James as saying that he detested to the end ‘the pride, temerity, fraud, and whole conduct of the bishops’. Melville added that he also ‘made a confession of his faith, and professed his sincere attachment to the doctrine and discipline of our Church, in which he desired to die’.36 In this respect, Johnston’s views were at odds with those of James. For the king had long been suspicious

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Angus Vine of the Presbyterians, and in Basilicon Doron (1597) he had, in fact, recommended boosting episcopal powers. In that work James attributes all the troubles and disturbances in Scotland to the Presbyterians, observing that their ministers ‘would sometimes snapper out well grossely with the trewth of their intentions, informing the people, that all Kings and Princes were naturally enemies to the libertie of the Church, and could never patiently beare the yoke of Christ’. He therefore warns Prince Henry, his son and the principal addressee of the work, to ‘[t]ake heed  to such Puritanes, verie pestes in the Church and Common-weale, whom no deserts can oblige, neither oathes or promises binde’.37 Johnston’s position in the Urbes Britanniae is the very opposite, suggesting once again that these apparently orthodox poems are less closely aligned with Jacobean monarchical rhetoric than they initially seem. If read through a religious, reformist lens, these spectacles from Scotland become much more effective. There are other ways, too, in which Johnston’s poems articulate what we might consider to be specifically Scottish concerns, ways in which they do fill gaps in Camden’s narrative. Many of the poems, for example, reflect the kind of antiquarian and historical interests that fill most of the pages of the Britannia, but that are deficient in the Scottish section. In this regard, Johnston’s poems offer both a window onto Scotland and a device for correcting the defectiveness of Camden’s vision, the two meanings of spectacle that are, of course, at play in the title of the book in Drummond’s library.38 The poem on Perth, for example, is almost entirely historical in its subject matter and so fits perfectly into the context of Camden’s book. First of all, though, and in fact also in keeping with antiquarian writing, the poem locates the city geographically on the banks of the river Tay: Propter aquas Tai liquidas, & amœna vireta, | Obtinet in medio regna superba solo (‘Nere to the waters cleere of Tai, and pleasant plaines all greene, | In middle ground betweene them stands Perth, proudly like a Queene’).39 Then it switches tack to history and praises the city for its illustrious past, one that takes in repelling successive waves of brutal invaders from the Britons to the Saxons and the Danes. The poem then ends with an apostrophe, with a couplet that enjoins the present city to live up to its glorious history: Felix laude noua, felix quoque laude vetusta, | Perge recens, priscum perpetuare decus (‘Happy for praises old, happie for praises new of late, | New as thou art, thine honour old striue to perpetuate’).40 Another poem that is in the spirit of Camden’s book, but also fills an obvious gap there, is the one on the city of Ayr. This poem is, in essence, an extended pun on the city’s name and origin. It is, that is to say, a poem about etymology – a subject that is central to early modern

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11. Spectacles from Scotland antiquarian method.41 It is also therefore a subject that lies at the heart of Camden’s book. Indeed, in his preface, Camden writes that when researching it his first task had been to make ‘search after the Etymologie of Britaine and the first inhabitants’.42 For the city of Ayr, however, Camden does not give an etymology, although he does propose a possible Roman equivalent: ‘In Ptolomees time, there was knowen a place heere named VIDOGARA, haply Aire, which is a Sherifdome, hath a townelet also of merchandise, and a well knowen port, by a little river of the same name’.43 Camden is, though, circumspect about this, and the name Ayr itself goes unexplained. Johnston therefore has to step into the breach, filling the gap in what is for him a surprisingly playful vein:44 Parua vrbs, ast ingens animus in fortibus hæret, Inferior nulli nobilitate virûm. Aëris è campis haurit purissima cœlum Incubat & miti mollior aura solo. Aeria hinc, non Æra priùs, credo, illa vocata est, Cum duris quid enim mollia iuris habent? Infera cum superis quod si componere fas est, Aurea fors dici debuit illa prius.

5

A Citie small, but yet great minds in valiant bodies rest: For noblenesse of Gentlemen, matching the very best. Out of the fields what aire it draw’s, is right pure, fresh and kind The soile is milde, and upon it there breath’s a gentle wind. Hence I suppose AERIA first not Aera cald it was, For what haue Elements to doe with matters hard, as Brasse? But to compare low things with high, if that I may be bold, Then haply well it should haue beene nam’d AVREA of old.

The poem supplies an etymology for the city, punning on the almost homophonous aerius and aereus, as Johnston seeks to equate the city’s mild climate and gentle air with an equally mild and gentle name.45 This practice, of course, reflects the widely held belief in the early modern period that there was a correspondence between the name of something and its nature. Johnston plays on this, suggesting that the city must originally have been called ‘Aeria’ rather than ‘Æra’, as it would more accurately be described as airy than brass. The poem then ends with Johnston recasting the city entirely, switching its name in the final couplet from brass to the more obviously panegyric gold. Panegyric is, of course, one of the predominant modes in Johnston’s poems. Given their purpose and also their publication history, this is hardly surprising. Straightforward panegyrics elsewhere in the sequence include the poem on the towns of the Fife coast and that on Aberdeen. The first of these focuses on the towns’ inhabitants, praising

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Angus Vine them for their industriousness, valour, and care, and linking these virtues directly with the towns’ prosperity and wealth.46 As well as being a panegyric, this poem is also therefore a kind of urban georgic, replacing Virgil’s celebration of rural contentment with a paean to the virtues of commerce and trade. The poem on Aberdeen, Johnston’s hometown, sounds a similar note.47 First of all, and to the English reader at least, perhaps surprisingly, the city is praised for its moderate climate (Mitior algentes Phœbus sic temperat auras, | Non æstum vt rabidum, frigora nec metuas, ‘The warme Sun-beames such temper give to sharpnesse of the aire, | That neither skorching heat you need, nor pinching cold, to feare’). Then, its inhabitants are praised: this time not for their commerce and trade, but for their candidness, their good cheer, and the hospitality that they freely offer (Candida mens, frons læta, hilaris, gratissima tellus | Hospitibus). Johnston also praises them for their nobility, antiquity, and rich livings (Nobilitas antiqua, opibus subnixa vetustis).48 This, in particular, is just the kind of thing that an early modern reader would expect to find in an antiquarian book. The poem then ends with a kind of litotes, as Johnston observes that all cities bow before Aberdeen and that no poet therefore has either the art or the natural genius sufficiently to praise it – despite what he himself has done in the previous twelve lines.49 The paean therefore is to the city, but also to Johnston himself as a native of that city who has succeeded in doing what the poem itself states as impossible. As a whole, Johnston’s poems, therefore, inhabit a complicated textual position. Published in a work that is unashamedly unionist, some of them do seem to defend James’s policies regarding the union. But others, in particular those that speak of Reformation politics, distance themselves from the monarch. Johnston’s voice in the Urbes Britanniae is therefore neither straightforward nor single, but multiple and polyphonous, something that is also reflected in the generic diversity of his poems. There is, however, one constant, something that brings all the poems, all the voices, together: their distinctively Scottish accent. The fact that they are written in Latin, paradoxically, is the key to this. For, as John Kerrigan has argued, ‘[i]n the early modern period, pride in Scottish culture was if anything more naturally displayed in Latin’ than in Scots or Gaelic.50 Johnston’s poems, as I have argued here, undoubtedly express just that kind of Scottish pride. And what is more, there is good reason to believe that Camden himself encouraged this. It is suggestive, and surely also significant, that when the English translation of the Britannia was printed in 1610, with Camden’s direct involvement, Johnston’s poems appeared first of all not in English, but in their original Latin. Their Scottish accent, therefore, persists, even in a volume that in translation becomes an essentially Anglophone

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11. Spectacles from Scotland book. Contrary to Drummond’s title, it seems, then, that Camden not only already had a pair of Scottish spectacles, but had also started to wear them. Notes 1. Auctarium 1627: 27. 2. The work does, however, seem to have been known more widely at the time: the title of Sir Robert Sibbald’s antiquarian and chorographical work, Nuncius Scoto-Britannus, sive, Admonitio de Atlante Scotio, seu, Descriptione Scotiae antiquae et modernae (1683), for example, appears to allude to it. 3. For an account of the Britannia’s poor reception in Scotland, see Nicolson 1702: 13-15. 4. EUL, MS Dc.5.50. Just to underline the point, on one of the front flyleaves of the manuscript, the scribe wrote: Mendacem, indoctum, vanum, vacuumque cerebri Camdenum bellus comprobat iste Liber (‘this fine book shows Camden to be mendacious, unlearned, vain, and empty of understanding’). For other copies of the tract, see NLS, Advocates MSS 31.6.9, 31.6.12, 31.6.13. 5. William Camden, Britannia, sive florentissimorvm regnorvm Angliæ, Scotiæ, Hiberniæ et insularum adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio (London, 1607), sig. 5B5r: ídque prouidè cautus tam ingenuo & syncero veritatis studio, vt nec vel maleuolentissimum offendero, tamque succincta breuitate vt nec eorum curiosam diligentiam præuortam qui hæc pleniore penicillo, & viuaciore colore perpolire moliantur (‘And that so circumspectly with such an honest desire and sincere affection to truth, that I hope I shal not give offence to the malicious; and with so compendious brevity, that I will not prevent their curious diligence, who are in hand to set out these matters with a fuller pensill, and to polish the same with more liuelie and lasting collours’: see William Camden, Britain, or A Chorographicall Description of the Most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Ilands adioyning, out of the depth of Antiquitie, trans. Philemon Holland [London, 1610], sig. 4A2v. All subsequent translations are taken from this edition.). 6. The original presentation manuscript of the Urbes Britanniae survives today, bound as the last item in a volume of pamphlets now in the library and muniment room of Westminster Abbey (shelf-mark: WAL, CB 7 (14)). 7. For the best introduction to Johnston’s life, see Cameron 1979. For the wider significance of Johnston’s correspondence, see Baxter 1928: 392. 8. John Johnston to William Camden, 10 April 1590, in V. cl. Gulielmi Camdeni, et illustrium virorum ad G. Camdenum epistolæ, ed. Thomas Smith (London, 1691), p. 42: Sed hæc ipsa mihi obscura & ignota fuissent, nisi Henricus Wottonus juvenis nobilissimus, omnique virtute & liberali literatura instructissimus, è Britannia discedens, Britanniam tuam secum huc asportasset (‘But these things would have been obscure and unknown to me, if Henry Wotton – a most noble young man and a great scholar of letters – had not left Britain and brought a copy of your Britannia with him’). 9. Johnston (ed. Cameron 1963), p. xlix. 10. For Camden’s time as a master, see Herendeen 2007: 91-279. 11. John Johnston to William Camden, 10 August 1606, in V. cl. Gulielmi Camdeni  epistolæ, pp. 75-6.

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Angus Vine 12. For a more detailed discussion of Camden’s editing of the poems, see Vine 2010: 100-5. 13. See Upton 1985. 14. For an account of the influence of Ausonius’ work, albeit one that is limited to later classical and medieval literature, see di Salvo 2000: 32-6. 15. John Johnston, Inscriptiones Historicæ Regvm Scotorvm, Continvata Annorvm Serie A Fergvsio primo Regni Conditore ad nostra tempora (Amsterdam, 1602), sig. *2r: INSCRIPTIONES has Regum maiorum tuorum, REX SERENISSIME, adolescens in Germania primùm meditatus fui. Incitavit me huc cùm studium historiæ nostræ, tùm exemplum illustrium Poëtarum, Ausonii, Mycilli, Velii, Sabini, qui simili modo descriptos Cæsares Romanos, & Germanicos invulgarunt (‘I first contemplated these Inscriptiones of your ancestors, most serene king, when I was a young man in Germany. Not only did enthusiasm for our history spur me on, but so also did the example of the illustrious poets Ausonius, Mycillus, Velius, and Sabinus, who published descriptions of Roman and German emperors in a similar fashion’). 16. For more on this, see Piggott 1951: 208. 17. As Hendrik Dey (2010: 35) has pointed out, when Ausonius praised Roman walls and fortifications, he ‘studiously ignored the resurgent fortifications at Rome, Constantinople, and Antioch in his list of the twenty greatest cities of the empire, while fulsomely praising the walls at places such as Milan and his native Bordeaux’. 18. For critical readings of Johnston’s poetry, see Macqueen 1988 and Eatough 2010: 13. Eatough argues that Camden ‘allows a little too much room in Britannia’ to Johnston, but his criticism here misses the significance of the fundamentally Scottish context of the edition of the Britannia in which those poems first appear. 19. In the event, of course, those plans never got off the ground, and by 1607, in the face of implacable parliamentary opposition, James laid them aside. Camden’s defences of the policy in the Britannia were therefore belated and almost immediately rendered redundant. 20. Camden, Britannia, sig. p2r: SERENISSIMO, POTENTISSIMOQVE PRINCIPI IACOBO, BRITANNIÆ MAGNÆ, FRANCIÆ, ET HIBERNIÆ REGI, FIDEI PROPVGNATORI, AD ÆTERNITATEM BRITANNICI NOMINIS IMPERIIQVE NATO, PERPETVÆ PACIS FVNDATORI, PVBLICÆ SECVRITATIS AVTHORI GVILIELMVS CAMDENVS MAIESTATI EIVS DEVOTISSIMVS D.D. CONSECRATQVE (‘William Camden, his majesty’s most devoted servant, gives, devotes, and dedicates this book to the most serene and powerful prince James, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, born to the eternity of the British name and empire, founder of perpetual peace, and guarantor of the state’s security’). 21. John Johnston, Eboracum, ll. 1-10; see Camden, Britain, sig. 3N4r. 22. John Johnston, Beruicum, ll. 3-6; see Camden, Britain, sig. 3Y5v. 23. Indeed, the poem ends not with a discussion of the two titular cities, but with a series of rhetorical questions about the fates of a succession of classical cities: Dic vbi nunc Carthago potens? vbi Martia Roma? | Troiaque & immensæ ditis opes Asiæ? | Quid mireris enim mortalia cedere fatis | Corpora? cum videas oppida posse mori (‘What’s now become of Carthage great? where is that martiall Rome? | Where Troy? of wealthy Asia the riches all and some? | No mervaile now that mortall weights to death be subject, why? | Because you

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11. Spectacles from Scotland plainely see that townes and Cities great may die’: John Johnston, Innernessvs, & Innerlothea, ll. 11-14; see Camden, Britain, sig. 4E1v). 24. In his narrative, Camden fills in the historical gaps here, tracing the history of the city and its castle, and how they passed back and forth between the English and the Scots; see Camden, Britain, sigs. 3Y4v-3Y5v. 25. John Johnston, Beruicum, ll. 9-14. 26. For a recent reassessment of James as rex pacificus, see Smuts 2002. 27. Ben Jonson 1604: sigs. D1v-D2r. 28. ‘A Proclamation for the Uniting of England and Scotland’, in Stuart Royal Proclamations (eds. Larkin and Hughes 1973), p. 19. 29. John Johnston, Hadingtonia, ll. 3-6; see Camden, Britain, sig. 4A6v. 30. For a further description of this work, which survives only in manuscript and was never printed, probably on account of Johnston’s death in 1611, see Cameron 1962. 31. Manuwald 2010: 50. 32. John Johnston, Edinburgum, ll. 9-10; see Camden, Britain, sigs. 4B1v-4B2r. 33. Here, we might also think of the poem on Dundee, where Johnston again speaks of the pure light of the reformed religion and celebrates the city for this: Fama vetus creuit cum Relligione renatâ, | Lucis & hinc fulsit pura nitela alijs (‘With new spring of Religion, her old fame more did grow: | Hence shone pure light, hence to the rest cleere beames full bright did show’: John Johnston, Taodvnvm, siue Deidonvm, ll. 7-8; see Camden, Britain, sig. 4D4v). 34. John Johnston, Edinburgum, ll. 11-14; see Camden, Britain, sig. 4B2r. 35. John Johnston, Fanvm Regvli, siue Andreapolis, ll. 3-6; see Camden, Britain, sig. 4C5r-v. 36. Quoted in Leask 1910: 102. 37. King James VI and I, Basilicon Doron, in Political Writings (ed. Sommerville 1994), pp. 26-7. 38. OED s.v. spectacle, n. II.5 and 6(a). 39. John Johnston, Perthvm, ll. 1-2; see Camden, Britain, sig. 4D3r. In the 1610 text (in the copies inspected, at least), the opening line reads ‘Propter aquas Tai liquidas, & amœna vineta’, but this is presumably a compositorial error. Not only do vineyards in Scotland seem optimistic, even on the banks of as fine a river as the Tay, but Holland’s translation is a rendering of the much likelier vireta. 40. Ibid. ll. 11-12. 41. Parry 1999: 9. See also Vine 2010: 51-79. 42. Camden, Britain, sig. p4r. 43. Ibid. sig. 4B4v. 44. John Johnston, Æra, siue Æria, ll. 1-8; see Camden, Britain, sig. 4B4v. 45. This pun appears to have been popular at the time. In his own poem on the city Johnston’s namesake Arthur also made it: Urbs caeli contenta bonis, vel ab aëre puro, | Vel, quo forte cluis, nomen ab aere trahis (‘A city happy with the gifts of heaven, either you draw your name from the pure air, or perhaps you take it from bronze’). See Aera in Johnston (ed. Geddes 1895), ll. 1-2. 46. John Johnston, Urbes Fifae Littorales, ll. 7-11: Cuncta operis intenta domus, fœda otia nescit; | Sedula cura domi, sedula cura foris. | Quæ maria & quas non terras animosa iuuentus | Ah! fragili fidens audet adire trabe? | Auxit opes virtus (‘In every house they ply their worke: no idle drones they are: | Busie at home with diligence, busie abroad with care. | What seas or lands are there to which a voiage for to make, | In britle barkes, will not their youth

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Angus Vine courageous undertake. | By valour be they growne to welth’; see Camden, Britain, sig. 4C6r). 47. Although Johnston moved away from Aberdeen, probably when he was nineteen, his connections with the city were lifelong, and in his will he bequeathed a sum of 1,000 marks to set up a four-year studentship for a divinity scholar there. See Reid 2007: 188. 48. John Johnston, Aberdonia, ll. 3-4, 7-8, and 9. 49. Ibid. ll. 13-14: Omnia ei cedunt, meritos genetricis honores | Pingere non vlla Ars, ingeniumuè valet (‘All short of her. But praises all of this my genitresse | That shee deserv’s, no wit, nor art is able to expresse’: see Camden, Britain, sig. 4D5v). 50. Kerrigan 2008: 152. See also Macqueen 1988: 213.

Bibliography Manuscripts Edinburgh University Library (EUL), Edinburgh, MS Dc.5.50 National Library of Scotland (NLS), Edinburgh, Advocates MSS 31.6.9, 31.6.12, 31.6.13 Westminster Abbey Library (WAL), London, CB 7 (14)

Primary sources Auctarium bibliothecæ Edinburgenæ, sive catalogus librorum quos Guilielmus Drummondus ab Hawthornden bibliothecæ D.D.Q. anno. 1627. Edinburgh [= Auctarium 1627]. Camden, William (1586) Britannia, sive florentissimorvm regnorvm, Angliæ, Scotiæ, Hiberniæ, et insvlarvm adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio. London. Camden, William (1607) Britannia, sive florentissimorvm regnorvm Angliæ, Scotiæ, Hiberniæ et insularum adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio. London. Camden, William (1610) Britain, or A Chorographicall Description of the Most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Ilands adioyning, out of the depth of Antiquitie, trans. Philemon Holland. London. Camden, William (1691) V. cl. Gulielmi Camdeni, et illustrium virorum ad G. Camdenum epistolæ, ed. Thomas Smith. London. di Salvo, Lucia (ed.) (2000) Ausonio: Ordo urbium nobilium. Naples. Geddes, William Duguid, Sir (ed.) (1895) Musa Latina Aberdonensis. Arthur Johnston, vol. II: The Epigrammata and Remaining Secular Poems. Aberdeen (Aberdeen University Studies). James VI and I, King, Political Writings, ed. J.P. Sommerville. Cambridge, 1994. Johnston, John (1602) Inscriptiones Historicæ Regvm Scotorvm, Continvata Annorvm Serie A Fergvsio primo Regni Conditore ad nostra tempora. Amsterdam. Johnston, John, Letters of John Johnston c. 1565-1611 and Robert Howie c. 1565-c. 1645, ed. J. Kerr Cameron. St Andrews, 1963. Jonson, Ben (1604) His Part of King Iames his Royall and Magnificent Enter-

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11. Spectacles from Scotland tainement through his Honorable Cittie of London, Thurseday the 15. of March. 1603. London. Leask, W.K. (ed.) (1910) Musa Latina Aberdonensis, vol. III: Poetae Minores. Aberdeen (Aberdeen University Studies). Nicolson, William (1702) The Scottish Historical Library: Containing a Short View and Character Of most of the Writers Registers, Law-Books, &c. Which may be Serviceable to the Undertakers of a General History of Scotland, Down to the Union of the Two Kingdoms in K. James VI. London. Sibbald, Robert, Sir (1683) Nuncius Scoto-Britannus, sive, Admonitio de Atlante Scotio, seu, Descriptione Scotiae antiquae et modernae. Edinburgh. Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. I: Royal Proclamations of King James I 1603-1625, eds. J.F. Larkin and P.L. Hughes. Oxford, 1973.

Secondary sources Baxter, J.H. (1982) ‘The Letters of John Jonston’, The Scottish Historical Review 25: 392. Cameron, J.K. (1962) ‘A St. Andrews Manuscript of Poems by John Johnston (c. 1565-1611)’, Aberdeen University Review 39: 230-2. Cameron, J.K. (1979) ‘The Correspondence of John Johnston and Robert Howie’, in P. Tuynman, G.C. Kuiper and E. Kessler (eds) Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Amstelodamensis, 197-205. Munich. Dey, H. (2010) ‘Art, Ceremony, and City Walls: The Aesthetics of Imperial Resurgence in the Late Roman West’, Journal of Late Antiquity 3: 3-37. Eatough, G. (2010) ‘William Camden’s Reshaping of Britain’, in T.A. Hass and J. Ramminger (eds) Latin and the Vernaculars in Early Modern Europe, Renæssanceforum 6: 119-39. Herendeen, W.H. (2007) William Camden: A Life in Context. Woodbridge. Kerrigan, J. (2008) Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707. Oxford. Macqueen, J. (1988) ‘Scottish Latin Poetry’, in R.D.S. Jack (ed.) The History of Scottish Literature, Volume I: Origins to 1660 (Medieval and Renaissance), 213-26. Aberdeen. Manuwald, G. (2010) ‘Two Johnstons on Glasgow: Examples of Scottish NeoLatin encomia urbis’, Classical Receptions Journal 2: 44-59. Parry, G. (1999) The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford (first published 1995). Piggott, S. (1951) ‘William Camden and the Britannia’, Proceedings of the British Academy 37: 199-217. Reid, S.J. (2007) ‘Aberdeen’s “Toun College”: Marischal College, 1593-1623’, The Innes Review 58: 173-95. Smuts, M. (2002) ‘The Making of Rex Pacificus: James VI and I and the Problem of Peace in an Age of Religious War’, in D. Fischlin and M. Fortier (eds) Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, 371-87. Detroit. Upton, C.A. (1985) ‘John Jonston and the Historical Epigram’, in R.J. Schoeck (ed.) Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bononiensis: Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, 638-44. Binghamton, NY (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies). Vine, A. (2010) In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England. Oxford.

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Lucan in the Highlands: James Philp’s Grameid and the traditions of ancient epic L.B.T. Houghton Despite its status as the last neo-Latin epic to be written in the British Isles and ‘the first great work of Jacobite literature’,1 the Grameid of ‘Panurgus Philo-caballus Scotus’ (James Philp, or Philip, of Almerieclose) has received surprisingly little attention from scholars of neoLatin literature.2 This neglect is perhaps all the more surprising given that the text of the Grameid has been available with an accompanying English paraphrase-translation for well over a century.3 Philp’s unfinished heroic poem of just over five books, which survives in five manuscripts including one in the author’s own hand dated 1691,4 traces the initial skirmishes and manœuvres in the rising of 1689 led by John Graham of Claverhouse, first Viscount Dundee, but breaks off before Dundee’s fatal victory at the Pass of Killiecrankie. For all its incompleteness and poetic hyperbole, the Grameid is thus an important source for contemporary history and sentiment, having been at least partly composed within two years of the events it describes, and its historical value has long been recognised:5 Lord Macaulay, although he believed the poem itself to be lost, and the picture he paints of the leader of the rising is very different from the adulatory treatment accorded to ‘Bonnie Dundee’ in the Grameid, claimed to have used an English translation of excerpts from Philp’s work in writing his History of England.6 Of particular significance is the fact that the author of the epic, a second cousin of the victor of Killiecrankie, presents his narrative as an eyewitness account: he himself, he says, accompanied Dundee’s campaign, and acted as the latter’s standard-bearer (Grameid 2.148-9; 4.72-4, 442; 5.387-9). In view of this unique proximity of the narrator to the incidents he recounts, at least one reader of the poem has been moved to lament Philp’s decision to couch his testimony in the language of Latin epic: ‘Our chief regret in reading the poem is that our author did not avail himself of his splendid opportunity for a plain narrative in English ’.7 But the military historian’s loss is in this case the literary and cultural historian’s gain, and what the poet’s choice of

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12. Lucan in the Highlands medium takes away from the exactitude of his reportage, it more than makes up for by the light it sheds on the place occupied by Latin literature in the aesthetic, educational and political life of Scottish Jacobite circles.8 The surviving books of Philp’s poem intersperse brisk historical narrative with protracted passages of virulent invective against the opponents of his cause, principally William of Orange (William III) and his supporters, and the unbending champions of Scottish presbyterianism; the second half of Book 5 is entirely devoted to what seems a rather gratuitous vilification of the figure of ‘the Presbyterian’ (presbyter), put into the mouth of Claverhouse himself in order to justify its inclusion here. The overriding theme of the Grameid, established from its opening lines, is that of civil war, the internecine struggle that had divided and devastated the population of Britain since the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and the exile of the Stuart king James VII and II. The consequences of this (from a Jacobite perspective) usurpation are depicted in their full horror by Philp’s appropriation of the pre-eminent classical exemplar of civil war poetry, the Latin epic of Lucan, the incipit of which is clearly echoed in the announcement of the poet’s subject in the first line of the Grameid as Bella Caledonios civiliaque arma per agros (‘Wars and civil arms through the Caledonian fields’, Grameid 1.1; cf. Lucan, Bellum Civile 1.1, Bella per Emathios plus quam civilia campos, ‘Wars, more than civil, over the Emathian plains ’).9 The recurrence of items of vocabulary from the seven-line exordium to Lucan’s poem in the remainder of Philp’s eight-line prologue (acies, canimus, signis, potentem), and the numerous further structural and lexical reminiscences in the initial forty-three lines of the Grameid, corresponding to the thirty-two verses of Lucan’s introduction, confirm this programmatic parallel, which underlies the repeated references to civil conflict throughout the later text. The analogy is spelled out unequivocally at the start of Book 2, where Philp directly cites the civil wars of Rome as the pattern for recent developments in Britain (Grameid 2.1-16): Civilis rerum Dominam discordia Romam Quae fines terris, famamque aequavit Olympo, Perdidit, et fortes bella intestina Quirites Fregerunt; toto dominataque moenia mundo In se versa ruunt, Romae et civilibus armis Gloria magna perit, cui nunquam barbarus ensis, Parthorum missae nec post sua terga sagittae, Tantam adeo stragem, nec vulnera tanta dedere Infelix Trebia, aut Poenorum gloria Cannae, Quam nimis infames civili sanguine Campi Aematii, et sparsi Romana caede Philippi. Corruit hinc mundi imperium, ceciditque superbi

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L.B.T. Houghton Romulidae decus, et rerum pulcherrima Roma. Haud aliam saevos convellere fata Britannos Invenere viam, quos non domuere potentes Ausonii, aut Latiae populator Vandalus orae.

15

Civil discord destroyed Rome, mistress of the world, who made her boundaries co-extensive with the earth, and her fame equal to heaven, and internal wars shattered the brave Romans; walls which had lorded over all the world rushed headlong, turned against themselves, and by civil arms the great glory of Rome perished, to which neither the barbarian sword, nor the Parthians’ arrows loosed behind their backs, ever dealt such great slaughter, nor did unhappy Trebia or the Carthaginians’ glory Cannae give so many wounds, as the Haematian plains, too ill-famed through civil bloodshed, and Philippi sprinkled with Roman gore. As a result of this, the world-empire collapsed, and the splendour of Romulus’ proud descendant fell, and Rome, most beautiful of things. No other way did the Fates find to tear apart the savage Britons, whom neither the mighty Italians nor the Vandal, ravager of the Latian coast, subdued.

Both language and thought here are impeccably Lucanian;10 but the passage also illustrates another characteristic of the Grameid, namely the equal prominence given to material from the works of Virgil, with whom Lucan shares chief place in Philp’s poetic repertoire (after all, the first line of the Grameid declares its subject to be both bella [‘wars’, Lucan, BC 1.1] and arma [‘arms’, Virgil, Aeneid 1.1], thereby conflating its two great models in Latin epic).11 The Aeneid, with its account of Aeneas’ journey over the sea to the land where he is destined to rule and found an illustrious dynasty, was to become a favoured Jacobite text,12 and Philp’s extensive appropriation of Virgilian imagery and phraseology may well have played some part in this. Like Virgil himself, Philp repeatedly echoes the opening words of the Aeneid over the course of his poem, bringing together various forms of the words arma and vir (‘arms’ and ‘the man’);13 and other Virgilian tags are scattered throughout the text.14 At a number of points the reader is clearly meant to be aware of the original context of Philp’s borrowings from Virgil, which serve to associate the hero of the Grameid with his counterpart in the Aeneid, the Stuart monarchy with the supremacy of Aeneas’ Roman descendants, and its enemies with the forces of chaos and disorder facing Aeneas and Augustus in the Roman epic.15 So the anxious wakefulness of Graham recalls the careworn deliberations of the Trojan leader at critical moments in the Aeneid (Grameid 4.456-8; 5.177-8 ~ Aen. 1.305; 5.700-2; 8.19); the glorious destiny that awaits Prince James Edward Stuart evokes Jupiter’s prophecy of the greatness in store for Aeneas’ descendant Caesar (Grameid 1.275-6 ~ Aen. 1.287); and the qualities attributed to Charles I, prophet, king, martyr and hero, at Grameid 5.632-3 mirror the virtues of Aeneas enumerated

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12. Lucan in the Highlands by the Trojan spokesman Ilioneus at Aeneid 1.544-5. The ‘friendly silence of the moon’ (amica silentia lunae: Aen. 2.255; Grameid 5.151) covers both the surreptitious approach of the Greeks from Tenedos and the furtive movements of the enemy general Mackay of Scourie, who is also implicitly likened in his bulk to the monster Cacus (magna se mole ferebat: Aen. 8.199; Grameid 3.704); while the despised Presbyterian shows himself the equal of Sinon by being praeclarus  arte Pelasga (‘renowned for his Pelasgian guile’, Grameid 5.465; cf. Aen. 2.106) and condemns himself to Hell, like the Virgilian sinner punished at Aeneid 6.621-2, by selling his country for gold (Grameid 5.543-4). Specific recollections aside, the entire linguistic and conceptual framework of Philp’s poem rests on the defining conventions of Roman epic; in fact, the Grameid as a whole could be seen as an attempt to accommodate the contemporary world of the poet’s subject-matter to the literary and mythological worlds of his epic models, and vice versa. The moral universe of the Grameid is structured according to the characteristic polarities of the tradition defined and exemplified by Virgil and Lucan: against the representatives of pietas (‘piety’),16 the loyal Graham and his persecuted royal master, are ranged the agents of furor (‘frenzy’) and impietas (‘impiety’),17 along with rabies (‘madness’) and scelerata insania (‘criminal lunacy’).18 In the heat of civil war, the prevailing passion is that of ira (‘anger’),19 and established conceptions of right and wrong (fas and nefas: Grameid 1.192 ~ Virgil, Geo. 1.505; Grameid 2.28 ~ Lucan, BC 1.6) are overturned.20 Several of these motifs come together in an impassioned outburst as the narrator contemplates the deposition of James VII and II and the supposedly Glorious Revolution (Grameid 1.246-55):21 O Populi furor! O Procerum male sana libido! O secli impietas! O degener Anglia diris Cladibus exposita, et civilibus obruta bellis! In ferrum flammasque ruunt tria regna stupendis Motibus, insanis Mavors nunc ardet in armis Improbus. O quantos potuit suadere furores Relligio! Patriaeque graves inferre ruinas. Quis furor iste sacer? rabies quae tanta nocendi Sternere praecipitem sublimi a culmine Regem, Atque iterum patrios foedare in pulvere fasces!

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O frenzy of the people! O unhealthy appetite of the leaders! O godlessness of the age! O degenerate England, laid open to dreadful slaughter, and overwhelmed by civil wars! Into the weapons and the flames rush three kingdoms in awesome motion, now Mars wickedly blazes in demented arms. What great frenzy was religion able to incite, and bring cata-

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L.B.T. Houghton strophic ruin to our country! What is that accursed frenzy? What madness so great for doing harm, to bring down the King headlong from his lofty summit, and once again to befoul ancestral rods of office in the dust!

In addition to the evocation of Lucan and his protagonists’ indignant questioning of the combatants in Rome’s civil war (quis furor ?, BC 1.8, 681; 7.95; cf. also Grameid 1.9), and of his unnamed elder’s apostrophe to the Romans of Marius’ day degener o populus (‘O degenerate people’, BC 2.116), note also the adaptation in lines 1.251-2 of Lucretius’ more general tirade against the evils of religio (tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, ‘so much evil could religion incite’, 1.101) to denounce the political coup fuelled by confessional loyalties. The physical composition and the residents of Philp’s poetic universe are similarly redolent of the structure and inhabitants of the epic cosmos. While Charles the Martyr shows the way to ‘Olympus’ (Grameid 1.183-4), and prayers are addressed to ‘Jupiter’ (5.734), the ‘ruler of starry Olympus’ (stellantis Rector Olympi, 5.204 ~ Lucan, BC 2.4; 5.620),22 the enemies of the exiled monarch are branded as worthy of damnation to Tartarus and all the punishments of Stygian Orcus.23 Philp’s war-torn Britain is stalked by the Furies,24 specifically Allecto, Megaera and Tisiphone (Allecto: 1.91, 327-50; Megaera: 1.90; Tisiphone: 2.17-19), by the crazed Bellona, spirit of conflict (1.55-9, 99; 5.646 – cf. Lucan, BC 7.568; Virgil, Aen. 8.703), and by the whole menagerie of infernal abominations to be found at the entrance to Virgil’s underworld (Grameid 1.44-7 ~ Aen. 6.285-9). Indeed, not only is the Presbyterian, born in Erebus (5.507), an Enyo to his fatherland (5.435), the Dutch claimant a ‘vast, fearsome monster’ on a par with Virgil’s Cyclops and Fama (Monstrum horrendum ingens, Grameid 1.651 ~ Aen. 3.658; 4.181),25 and priests of the Roman Church concurrently the many-headed Hydra, progeny of Scylla, descendants of the ancient giants, hundred-handers, and offspring of the Lapiths (5.4414); Dundee’s covenanting bugbear is worse than any monster sent by Jupiter (5.495-6), and can take more forms than the wily shape-shifting Proteus (5.498-501). Again, while the Prince of Orange and his supporters are explicitly compared to the giants impiously besieging the gods in Heaven (1.655-62; 5.209-15; cf. Lucan, BC 7.145; 9.656), the inhabitants of the Highlands are more than once actually termed ‘Grampian giants’ (Grampigenum  gygantum, 2.635; 3.514). On a more mundane level, British institutions are designated by what Philp evidently conceived to be their nearest Roman equivalent. Deliberative bodies in both London and Edinburgh are referred to as senatus (‘senate’, 1.240, 660; 5.4, 13, 88, 411); the absent James is extolled as Patriae Pater (‘Father of his country’, 1.528), evoking the

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12. Lucan in the Highlands Roman title pater patriae, and his abused regalia – as we have already seen – labelled patrios  fasces (‘ancestral rods of office’, 1.255), the quintessential Roman symbol of legitimate power. The Stuart king is consistently styled ‘Caesar’, and once, by implication, ‘Augustus’ (5.552); like Augustus in Italy, he is said to have instigated the Golden Age in Scotland (1.205 ~ Virgil, Aen. 6.792-3). Considerable ingenuity is expended on rendering Scottish names in idiomatic Latin compatible both with Philp’s chosen metre and poetic register and with his occasionally fanciful conceptions of the etymology of these names. So the county of Angus becomes Aeneadum dicta  de nomine tellus (‘the land called by the name of the Aeneadae’, 1.369), reflecting the Scottish Latinisation of the personal name Angus as ‘Aeneas’;26 Falkirk is translated as Varium Sacellum (‘the dappled shrine’, 2.66) after the Gaelic Eaglais Breac, the spotted kirk;27 the village of Kincardine O’Neil in Deeside is elaborately glossed as Oneali villam, quo nomine dicta est | Carnea jam Regis (‘the estate of O’Neal, by which name King’s Carnea is now called’, 2.245-6);28 and the name of the ford at Culnakyle on the River Spey is derived by Philp, following the tale given currency by George Buchanan in his Rerum Scoticarum Historia, from the legendary king Coilus – vada, queis Coilo deducta colonia nomen | Indidit (‘the shoals to which the colony founded by Coilus gave a name’, 3.666-7).29 Personal names are similarly treated, usually appearing in the most lightly Latinised forms (Gramus, McKaius), but sometimes assimilated according to their etymological components: the dragoon Livingstone is presented as Ductor  a vivo ducit qui nomina saxo | Inclyta (‘the leader who takes his glorious name from the living rock’, 2.543-4),30 while the Clan Macpherson becomes sacerdotis dictam de nomine gentem (‘the race called by the name of the parson’, 4.550). The royalist hero Montrose more than once appears as Mons Rosarum (‘mountain of roses’, mount-rose, 4.166; 5.27), and the site of his victory at Auldearn in 1645 as Erna antiqua or Erna Vetus (‘ancient/old Erna’, 2.287; 5.36). The patronymic prefix Mac- or Mc- naturally lent itself to the kind of grandiose genealogical epithets favoured in Latin epic – so the surname Maclean emerges as antiqui proles generosa Cleani (‘the noble offspring of ancient Cleanus’, 4.218; see also 4.251, proceres  de gente Cleani, ‘chieftains of the race of Cleanus’), and Dundee’s Irish messenger Dennis McSwyne is addressed by his general as Sate stirpe Suini | Insignis Dionysi  (‘outstanding Dennis, sprung from the stock of Suinus’, 3.528-9), conferring on the name a ponderous dignity almost humorously at odds with its ungainly resonance in the vernacular. That the poet was conscious of the discrepancy between classical elegance and northern nomenclature is apparent from his comment during the

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L.B.T. Houghton catalogue of Highland forces, where he remarks on the presence of Nabide prognati, Cowloque et Gibbone, quorum | Horrescunt Latiae tam barbara nomina Musae (‘the descendants of Nab [i.e. MacNab!], Cowal and Gibbon, at whose names so barbarous the Latin Muses shudder’, 4.211-12). At times Philp had to contend with contemporary concepts and apparatus for which no parallel in classical Latin existed; so, for instance, the part played in the skirmishes by firepower entailed the employment of various later terms, or of ancient expressions invested with new meanings, to denote the ideas of gun, pistol, cannon, bullet and related paraphernalia.31 As Mackay, the commander of the enemy troops, prepares to besiege Edinburgh Castle with his artillery, we are told Ferratas tormenta rotantia glandes | Collocat, atque arcis jam propugnacula bombis | Concutit ignivomis (‘he positions slingshots whirling iron balls, and now shakes the defences of the citadel with fire-breathing bombardment’, 2.178-80). The problem did not originate with Philp, however, and this kind of subject-matter had already been handled with some success by earlier neo-Latin poets – most notably in a famous simile in Marco Girolamo Vida’s biblical epic, the Christiad (1535), where the words of Nicodemus before the Sanhedrin produce an effect which is likened to the firing of a cannonball (Christiad 2.20513).32 The Scottish poet will also have had at his disposal lexical tools catering for such contingencies, which arose necessarily from the desire to present events from modern history in classical guise, by no means confined to our author.33 A greater feat, and more distinctively related to his own cultural milieu, is Philp’s articulation in Latin of the concept of bagpipes, though here he partly has to resort to Greek vocabulary to achieve his end: Martemque ciens rauco ore pithaules | Inflarat plenis marsupia turgida buccis (‘and raising war with raucous tone, the piper had inflated with full cheeks the swelling pouch’, 4.40-1).34 But side by side with these details of familiar equipment sit the less plausible, if more exotic, vestiges of the epic tradition: among the Highland muster we hear of a seven-fold shield (clypeo septemplice, 4.358), an implement more at home in the hands of the greater Ajax; another is said to be clad in ‘Herculean clothing’ (Herculeo  amictu, 4.346); while princes, prelates and local dignitaries are repeatedly swathed by the narrator in ‘Tyrian purple’, and the clans kitted out in tartans decorated with ‘Phrygian needlework’,35 with more regard for Virgilian glamour than for seventeenth-century economic reality.36 The defining stylistic devices, structural elements, and literary conventions of ancient epic are all marshalled by the author of the Grameid to lend his verses a recognisable heroic lustre. The poem’s editor, Alexander Murdoch, quotes his correspondent H.F. Morland Simpson

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12. Lucan in the Highlands to the effect that Philp ‘will spare us none of the pomp and circumstance of a great epic poem, adorned with all the artifice he has gathered from long and careful study of his Latin models’; indeed, Simpson goes on to observe that the poet ‘seems to take a somewhat pedantic delight in painting with the whole pot’.37 In the narrative sections of the work, dawn, midday, evening, nightfall, night and midnight pass by on their ceaseless round draped in distinctively classical colours; when the trumpets sound for battle they do so with a resonantly Roman note, a bellicose blare worthy of the bugles of Ennius. The protagonist is given his own recurring epithet, Kilychranchius heros (‘the hero of Killiecrankie’, 2.608; 3.761), and the sites of the conflict are treated according to the norms of epic ekphrasis, most notably the programmatic opening est locus (‘there is a place’, see 1.369; 4.31). Philp’s text occasionally displays the epic phenomenon of tmesis (the splitting of a single word over the course of a line or more for metrical or stylistic purposes),38 is punctuated by the usual array of heroic speeches of exhortation or abuse, and of course includes the indispensable assortment of epic similes, ranging from the most compressed comparisons (e.g. nigri instar turbinis, ‘like a dark whirlwind’, 3.581 – cf. Virgil, Aen. 12.923) to more prolonged likenesses extending over several lines (see esp. 3.709-23, 739-53). These too are eminently classical in character, and sometimes look back to specific antique models – see for instance the simile comparing Claverhouse to a lion preparing for battle, which closely recalls the opening lines of the famous simile in the first book of Lucan, where the same imagery is applied to Caesar as he embarks on the crossing of the Rubicon (Grameid 3.254-7; cf. Lucan, BC 1.205-10): Ceu Lybica de gente leo jam concitus ira Attollit cervice jubas, seque erigit omnes Protinus in vires, et saevae verbere caudae Se stimulat, pugnaeque exultat mente propinquae 

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Like a lion of the Libyan race, already stirred with anger, lifts up the mane on his neck, and raises himself at once to his full strength, and whips himself up with the lash of his fierce tail, and exults in his mind at the approaching fight 

No epic in the grand Roman style would be complete without at least one invocation to a higher power to grant assistance to the poet, or to disclose the underlying causes of the events he proposes to relate. The first book of Philp’s poem features examples of both the Virgilian and the Lucanian types, with an appeal to the Muse to recount the causes of civil conflict (1.109-11; cf. Virgil, Aen. 1.8), and a petition to the Prince of Wales, James Edward Stuart, to prosper his enterprise – a

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L.B.T. Houghton fount of inspiration more efficacious than great Apollo himself, like Lucan’s Nero, whose divine aid, the poet asserts, replaces that of those traditional sponsors of poetic endeavour, Apollo and Bacchus (1.779-85 ~ Lucan, BC 1.63-6). A further invocation serves, like comparable passages in the same position in the classical epic tradition (see Homer, Iliad 2.484-93; Virgil, Aen. 7.641-6; 10.163-5), to introduce the catalogue of troops, another standard feature of heroic poetry. In 1916 W. Warde Fowler published a short book on the catalogue of Italian forces in Aeneid 7 under the title Virgil’s “Gathering of the Clans”;39 but the parallel, it seems, had already occurred to Philp, who devotes most of the first half of Book 4 to a review of the Highland army clearly modelled on Virgil’s catalogue, detailing for each contingent its geographical origin and peculiar arms and dress. In spite of their evident affinities in language and structure, the difference between the roll-call in the Grameid and those of its ancient exemplars is that Philp can claim to have witnessed the forces amassed by Graham and his allies, whereas the classical bards, at several centuries’ distance from the events of their narrative, are compelled to rely on the mediation of the Muses for their information. So to his opening invocation, which draws unmistakably on the wording of Virgil’s address at Aeneid 7.641-6, the Jacobite poet adds both local touches and a confident affirmation of autopsy (4.65-75): Pandite Pierides fontes Permessidis undae, Et juga Parnassi, totumque Helicona ciete Ut meminisse queam, cantuque referre sonoro, Ingentem virtute Ducem, pro Caesare qui tum Exule Grampiacis picta intulit agmina castris. Exciti quique aere viri, quae quemque secuta est Ductorem chlamydata cohors, quibus Abria mater Floruit alma viris, quibus et gaudebat alumnis. Non tamen haec dubia referam mihi tradita fama, Sed quae oculis coram vidi, quaeque auribus hausi, Pandere fert animus, saeclisque aperire futuris.

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Open up, Pierides, the springs of Permessus’ water, and the ridges of Parnassus, and awake all Helicon, that I may be able to remember, and to relate in resonant song, the commander immense in his valour, who at that time brought the painted columns into his Highland camp on behalf of the exiled Caesar; what men were roused by the bronze [trumpet], what plaided contingent followed each leader, with what men nurturing mother Abria flourished and in what nurselings she rejoiced. I shall not, however, relate these things handed down to me by doubtful hearsay, but it is things I saw in person with my own eyes, things I took in with my own ears, that my mind directs me to lay bare, and to disclose to generations to come.

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12. Lucan in the Highlands At several points in his work, Philp almost appears to be framing the events of his story as a replay or restaging of the Roman cataclysms chronicled by his antique models. So the programmatic expostulation Quis novus arctoum nunc o furor excitat orbem? (‘What new frenzy now rouses the northern world?’, 1.9) significantly adds novus (‘new’) to the equivalent line in Lucan (quis furor, o cives, quae tanta licentia ferri?, BC 1.8); and the vocabulary of repetition and renewal figures prominently in the poet’s subsequent references to civil strife, especially in the opening book of the poem. On a number of occasions we are told that a particular incident – generally involving language, imagery or subjects from ancient epic – is happening ‘again’ (iterum, see 1.52, 90, 255). On one level, of course, this alludes to the upheavals of the English Civil War, which had shaken the inhabitants of Britain earlier in the century, still very much within living memory. But when the narrator asks Anne adeo veteres oblita Britannia clades? (‘Is Britain so forgetful of old calamities?’, 1.13) and asserts that Britannia diros ardet renovare furores (‘is ablaze to renew terrible frenzy’, 1.41), followed almost immediately by a diagnosis of contemporary woes that combines some of the most loaded terms in the lexicon of Roman epic (nunc ira furorque tumultus | Concitat insanos, et tristia trudit ad arma, ‘now rage and frenzy arouse mad turmoil, and impel them towards grim warfare’, 1.42-3), it is hard to stifle a suspicion that in employing such expressions, the poet is not simply alluding to previous historical disturbances, but also making a claim that proceedings in late seventeenth-century Britain should be construed as a replica of the situation in late republican Rome. If so, there may also be a suggestion that Philp’s own poem represents a counterpart to and revival of the conflict narratives of Virgil and Lucan: as developments in the political sphere reanimate the convulsions of Roman civil war, so the Grameid fashions itself as a successor to, and a reincarnation of, the poetry of furor, ira and arma.40 None of this, however, answers (at least, not directly) the central question of why Philp chose the medium of Latin epic for his account of Dundee’s rising. There are a number of possible motives for this choice of literary vehicle, any or all of which may have contributed to the author’s decision to present his material in this form. On the artistic side, Philp’s hexameters may reflect the vitality of classical education and literary culture in contemporary Scotland, particularly in the north east around Arbroath, where we may assume the laird of Almerieclose was writing.41 The poet’s selection of models may have been designed to carry a political message, adopting as his pattern the relentless brutality of Lucan to counter his opponents’ presentation of the Williamite coup as a bloodless ‘Glorious Revolution’, and the imperial effusions of

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L.B.T. Houghton Virgil to proclaim his hopes for the reinstatement of the rightful succession.42 This strategy may also owe something to the fact that Lucan’s Civil War was a favourite book of the champion of the royalist cause in Scotland forty years previously, the Marquis of Montrose, himself a distant relative of Dundee (and hence also of the poet).43 Murdoch suggests that use of the ancient tongue served to make Philp’s polemic less accessible to the majority of readers, and hence allowed his vituperation to circulate without fear of reprisal.44 Alternatively, given the location of the deposed king and his retinue on the continent, and the continuing hopes of Jacobite sympathisers for a restoration of the Stuart line backed by foreign powers, Philp’s presentation of his version of affairs in Britain in the international language of learning, and in a literary form the status of which would have been universally recognised among the educated élite of Europe, may have been intended to promote its diffusion among potential supporters beyond the shores of Scotland. Perhaps the most compelling reason for the poet’s recourse to this classical paradigm is supplied by the elevated stature and illustrious associations of the epic genre. By casting his narrative in the style of the Aeneid and Bellum Civile, the author of the Grameid implicitly raises his theme to the level of the great historical and mythological conflicts of antiquity, as immortalised by its sublimest poets. Philp’s choice of literary medium thus constitutes a claim for the monumental significance of his subject, reinforced by repeated comparisons of Graham, his accomplices and his adversaries to exemplary figures from the annals of Roman history: so Claverhouse, in his gradual progress through the north, is expressly said to resemble the Roman hero Q. Fabius Maximus Cunctator, celebrated by Virgil and Ennius (Verum tardigrado procedens agmine Gramus |  | Cunctanti similis Fabio se ostendit in armis, ‘But Graham, proceeding with his slow-moving column  showed himself in arms, similar to delaying Fabius’,45 5.412-14 – cf. Ennius, Annales 363 Skutsch; Virgil, Aen. 6.845-6). Meanwhile the new Queen Mary, daughter of James VII and II and wife of the Prince of Orange, is vilified by the narrator – no doubt remembering Livy’s account (1.48.5-7) of the outrages perpetrated on Servius Tullius, sixth king of Rome, by his daughter – as ‘wife worthy of such a husband, Tullia deservedly united with proud Tarquin, who impiously befouled your father’s face in the dust ’ ( tali conjunx o digna marito, | Tullia Tarquinio merito conjuncta superbo | Impia quae Patrios foedasti in pulvere vultus , 1.717-19). But Philp does not content himself with alleging or implying that the characters in his drama are merely counterparts or clones of the heroes and villains of ancient Rome; rather, the epic dimensions of Dundee’s

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12. Lucan in the Highlands campaign as portrayed by his poet are even more imposing than the prodigious contests of the past, the hardships endured by the Jacobite leader and his soldiers even more gruelling than the rigours faced by the most renowned tacticians of ancient times. As the Highland army makes its way into the mountains, we are told that ‘Hannibal did not wear down the rocks with such great toil when he burst through the aerial Alps with fire and vinegar’ (Hannibal haud tanto contrivit saxa labore | Cum flamma aereas et aceto rumperet Alpes, 2.713-14; see Juvenal 10.152-3), and that in the course of their march into Lochaber, Graham and his enterprising troops reached places never seen by the all-conquering Romans, the frenzied Cimbri, or the weapons of the raging Saxon (2.720-2). Had earlier generals and their followers been as indomitable as Claverhouse and his cohorts, the course of Roman history (and even of the Trojan saga), according to Philp’s narrator, could have been very different (3.237-42): Illa fames duram queat expugnare Saguntum, Et Numantinam concederet hostibus urbem; Traderet et Phrygios nullo certamine muros. Quam si adeo infelix invicta mente tulisset, Haud profugus patrios fudasset Scylla triumphos; Castra nec exutis cessisset Afranius armis.

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That hunger would be able to defeat hardy Saguntum, and would have yielded the city of Numantia to the enemy; and it would have handed over the Phrygian walls without a struggle. If unlucky Sulla had borne it with unconquerable intent, he would not, as an exile, have wasted his father’s triumphs, nor would Afranius have surrendered his camp, after stripping off his arms.

Again, the sheer scale of the arena in which the action of the Grameid is played out dwarfs even the most gargantuan expeditions known to the ancient world, or conceived by the literary imagination. The plain of Dalcomera exhausts in its immensity the legendary hosts of the Trojan cycle as well as the historical myriads of the Persian wars (4.35-8):46 Planities ibi vasta jacet, lateque patentem Aspicies campum, quem nuncquam Memnonis atri Obtegerent acies, magni non agmina Xerxis, Non Agamemnoniae poterant complere catervae.

35

A vast plateau lies there, and you will see a plain extending far and wide, which the hordes of black Memnon would never cover, nor the columns of great Xerxes; nor could the squadrons of Agamemnon fill it.

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L.B.T. Houghton And yet, a few lines later, we are told that the unprecedented array of Dundee’s forces did precisely that – a truly epic assembly (4.49-51; see also 4.266-8). Nor does Graham’s devoted panegyrist shrink from yet more superhuman comparisons: elsewhere the hero’s horse is said to surpass the classic warrior steeds of mythology – Pegasus, Bellerophon, the horses of Castor and Achilles (4.779-81). The most definitive statement of the superiority of Philp’s commander to the pre-eminent military leaders of classical history and legend not only exalts the first Viscount Dundee above such proverbial conquerors and defenders as Alexander the Great, Manlius Capitolinus and Agamemnon (who presided over the siege of Troy, 2.155),47 but also furnishes an ancient parallel for the part played in Dundee’s venture by the poet himself, who is here presented as the counterpart to Ennius, who had accompanied the elder Scipio on his campaigns and celebrated his exploits (2.148-55): Ipse ego militiam, Gramumque in castra secutus Regia. Sic medio bellorum in turbine fortem Scipiadem ipse pater stipaverat Ennius olim. Nec cecinisse Ducis mihi contigit acta minoris, Cui Macedum magnus cedat Rex pectore et armis, Et Capitolinae defensor Manlius arcis. Cui ferus ipse etiam eversor Carthaginis altae Cedat, et Iliacos qui cinxerat agmine muros.

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I myself undertook military service, and followed Graham in the royal camp. Thus father Ennius himself in the middle of wars’ whirlwind once adhered to the brave scion of the Scipios. Nor did it befall me to sing the deeds of a lesser leader, [but of him] to whom the great king of Macedonia would give place in spirit and in arms, and Manlius, defender of the Capitoline citadel; to whom even the fierce destroyer of lofty Carthage himself would give place, and he who surrounded the walls of Troy with his forces.

Confronted with such manifold excellences, the narrator finds himself at a loss to determine which aspect of his protagonist is most deserving of eulogy (2.96-8; for the expression of line 96, cf. Virgil, Aen. 11.126): Ingenii numne Hercle prior belline laborum Laudibus ambiguum, sed certe magnus utroque, Aequandus prisci magnisque heroibus aevi  Whether, by Hercules, he was foremost in the glory of genius or of the labours of war is unclear, but certainly he was great in both, and comparable to the mighty heroes of olden time 

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12. Lucan in the Highlands That final line is emblematic, I think, of what ‘Panurgus Philo-caballus Scotus’ was attempting to convey by his adoption of the language and literary form of Virgil and Lucan for his glorification of Claverhouse and his cause, reflecting on a stylistic level the author’s conviction that his general and kinsman had been a warrior worthy to stand comparison with the mightiest combatants of antiquity. In his effort to mould and perpetuate the memory of his hero and the latter’s campaign through the medium of martial epic, the poet of the Grameid was seeking to ensure that despite the collapse of Dundee’s rising after his death in the hour of victory at Killiecrankie, when subsequent generations came to look back on the tumultuous events of 1689 it would still be the Piper who was calling the tune. Notes Thanks to Gesine Manuwald, Roger Green and Michael Reeve, and participants in the Early Modern Exchanges conference held at University College London in September 2011. My title echoes Farrell 1991. 1. Kidd 1991: 113. 2. The poem is listed in Bradner’s appendix (Bradner 1940: 373) and receives brief mention in Kidd 1991: 113-14; Money 1998: 26; Crawford 2007: 201; MacQueen 2007: 205-6. An exception to this general neglect is to be found in the work of Murray Pittock: see e.g. Pittock 1994: 7, 39-42; 1995: 237-8; 1998: 47-8; 2000: 121; 2007: 107. 3. Murdoch 1888. Murdoch’s ‘translation’, as he readily admits, is often little more than a paraphrase of the Latin, and is sometimes inaccurate; for some corrections, see Murdoch 1888: xlix-lvi. For this essay, I have supplied my own translations. 4. See Murdoch 1888: xxvii-xxxii. 5. On the historical value of the Grameid, see Murdoch 1888: xxxv-xlvi; extended passages from the poem are quoted in translation in Napier 1859-62. 6. Macaulay 1849-61: 3.331 n. For a polemical riposte to Macaulay’s note, see Napier 1859-62: 2.11-16. 7. H.F. Morland Simpson (in a letter to the editor), quoted by Murdoch 1888: xliv. 8. In addition to Philp’s Grameid, see also the Latin epitaph on Dundee composed by his contemporary Archibald Pitcairne, which was translated by Dryden: Bradner 1940: 194, 200 (and generally on Pitcairne, 193-5, 245-9); Kidd 1991: 114-15; MacQueen and MacQueen 2009: 72-3, 308-10. 9. For the allusion see Murdoch 1888: 1 n. 1; Money 1998: 26. For the expression note also these lines from the neo-Latin epic Ormonius (1615) by the Irish poet and physician Dermot O’Meara: Prima Caledonijs fuerant exercita campis | Arma viri (‘The warrior’s arms had first been exercised on the Caledonian plains’, Ormonius 1.14-15). In his five-book account of the deeds of Thomas Butler, tenth Earl of Ormond, O’Meara draws on many of the same epic techniques and conventions as Philp: for the text of the poem see Edwards and Sidwell 2011, and for discussion of both Ormonius and Lucan in Jacobite Latin epic see Sidwell in this volume.

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L.B.T. Houghton 10. For the thought see Lucan, BC 1.30-2; for individual phrases see BC 1.33-4 (non aliam  fata  | invenere viam), 1.44 (Roma  civilibus armis), 1.81 (in se  ruunt), 1.230 (missa Parthi post terga sagitta), 1.680 (Philippi and Haemus), 2.46 (Cannae and Trebia). 11. Virgilian parallels: Aen. 1.282 (Romanos rerum dominos), 2.197-8 (quos neque  |  domuere), 6.782 (imperium terris, animos aequabit Olympo); Geo. 1.489-92 (Philippi and Haemus), 2.534 (rerum  pulcherrima Roma). Philp’s combination of Virgilian and Lucanian elements is noted by Murdoch 1888: xxxvii; Pittock 1994: 39, 40; 1995: 237; 1998: 47-8; 2000: 121 (‘a fine blend of Lucanian grimness and Vergilian hope’); 2007: 107. 12. See Pittock 1994: esp. 7, 10-12, 38-43, 183-5; 1995; Rogerson 2005: 12-13, 27-42. 13. Grameid 1.5, 604; 2.201, 619; 4.6, 500, 671; 5.69, 292; 6.36. On repetitions and variations of arma virumque within the Aeneid, see Niehl 2002: 15, 18, 63, 64, 79, 92, 108; Oliensis 2004. 14. So e.g. decus et tutamen in armis (‘an ornament and safeguard in arms’, Aen. 5.262) at Grameid 3.545 and 6.41. 15. A notable exception is Grameid 5.478, where spem vultu simulat (‘he feigns hope with his face’, used of Aeneas at Aen. 1.209) is transferred pejoratively to the duplicitous Presbyterian; see also Grameid 1.356 ~ Aen. 12.946-7 (though arguably Aeneas is not being portrayed here in a positive light, so Philp’s transfer of the description to an enemy is understandable). 16. pietas: 1.93-4, 180, 194, 641, 752; 2.206; 3.734. 17. furor and cognates: 1.9, 41, 42, 75, 136, 168, 174, 189, 246, 251, 253, 261, 323, 356, 633, 757; 2.18, 29-31; 4.107, 124; 5.18, 347, 460, 511, 610. impietas: 1.247, 682. On the place of these concepts in the Virgilian tradition, see esp. Hardie 1993: 58: ‘The basic dualism is most often expressed through moral and psychological abstractions, above all pietas and furor, or reason and unreason.’ 18. rabies: 1.253; 5.528; scelerata insania: 2.22 (cf. Aen. 7.461). For the combination of furor and rabies in Lucan, see BC 7.551, 557 with Lapidge 1979: 359, 363, 366-70; Masters 1992: 71-2, 142-5; Roche 2009: 113 (‘furor is a key word in Lucan  and along with rabies  highlights one aspect of the narrator’s insistent portrayal of civil war’). 19. ira: 1.42, 60, 62, 110, 139, 144, 229, 239, 260, 331, 340, 356; 2.27; 4.102, 720; 5.180, 514, 547. For anger as ‘the epic emotion’ (original emph.), see Hardie 1993: 67, 95. 20. On ira and nefas in Lucan, see esp. Lapidge 1979: 363, 365, 367, 368-70; Masters 1992: esp. 7, 71-2, 82, 205-15. 21. The opening lines of this passage (up to Relligio, 1.252) appear also in a shorter piece by Philp, printed at Murdoch 1888: 247-8. 22. Note also superi regnator Olimpi, ‘ruler of Olympus above’: Grameid 5.689 ~ Virgil, Aen. 2.779; 7.558; 10.437. 23. Tartarus etc.: 1.749; 2.168; 3.520; 4.681; 5.215, 368, 745. 24. Furies: 1.50-4, 90-1, 93, 97-101, 198, 430-1. 25. See also 3.106, Monstrum informe, ingens (of the primitive race of Highlanders). 26. See Murdoch 1888: 17 n. 1. 27. Murdoch 1888: 41 n. 2. 28. Murdoch 1888: 50 n. 4 comments that ‘[t]he Poet’s skill in rendering the name into Latin deserves more praise than his etymology’. 29. Murdoch 1888: 112 n. 1 (and xxxvii-xxxviii); see also 4.735 with Murdoch

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12. Lucan in the Highlands 1888: 182 n. 3. For further etymologies see 1.336 (London as urbs Luddi, ‘the city of Lud’ – i.e. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mythical King Lud); 2.290 (Arderseir as Arthuri  fretum, ‘Arthur’s strait’: Murdoch 1888: 54 n. 2); 5.324 (hill of Knockbrecht as Ardua rupes  de nomine dicta cruoris, ‘the steep rock called by the name of blood’ [Gaelic brecht = ‘speckled’]: Murdoch 1888: 211 n. 3), 699 (Pentland Hills as juga Pictica, ‘Pictland Hills’: Murdoch 1888: 232 n. 1). 30. See Napier 1859-62: 3.558 n. 1, who observes that ‘Our heroic bard, whose ingenuity is great in accommodating proper names to his sonorous hexameters, here indulges in a pleasantry.’ 31. Cannon / guns etc.: 2.178-80, 576, 580-1; 3.76-7; 4.130, 190-1, 204, 632-4, 702-4, 741, 790; 5.317 (with Murdoch 1888: 211 n. 2), 319-21, 355-9, 372, 559. That the Latin for ‘cannon’ was still felt to be an issue in the late eighteenth century is clear from the encyclopaedia cited by Waquet 2001: 127. 32. See Gardner 2009: xx-xxi, xxiii (and 74-5 for text and translation). 33. Philp may have used the English-Latin section of Holyoke’s dictionary (1677) for some of this modern vocabulary: Murdoch 1888: xliii, xlv. 34. Murdoch 1888: 120 n. 3 notes that the description refers very definitely to Scottish bagpipes (blown, plenis  buccis) rather than Irish and continental varieties (worked by bellows), and comments that ‘ “rauco ore” speaks unmistakably of the drone’. 35. See 1.267, 361; 2.211; 4.78-9, 188-9, 226, 229, 309, 404, 585; 5.341, 364. 36. Also Virgilian is the description of one Highland contingent as Cinctu conspecta Gabino (‘conspicuous in Gabine cincture’, 4.264), a ritual style of dress in Rome, worn – according to Virgil – by the consul when declaring war (see Aen. 7.612-13, cinctu  Gabino | insignis); here the expression apparently refers to the belted plaid (Murdoch 1888: 141 n. 3). 37. Murdoch 1888: xlii. 38. See 1.600; 3.511; 4.53; 5.150. On tmesis in Roman epic, see e.g. Harrison 1991: 262 on Aen. 10.794. 39. Warde Fowler 1916. 40. Cf. Hardie 1993: 17-18 on ‘words of iteration’, 48 on novus  furor at Statius, Theb. 12.808. 41. Crawford 2007: 201; Kidd 1991: 115-16, on ‘the learned classical civilisation of the northeast’ (116). On the tradition of neo-Latin poetry in seventeenth-century Scotland more generally, see Bradner 1940: 158-200 (on epic, 195-8). 42. So Pittock 1994: 40. 43. Murdoch 1888: xxi; Pittock 2007: 107. 44. Murdoch 1888: xl. 45. Did Philp mean similem – i.e. ‘showed himself similar to delaying Fabius in arms’? 46. Murdoch 1888: 120 n. 2 comments, perhaps rather literal-mindedly: ‘Though the size of the field will hardly justify the Poet’s language, yet I am told that it is large, and that more than one battle was fought on it’. 47. For the same tendency in French neo-Latin panegyrics of the earlier seventeenth century, see Bannister 2001-2.

Bibliography Bannister, M. (2001-2) ‘Heroic Hierarchies: Classical Models for Panegyrics in Seventeenth-Century France’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 8: 38-59.

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L.B.T. Houghton Bradner, L. (1940) Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry 15001925. New York and London (The Modern Language Association of America, General Series X). Crawford, R. (2007) Scotland’s Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature. London. Edwards, D. and Sidwell, K. (eds) (2011) The Tipperary Hero: Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius (1615). Turnhout. Farrell, J. (1991) Vergil’s Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic: The Art of Allusion in Literary History. New York and Oxford. Gardner, J. (ed. & tr.) (2009) Marco Girolamo Vida: Christiad. Cambridge, MA and London. Hardie, P. (1993) The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition. Cambridge. Harrison, S.J. (ed.) (1991) Vergil: Aeneid 10. Oxford. Kidd, C. (1991) ‘The Ideological Significance of Scottish Jacobite Latinity’, in J. Black and J. Gregory (eds) Culture, Politics and Society in Britain 16601800, 110-30. Manchester. Lapidge, M. (1979) ‘Lucan’s Imagery of Cosmic Dissolution’, Hermes 107: 344-70. Macaulay, T.B. (1849-61) The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, 5 vols. London. MacQueen, J. (2007) ‘From Rome to Ruddiman: The Scoto-Latin Tradition’, in I. Brown et al. (eds) The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 1, 184-208. Edinburgh. MacQueen, J. and MacQueen, W. (eds & trs) (2009) Archibald Pitcairne: The Latin Poems. Assen. Masters, J. (1992) Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s Bellum Civile. Cambridge. Money, D.K. (1998) The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Tradition of British Latin Verse. London. Murdoch, A.D. (ed.) (1888) The Grameid: An Heroic Poem descriptive of the Campaign of Viscount Dundee in 1689, and other pieces by James Philip of Almerieclose, 1691. Edinburgh. Napier, M. (1859-62) Memorials and letters illustrative of the life and times of John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, 3 vols. Edinburgh. Niehl, R. (2002) Vergils Vergil: Selbstzitat und Selbstdeutung in der Aeneis. Frankfurt am Main. Oliensis, E. (2004) ‘Sibylline Syllables: The Intratextual Aeneid’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 50: 29-45. Pittock, M.G.H. (1994) Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Cambridge. Pittock, M.G.H. (1995) ‘The Aeneid in the Age of Burlington: A Jacobite Text?’, in T. Barnard and J. Clark (eds) Lord Burlington: Architecture, Art and Life, 231-49. London and Rio Grande. Pittock, M.G.H. (1998) ‘James Macpherson and Jacobite Code’, in F. Stafford and H. Gaskill (eds) From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations, 41-50. Amsterdam. Pittock, M.G.H. (2000) ‘Literature and Nationhood’, in D. Womersley (ed.) A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake, 114-30. Oxford and Malden. Pittock, M.G.H. (2007) ‘Scottish Song and the Jacobite Cause’, in I. Brown et al. (eds) The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 2, 105-9. Edinburgh.

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12. Lucan in the Highlands Roche, P. (ed.) (2009) Lucan: De Bello Ciuili, Book 1. Oxford. Rogerson, A.I. (2005) Reading Ascanius and the Aeneid, unpublished PhD diss. Cambridge. Waquet, F. (2001) Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, tr. J. Howe. London. Warde Fowler, W. (1916) Virgil’s “Gathering of the Clans”. Being Observations on Aeneid VII.601-817. Oxford [2nd edn 1918].

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Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens: a sense of place in some Latin works from Glamorgan Ceri Davies Memoria repeto (Illustris ac generose miles) in celebri Castro Sancti Donati, tua tuorumque maiorum equestri dignitate conspicuorum antiqua sede, quo te tuamque coniugem praenobilem visendi gratia adueneram, incidisse me fortuito in quoddam venustum poema, a D. Thoma Leysono viro cum rei medicae tum poetices peritissimo Latinis numeris contextum, quo, fausto satis Appolline, praedicauerat illius munitissimi castri situm, undiquaque longe commodissimum, tum porro illa sumptuosa aedificia, quorum totam fere materiam ex ipsius pelagi cautibus non absque ingenti sumptu extraxeras, adeo mirandum in modum in extremo litoris margine abs te extructa, ubi sic feruet fremitque indignabundum fretum ut insani fluctus incredibili mole saxa quotidie frustra contorqueant in ipsa aedificiorum moenia. Illustrious and high-born Knight! I recall how once I came to visit you and your most noble wife at celebrated St Donat’s Castle (your ancient seat, inherited from your ancestors, renowned for their rank as knights) and how I chanced there upon a delightful poem written by Mr Thomas Leyson, a man of outstanding ability both as a doctor and as a poet. The poem was composed in Latin metres, and in it – with Apollo’s plenteous favour to aid him – the poet had extolled the position of that well-fortified castle, from every direction the most advantageous position by far. Furthermore, he praised those costly structures, nearly all of the material for which you had extracted at great expense from the rocks of the sea itself, structures which you built in such a wonderful way on the very edge of the sea shore. There the enraged deep foams and roars so much that the wild waves, day after day, hurl incredibly massive rocks against those well-constructed bulwarks, but all in vain.

This finely-balanced passage, one sentence in Latin and clearly the work of a writer whose ear is attuned to the language’s rhetorical copiousness, is the beginning of a lengthy dedicatory letter attached to a grammar of the Welsh language, published in Latin in 1592, Cambrobrytannicae Cymraecaeve linguae institutiones et rudimenta.1 The author, of both letter and grammar, was Dr Siôn Dafydd Rhys (1533/4-

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13. Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens c. 1620), a Welsh physician and humanist of wide interests and varied experience, who was then in his late fifties. A native of Anglesey in north Wales, Rhys had been an undergraduate at Oxford before making his way (in part, at least, because of Catholic sympathies) to the continent and eventually to Italy, where he graduated in 1567 as Doctor of Medicine from the University of Siena. Whether or not he practised as a physician in Italy is unknown, but his stay, of about ten years, in some of the country’s northern cities certainly gave a special edge to his interests as a scholar and grammarian.2 During a period spent in Pistoia, where he was private tutor to the sons of Vincenzo Gheri (whose family had connections with the Medici), Rhys wrote, in Latin, a Greek grammar (now lost) and, in Italian, a Latin grammar, published in Venice in 1569.3 The most masterly product of Rhys’s time in Italy was a Latin handbook on the pronunciation of Italian, De italica pronunciatione et orthographia libellus, an account of Tuscan phonetics, which is groundbreaking not only for the author’s linguistic knowledge, but also for his understanding of the physiology of soundarticulation.4 In the early 1570s he returned to north Wales and was appointed headmaster of Friars’ Grammar School in Bangor. However, in 1577, Bishop Richard Davies of St David’s invited the well-travelled scholar to join him at the episcopal palace near Carmarthen, perhaps with the intention that Rhys should be a collaborator in the work of translating the Old Testament into Welsh and thereby complete the work begun by Bishop Davies and William Salesbury in the 1567 translation of the New Testament and the Book of Common Prayer. That aspiration was not to be realised until 1588 and Dr William Morgan’s translation of the entire Bible, but the transfer from Bangor served to bring Siôn Dafydd Rhys to south Wales. In 1581 he proceeded east to the Cardiff area, where he may, at last, have practised as a doctor. The move also brought him into the ambit of the illustris ac generosus miles who is addressed at the beginning of the passage quoted. That addressee is Sir Edward Stradling (1529-1609), Rhys’s slightly older contemporary and owner of St Donat’s Castle, an impressive edifice overlooking the Bristol Channel on the southern fringe of the agriculturally rich Vale of Glamorgan (see Figure 1). St Donat’s, in Welsh Sain Dunwyd, is now home to Atlantic College, established in 1962, the first of what was to become the international network of United World Colleges.5 Earlier in the twentieth century it belonged to the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who bought it in 1925 as a retreat and (according to some reports) lavished more than a million dollars on renovations and adornments for the place, behaviour which did not go down well in a part of the United

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Figure 1. St Donat’s Castle from the North West; engraving by Samuel and Nathaniel Buck (1740). Image courtesy of Glamorgan Archives.

13. Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens Kingdom which suffered deprivation on a massive scale in the industrial depression of the 1920s and 1930s.6 St Donat’s, however, has a history which is much more important than that of the Hearst episode. There was an early Norman castle on the site, built and owned by the de Hawey family. At the end of the thirteenth century the castle, and the manor attached to it, passed (by the marriage of Joan de Hawey to Peter ‘de Stratelinges’) to the Stradlings, who over the next three centuries built a new castle and extended it, in its dimensions much as it is today. In addition to their interests in estates on the English side of the Bristol Channel, they were to be key figures in the public life of Glamorgan over many generations.7 Under Edward Stradling, head of the family in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, St Donat’s became a cultural centre of some significance.8 Educated in Oxford and admitted to the Inner Temple, he also travelled extensively in Europe, especially Italy, where in Rome in 1548-9 he spent some time in the company of Sir Thomas Hoby, who in 1561 was to publish The Courtier, an English translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (first printed in 1528). Edward Stradling’s accomplishments, as a man of affairs but also as a patron of the arts and man of letters, brought him as close as anyone in sixteenth-century Wales to the ideal of the Renaissance courtier as portrayed in Il Cortegiano. He collected a substantial library at St Donat’s, and was himself a writer, best remembered for ‘The Winning of the lordship of Glamorgan and Morgannwc out of the Welshmen’s hands’, a largely fictional (if sincerely believed) account of the Norman advance in south-east Wales, which was given wider currency by its inclusion in The Historie of Cambria (1584) of the historian David Powel.9 For all that may have been wrested ‘out of the Welshmen’s hands’ at the end of the eleventh century, Sir Edward was noted, in his day, for the support he gave to Welsh-language poets like Dafydd Benwyn, Meurug Dafydd and Llywelyn Siôn. He viewed Welsh literature in the light of his wider humanism, and it is not surprising that he and Siôn Dafydd Rhys, who calls him ‘my Maecenas’, were drawn to each other.10 In his dedicatory letter Rhys recalls Sir Edward’s fine artistic and literary taste, and his support for men of letters. The experience of living in Italy, which they shared, made for a further bond between them, as Rhys recalls in another carefully fashioned passage:11  ipse sis perquam foeliciter in literis versatus, et adhuc illarum ita suauitate deliniaris, vt cunctis eruditis tuae semper pateant aedes: cum his enim suauiter sermones misces, horum dulci colloquio ingenium exerces, animique lassati vigorem reuocas. Quid quod non solum in Italia, cui ego florentissimae regioni meae eruditionis (siqua tandem est) apicem acceptum fero, perdiu mansus, verum partem etiam Europae reliquae

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Ceri Davies longe maximam fueris permensus? Quibus rebus effectum est, vt experientia doctrinam, doctrina tot in te genuerit virtutes. You are yourself a man most happily versed in letters and are so fashioned by the charm which attaches to them that your home is always open to all men of learning. You find delight in joining in the discussion between such men, you exercise your own intellect in the pleasure of talking to them, and thus you restore the vigour of your tired mind. Furthermore, not only have you spent a long time in Italy, that brilliant country to which I owe the distinction of any erudition which may be mine, but you have also travelled through most (by far) of the rest of Europe. As a result of all these things experience has produced learning in you, and learning so many virtues.

Rhys had much for which to be grateful to Sir Edward Stradling. It was thanks to his encouragement that he wrote his Welsh grammar, doing so in Latin in order that knowledge of the Welsh language and its literature should be more easily disseminated. Such was the interest in Welsh kindled in Sir Edward  vt contentissimo tandem studio a me efflagitaueris vt de Cymraecae dialecti natura, methodico grammaticoque modo, Latine quo facilius ad exteras quoque gentes illius linguae cognitio dimanaret, praeciperem.12  that in the end you most earnestly and zealously demanded of me that I give instruction, in a methodical and grammatical manner, concerning the nature of the Welsh language. I was to do this in Latin, so that knowledge of the Welsh language might the more easily spread to other nations too.

Sir Edward also paid for the printing of 1,250 copies of the book, a work of over three hundred pages, from Thomas Orwin’s press in London. Edward Stradling, besides his scholarly and literary interests and the prominent rôle which he played in the administrative and public life of Glamorgan in the late sixteenth century, also paid great attention to the St Donat’s estate. Improvements were made to the fabric of the castle itself, and, like his father, Sir Thomas Stradling, before him, Sir Edward set about beautifying the gardens, combining the work with the construction of an impressive embankment against the inroads of the sea and with the building of five grand terraces above it.13 Siôn Dafydd Rhys refers to these works in that eloquent sentence with which we saw him beginning his dedicatory letter. In particular he reminds his patron of a Latin poem in praise of St Donat’s by Thomas Leyson, a work with which he was so taken that he acceded to Sir Edward’s request that he produce a Welsh translation of the poem. Thomas Leyson (1549-c. 1608) was born at Neath, some twenty miles

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13. Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens west of St Donat’s.14 He came from the same gentry class as Sir Edward Stradling himself (his mother was one of the Bassetts of Beaupré, also in the Vale of Glamorgan, his father a prebendary of Llandaff), and that local link, together in time with Oxford and West Country connections, led to his close association with both Sir Edward and his heir. Thomas Leyson was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, of which he was scholar and then fellow for nearly twenty years. Qualified in medicine, he subsequently settled as a doctor in Bath, where (in Anthony à Wood’s pithy words) ‘he became as much noted for his happy success in the practice of physic, as before he was for his Lat[in] poetry in the University’.15 His standing as vir cum rei medicae tum poetices peritissimus particularly commended him to his fellow-physician Siôn Dafydd Rhys. Thomas Leyson’s Latin poem in praise of St Donat’s has not survived. Siôn Dafydd Rhys’s translation of the poem into Welsh verse has, however, been preserved, in his own hand, in a slightly damaged manuscript which is now in the National Library of Wales.16 The Welsh version is well over a hundred lines and, although there is no indication of the metre of the original Latin work, the length of line and grand linguistic register of Siôn Dafydd Rhys’s composition suggest that the poem was either in elegiacs or in stichic hexameters. Thomas Leyson begins with an address, from Oxford, to Edward Stradling, recalling how St Donat’s and its buildings are as well known to him as are their own homes to those who live in them. Praise is bestowed on Edward Stradling and his wife and their generous hospitality recalled. Two themes in particular are developed in relation to the site. First, as was indicated by Siôn Dafydd Rhys’s Latin summary, the buildings and sea defences at St Donat’s are praised, and comparisons are made with maritime sites which are resonant with both classical and contemporary associations: As stood Carthage, and as you Corinth stand replete with great riches, as the beautiful courts of the Venetians and their numbers stand in the middle of the briny deep, for so long may it last, the dwelling built on a rock in the sea. For ever and ever may this location of yours stand unimpaired, longer than stood Carthage without sinking and great Troy without punishment (for they were both destroyed through fate’s necessity). Let your sea-rocks be blessed with no less success and prosperity than is the daily increase in wealth which daily comes to the Venetians’ courts. Without cause for fright, and while life remains, let the sea around St Donat’s bring to land here an abundance of riches, conveyed from the ends of the whole earth.

The other main theme in Thomas Leyson’s poem is praise of the garden at St Donat’s, its terraces and plants. Sir Edward is complimented on

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Ceri Davies ‘dy ardh newydh’ (‘your new garden’). The garden is sheltered by walls and stonework against the extremities of cold and heat, its flowers and plants are a wonder to see: The multicoloured garden is radiant with a variety of beautiful flowers, a feast for the eyes. Here one finds six varieties of wine-producing grapes, nards, amomum, roses and lilies fair to behold. Here the bees work at making the best honey.

Classical allusions continue to abound. The sea-god Neptune and the sea-goddess Thetis leave the deep to visit the garden, perhaps a suggestion that its statuary included images of the two deities.17 The bees and their honey evoke Aristaeus and the bougonia of Georgics 4 (‘yscrybyl Aristaews’), while the golden apples (‘abhalev ereid’), the result of the planting and cultivation of the eques auratus Edward Stradling and his wife, recall the golden apples of the garden of the Hesperides. The encomium ends with the poet’s claim that it would be easier to steal Hercules’ club or Jupiter’s thunderbolt or Homer’s excellent muse than it is to bestow adequate praise on Edward Stradling’s orchard.18 Edward Stradling and his wife were childless, no doubt a matter of sadness to a man proud of what he believed (albeit mistakenly) ‘to be his family’s  unbroken lineal descent from one of the original twelve knights who conquered Glamorgan’.19 He had long identified as his successor a member of a collateral branch of the Stradling family, and so in 1609 St Donat’s and the estate passed to Sir John Stradling (1563-1637), who shared the same great-grandfather as Sir Edward (although he always referred to the older man as an uncle).20 The familial bond between them was made stronger by the fact that John Stradling’s wife Elizabeth (née Gage, of Firle in Sussex), whom he married in 1599, was a niece of Sir Edward’s wife Agnes (also née Gage). John Stradling was one of at least eight children of Francis and Elizabeth Stradling, of the parish of St George’s (Easton-in-Gordano) near Bristol. From the school attached to Bristol Cathedral he went up to Oxford, where he was held, according to Anthony à Wood, ‘a miracle for his forwardness in learning and pregnancy of parts’.21 Like Edward Stradling he studied at the Inns of Court and also went on a Grand Tour in Europe. He too was to play a major rôle in the political and administrative affairs of Glamorgan, and is particularly remembered to this day as the founder of Cowbridge School, the first endowed grammar school in the county.22 Above all John Stradling’s interests were in learning and literature, and he was a not inconsiderable writer and poet, in both English and Latin. His education and experience drew him to the same humanist preoccupations which had so engaged Sir Edward, and for these rea-

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13. Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens sons too ‘it is not perhaps surprising that he should have been chosen as his older relation’s heir’.23 It is clear that John Stradling was a regular presence at St Donat’s long before he inherited the estate. Siôn Dafydd Rhys ends a letter addressed to Sir Edward in July 1592 (the year in which his ‘Maecenas’ generously ensured the publication of the Welsh Grammar) with good wishes to his patron and his wife ‘and hartye comendacions to Mr John Stradlinge’.24 As a student in Oxford, the younger Stradling had been drawn to the De Constantia Libri Duo (1584) of the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius (Joest Lips) and its Christianised version of Stoicism. In 1594 he produced, in five weeks, an English translation of Lipsius’ work, as a gift for Sir Edward, who determined to have the work printed.25 The ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’, addressed to Edward Stradling, was written ‘[f]rom my chamber in your castle of St Donatts’ and dated 13 June 1594. Likewise the ‘Epistle to the Reader’, dated 24 August 1594, is ‘[f]rom the castle of Saint Donatts’.26 The printing of John Stradling’s version of De Constantia, which Lipsius produced in the face of the turmoil of the religious wars on the continent and which takes the form of a dialogue between the author and an older friend, Carolus Langius (Charles de Langhe), presented English readers for the first time with what came to be established as the seminal introduction to Neostoic teaching on facing emotional distress. For John Stradling himself, staying in St Donat’s and translating Lipsius may also have had therapeutic connotations of a more personal nature. Two years after producing Two Bookes of Constancie he completed another prose work, this time his own, written in Latin. It too presents a dialogue between an older and a younger man; its address to the reader is written e castro Donataeo Stradlingorum apud Siluras (‘from the castle of the Stradlings at St Donat’s in South Wales’ – literally ‘among the Silures’) and is dated 12 June 1596; it is dedicated to the older Stradling, greeted as vitae meae praesidium, Eduarde Stradlinge, Eques illustrissime. A year later the work was published, in Frankfurt: De Vita et Morte Contemnenda, Libri Duo (‘On treating both life and death as of no importance, two books’).27 The treatment of the theme is that of Christianised Stoicism, and the book is clearly inspired by Lipsius’ work.28 This time, however, John Stradling reveals something of his own experience and emotional trauma. He takes the reader back ‘nearly two years’, i.e. to the year when Two Bookes of Constancie was completed:29 Fere biennium est, cum fraternas aedes in agro Somersettensi anniuersarius hospes, solatii pariter ac sodalitii causa ex more inuiserem. Quae illic oblectatio animorum? Quae sensuum delectatio? Quanta beatitatis

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Ceri Davies fruitio nobis inter nos? Coniectet is, cui (praeter suauissimos sodales, amicos, affines, cognatos) germanarum insuper, et fratrum germanorum, complurium simul iucundissimo consortio et colloquio frui licuit. Ego imprudens ver nobis benignum arridere suspicabar; sed heu fluxam foelicitatem! Nam ex improuiso solstitium instat, et ad occasum Phoebus noster festinabat. Ecce enim derepente praeceps (fati dixerim, an fortunae?) flatus, non quatuor domus angulos concussit, sed ipsum fundamentum penitus conuulsit, glorem scilicet mellitissimam ANNAM STROUDAM, boni parentis optimam prolem, decus familiae suae delicias nostrae, lectissimam faeminam: praeter naturam, praeter aetatem, praeter opinionem; virtute, pietate, constantia suspiciendam. Durum inter caeteros mihi, quem vnice prae caeteris adamauit, visum est hoc telum: Verum mox aliud recta in me mittitur. Ad aegritudinem animi magna corporis accessit infirmitas. Haec dum acrius instaret, omnem anteactae vitae fructum, futurae spem praeripuit. Nearly two years have passed since I was a guest on an annual visit to my brother’s house in Somerset; going on such a visit has been my custom, as much for consolation as for companionship. What pleasure for minds was there? What delight for the senses? How great was our enjoyment of supreme happiness in each other’s company? One who can guess the answers is one who has been privileged to go beyond even the most welcome fellowship of companions, friends, relations and kinsmen and has enjoyed the delightful company and conversation of many of his own sisters and brothers, all together in the same place. I, for my part, was unwise enough to imagine that a beneficent spring was smiling upon us. But alas for our transitory good fortune! Without warning the solstice is upon us, and our sun-god Phoebus began hastening towards his setting. For look, all of a sudden a headlong blast – am I to call it a blast of fate, or of fortune? – did not just ‘smite the four corners of the house’ [Job 1:19] but completely undermined its very foundation. I refer to [the death of] my sister-in-law, Anne Stroud, sweetest of the sweet, the best offspring of a good father, the glory of her own family and the darling of ours, the most choice of women; who surpassed nature, surpassed her age, surpassed her own reputation; who won our esteem for her virtue, piety and constancy. Everyone felt it, but this struck me as a severe shaft: for she loved me greatly, to a singular degree in comparison with the others. Soon, however, another shaft was directed straight against me. In addition to sickness of mind, I was assailed by great infirmity of the body. As this pressed in more intensely upon me, it snatched from me all pleasure I had derived from life before that time and all hope for life in the future.

The dear sister-in-law whose sudden death so affected John Stradling was Anne (née Stroud), the wife of his older brother Edmund, who had inherited the family home at Easton-in-Gordano when his father died in 1589. John Stradling’s tribute, no less moving for the rhetorical skill with which it is crafted, betokens a sensitive man (mihi, quem vnice prae caeteris adamauit) who stood in need of solatium as well as sodalitium and for whose vulnerability Anne Stroud’s virtus, pietas and (notice) constantia had provided sanctuary. The trauma of his unex-

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13. Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens pected bereavement led to profound mental depression and physical illness. The paragraph proceeds: Sed diuinam veneremur prouidentiam, quae quos saluos velit, eisdem idonea salutis instrumenta destinauit. His quidem ista, illis alia. Mihi quem maxime omnium vellem, IOANNEM DAVIDEM RHAESUM, Cambrobritannum, medicum SENENSEM, nouum antiquae Britannicae linguae lumen, Galenum nostrum; hominem mihi cum veteri amicitia, tum recentis officii vinculis coniunctissimum. Is vbi lecto me decumbentem vidit (insperatus huc, sed opportune aduenerat), blande affatus senex, patientiam ingerens pauculis consolatus est. Glory be, however, to divine providence, which has set in place suitable instruments of salvation for those whom it wishes to be saved: different instruments to serve the needs of different people. For me, providence’s chosen instrument was the man whom I would wish for most of all, the Cambro-Briton SIÔN DAFYDD RHYS, physician from Siena, the new guiding light on the ancient British language, our Galen: a man who could not be closer to me, both on account of our old friendship and because of the bonds of his recent act of kindness which tie me to him. When he saw me lying on my bed (he had come here unexpectedly, but at the right moment as far as I was concerned), the old man spoke to me gently, he exercised patience and consoled me with just a few words.

The visitor who comes huc (i.e. to St Donat’s) and appears at the sick man’s bedside is none other than the Siôn Dafydd Rhys who was the beneficiary of Sir Edward Stradling’s patronage in the 1580s and 1590s. From the beginning of De Vita et Morte Contemnenda a picture begins to emerge of Rhys in his professional rôle as ‘physician from Siena’ and as ‘our Galen’. John Stradling goes on to portray himself as one who, in response to the visitor’s gentle approach, reacted in a totally demented manner (plus aequo impos animi): Migrandum est ex hac vita? Linquenda tam bella sita Donati sedes? Morte multandum hoc caput? (‘Must one depart from this life? Must one leave the – o! so beautiful – site of St Donat’s? Must one be faced with the penalty of death?’) The sick man’s complaint continues over many more sentences, until finally (at the beginning of chapter 2) he lies back in exhaustion (cum sermone fatigatus paulum me reclinassem), and his Galen is given an opportunity to begin applying a remedy. The situation echoes, in many respects, the opening scene of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and the visit of personified Philosophy to the prisoner’s bedside. The time will come when the patient will be strong enough for proper healing to begin (collige te paulisper, donec opportunum medicinae tempus adueniat). Meanwhile, let his friend play ‘Dauides’ (David, in Welsh Dafydd, the doctor’s middle name) to his King Saul.30

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Ceri Davies So De Vita et Morte Contemnenda unfolds, a work of a hundred and twenty-three pages, in the form of a dialogue, in two books, between the older and the younger man. In the blending of Christian and Stoic teaching in the face of all that life and death can throw at us, Lipsius’ De Constantia is clearly the model, with Siôn Dafydd Rhys corresponding to Langius as senex and John Stradling in a rôle similar to that of Lipsius, although Christian emphases are more prominent in De Vita et Morte Contemnenda. Whatever conversations took place between the sick Stradling and Siôn Dafydd Rhys, they have been subsumed within the work into a literary and philosophical colloquy. There is no doubting, however, the reality of the crisis which overtook John Stradling. At the end of the second book, in the Conclusio libelli ad patronum (‘Conclusion of the book, addressed to my patron’), he says that he undertook the writing of the work when he had started to recover (Postquam igitur conualescere occeperam  ad scribendum me protinus accingo). He, and the book, both belong, more than ever, to Edward Stradling: Tuum enim iure est, qui ipse tuus sum. Any faults in the book are not to be attributed to Siôn Dafydd Rhys, the dialogue’s wise senex, but rather to the writer’s failure of memory, which was considerably weakened by his illness (a morbo quanto debilior).31 John Stradling’s De Vita et Morte Contemnenda adds a new dimension to our knowledge of Sir Edward’s heir at a critical time in his life. It also enriches the picture of the social life of St Donat’s and its dulce colloquium. It is not entirely surprising that the single congratulatory poem that the book contains is a Latin epigram of five elegiac couplets (Ad Ioannem Stradlingum, De Libello Suo) by the other doctor-poet connected with St Donat’s, Thomas Leyson.32 Whether or not Thomas Leyson had seen a manuscript of De Vita et Morte Contemnenda is another matter. In the poem John Stradling is compared to Cicero, writing his philosophical works at the end of his life. Ille senex: at tu iuuenis, ‘he was an old man, whereas you are young’, is one of a number of complimentary observations which are meant to underline the achievement of the work, but which hardly engage with its real substance. John Stradling clearly overcame the illness of the early 1590s. In 1599 he and Elizabeth Gage were married, and they went on to have thirteen children, among them sons who attained high ranks in the navy and the army and one son, George, who became Dean of Chichester Cathedral. John Stradling himself was knighted, in 1608, a year before he inherited St Donat’s and the estate from his uncle. Even before Sir Edward’s death he had been increasingly involved in the public affairs of the county of Glamorgan, as ‘was to be expected of the heir to one of its two or three leading families’.33 In 1611 he became one

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13. Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens of the first baronets in Glamorgan, when baronetcies were created under James I. His loyalty to King James was later to be displayed in a long poem in English, ‘Beati Pacifici: A Divine Poem Written to the Kings Most Excellent Maiestie’ (1623).34 He was also a member of several parliaments in the 1620s. Care for the St Donat’s estate and its environs was as important to him as it had been to his uncle, and a treatise which he wrote for his uncle is a lively account of a territorial dispute in which Sir Edward was involved.35 Of all John Stradling’s writings,36 the most engaging are some of the Latin poems in his Epigrammatum Libri Quatuor (published in 1607), a collection that has not received much scholarly attention.37 The poems are largely undated, although the four books seem to follow a roughly chronological order. During his years in London John Stradling had gained the friendship of Sir John Harington, and three poems (beginning with a poem dated 1590) are addressed to Harington (1.74; 2.101; 4.8).38 Likewise, friendship with the antiquarian William Camden is acknowledged (2.65).39 Some of the few cross-references in the printed text of Epigrammatum Libri Quatuor are to Camden’s Britannia. Also complimented (4.90)40 is John Owen, from the Llyn peninsula in north Wales, the first collection of whose Latin epigrams was published in 1606 and whose poems were destined to become hugely popular, not only in Britain, but also on the continent.41 A large group of John Stradling’s poems is concerned with his family and friends. His affection for his brothers and sisters, wife and children, abounds. Many poems go well beyond the conventions of the pithy epigram and are windows which reveal their author’s sensitive nature. In an epitaph for his parents, Francis and Elizabeth Stradling, he recognises the danger that an overwhelming sense of grief will drive him over the edge of insanity (Quae, Stradlinge, tuum torquet dementia pectus?, 1.54.11).42 A long lament, of forty hendecasyllabic verses, is devoted to the memory of his sister-in-law Anne Stroud (2.13.26-31):43 Haec me corde suo fouebat, illam Sed plus corde meopte diligebam. Quae praesens oculos meos beabat: Absente hac miseri rubent ocelli. Sic o vos oculique corque moestum Hoc desiderio liquescitote.

30

In her heart she cherished me, but more than my own heart did I love her. With her presence she gladdened my eyes: now that she is absent, my wretched eyes grow red. So, you eyes and sad heart, become liquid with this sense of longing.

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Ceri Davies Among the many friends, associated with St Donat’s, who are addressed are the two doctors, Thomas Leyson and Siôn Dafydd Rhys. Six poems are to, or about, Thomas Leyson, four in the first book; of the four, three (1.12; 25; 61) are concerned with Leyson’s successful medical ministrations, all of which may point to the poet’s concern about his health, especially in the first half of the 1590s.44 More interesting are two epigrams addressed to Siôn Dafydd Rhys. One (1.60) is a short piece to accompany the gift of a copy of De Vita et Morte Contemnenda, the dialogue in which Stradling and Rhys are the two interlocutors.45 The other poem breathes respect and friendship for the older man, reaching a climax in the simple, but effective, chiastic juxtaposition of Ipse tibi, mihi tu in the last line. The poem is prominently placed, early in the first book, immediately (apart from a poem addressed to Sir Francis Drake) after poems to Sir Edward and Lady Agnes Stradling and before a poem to Thomas Leyson. Undertones of the writer’s gratitude for help in a time of need are unmistakable (1.11):46 AD IOHANNEM DAVIDEM RHAESVM MONENSEM, MEDICVM SENENSEM, AMICVM Rhaese, mihi charos venerabilis inter amicos Canitie, fida sed probitate magis, Mona cui natale solum, Britannia stirpem, Italia ingenium, Sena deditque gradum, Hanc tibi Stradlingus chartam pro munere mittit, Dona (senex) iuuenis qualiacunque cape. Europa quanuis peragrata, Rhaese, noteris, Forsan at hac charta notior esse potes. Sed pereant chartae, expungatur quicquid in illis. Ipse tibi, mihi tu pectore charus eris.

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Rhys, among my dear friends venerable for your grey hair but more for your loyal integrity, to whom Anglesey gave your native soil, the country of the Britons [Wales] your lineage, Italy your skill and Siena your degree: Stradling sends you this page in place of a gift. Old man, accept a young man’s offerings, such as they are. Although you are known for having travelled throughout Europe, perhaps you can be even better known because of this page. But let pages perish, let what is in them be blotted out: still I shall be dear to you, to me you will be dear in my heart.

As one might expect, the individual who is addressed most of all in John Stradling’s epigrams is his uncle, Sir Edward Stradling. Ten poems are to him, beginning with Ad Dominum Edwardum Stradlingum Avunculum, Equestris Ordinis Cambrobritannum early in the first book (1.8)47 and continuing through to near the end of the fourth book, Ad egregium et omni virtute insignem Dominum Edwardum Stradlingum Equitem

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13. Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens anno aetatis suae 78, animi corporisque vigore pollentem, avunculum sibi praecharissimum (4.123).48 Many poems commemorate the engineering works undertaken by Sir Edward, among them the project of building an aqueduct, on the mouth of the River Ogmore at Merthyr Mawr (to the west of St Donat’s) (2.9), and the construction of a sea wall at Aberthaw (to the east) (4.62).49 Such undertakings involved, however, a running battle with the sea (3.3),50 and a sequence of poems in the fourth book recalls extraordinarily violent storms and flooding along the Severn in January 1607 which led, among other disasters, to the destruction of the newly built sea wall at Aberthaw (4.98).51 Among the most attractive of John Stradling’s poems are those concerned with St Donat’s Castle itself, its buildings and immediate environment. Years of living there as a young man and his uncle’s hospitality were an inspiration to him, and the example of Thomas Leyson’s poem in praise of St Donat’s and its garden was also a likely stimulus. A poem in hendecasyllables is given especially to the vineyard which Sir Edward planted (1.40).52 Pre-eminent is a poem of thirty-four lines, in hexameters,53 which is dedicated (like the poem before it, hence ‘AD EUNDEM’) to Edward Stradling and forms the climax of the first book (1.120):54 AD EUNDEM: HORTI SUI DONATAEI DESCRIPTIO Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens Donati auspiciis fundato, in valle profunda, Nimbosas vergens Austri pluuialis ad oras: Quem quondam cupide Dryades coluere puellae, Nymphae syluestres, et agrestia numina Fauni. Elatis primum saxis insignis, et orno, Incultis spissae crescebant sentibus umbrae: Sedes lasciuis dudum bene nota capellis, Cuniculis leuibus, syluasque colentibus apris. Iam vice mutata, tanquam deus ipse fabrilis Mulciber, in terram coelo delapsus ab alto, Auspicio coepisset opus (mirabile dictu!), Planities spatiosa subest, quae fertilis herbis, Inter vtrumque nemus vultu speciosa renidet: Lymphaque curuoso transcurrens tramite syluam Terminat, et tandem vasto se gurgite condit. Post, hortum interior succingit murus, ouantes Propellens ceruos vilesque a floribus haedos. Ac murum grato vestit velamine circum Vuida vinoso sacratum vitis Iaccho. Vtque decus castae niueis emblema lacertis Matronae, vt digitis aurei praemollibus orbes, Atque inter turpes fulgescit gemma lapillos, Sic praematuri splendent in vite racemi.

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Ceri Davies Singula quid memorem? Stant circunquaque columnae Materia insignes, atque insuper arte micantes, Dulcibus in medio respirat flatibus aura. Hic ver perpetuum, varios hic divite tellus Largitur vena flores, hic gramina circum Pallentes violas et lilia candida Nymphis Fundit humus, gratasque creat mortalibus herbas: Quas neque regalis fastidit mensa tyranni, Nec fugit vt nocuas medicinae inuentor Apollo, Nec suauem Cytheraea Venus contemnit odorem.

25

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There is a place, sloping down an inclining cliff away from the castle founded under Donat’s auspices, and in a deep valley it touches upon the storm-swept shores that are drenched by the rain-bringing South Wind. In former times maiden Dryads eagerly inhabited this place, woodland Nymphs and Fauns, divinities of the fields. At first it was noted for its high rocks and mountain-ash, and untrimmed briers caused the shades to grow ever thicker and thicker; for a long time it was to frisky goats, nimble rabbits and forest-dwelling wild boars that the place was well known. Now its fortune is quite changed, as if Mulciber, the builder-god [Vulcan] himself, had descended to earth from high heaven and had by his authority (a wonder to relate!) set the work going. Lower down there is a spacious level area, luxuriant with grass and resplendently beautiful to behold, with groves on either side. A stream, flowing past in its curving channel, marks the end of the wood, and finally loses itself in the vast deep. Next, there is the garden, surrounded by an inner wall which keeps triumphing deer and common goats away from the flowers. With its welcome covering a juicy vine clothes the wall around and makes it sacred to Iacchus, the wine-god. As a bracelet is an embellishment for the snow-white arms of a chaste lady, as gold rings are an adornment on tender fingers and as a pearl gleams among cheap stones, so too the early clusters of grapes gleam on the vine. Need I mention each detail? On every side stand columns made of wonderful material, glowing beyond measure for their art; in their midst the breeze blows gently with sweet gusts. Here spring is perpetual, here the land bountifully bestows a rich crop of flowers of many kinds, here in honour of the Nymphs the earth pours forth, bordering on the grass, pale violets and white lilies, and for mortals it produces herbs that are pleasing. These the royal table of a monarch does not spurn; Apollo, author of the art of healing, does not avoid them as if they were hurtful; nor does Cytherean Venus disdain their delightful fragrance.

The poem, as its title announces, is a descriptio, introduced by the Est locus formula, the familiar signal of topographical ekphrasis in Virgil (Aeneid 1.530; 3.161; 7.563). Virgilian echoes do not end with the opening two words. From the opening nine lines alone, in valle profunda (2) carries echoes of Georgics 2.391, Austri pluuialis (3) of Georgics 3.429, incultis  sentibus (7) of Eclogue 4.29, lasciuis  capellis (8)

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13. Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens of Eclogue 2.64. Most striking of all is the patchwork effect, in lines 4-5, of words from the opening passage of the Georgics (1.10-12): et vos, agrestium praesentia numina, Fauni (ferte simul Faunique pedem Dryadesque puellae: munera vestra cano). you too, Fauns, divinities present to help men who work the fields (join together in the dance, Fauns and maiden Dryads: your gifts I sing).

The Virgilian resonances are part of the neo-Latin poet’s display of his literary credentials, and it is not surprising that the Georgics are in the poet’s mind as he contemplates the horticultural and agricultural transformation (vice mutata, 10) of the landscape wrought by Edward Stradling.55 Nor does classical – and Virgilian – colouring stop there. The ancient gods also enter the scene. Sir Edward’s achievement is as if Vulcan, Mulciber (Aeneid 8.724), has been at work (10-11); the wall surrounding the garden is made sacred, by the vine growing on it, to the wine-god (19-20; for vitis Iaccho, cf. Eclogue 7.61); perpetual spring and flowers bordering the grass (28-9) come as a pastiche of the tricolon crescendo in Eclogue 9.40-1 (hic ver purpureum, varios hic flumina circum | fundit humus flores, hic ), while the garden’s produce is disdained by neither Apollo nor Venus (33-4). One might, then, view John Stradling’s poem as a pleasing, but not unconventional, reworking of classical themes and references, with nice touches of the descriptive style. (Several lines – e.g. 3, 7, 8, 13, 34 – present the usual variations on the ‘Golden Line’.) There is more, however, to this work. True, its evocation of a locus amoenus takes the classical reader back, via Tiberianus and the Augustan poets, to the garden of Alcinous in the Odyssey. But this is also a modern poem, belonging to its own day. On account of its detailed and accurate description of the gardens at St Donat’s, a description which ‘still holds good today’, it is regarded as ‘of enormous importance for Tudor gardens in Britain’.56 John Stradling’s poem portrays not only an idyllic scene, but also a kind of garden which in its configuration was very new in Britain. Certainly there was a formal and organised aspect to St Donat’s, with its terraces and columns and statuary: this is ars, as is emphasised about the columnae, which are insuper arte micantes (‘glowing beyond measure for their art’, 26). There are also walled gardens (17), keeping nature under control so that it gives of its bounty. But there is also beyond, in the valley, a further, less regulated area: a stream, groves on either side, deer and goats (14-18). From where did the idea of such a garden, combining the artificial and the natural, come? The inspiration for the geometric formality of

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Ceri Davies some of the early Tudor gardens, pre-eminently those at Hampton Court, came largely from France and from the royal gardens designed for François I.57 However, the Grand Tour had taken Edward Stradling, like so many other Tudor gentlemen, to Italy, the ultimate source of all Renaissance gardens. There Pirro Ligorio, designer of the garden of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli in the mid-sixteenth century, ‘retained the classical contrast between the more formal, cultivated parts of the garden and the wilder, informal parts’, a principle which was to be followed ‘and extended on an even larger scale later in the century in the two Medici gardens of Boboli and Pratolino’.58 Edward Stradling had, of course, to work with the topography of the Glamorgan coast, but in planning his own garden at St Donat’s he was, I suggest, directly inspired by what he experienced during his time in Italy. A relevant commentary on the combination at St Donat’s of symmetry and irregularity may come from the words of Sir Henry Wotton, ambassador to Venice in the early seventeenth century. It is thought that Wotton may be alluding to the garden at Pratolino:59 First I must note a certaine contrarietie betweene building and gardening: For as Fabriques should bee regular, so Gardens should bee irregular, or at least cast into a very wilde Regularitie. To exemplify my conceit; I have seene a Garden (for the maner perchance incomparable) into which the first Accesse was a high walke like a Tarrace, from whence might bee taken a generall view of the whole Plott below but rather in a delightfull confusion, then with any plaine distinction of the pieces. From this the Beholder descending many steps, was afterwards conveyed againe, by severall mountings and valings, to various entertainments of his sent, and sight: which I shall not neede to describe (for that were poeticall) let me only note this, that every one of these diversities, was as if hee had beene Magically transported into a new Garden.

John Stradling, being ‘poeticall’, has felt impelled to describe! There is yet a further dimension to the poem. Its position, at the end of the first book, comes after De Ferrea Aetate (‘The Age of Iron’), an even longer hexameter poem, of sixty-nine lines, also dedicated to Sir Edward Stradling. The poet’s censure of the Age of Iron is replete with classical allusion and ends with a call upon those who worship the gods to learn the justice of their fathers and the ways of their ancestors. Then the Age of Iron will be put to flight (1.119.68-9),60 Paulatimque nouos reparabunt omnia vultus, Aurea dum seris resplendent secula natis. Gradually everything will restore its appearance, made all new, as the Golden Age shines brightly for those born late in time.

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13. Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens These lines are followed immediately by the Est locus poem describing St Donat’s and its garden. Sir Edward’s creation is not only a horticultural achievement; it also stands for reparatio, the restoration of the balanced way of life of a Golden Age. The most telling commentary on the significance of a garden as the scene not only of aesthetic satisfaction but also of mental and psychological restoration comes from the first three chapters of Book 2 of Justus Lipsius’ De Constantia, the work which John Stradling himself translated. Langius leads his interlocutor into his garden, and Lipsius is overwhelmed by its attractiveness and beauty. I quote from John Stradling’s version:61 In the very entrance as I cast my eyes about with a wandering curiositie, woondring with my selfe at the elegancie and beautie of the place: My Sire (saide I) what pleasantnesse and brauerie is this? You haue heauen here (Langius) and no garden: Neither doe the glittering starres shine clearer in a faire night, than your fine flowers glistering and shewing their collours with varietie.

Such praise of Langius’ garden, and of fine gardens in general, continues, until ‘then spake Langius softlie vnto me’. He warns his companion that gardens can become the occasion of vanity and idleness. If, however, they are properly appreciated,62 [b]eholde (Lipsius) the true end and vse of gardens: to wit, quietnes, withdrawing from the world, meditation, reading, writing: and all this, as it were, by way of recreation & sport. As painters hauing dimmed their eies with long and earnest beholding their work, do recomfort them with certain glasses or green collours[,] so here may we refresh our wearied and wandring minds.

John Stradling, it seems, had known weariness and wandering of mind. St Donat’s and its garden meant much in his experience, not only for the ‘beautie of the place’ but also for the recreation, recomforture and refreshment of spirit which the locus and its society brought him. In the early 1590s the untimely death of Anne Stroud had brought to an abrupt end the ver benignum which he had enjoyed: Phoebus, as sun-god, had hurried the year’s course towards winter.63 Now, however, Cytheraea Venus – the goddess who, in the first of Horace’s spring odes, memorably presides over the relaxing of the grip of harsh winter (acris hiems) as spring makes its welcome return (grata vice veris)64 – is a willing presence in the garden at St Donat’s. As for Apollo, he no longer assumes the guise of the sun-god whose advance puts an end to joy. On the contrary, he comes as the author of the art of healing (medicinae inuentor) to a garden in which mortals, whose delight it is, experience nothing other than ver perpetuum.

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Ceri Davies Notes r

1. Rhys 1592: sig. *2 . 2. On Rhys, who is sometimes also known as ‘Dr John Davies (of Brecon)’, see Gruffydd 1973; 1992; Williams 2010: 84-7. 3. Williams 2008: 194-6. 4. Facsimile reprint in Maraschio 1992: 93-193; discussion in Griffith 1961: 10-20. 5. Sutcliffe 1983. 6. Jones 1983: 69. 7. Williams 1960; 1983; Griffiths 1963. 8. Williams 1983: 29-37; Lewis 1993; Williams 2010: 87-92. 9. Wynne 1812: xxv-xlvi; James 1983: 147-64. 10. Traherne 1840: 314. 11. Rhys 1592: sigs. *2v-3r. 12. Rhys 1592: sig. *2v. 13. Whittle 1999. 14. ODNB (2004-11): s.v. Leyson, Thomas. 15. Wood 1691: col. 296. 16. NLW MS Peniarth 118, 11-19. For the Welsh text, see Williams 1926: 226-9. Williams 2010: 95 points out that the metrical version is followed (NLW MS Peniarth 118, 19-25) by a less elaborate prose version. 17. Williams 2010: 97. 18. Williams 1926: 229. 19. Williams 1983: 37. 20. Williams 1973. 21. Wood 1691: col. 429. 22. Davies 1967: 15-16. 23. Pursglove 2003: Introduction §3. 24. Traherne 1840: 315. 25. Stradling 1595. A reprint, with introduction (and notes by C.M. Hall), is Kirk 1939. Sellars 2006 does not include John Stradling’s prefatory material. 26. Stradling 1595: sigs. A2v, A4r. 27. Stradling 1597. The date of the address to the reader is on sig. A3r, the dedication to Edward Stradling on sig. A3v (= p. 6). 28. Monsarrat 1984: 58-9. 29. Stradling 1597: 6-7. 30. Stradling 1597: 7-9. 31. Stradling 1597: 122-3. 32. Stradling 1597: sig. A1v. 33. Williams 1973: 14. 34. Pursglove 2003. 35. Randall and Rees 1932. 36. In addition to the works mentioned in the text of this paper, his œuvre includes another volume of English poetry, Divine Poems (1625) and some works still in manuscript, among them a translation of selections of the work of Guicciardini. See Thomas 1985-6: 412; Williams 2010: 87. 37. Bradner 1940: 85-6; Davies 1981: 40-6; Sutton 2001. 38. Stradling 1607: 32; 82; 137-8. The numbering (book and poem) given within the text follows that of Sutton 2001, the footnote reference gives the page number in the 1607 edition of Epigrammatum Libri Quatuor.

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13. Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens 39. Stradling 1607: 70. On Camden see Angus Vine’s chapter in this volume. 40. Stradling 1607: 156. 41. See the introduction to this volume. 42. Stradling 1607: 23. 43. Stradling 1607: 54. 44. Stradling 1607: 5, 8-10, 16. 45. Stradling 1607: 26-7. 46. Stradling 1607: 4-5. 47. Stradling 1607: 3. 48. Stradling 1607: 170. 49. Stradling 1607: 50; 151-2. 50. Stradling 1607: 92. 51. Stradling 1607: 161-2. 52. Stradling 1607: 18-19. 53. Stradling 1607: 44-5. Cytheraea (line 34) is an emendation of Cytharaea (Stradling 1607: 45). 54. The poem is followed by only two four-line epigrams, one addressed to the reader, the other to the bookseller. Stradling may at one time have intended that the first book be published on its own. 55. On Virgil’s importance for landscape gardening in Britain, especially from the middle of the seventeenth century, see Chambers 1993: 12-32. 56. Whittle 1999: 109. 57. Strong 1979: 23-33. 58. Strong 1979: 21. 59. Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (1624), 109-10, quoted in Hunt and Willis (1988): 48. 60. Stradling 1607: 42-4 (44). 61. Stradling 1595: 59. 62. Stradling 1595: 65-6. 63. Stradling 1597: 6-7. See p. 216 above. 64. Horace, Carmina 1.4.1, 5. Horace also has Vulcanus ardens (line 8), Stradling’s deus ipse fabrilis | Mulciber, resume his tasks in springtime.

Bibliography Primary sources Rhys, Siôn Dafydd (1592) Cambrobrytannicae Cymraecaeve linguae institutiones et rudimenta. London. Stradling, John (1595) Two Bookes of Constancie. Written in Latine, by Iustus Lipsius.  Englished by John Stradling, Gentleman. London. [Publication, according to the volume’s imprint, was in 1594; but 1595 is more likely, the date borne by the colophon.] Stradling, John (1597) De Vita et Morte Contemnenda, Libri Duo. Quorum prior vitae, posterior mortis contemptum speciatim suadet: Familiari colloquio, perspicua methodo, succincta breuitate. Ad egregium & illustrem virum Edvvardum Stradlingum, Equitem auratum. Authore, Ioanne Stradlingo. Frankfurt. Stradling, John (1607) Ioannis Stradlingi Epigrammatum Libri Quatuor. London.

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Ceri Davies Secondary sources Bradner, L. (1940) Musae Anglicanae: A History of Anglo-Latin Poetry 15001925. New York and London (The Modern Language Association of America, General Series X). Chambers, D. (1993) The Planters of the English Landscape Garden: Botany, Trees, and the Georgics. New Haven and London. Davies, C. (1981) Latin Writers of the Renaissance. Cardiff (Writers of Wales). Davies, I.D. (1967) ‘A Certaine School’: a History of the Grammar School at Cowbridge, Glamorgan. Cowbridge. Denning, R. (ed.) (1983) The Story of St. Donat’s Castle and Atlantic College. Cowbridge. Griffith, T.G. (1961) Avventure linguistiche del Cinquecento. Florence. Griffiths, R.A. (1963) ‘The Rise of the Stradlings of St. Donat’s’, Morgannwg 7: 15-47. Gruffydd, R.G. (1973) ‘The Life of Dr John Davies of Brecon’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion Session 1971: 175-90. Gruffydd, R.G. (1992) ‘Dr John Davies, “the old man of Brecknock” ’, Archaeologia Cambrensis 141: 1-13. Hunt, J.D. and Willis, P. (eds) (1988) The Genius of Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820. Cambridge, MA and London. James, B.Ll. (ed.) (1983) Rice Merrick: Morganiae Archaiographia. Barry. Jones, H.C. (1983) ‘W.R. Hearst and St. Donat’s’, in Denning 1983: 69-83. Kirk, R. (ed.) (1939) Two Bookes of Constancie. Written in Latine, by Iustus Lipsius.  Englished by John Stradling, Gentleman. New Brunswick. Lewis, C.W. (1993) ‘Syr Edward Stradling (1529-1609), y “Marchog Disgleirlathr” o Sain Dunwyd’, in J.E.C. Williams (ed.) Ysgrifau Beirniadol XIX, 139-207. Denbigh. Maraschio, N. (ed.) (1992) Trattati di fonetica del Cinquecento. Florence. Monsarrat, G.D. (1984) Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature. Paris. ODNB (2004-11) [Oxford Dictionary of National Biography]. Oxford. Pursglove, G. (ed.) (2003) Sir John Stradling: Beati Pacifici. A Hypertext Critical Edition (The Philological Museum). http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/strad/2. Randall, H.J. and Rees, W. (eds) (1932) The Storie of the Lower Borowes of Merthyrmawr, by John Stradling (1598-1601). Cardiff (South Wales and Monmouth Record Society, Publications 1). Sellars, J. (ed.) (2006) Justus Lipsius On Constancy. De Constantia translated by Sir John Stradling. Exeter. Strong, R. (1979) The Renaissance Garden in England. London. Sutcliffe, D. (1983) ‘The First Twenty Years of the United World Colleges’, in Denning 1983: 85-118. Sutton, D.F. (ed.) (2001) John Stradling: Epigrammatum Libri Quatuor (1607). A Hypertext Critical Edition (The Philological Museum). http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/stradling/. Thomas, G. (1985-6) ‘The Stradling Library at St. Donat’s, Glamorgan’, National Library of Wales Journal 24: 402-19. Traherne, J.M. (ed.) (1840) Stradling Correspondence: A Series of Letters Written in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. London. Whittle, E. (1999) ‘The Tudor Gardens of St Donat’s Castle, Glamorgan, South

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13. Est locus a castro decliui rupe recedens Wales’, Garden History. The Journal of the Garden History Society 27: 109-26. Williams, G. (1960) ‘The Stradlings of St. Donat’s’, in S. Williams (ed.) Vale of History, 85-95. Cowbridge (Vale of Glamorgan Series). Williams, G. (1973) ‘Sir John Stradling of St. Donat’s (1563-1637)’, in S. Williams (ed.) Glamorgan Historian, vol. 9: 11-28. Cowbridge. Williams, G. (1983) ‘The Stradling Family’, in Denning 1983: 17-53. Williams, G.A. (2008) ‘Cymwynaswyr Cyntaf Siôn Dafydd Rhys yn yr Eidal’, Llên Cymru 31: 190-6. Williams, G.A. (2010) ‘Dyneiddiwr yn y Fro: Siôn Dafydd Rhys a Stradlingiaid Sain Dunwyd’, Llên Cymru 33: 80-106. Williams, G.J. (1926) Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau’r Ychwanegiad. London. Wood, A. à (1691) Athenae Oxonienses, vol. 1. London. Wynne, W. (ed.) (1812) D. Powel: The History of Wales. Merthyr Tydfil.

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Ireland’s first Renaissance poet: the Latin verse of Doncanus Hibernus Jason Harris In 1539 two small booklets were published at Wittenberg under the authorship of ‘Doncanus Hibernus’, a man about whom till now nothing has been known, but who is, on the basis of these two imprints, the first Irishman to my knowledge to have published Renaissance Latin verse.1 In this he precedes his nearest successor, Richard Stanihurst, by over forty years.2 On the whole, Irish writing in Latin during the Renaissance has received comparatively little attention from literary and cultural historians, though attempts have been made in recent years to change this situation.3 The discovery of examples of humanist Latinity from the pens of Irish writers in the first half of the sixteenth century is a matter of no little consequence, for it provides a counterpoise to traditional accounts of the Renaissance in Ireland, which ultimately derive, for the most part unwittingly, from Tudor propaganda that presented the island as an isolated cultural backwater in need of foreign civility. Nationalist counter-narratives which depict Ireland as possessed of a pure Gaelic culture uncontaminated by outside influences ironically replicate the structure of this model.4 As will be seen, the writings of Doncanus Hibernus are of particular interest because they fit no existing account of the development of the Renaissance in Ireland. An analysis of his work is therefore long overdue, and it is this task that I have set myself to undertake here. The author The author ‘Doncanus Hibernus’ has never yet received the attention of a biographer. It is evident that he was a Protestant, both from the fact that he published his poetry in Wittenberg and because he may with confidence be identified with the ‘Joannes Duncanus ex Hibernia’ who is enrolled in the matriculation book of the University of Wittenberg for the year 1536 during the rectorate of Jakob Milich of Freiburg.5 The vernacular form of his name may only be surmised with some

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14. Ireland’s first Renaissance poet uncertainty. His association with Protestantism and, as we shall see, with English court circles, renders it likely that he was of Old English stock, in which case his name was probably ‘John Duncan’. The fact that he prints his name ‘Doncanus’ may suggest an Irish root such as O’Donegan or Dungan, though it is worth noting that other occurrences of his name spell it ‘Duncanus’, as will be seen below. In the Wittenberg matriculation record he is included among those who were gratis inscripti, which indicates that he did not have sufficient means available to him to pay the matriculation fees and so was technically regarded as a pauper. It seems that his financial circumstances did not quickly improve during his time as a student, as may be surmised from three letters from the correspondence of Philip Melanchthon that seek financial aid for him. The first of these, dated 25 March 1537, is addressed to the learned humanist Johannes Aepinus in Hamburg. Amid news of Luther and discussion of affairs in England and France, Melanchthon makes the following request:6 Est hic Duncanus Hybernicus tibi, ut audio, notus, cuius ingenium, mores et studia valde probo. Is sperat se vestra ope aliquid pecuniae impetraturum esse istic, ut diutius in academia haerere possit. Credo vos istic onerari talibus officiis, sed tamen huic Hybernico meam commendationem deesse nolui tibique polliceor praeclare in eum collocari haec beneficia. Quare si quid spei est, annitere, ut homo studiosus, qui olim usui erit ecclesiae, adiuvetur. There is here [in Wittenberg] one Duncanus the Irishman, who is, I gather, known to you, and whose character, disposition and studiousness I greatly approve. He hopes he might with your help be able to procure some money there [in Hamburg] so that he can remain at university a while longer. I understand that you are loaded down with duties like this over there, but I did not want this Irishman to lack a recommendation from me and I promise you the kindness would be very well placed in him. Therefore, if there is any hope, take some trouble that this scholarly fellow, who will some day be of value to the church, may receive assistance.

Students who could provide a testimonium paupertatis were granted an exemption from matriculation and course fees, but still needed a source of income to cover the basic costs of living.7 Melanchthon’s letter of reference is thus a straightforward attempt to procure financial aid for a good but indigent student. On the same day, he wrote a second reference to Johannes Garcaeus the Elder, who was his former student and a close associate of Aepinus in Hamburg:8 Memini, quam difficulter a vestris anno superiori impetrarim aureos aliquot Flandro cuidam. Cumque non dubitem multos peregrinos con-

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Jason Harris fluere in urbem vestram, facile ratiocinor vos hoc genere officiorum immodice onerari. Sed non volui deesse Duncano Hybernico, qui narrabat spem quandam istic sibi factam esse. Commemorabat etiam tua beneficia et egregiam erga se voluntatem tuam. Cum igitur testimonium meum sibi profuturum esse arbitraretur, scripsi ad te, teque rogandum esse duxi, ut ei aliquot aureos alicunde impetrares, ut haerere in academia diutius possit. Est enim moribus modestissimis et in literis Graecis et Latinis magna cum laude versatur, ad quas adiungit doctrinae christianae studium, ut aliquando possit usui esse ecclesiae Christi. Quare cum sperem eius ingenium profuturum aliquando reipublicae, te rogo, ut istic eum bonis viris commendes. I remember with what difficulty I procured from you some money for a certain Flemish man last year, and since I have no doubt that there are many travellers who gather in your city, I can well imagine that you are greatly burdened by duties of this kind. But I do not want to be remiss with regard to Duncanus the Irishman, who says that he was granted some expectation there [in Hamburg], and he mentions your generosity and your extraordinary good will towards him. Therefore, since he judges that a testimonial from me would be of assistance to him, I am writing to you supposing that you are the right person to ask to procure some money for him from somewhere so that he can stay at university a while longer. For he has a very honourable disposition, and he has attained great distinction in Latin and Greek, to which he has added the study of Christian teachings, so that he may at some time be able to be of value to the church of Christ. Therefore, since I hope that his talents will eventually be beneficial to society, I ask that you commend him to men of good character there [in Hamburg].

Melanchthon’s allusion to the future value of Doncanus for the reformed church is an apt expression of his educational outlook, but is also well suited to procuring aid from Aepinus and Garcaeus, who were clerics involved in efforts to reform the church in Hamburg. The claim that Doncanus has attained great distinction in Greek is particularly significant, since this is an area in which many students were deficient, despite the emphasis on Greek learning at Wittenberg. An estimate such as this from a scholar as eminent as Melanchthon is high praise indeed, but it should not merely be ascribed to the conventional or insincere expression of an academic referee keen to procure advancement for his student. Melanchthon made some effort to personalise his letters of commendation and was also willing, when necessary, to express discernible reserve with regard to those of lesser talent who had procured a reference from him.9 In the case of Melanchthon’s references for Doncanus the Irishman there is no trace of such reserve. Accordingly, we learn that his request procured the desired outcome. On 3 August 1537 he wrote to Johannes Aepinus to thank him for sending money and to check whether the messengers had stolen some of it:10

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14. Ireland’s first Renaissance poet Scis ecclesiam vere exulare in hoc mundo. Quare cum nos, qui membra sumus ecclesiae, exulemus ipsi, decet nos meminisse nostrae fortunae et affici calamitatibus exulum. Laudo igitur liberalitatem vestram erga Duncanum Hybernicum nec dubito, quin deo gratum erit officium, iudicoque id beneficium aliqua ex parte ad me pertinere. Sex aureos moneta Megapolensi reddidit mihi nuncius nec praeter hoc quicquam. Hos statim dedi Hybernico, munere, meo sane iudicio, digno. Si praeter hos addidisti Ioachimicum, scito nuncium non reddidisse; ac negat se accepisse. Hoc ego significo, ut nunciorum fidem consideretis. Ego enim sic intellexi tuas literas addidisse te Ioachimicum. Quod vero scribis de aliis duobus Ioachimicis dandis Duncano Hybernico, nondum dedi, nam hoc tempore non indiget, nec tu solves ulli quicquam hoc nomine sine meis literis. Mira est hominum perfidia, ut Hesiodus non temere praecepisse videatur: ka< te kasignˇtü gel£saj 1p< m£rtura q2sqai. You know that the church is really in exile in this world, and so, since we who are members of the church are ourselves exiles, it is appropriate for us to be mindful of our fate and to be moved by the misfortunes of exiles. Therefore I commend your generosity towards Duncanus the Irishman and I do not doubt but that your service will be pleasing to God, and I think that the kindness extends in part to me too. The messenger gave me six gulden of Mecklenburg and no more. I immediately gave them to the Irishman, who is well worth it, if you ask me. If in addition to this you added a gulden of Joachimsthal, you should know that the messenger did not deliver it and denies that he ever was given it. I note this so that you may gauge the reliability of the messengers, for I understand from your letter that you did add a Joachimsthal gulden. As regards what you say about giving the other two Joachimsthal gulden to Duncanus the Irishman, I have not yet given him them, for he is not short of money at present, and do not pay them to anyone for this purpose unless you get a letter from me. The treachery of men is remarkable, so that Hesiod seems not to have judged unwisely: ‘even with your brother smile – and get a witness.’11

I am not aware of any other correspondence concerning Doncanus, but it should be noted that the amount he received from Hamburg was not very large, eight gulden being the annual stipendium for Wittenberg students in the early sixteenth century.12 By contrast, the annual salary of a peasant in the region might amount to around twentyfour gulden, and in 1533 Justas Jonas suggested that the bare minimum for a pastor’s annual salary should be thirty gulden.13 Melanchthon’s statement that Doncanus was no longer in great need suggests that he had found another source of income. Confirmation of this can be found in the preface to his Ad Thomam Crumuellum de dignitate consiliarii carmen heroicum, written in February 1539 and addressed to Thomas Cromwell himself. The opening of the dedicatory epistle explains:14

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Jason Harris Et si iamdudum es oblitus, vir multis modis obseruande, beneficij, quod in me contulisti non ita multo ante, magnum quidem illud, & vt sine vllo meo merito, ita sane excellentia tua dignissimum, ego tamen, vt decet, eius adhuc memini gratissimo animo, nec eius obliuiscar, donec spiritus hos reget artus, vt Poeta inquit. Even if you immediately forgot, man in many ways to be esteemed, the kindness that you conferred upon me not so long ago, it was indeed great, and just as it came not on account of any merit of my own, so it was certainly most worthy of Your Excellency. And I do remember it, as is fitting, with a most grateful mind, nor will I forget it so long as spirit governs these limbs, as the poet says.15

Later on in the preface he confirms that the gift that Cromwell gave him was intended to support his studies:16 Atque ita quod mihi dedisti, non tam dedisti mihi, quam honestis artibus, et liberalibus studijs, et Publicae vtilitati, quo merito nullum possit esse praestantius, nullum vberius, nullum tua persona dignius. And so what you gave me you did not so much give to me as to the honourable arts and liberal studies, and to the common good; nothing could be more noble than this kindness, nothing more generous, nothing more worthy of you.

Despite this generous support, there is no evidence that Doncanus managed to complete his course of studies at Wittenberg; indeed, I have found no other record of him in the archives of Wittenberg University. The cost of graduation for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Wittenberg during this period was three gulden, while the cost for promotion to Master of Arts was six gulden.17 It is possible that Doncanus was unable to afford this, despite the support that he had been given, or that he travelled elsewhere to a less expensive university to get his degree, a practice common in the period. From Melanchthon’s correspondence it may be inferred that Doncanus had connections in Hamburg, which was a common stopping-point for English students en route to Wittenberg.18 It is likely that he passed through the city on his way to Wittenberg in 1535 or 1536, perhaps as a servant in the company of one of the delegations sent by Thomas Cromwell to Germany at this time to procure support for the Henrician Reformation.19 The evidence of his publications supports this inference, since the first book is dedicated to Cromwell himself and the second to Edmund Bonner, who was still at this time part of Cromwell’s circle and involved in his diplomatic enterprises.20 It is likely that Doncanus initiated contact in the hope of gaining support to complete his studies in Wittenberg. If so, his timing was unfortunate. Cromwell’s dramatic

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14. Ireland’s first Renaissance poet fall from power in 1540 may be one of the reasons why Doncanus disappears from the historical record after such a promising first foray into the world of print in 1539, in the course of which he had so publicly associated himself with Cromwell’s party. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that future research will uncover more information about him which may clarify whether his career continued or ended at this point. Ad Thomam Crumuellum de dignitate consiliarii carmen heroicum The first poetry that Doncanus published was a small octavo booklet of sixteen pages containing a ten-line Epigramma to Viet Amerbach and an Octostichon to Thomas Cromwell (both written in elegiacs and referring to Thalia as their muse), a dedicatory letter of some 500 words addressed to Cromwell and a 263-line carmen heroicum on the theme of the dignity of the rôle of royal counsellor. The dedicatory epistle is dated 18 February 1539 (xii Calendas Martij anno MDXXXIX), at which time, as the Epigramma explains, Philip Melanchthon was absent from Wittenberg, to whom Doncanus says his muse is greatly indebted: cui debet multum nostra Thalia viro (2). Accordingly, he chooses to give (tradere) his verse to Viet Amerbach, another teacher of Latin verse in Wittenberg, though he has not secured his opinion in advance as to publishing it: sine | edita consilio carmina nostra tuo (9-10). Whereas the Epigramma justifies the choice of poetic patron, the Octostichon explains the dedication to Cromwell, to whom Doncanus wishes to give thanks – soluere grates (1) – for his generosity. The theme of generosity is developed further in the course of the dedicatory epistle, which consists of a short essay de officiis et beneficiis. Doncanus proceeds to cite Menander on the subject of gift exchange: c£rin labën m2mnhso ka< do)j 1pil£qou (‘let us remember when we receive gifts, but forget when we give them’), commenting that if everyone obeyed this precept, the world would be a better place.21 In a carefully worked prolusio on his theme, Doncanus passes from the virtue of liberality to the generosity Cromwell has shown him and on to the wider contribution he has made to the world of learning and the realm of England.22 The topic and the sentiments expressed are entirely conventional, but they indicate that the writer possesses some facility at rhetorical elaboration on a well-worn theme. The carmen heroicum presents itself as a didactic poem on the theme of the good counsellor, but is in fact much taken up with praise of Henry VIII, England and Cromwell in the context of good government and religious reform. The poem opens with a clever inversion of the famous

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Jason Harris recusatio at the opening of Virgil’s sixth Eclogue, thickly studded with allusions to other Virgilian passages (1-7):23 Florida susceptum concede Thalia laborem, Atque meis felix audacibus annue ceptis. Non ego nunc arbusta cano, non sordida rura, Vt quondam ille tuus muscosi ad flumina Minci Tityrus agresti deduxit carmen auena. Me grauius, teneris & longe viribus impar Vrget opus, tenuemque premit res ardua venam.

5

Blossoming Thalia, allow the work I have begun and abundantly favour my bold undertaking. I do not now sing of the woods or humble countryside as did your Tityrus once, who drew forth his song on a rustic pipe by the stream of the mossy Mincius; a heavier task prompts me, far beyond my tender skills, and a hard subject presses on my tender nature.

When Virgil planned to desert his bucolic muse (Thalia) to sing of kings and battles (reges et proelia), Apollo commanded him instead to graze his sheep and sing well-made poetry (deductum carmen), and so he expresses his commitment to singing rustic songs with his tender pipe (agrestem tenui meditabor arundine Musam).24 By contrast, Doncanus compares himself to Ascanius at his first experience of war (annue ceptis), feeling pressed by the obligation to undertake the more arduous task of addressing public affairs. Aside from this Virgilian intertextuality, Doncanus also presents a two-fold etymology of Thalia (florida  felix), which demonstrates his knowledge of Greek, quietly announcing the seriousness of his intent while disavowing his capacity to accomplish the task before him. The poem quickly moves on to introduce its subject, Cromwell, whose erudite judgement the poet fears, and so he asks Thalia to increase his poetic talents to enable him to do justice to his theme (nunc iustas largire in carmine vires, 15). If he can prove equal to his task, Orpheus himself will not outshine him (ipse puto nunquam Doncanum vinceret Orpheus, 35). God himself has ordained the office of counsellor to the king, since otherwise the task of governing the kingdom would overcome the powers of any one mere mortal (53-64):25 Hinc est, quod tales socios, talesque ministros Magnanimi Heroes, cuncti Regesque ducesque Semper amant, semper summo dignantur honore. Et merito. Neque enim solius cura monarchae Imperij ferret molem, nisi prouidus illi Non raro dubijs in rebus adesset Achates,

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14. Ireland’s first Renaissance poet Fida suo Regi dare qui pro tempore possit Consilia, atque illum recta ratione iuuare. Ergo beata illa est, & terque quaterque beata Terra, cui placidum non tantum prospera Regem, Et vires, & fortuna dedit, sed ei quoque Regi Contigit egregia fidus consultor in aula.

60

This is why great-minded heroes and every commander and every king always love such advisors and companions and always award them every kind of honour. Justly so. For the attention of one monarch alone could not bear the burden of rule unless there were a wise Achates by his side for his many difficult decisions who might give loyal counsel to the king at the right time and assist him with correct analysis. Therefore thrice and four times blessed is that land, that lucky land, which fortune grants not only power and a serene king but also gives that king a trusty advisor within an outstanding court.

Doncanus claims that England is particularly blessed in this respect and he proceeds to praise the country for the remarkable attributes and reputation of its glorious king (71-5):26 Magnanimum, inuictum, studiosum pacis, & oci, Cuius in Eois fama est celeberrima terris, Cuius & Hesperijs virtus celebratur in oris, Inque plaga Boreae gelida spirantis ab arcto, Inque procellosi latis regionibus austri.

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Great-minded, unconquered, studious of peace and leisure, whose reputation is acclaimed in the lands of the east, and whose virtue is celebrated in the shores of the west, in the icy plains where the north wind blows from the pole, and in the broad territories of the stormy south.

Henry is depicted as the ideal monarch who governs in the interests of his subjects. Yet his remarkable accomplishments as a ruler invite a dubitatio – what kind of man could be such that Henry, the Britannicus Heros, would have need of his advice? The answer is, of course, Thomas Cromwell, who is furnished with every gift of nature and than whom no one is more honourable, apart from the king himself (93-7):27 Hic est ille meus Cromuellus, praeditus omni Virtutum genere, & numero perfectus ab omni, Qualem ego crediderim grandaeuum Nestora quondam Nestora progenitum Nelei de stirpe fuisse. Nestore vel si quid potuit prudentius esse.

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Jason Harris This is that Cromwell of mine, possessed of every kind of virtue, greatly accomplished by any measure, such that I believe he was born of the same stock as once was Nestor, long-lived Nestor son of Neleus, and is, if anyone may be, wiser even than Nestor himself.

The tasks that face this Nestorean hero are indeed arduous. For, as Doncanus notes, it is his duty to help the king preserve the true faith (illius est veram defendere relligionem, 106) and to intercede with his monarch when necessary to ensure that the proper course of action is followed (honestis flectere dictis, 109).28 If anyone is foolish enough to suppose that this task is not so difficult as Doncanus has suggested, he is described in Ovidian terms as follows (113-15):29 Ille nec humanae siccauerit vbera matris, Nec quicquam rationis habet, sed Tygride natus, Nil habet in fatuo syncerae pectore mentis.

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He has not sucked dry the breasts of a human mother, nor has he any vestige of reason; he is a tiger’s whelp with no semblance of a sound mind in his foolish heart.

The truth of the matter is that, in the words of the ancient adage, not everyone is made to go to Corinth (non cuiuis contingit adire Corinthum, 118) and everyone should avoid such responsibilities if not specifically favoured by Apollo.30 The qualities that one would wish for in a good counsellor are enumerated as constantia, syncera fides and prudentia, each of which in turn is ascribed to Cromwell; even as a young man he possessed them. Nor does he suffer from that greatest fault of counsellors, ambitio; though he has like Cicero risen up from humble origins, he did so by means of virtue alone.31 The last of these virtues, prudentia or sapientia, leads the poet on to the Erasmian theme of peace (190-205).32 Quotquot enim Reges gesserunt horrida bella Optima tranquillae rumpentes foedera pacis, Hos imprudenti motos plerunque videmus Consultore, cui fas non parere fuisset. Sed quia nunc placida diues videt Anglia pace, Et leges, & iura colit Rex arma perosus, Et quia sacratam defendit relligionem, Non mihi sit dubium, tua quin sapientia semper Bella vetet, pacemque & ponere suadeat arma. Sicut enim Regem stolidus consultor ad arma Incitat, & plena canit illi classica voce, Sic retinet prudens Regem consultor, & omnes Arte vias tentat, ne qua prorumpat ad arma.

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14. Ireland’s first Renaissance poet Quod cum tu facias, tua non sapientia tantum Hinc patet, ast etiam, quae pacis tempore floret, Relligionis amor, mira & reuerentia legum.

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For as many kings as wage frightful wars, breaking the finest treaties of tranquil peace, these we see are mostly moved by an improvident counsellor who ought not to have been obeyed. But since England rich in peace now sees tranquillity and its king, weary of war, cherishes law and justice, and since he defends consecrated religion, I doubt not but your wisdom always wards off war, making the case for peace and the laying down of arms. For just as a foolish advisor rouses a king to arms and sounds the trumpet for him with all his might, so the wise advisor restrains his king and tries his skill on every path that war might not break out. When you do this, not only your wisdom shines forth but also that which in peace-time flourishes – love of religion and wonderful respect for the law.

Finally, Doncanus asks himself what it is that makes Cromwell better than anyone else at advising the king. He concludes that others are just as faithful and constant, but none is as wise – some god, whether Phoebus or Minerva, must reside in his breast.33 This is why he is in contact with Philip Melanchthon and other learned men.34 As the poem draws to a close, Cromwell and the king are elevated to still higher levels of praise, with the theme of divinely-ordained good counsel providing the occasion for a final reflection on the glory of the two men and the capacity of the poet to convey it (242-56):35 Si quid habent igitur vatum praesagia veri Crumuelle Angliaci consultor maxime Regis, Omnis posteritas, atque omnis laudibus aetas Te feret, & magno semper celebrabit honore. Hoc nati natorum, & qui nascentur ab illis, Cum tuus ad superas migrarit spiritus arces, Obstrictis facient votis, et carmina dicent. Insuper Henricum tollent super aethera Regem, Semideum genus Henricum, sobolemque deorum, Cuius non capiunt iuuenilia carmina laudes, Moenidae vult ore cani, vult ore Maronis Magna cani magni virtus, & gloria Regis, Sed tamen hoc tenui sat erit me dicere versu, Hunc Regem virtute sua meruisse perenni, Diuino vt virtus cunctis celebretur honore. If the prophecies of the poets have any truth in them, Cromwell, greatest advisor of the English king, all posterity and every age will bring you praise

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Jason Harris and always celebrate you with great honour. The children of our children, and their children too, will praise you with binding oaths and compose poems when your spirit has passed on to heaven’s citadels. King Henry, too, they will carry above the ether, Henry of the race of demi-gods, child of the gods, whose praises my juvenile songs cannot capture. The great virtue and glory of the great king wants the mouth of a Maeonides or a Maro to sing it. But this much I will say in my slender verse: for his perennial virtue the king deserves to be revered by all with honour fit for the gods.

This peroration, rather daring given its publication in pious Wittenberg, draws the poem up to its last lines, in which the poet promises in conventional fashion that he desires to elevate Cromwell’s glories to the stars (tuas ad sidere tollere laudes, 263).36 There is a certain tidy circularity to the structure of the poem, closing as it began with a contrast between the poet’s ambitions, youth and slender composition (tenui  versu) and the timeless majesty of his theme and those he describes. In so far as it employs classical poetic diction and apt allusions to argue a contemporary theme in a coherent fashion, disavowing the author’s ability while praising his intended patrons, the poem may be judged a highly accomplished first publication. Ad Edmundum Bonerum carmen gratulatorium Doncanus’ second book of poetry appeared five weeks after the first, on 28 March 1539. It is a small octavo printing, containing thirteen pages within which are found a six-line epigram in elegiac couplets addressed to envy, a dedicatory epistle of roughly 400 words, a 58-line epode in alternating dactylic hexameters and iambic trimeters, and a 147-line carmen gratulatorium in dactylic hexameters. The title page explains that the collection has been published in honour of the recent conferring of the bishopric of Hereford upon Edmund Bonner, who is described as the most eloquent diplomat (Legatum eloquentissimum).37 This event had taken place on 27 November 1538 while Bonner was occupied as ambassador to the French king in Paris. He had previously been sent as an ambassador to Lutheran north Germany in 1535, and it is possible that Doncanus had travelled to the continent in his company at that time. In his dedicatory epistle Doncanus expresses his joy that such an eminent man has been appointed to a bishopric in this most troubled and miserable period for the church (hoc turbulentissimo tempore, & miserrimo statu Ecclesiae Christianae).38 This is both his reason for writing the poem and for distributing it to a wider audience:39

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14. Ireland’s first Renaissance poet Quapropter, vt meum animum, & gaudium declararem non solum tibi, sed etiam patriae nostrae, vel potius toti Ecclesiae Christianae, scripsi hoc poema, & publicaui paruum illud quidem, sed natum in pectore abundantissimo talibus cogitationibus, & gratulationibus, quales vtcunque in carmine adumbraui tantum, non explicaui. For this reason, in order to declare my mind and my joy not only to you but also to our country, or even to the whole of the Christian church, I have written this poem and published it, though it is indeed a trivial piece, but born in a chest so filled with the kind of thoughts and felicitations that I can only in some fashion adumbrate but not fully uncover in my poem.

After further expressions of his own incapacity, Doncanus pointedly refers to his hopes for patronage from Bonner, pointing to the fact that he had previously received support from him:40 Quid enim ego referrem, qui adhuc spe, & expectatione auxilij tui me consolor, ac sustento, planeque sic animatus sum, vt existimem sine tua me ope non posse viuere, ac susceptum studiorum cursum retinere, nec dubito velut manum auxiliatricem nunc a me te non subtracturum esse constitutum in hac tanquam statione, & specula defendorum, & iuuandorum pauperum, & tenuiorum. For how might I repay you who even now comfort and sustain myself with the hope and expectation of your aid; indeed, I am so enlivened that I think that without your help I could not live or stay in the course of studies I have undertaken. Nor do I fear that you will take away your helping hand from me now that you are posted in this, as it were, camp or look-out post for the support and protection of the poor and weak.

The reference to episcopal dignity as a statio or specula plays on the Greek etymology of episcopus to introduce the concept of an overseer who will look out for Doncanus, but who will also carry out the essential task of making sure that the true faith is passed on openly to the people (ut Christiana doctrina syncere et Catholice tradatur populis) and not excluded from the church like the arrogant dreams and fantasies (portentosa figmenta et somnia) of sects such as the anabaptists or sacramentarians.41 In other words, reformed preaching of the gospel must not be occluded by the false teachings of the radicals and those who follow Zwingli’s teaching on the sacraments. Finally, Doncanus ends his preface with the hope that Bonner will be equal to or even surpass the expectation that good men have of him, an expectation that implicitly includes his own hope for patronage.42 The epigram addressed to envy that appears on the title page of the booklet, while conventional in subject, demonstrates the characteristic defiant humility of the poet that we have seen in his earlier collection (1-6):43

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Jason Harris Mirum, si liuor tibi carmina nostra placebunt. Da meliora meis, si meliora potes. Si meliora nequis, cur me suspendis adunco Naso? cur toties talia verba refers? Hoc nihil est, nihil est, inquam, rude carmen Hiberni. Est aliquid, sed tu quod facis, hoc nihil est.

5

Envy, it would be amazing if our poems pleased you. Do better than mine, if you can do better; if you cannot do better, why look down your hooked nose at me? Why so often such words as these? This is nothing; an Irishman’s rough poem, I say, is nothing. Or it is something, but what you do, that is nothing.

This poem introduces several ideas that will recur later in the collection. Of particular interest is the Ovidian phrase rude carmen, which echoes Ovid’s description of the Metamorphoses in Tristia 1.7. On the one hand, this plays on the topos of the uncivilised Irishman, allowing Doncanus once more to disavow his talents; on the other hand, it implies a comparison with Ovid that suggests that his poem is indeed aliquid. The epigram as a whole is redolent of Martial and provides a confident rebuttal of the adunco naso (cf. Horace, Satires 1.6) of the poet’s rivals and critics. The balance between humility and self-justification is explored at greater length in the 58-line epode which follows the dedicatory epistle. Doncanus apologises for the fact that he has not written anything for his patron for a long time (tam diu), but he could not bring himself to send something unpolished (1-6):44 Non oblita tui fuerat mea Musa Bonere, Quod tam diu ad te nil Patrone scripserit. Sed non ausa fuit incultos mittere versus, Ad tam peritum iudicem, & doctum virum. Iudice me quisquis scribit mala carmina docto Infantiam tantum probo prodit suam.

5

My muse has not forgotten you, Bonner, though long since she has written nothing to you, my patron, but she did not dare to send unpolished verses to such a learned man and erudite judge. As I see it, whoever writes poor poems for a learned man merely reveals to the wise how tongue-tied he is.

Nevertheless, the sum of all Bonner’s merits (meritorum summa tuorum) spurred him on and, moreover, Apollo appeared to him one night and lambasted him with the following speech (13-18):45

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14. Ireland’s first Renaissance poet Cur ignaue dies frustra consumere totos Es ausus? & cur nocte tota stertere? Viribus ipse tuis nimium diffidis inepte, Et nescio subrusticus quisnam pudor Te tenet, vt malles prorsus nihil vtile scire, Aut scire sic, vt nemo scire te sciat.

15

Why, dullard, dare you waste away the day in vain and spend all night snoring asleep? Fool, you trust too little in your own talents and I don’t know what bumpkin-like modesty inhibits you, so you prefer to know nothing useful at all, or so to know that no one knows you know.

The speech draws phrases from Persius, Cicero and Martial to give it an idiomatic character, and it is invigorated by the iambic metre of every second line, which helps to convey the sense of rebuke in Apollo’s words. The term subrusticus picks up on the earlier references to a rude carmen and incultos versus, suggesting that the subtext is the ethnic identity of Doncanus, who will again identify himself in the final line of the poem merely as Hiberni tui. Yet Apollo explains that Bonner is too kind to judge his poems harshly, and the god now gives Doncanus an appropriate subject for his verse – Bonner’s appointment to the bishopric of Hereford. The poet is thus left little choice but to reflect upon his plight, muster up his courage, and try his best (41-8):46 Sic cum fatus erat, tenues discessit in auras, Et imperito tantum onus iungit mihi. Quod neque Vergilius, si fas est dicere, nec tu Homere, quo non alter est praestantior, Ferre queas. Igitur de me quid fiat amici? Qui tantum onus sic sumpserim imprudens mihi. Quid facerem? mihi quam noui sit curta supellex, Deo tamen fuit nefas non obsequi.

45

Having spoken thus, he vanished into thin air, yoking me, unskilled, to the kind of burden that neither Virgil himself, if I may say so, nor you, Homer, than whom there is no one more outstanding, could bear. And so, friends, what is to become of me, having unwisely drawn such a burden on myself? What should I do? I know how meagre is my stock, but it would have been wicked not to obey god.

In the last line of this passage deo refers both to Apollo and to the Christian god, as is made clear in the next two lines where Bonner is addressed as sanctissime praesul whom God himself favours (quos auget ille summus author omnium, 50).47 It is, therefore, a specimen of

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Jason Harris pietas (though the word is not used) for Doncanus to write in celebration of Bonner’s appointment and, accordingly, he closes his poem with a request for forgiveness and an appeal that the bishop should judge the intention rather than the product of his unskilled Muse (indoctae Musae, 53) and accept with his customary graciousness the rough poem that follows (rude, quod sequitur, carmen, 57).48 The last poem in the collection opens with a reference to the ethnic background of Doncanus, whom fate has not permitted to live in his native shores (2-3):49 Dulcis vbi medios iacet inter Hibernia fluctus Insula diues opum regno vicina Britanno. Where sweet Ireland lies in the midst of the waves, an island rich in resources, nearby the realm of Britain.

Because he is abroad, he has been slow to learn of Bonner’s elevation to a bishopric, but he now announces his joy and felicitations, declaring that in future an annual festival should be observed on the date that the appointment was made (26-32):50 Festa sit illa dies, albo hanc signate lapillo, Tunc pulchris sacras ornate taperibus aedes, Et memores laudate Deum, laudateque Regem Inclyta qui regni moderatur frena Britanni. Cuius & haec multas inter non ultima curas Cura fuit, Christo sacros offerre ministros, Qui populum sancti doceant mysteria verbi.

30

Let this day be a festival; mark it with a white stone and adorn the churches with beautiful candles; remember and praise God, and praise the king who holds the glorious reins of the British realm and among whose many cares not least was his concern to offer Christ sacred ministers to teach the people the mysteries of God’s word.

Henry VIII is thus presented as the Lutheran ideal of the godly prince who intervenes in the running of the church to ensure the accurate preaching of the Word – a representation of the king that even Henry’s own ambassadors in Germany were no longer, at this stage, trying to promote.51 Yet for Doncanus the king is a foil to tyrannical Catholic princes who persecute Protestants (38-42):52 Heu videas certe passim saeuire tyrannos In Dominum puro profitentes pectore Christum,

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14. Ireland’s first Renaissance poet Hos domibus pellunt, hos igne cremant infando, Hos liquidis mergunt vndis, hos ense trucidant, Obliti pietatis, & aequi vindicis irae.

40

Alas, everywhere you may surely see tyrants raging against those who profess the Lord Christ with a pure heart; these they drive from their homes, burn in unspeakable fires, drown in flowing waves, and slaughter with the sword, forgetful of piety and the fairness of vengeful wrath.

By contrast, Henry VIII is praised as a defender of true religion (semper synceram defendis relligionem, 49) who is concerned to ensure that all the churches in his realm are guided by learned and faithful ministers, of whom Bonner is a pre-eminent example.53 Not only Britain rejoices in this, but also those areas of France that are still subject to Henry, and Ireland, too, which is once again depicted dramatically (58-9):54 Gaudet inaccessas natalis Hibernia rupes Ostentans longe, pelagoque ambita sonanti. Ireland rejoices, my native land, displaying from afar unapproachable rocks and girded by the roaring ocean.

Returning to Bonner’s praises and his own inadequacy, the poet wishes for the inspiration granted Gallus and Hesiod, echoing Virgil’s sixth Eclogue, so that he could raise Bonner’s glory to the stars (66-9):55 O si me gelidas Permessi ad fluminis vndas Sisteret, & calamos, o si mihi Pieris illos Vna daret, quos Ascraeo dedit ante Poetae, Nomen ad astra boni ferrem sublime Boneri. O if one of the Pierians would lead me to the cold waters of Permessus and give me those bound reed pipes which once she gave the Ascraean poet, I would raise to the stars good Bonner’s sublime name.

Without men such as Bonner, the poet continues, the ship of state would flounder as though in a storm without a captain at the helm (81-7).56 But since he might not recognise his own qualities, the poet offers him a mirror of his virtues as displayed by some of his close colleagues (speculum quo contemplaberis omnes | quae sunt egregio virtutes, 104-5).57 Accordingly, Doncanus takes the opportunity to praise Thomas Cranmer, Philip Melanchthon, Alexander Alesius and Thomas Zieger – a device that provides some biographical interest but which rather dissipates the focus of the poem.58 Finally, however, he

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Jason Harris returns to Bonner, whose name is the last word of the poem, wishing that the gods might protect him, as all those who stand to benefit from his appointment desire. The ending is somewhat abrupt and fails to draw together the themes of the collection in the manner that Doncanus had so successfully managed in his earlier publication, leaving the reader to wonder whether Bonner was quite so inspirational as Doncanus would have us believe, or whether other circumstances prompted hasty completion of the work. Conclusion The poetic œuvre of Doncanus Hibernus, such as we have it, amounts to roughly five hundred lines of verse. Though his themes are largely conventional and the quality of his composition is perhaps slightly uneven, nevertheless he is on the whole a highly competent neo-Latin poet who displays considerable confidence in marshalling his material and employing classical intertexts while articulating a distinctive poetic persona. In particular, the indications in his second collection that he was beginning consciously to reflect upon the ‘Irishness’ of his standing within the neo-Latin world, though very much in the context of his loyalty to the regnum Britannum, are of considerable interest for scholars concerned with questions of Irish identity in the early modern period. It was, no doubt, unfortunate for Doncanus that his entry into the literary world should so closely have coincided with the downfall and execution of one patron (Thomas Cromwell) and the rejection by the other (Edmund Bonner) of the Protestantism so cherished by the poet. Whether this was the cause of his premature disappearance from the world of print must await further investigation. Notes 1. The two pamphlets are Ad Thomam Crumuellum de dignitate consiliarii carmen heroicum (Wittenberg, 1539) and Ad Edmundum Bonerum carmen gratulatorium (Wittenberg, 1539). Note that pagination for these editions is my own. Research for the present article was funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and by the School of History, University College Cork. 2. In 1583 Stanihurst published a small collection of Latin verse at the end of his The First Foure Bookes of Virgils Aeneis, 98-100. 3. See, in particular, Silke 1973: 169-206; Millett 1976: 561-86; and Harris and Sidwell 2009. 4. Harris 2009: 102-18. 5. See the nineteenth-century edition of the Matrikel: Foerstemann 1841: 161b. 6. Scheible and Thüringer 1993: 394-5. All translations are my own; note

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14. Ireland’s first Renaissance poet that I have altered tenses where English letter-writing style seems to demand it. 7. For discussion of student costs see Kius 1865: 96-159 and La Vopa 1988: 17-124. 8. Scheible and Thüringer 1993: 395-6. 9. See, for example, the letter of reference that he wrote on 6 July 1537 to Matthäus Delius in Hamburg on behalf of a unnamed student from Jülich, in which he expresses reserve about the student’s Latinity and hints that he might do better working with his hands: Bretschneider 1836: 743. 10. Scheible and Thüringer 1993: 484-5. 11. Hesiod, Works and Days 371. 12. Muther 1866: 184. 13. Karant-Nunn 1979: 39 n. 5 and 51 n. 95. 14. Doncanus 1539a: 3. 15. Virgil, Aeneid 4.336. 16. Doncanus 1539a: 4. 17. Recorded in the Indiculus expensorum in promotiones baccalaureorum et magistrandorum, Universitätsarchiv, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. 18. See Smith and Bar 1921: 422-33. 19. See the excellent recent discussion in Maas 2010: 9-42. 20. The relationship between Cromwell and Bonner can be traced in Merriman 1902: passim. 21. Doncanus 1539a: 3. 22. Doncanus 1539a: 5. 23. Doncanus 1539a: 6. 24. Virgil, Eclogues 6.1-8. 25. Doncanus 1539a: 8. 26. Doncanus 1539a: 8. 27. Doncanus 1539a: 9. 28. Doncanus 1539a: 10. 29. Doncanus 1539a: 10. 30. Doncanus 1539a: 10. 31. Doncanus 1539a: 11-12. 32. Doncanus 1539a: 13. 33. Doncanus 1539a: 13. 34. Doncanus 1539a: 14. 35. Doncanus 1539a: 15. 36. Doncanus 1539a: 15. 37. Doncanus 1539b: 1. 38. Doncanus 1539b: 2. 39. Doncanus 1539b: 2. 40. Doncanus 1539b: 3. 41. Doncanus 1539b: 3. 42. Doncanus 1539b: 3. 43. Doncanus 1539b: 1. 44. Doncanus 1539b: 4. 45. Doncanus 1539b: 4-5. 46. Doncanus 1539b: 5-6. 47. Doncanus 1539b: 6. 48. Doncanus 1539b: 6.

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Jason Harris 49. Doncanus 1539b: 7. 50. Doncanus 1539b: 8. 51. See Maas 2010: 32. 52. Doncanus 1539b: 8-9. 53. Doncanus 1539b: 9. 54. Doncanus 1539b: 9. 55. Doncanus 1539b: 10. 56. Doncanus 1539b: 10. 57. Doncanus 1539b: 11. 58. Doncanus 1539b: 11-12.

Bibliography Bretschneider, C.G. (ed.) (1836) Philippi Melanchthonis Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, vol. 3. Halle. De Ridder-Symoens, H. (ed.) (2003) A History of the University in Europe, vol. 2: Universities in Early-Modern Europe (1500-1800). Cambridge. Doncanus Hibernus (1539a) Ad Thomam Crumuellum de dignitate consiliarii carmen heroicum. Wittenberg. Doncanus Hibernus (1539b) Ad Edmundum Bonerum carmen gratulatorium. Wittenberg. Foerstemann, C.E. (ed.) (1841) Album Academiae Vitebergensis, vol. 1. Leipzig. Harris, J. (2009) ‘Renaissance Ireland – Some Problems and Perspectives’, in T.M. Barr (ed.) Italian Influences and Irish Outcasts: Essays on Torquato Tasso and Aspects of the Renaissance in Ireland, Europe and Beyond, 102-18. Coleraine. Harris, J. and Sidwell, K. (eds) (2009) Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters. Cork. Karant-Nunn, S. (1979) Luther’s Pastors: The Reformation in the Ernestine Countryside. Philadelphia. Kius, O. (1865) ‘Das Stipendiatenwesen in Wittenberg und Jena unter den Ernestinern im 16. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie 35: 96-159. La Vopa, A.J. (1988) Grace, Talent and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge. Maas, K. (2010) The Reformation and Robert Barnes: History, Theology and Polemic in Early Modern England. Woodbridge, Suffolk. Merriman, R.B. (ed.) (1902) Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 2 vols. Oxford. Millett, B. (1976) ‘Irish Literature in Latin, 1550-1700’, in T.W. Moody, F.X. Martin and F.J. Byrne (eds) A New History of Ireland, vol. III, 561-86. Oxford. Muther, T. (1866) Aus dem Universitäts- und Gelehrtenleben im Zeitalter der Reformation. Erlangen. Scheible, H. and Thüringer, W. (eds) (1993) Melanchthons Briefwechsel. Band T7 (1536-1537). Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt. Silke, J. (1973) ‘Irish Scholarship and the Renaissance, 1580-1673’, Studies in the Renaissance 20: 169-206. Smith, P. and Bar, R. (1921) ‘Englishmen at Wittenberg in the Sixteenth Century’, The English Historical Review 36, no. 143: 422-33.

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14. Ireland’s first Renaissance poet Strauss, G. (1978) Luther’s House of Learning. Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore. Strauss, G. (1984) ‘Protestantism and Literacy in Early-Modern Germany’, Past and Present 104: 31-55.

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15

‘Now or never, now and forever’: an unpublished, anonymous Irish Jacobite epic on the Williamite War (1688-91)1 Keith Sidwell A ‘Muse enchained’ In late 1691, or early 1692, so at least the poem’s text would have us believe, a former officer of the Judge on King’s Bench under James II sat in chains in a cell in Dublin Castle, attainted for treason, contemplating the events which had brought the supporters of the Stuart dynasty (whom we now call ‘Jacobites’, but who are always referred to in the text as Stuartani or by some phrase including the word Stuartus) to their recent crushing defeat. His response to the stressful circumstances in which he now found himself was apparently to obtain a copious supply of paper, quills and ink and set himself to composing a poem in Latin hexameters. We do not know how long his lucubrations took. Suffice it to say that he managed to compose an account of the whole of the Jacobite War 1689-91, prefaced by a long, less detailed, but imaginatively executed, introduction to the background – in particular, the religious background – of the war on Irish soil and the capitulation of the Irish at Limerick, which totals over 5,500 lines and thus exceeds by almost a third the size of the only other long Irish Latin hexameter poem of the seventeenth century, Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius (London: Thomas Snodham, 1615).2 The poem was never published. That it survived at all, given its highly partisan and often splenetically expressed views, is remarkable to say the least, if its author really was in prison attainted for treason in a Dublin now firmly under the control of William. But since at present his name and hence both his early history and his eventual fate are unknown to us, though enough evidence is certainly in the text given to identify him, we cannot be absolutely certain that the ‘prison motif’ is not a carefully crafted fiction designed to gain the reader’s sympathy (which, if a ploy, certainly works).3 However, there is one feature which is difficult to explain if the author was not slightly

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ nervous about his verses: at various points he forbears to give in full the name of persons whom he is attacking (although he appears to have left in the lines where this occurs an exact number of dots indicating the numbers of letters omitted and his scansion ought to allow us eventually to reconstruct his points of reference).4 This certainly might be explained by a desire not to be caught red-handed defaming influential living individuals, but it is still difficult to see how this might have saved him from a treason charge when he consistently calls the Prince of Orange ‘the Tyrant’!5 In the only extant copy (see n. 1), the writing is very clear and, in my view, with its regular twenty-five lines per page and very little sign of erasure and correction, far too well organised to constitute a first draft. Indeed, my first thought upon viewing the original was how closely it resembled the printed version of Ormonius in this respect. Further, it is divided into six books of very unequal length (see below). It has no title, no prefatory letter and no book headings, but on the other hand, blank spaces and pages are left at the end of books and between them. It does seem possible that it was being prepared for printing, and if so, then some interesting questions arise about its intended dedicatee and audience. In the catalogue of the Dublin City Public Library, the work is entitled Poema de Hibernia, though this comes nowhere near indicating its sheer size and scope, to say nothing of its genre. The manuscript has a number of handwritten notes, which might be the annotations of Gilbert (this will be able to be confirmed, since Gilbert did write some notes at the end of the original), though it is more likely that they belong much earlier, since they identify figures named or alluded to in the text. However, neither Gilbert nor most later scholars have bothered much with the poem as an historical source; and as a piece of literature, it has been completely neglected. Gilbert himself in 1892 published a small part of the Latin text of Book 6 (the account of the Battle of Aughrim).6 J. G. Simms mentions the poem in the bibliography to his classic work Jacobite Ireland, but uses it only once, in his account of the treachery of Henry Luttrell at Aughrim.7 It was apparently unknown to John Childs, who does not list it in the bibliography of his 2007 monograph The Williamite Wars in Ireland 1688-1691, despite the fact that Pádraig Lenihan had paid it some attention in his 2003 book 1690: Battle of the Boyne and has continued to work on it since then.8 So it is with great pleasure that I can announce here that Pádraig Lenihan and I now plan to produce a joint edition of the poem, with a translation by myself, which will receive its first preview here, and an introduction and historical and literary notes by both of us, which will aim to situate

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Keith Sidwell the work both as a piece of historical and ideological writing and as a product of the late seventeenth-century respublica litterarum, to which Ireland’s contribution has only recently begun to be documented.9 The poem’s genre Two questions leap immediately to mind upon the realisation that this is a Jacobite version of events. At the moment of defeat, why would one think of the epic or didactic genre rather than, say, elegiacs, where at least the theme of lamentation forms part of the tradition? And how, if the work is construed as epic, does one actually approach composition as a member of the losing side? To the first, one might answer as follows. Given that our poet (not a professional, as he makes clear in the proem to Book 1, where he contrasts himself with ‘veteran poets’) had decided to spend his (in his assertion, involuntarily) free time writing Latin verse, I suggest that he had the model of O’Meara’s Ormonius before his mind’s eye.10 I say this partly because he uses some words which were most unusual before O’Meara (such as Angligenus and Satrapas), and also because alongside the usual word-group for the Ormonds Ormond- he also uses what I have recently conjectured to be the O’Mearan invention Ormonia.11 But the proof that he had read O’Meara’s poem comes in a passage from Book 6, where our author describes the death of one Francis Meara (= O’Meara), whom he apostrophises as follows:12 Ergo, Meare, jaces tandem, cui docta Parentum Praeluxit series insignis Apolline utroque Seu graviore Ducum Heroum canere arma cothurno Sive Machaonijs mortem exarmare medelis. And so you die at last, O’Meara, whose Learnèd array of ancestors shone forth Famed in the two Apolline arts, to sing In graver buskin hero generals’ arms, Or disarm death using Machaon’s cures.

Francis O’Meara was the son of Edmund O’Meara, a doctor, and the grandson of Dermot O’Meara, the epic poet who sang the battles of Thomas Butler, tenth Earl of Ormond, and also a doctor, who published in 1619 in Dublin a treatise on hereditary diseases, which was republished by his son Edmund along with his own medical writings in 1655.13 There seems no doubt at all, then, that our writer knew Ormonius and that it came to mind, if not as a precise model exactly (since there is no single ‘hero’ in this poem, unless it be the Stuart monarchy itself), at

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ least as a template for the production of what is also a loyalist poem (and in fact only might seem otherwise because the legitimate monarch, James II, lost the war and the propaganda battle which preceded and followed). But these are not the only ways in which the poem evokes and utilises the model provided by O’Meara. Another Ormonian feature is the use of the idea that rebellion arises from the influence of malign powers in Hades, detailed by O’Meara in his prefatory letter Ad Lectorem.14 Thus Shaftesbury’s interference in a dream reported by a Protestant conspirator in Book 1 is directly attributed by him to the Furies who feature so prominently in Ormonius.15 Moreover, although the poem does not have, like Ormonius, a single hero around whose military achievements it is built, it does nonetheless contain many vignettes of brave Irish fighters. In this respect, it follows, as Ormonius does, the tradition of the Gaelic cathréim (‘battle career’) and is certainly designed to combat the view commonly held among contemporaries that the Irish gave up without a fight. The second question can partly be answered on the basis of the preceding insight. As an imitation of Ormonius its genre could be readily interpreted as didactic rather than epic.16 In fact, the work begins with a recusatio specifically ruling out the possibility that a man in the poet’s current plight could attempt the composition of an epic (see the excerpt given below in the résumé of Book 1). The contents and the general treatment of the material might also chime in with this classification. The desire to give an account of events as they unfolded is combined with a fervent hope and belief that this cannot be the final outcome planned by a just deity. The poem might be construed, then, as an attempt to teach its intended reader the facts of the matter in hand and the proper way to interpret them. This would work well if in fact the poem had been intended as a contribution to the political arguments about the legitimacy of the succession of James III and the practical attitude to be adopted by the French in its regard. But perhaps the greater part is to be supplied by asking ‘what ancient voice would be best suited to an epic poem in which right remains firmly aligned with the losing side and which portrays the battle between a father-in-law and a son-in-law for power?’ The answer that surely springs immediately to mind once the issue is framed thus is ‘Lucan’.17 That this was indeed the Irish poet’s intended model seems certain on a number of grounds. First, his invocation to the Muses (Gilbert 142: 2) contains a clear allusion to Lucan’s (1.64-5). Secondly, he models several structural elements on Lucan (e.g. Shaftesbury’s speech after his temporary furlough from Hell cited above recalls the circumstances of Julia’s to Pompey in Lucan 3.8ff.). Thirdly, his use of

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Keith Sidwell digressions, long speeches, apostrophe and directly indignant interruptions of the narrative seem calculated to replicate some of Lucan’s most obvious narrative techniques. Finally, his clear predilection for high rhetorical effects, especially the use of gruesome and ironic detail (see below on Sander from Book 4 and Schomberg’s camp from Book 5), suggests that he has paid very close attention to the way Lucan wrote and wishes quite clearly to be seen as following in his footsteps. Needless to say, the intertextual strength of such a strategy lies in appropriation of the ancient poem’s outright condemnation of the aggressor, Caesar – for whom, in this case, read the son-in-law, William of Orange. An outline of the poem So much in general. Let me now lay out the plan of the poem, which I shall do in some detail, since the vast bulk of it does not appear to have received any attention at all before. In order to give some taste of the poet’s Latin style, I shall insert brief excerpts into my résumés, accompanied by my verse translation. Book 1 (Gilbert 142: 1-29): The poem opens thus:18 Arma virosque canant alij qui libera laxo Rura terunt gressu, et campis spatiantur apertis: Dum me carcer habet manicis pedicisque coactum, Carnificem lictore mihi minitante crucemque, Quae profugo pro Rege fero: quo nomine lætor, Nec piget ista pati: suntque acceptissima ob ipsum. Res quocunque cadat: pleno iuvat ore fateri Obsequium: famulabar enim calamoque Coronam Vindice ad Acta Fori Majestatemque Stuartam (Cum violari Illam laedive vel ore vel actu Contigit) exagitans ea crimina Iure tuebar, Et mea †poena reos† stitit ad Regale Tribunal.19 Hinc mihi causa mali. versa vice mulctor et Ipse Proditione reus (sic Fata tulere) recenti. Arms and the men let others sing who tread Their free estates with easy step and walk In open fields. While prison holds me bound By manacles and by shackles, and with cross And hangman does the lictor threaten me (I bear these troubles for my exiled King, A name that I delight in, nor regret These sufferings, made acceptable by him. However things turn out), it pleases me With all my voice obedience to confess: For I did serve and with my vengeful quill Protect the Stuart Majesty in the Courts

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5

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ (Whenever it did chance that this was harmed Or violated, be it by word or deed), Dealing by means of law with charges such; My vengeance stood defendants at King’s Bench. Hence my disaster’s cause: the tables turned, I am myself arraigned, of treason fresh Accused (the Fateful Sisters so decreed).

After this highly personal opening, the author announces his theme:20 Sed quid ego tam dura pati me trister, et ipsos Summos posse viros paria in dispendia trudi Non videam? Non Regis opes ereptaque plorem Sceptra Stuartanis manibus? retroque recurram Indagemque mali causas et semina tanti? But why should I lament my sufferings hard, And see not that the chiefest men may fall Into an equal loss? Should I not mourn The King’s resources and the sceptre torn From Stuart hands and turn back to enquire The causes and the seeds of such great wrong?

He now outlines what he sees as the basic cause, namely the turn from Catholicism to sectarianism, and briefly mentions Charles I’s martyrdom (a death the poet asserts will eventually not go unavenged by God). He goes on to give an account of various events, leading to the eventual accession and coronation of James II (1685). The narrative continues with a brief account of the Monmouth rebellion and the riven religious state of the nation, which led to the successful plot against the King (1688). The birth of a legitimate (Catholic) heir to James and his wife, Mary of Modena, led to the circulation of rumours among disaffected Protestants that the child was in fact suppositious. The author now pictures a debate among the conspirators, one of whom (‘a squinty-eyed fellow’)21 reports a visitation to him in a dream of Lord Shaftesbury, freshly returned from Hell. Shaftesbury represents himself as an ardent Protestant and Republican, warns direly of the plans James has for legitimising the Catholic Church, and reports that he has been sent to the upper world by his peers in order to foment revolution to prevent these goals being achieved. He relates how in his exile, willingly taken at the Prince of Orange’s court, he had explained to the Prince what action he must take, to find his plans eloquently backed by an ambitious Mary, daughter of James II, who awoke in her husband a great thirst for war. The squinty spokesman urges his companions to action and they agree to send a message to the Prince of Orange stating their position and urging him to hurry to their aid.

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Keith Sidwell Book 2 (Gilbert 142: 31-69): The appointed messenger arrives at the Prince’s court and explains at length the case of the revolutionaries: ‘James is intent upon re-establishing Catholicism in England and Louis XIV aims at a grand alliance with James, involving a marriage to keep England Catholic. Prince William, take the throne, or if you will not, at least prevent James from fulfilling his plans for religious reform.’ The Prince replies that before a month has passed he will sail for England. The messenger returns secretly to England to bring the message from William to his fellow conspirators, who make preparations for armed insurrection. James calls a council, which agrees unanimously that he must send his wife and newborn son to a safe haven in France. They advise raising an army to face William, protect the true religion and defeat the forces of Republicanism. James declares war, and Mary and the child are put on board ship. The cloak that covers the baby, embroidered by Mary as a girl in Modena, is described in detail, with its biblical scenes, which in retrospect portend the current circumstances of mother and child. On board, an old man is moved to a long speech in which he wishes the child safe passage and predicts that the new king will eventually become hated by his subjects because he will impose exorbitant taxes to fight foreign wars. He prays that this baby will, when grown, return as leader to the English people:22 Tu modo, ceu Moses juncis23 commissus et undis Dux olim redeas populoque salutifer Anglo. Nunc prius aequor ara, Noachus velut alter, et isto Semina navigio Fidei Te sera foventem Et praemittentem speratae vimen olivae Excipiunt reducem melioris saecla metalli. Macte infans, Procede Puer rediture Vir, acri Marte redempturus rapti moderamina sceptri, Ulturusque nefas factum Tibi Vindice ferro. Now may you, like a Moses to the reeds And waves committed, at some time return Our general, saviour to the English plebs. Now first plough thou the main, a second Noah. An age of better metal shall receive Thee, warming in this bark the seeds so late Of Faith and holding forth before Thyself The stem of hoped-for victory. Child adored, Proceed, as man soon destined to return, Control of Thy snatched sceptre to redeem By war ferocious, and with vengeful sword To pay in kind the wrong now done to Thee!

He then berates the kings of Christendom: ‘Why are they fighting other

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ Christians when they ought to be their true enemies (the Turks, Moors and Tartars), or trying like their great predecessors in the First Crusade to gain control of the Holy Land?’ Book 3 (Gilbert 142: 71-100): Now Mars hurries to The Hague to assure William of a multitude of allies (whom he lists). Without delay the Prince gives the order to sail for England. The army assembled is huge. England capitulates at once and hands over the reins of power to William. The Stuarts have no means of fighting back, since their troops have gone over to William. Only the Irish stand apart, but they are butchered or imprisoned or sent into exile at the new king’s command. King James is captured, imprisoned and mocked by his gaoler. But he escapes and crosses the sea to France. Now, however, William decides to subdue Ireland. The scene now shifts to there, where the people prepare to defend James’s crown and the (Catholic) faith and prevent Ireland’s ruin. The Irish troops assemble at the command of Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnell, the Viceroy, at the Curragh of Kildare, of which a fond description is given:24 Est Locus Almus Apex ubi se Kildarius astris Inserit et socium lambunt fastigia caelum. Quem prope campus adest, immensi iugeris aequor Vomere quem nulli vel adunci vulnere aratri Sulcavere boves, nullae secuere lacunae. Non illic surgunt virgulta lapisve superstes Limes agro positus. Nullis hic terminus arvis. Terra patens, praebens promiscua Pascua, nullo Limine septa scrobis, sed toti libera Regno. Si foret hic lapidum jactu reparanda virûm stirps Perdita diluvijs, hic frustraretur inanis Deucaliona labor, silices nec Pyrrha novandis Hoc reperire queat mulieribus irrita campo. There is a bounteous place where Kildare’s tower Reaches the stars, whose roof-beams lick the sky, Its friend. Near this there is a plain, a sea Of acreage vast, which oxen have not scored With wound of curvèd plough, nor ditches cut. There do no thickets rise nor stones remain To mark the field’s edge – these fields have no end. The land lies open, pasture pure provides, Hedged by no boundary dike, but free for all. Were humankind, destroyed by floods, to need To be replenished here by casting stones, Here would the useless task Deucalion trick, And on this plain would Pyrrha all in vain Seek for the flints new womankind to make.

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Keith Sidwell The poet now gives a long list (pp. 82-100) of the troops mustered there, often including the name of the leader or the place of origin of the soldiers (or both) and sometimes anecdotes about their forebears. When the army is assembled, it marches north to Ulster, where it meets general success. Book 4 (Gilbert 142: 101-35): But Derry will not open its gates and in defiance flies William’s flag. Lt.-General Richard Hamilton, commander of King James’s troops, holds a council, which decides on a siege, but he first offers peace terms. The leaders of Derry debate the offer and are divided. They play for time, saying that if James himself will come to Derry and make terms in person, they will open the gates. But while James hastens to Derry, the people work to fortify the town. James arrives in Derry, but the citizens now claim they must obey the wishes of their London patrons and give allegiance to the Prince of Orange. James returns to camp and calls a council, where he instructs Hamilton to take the city by force, then moves to Dublin to hold a Parliament. Hamilton invests Derry and cuts off supply routes, captures Culmore fort, and has a boom constructed to block access to Derry from the sea up the Foyle. The arrival of the French generals Maumont and Pusignan livens up the battle for the city, especially around Pennyburn Mill. To the south, Hamilton is less successful at Windmill Hill. The poet expostulates at the loss of kindred blood:25 Heu! Quanta agnati est vis sanguinis. Exime fastis Hanc labem nostris, Aetas ventura, nefandam Nec patere affines opponi affinibus, oro. Alas! What quantity of kindred blood Was spilt! O age to come, erase this blot Nefarious from our annals and, I pray, Let not our kinsmen fight against our kin.

The poet now relates the hard fighting to both north and south of the city, where the deaths of Maumont and Pusignan occur. Hamilton now moves his camp back, but the leaders’ desire for victory lessens and many make excuses to go off to Dublin to Parliament. The camp empties and many citizens of Derry arrive there claiming they wish to defect. Hamilton gives them food and allows them to go wherever they wish. The Derry leader uses this kindness to evacuate the old, mothers and children and young women, who are fed and spared by Hamilton. The poet lambasts Hamilton for letting slip the opportunity to starve Derry into submission. In a piece of black humour, he cites the example of one Sander, a citizen of Derry who used to hunt with his dogs, but now grew so hungry that he had to eat them:26

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ Tabescens exinde parat vim Sander apertam Occluditque fores. Patulae transenna fenestrae Monstrat iter catulo, qui jam sua corpora saltu Subjectam in plateam librans excurrit, Herusque Obvius egreditur, sequiturque miserrimus unum Venaturque canem languens, moriturque sequendo. Ast ubi jam catulus post terga silentia sensit, Emensos relegit gressus Dominoque propinquat. Cujus, ut obstructae sensit spiracula vitae (Et genialis odor motusque sonusque repressus) Incumbit praede et Domini depascitur artus, Visceribusque suis sepelit cum Actaeone Sandrum. Non tamen Ipse diu est a tanta clade superstes, Sed cadit infoelix alienae victima mensae, Ultorem facturus Heri per fercula laetum. Tales exegit vindex Rhamnusia poenas. Then, fading fast, Sander planned open force And shut the doors. A gaping casement showed The dog a route. He launched his body through And landing in the square below, ran off. His master goes to find him, poor, poor man, And follows in pursuit his one last hound, But faints and dies while in pursuit of him. The dog now sensed the silence at his back, Retraced his steps and came close to his Lord. He realised the breath of life was stayed (His genial smell, movement and voice were gone), And bending to his prey fed on his limbs, Th’ Actaeon Sander burying in his gut. He did not, though, escape long such a fate: He fell, unhappy, victim to the board Of someone else, destined to make his Lord’s Avenger happy through a covered dish. Such was the penalty Nemesis did exact.

Now Major-General Percy Kirk, sent by William, lands a relief force at Inch Island in Lough Swilly. A small boy smuggles a letter sewn into his clothing to the fleet to explain the situation. Kirk easily breaks through the boom and lands supplies in Derry city. The Royal army in council decides that it should leave and does so swiftly. The poet ends the book with the speech of an ordinary soldier, Murray by name, who severely criticises Hamilton’s handling of the siege. Book 5 (Gilbert 142: 136-56): The poet describes the Stuart army’s retreat, via Omagh, Charlemont and Armagh to Ardee, where they encamp. Rumour now reports to Dublin the Duke of Schomberg’s arrival with the Williamite fleet at Bangor and this gives new spirit to the northern rebels. Carrickfergus and Charlemont are taken by the

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Keith Sidwell enemy, and they now move to Dundalk, where they winter, near the Stuart camp. James’s Dublin troops and Royal Guard now join the main army at the River Fane. Meanwhile, Schomberg’s forces are ravaged by the flux, the results of which are graphically described:27 Schombergi interea socios bacchatur in omnes Foeda Lues laxae fluor immedicabilis alvi, Ilia corrodens mordacis acumine morbi Cui non secretae jam suffecere latrinae: Quaeque etenim in turpes est versa platea cloacas Naribus officiens gradientum, oculisque videntum Lubrica quo nequeunt vestigia figere saxis. Meanwhile there raged ’gainst Schomberg’s allies all Foul plague, a flux of bowel, untreatable, Gnawing intestines with sharp bites of pain. Secluded garde-robes would not now suffice: Each square became an open sewer to thwart The noses of those walking and the eyes Of those who looked. Nor could they on the rocks Firm fix their slippery footsteps as they trod.

They are also infested with lice, and fever follows as a result. The poet imagines Schomberg’s anxieties, and comments that these would have been fulfilled had Marshall von Rosen, James’s commander, been allowed to attack, as he wished to. But Rosen grows impatient with the delay, and leaves the Royal army. Schomberg now orders his ravaged troops to retreat to recover for a spring offensive, but no attempt is made to harry their withdrawal. Now (1690) William decides to come to Ulster himself and sails to Bangor from London. The poet lists his forces (pp. 149-55). The Stuart army, encamped on the River Fane, harries William’s forces, but when the King realises the size of the enemy army, he moves south to put the River Boyne between the two contingents. He encamps at Oldbridge and fortifies his position by the ford. Book 6 (Gilbert 142: 157-229): The day of battle dawns. The Dutch troops wade into the river, following Schomberg, but he is shot and then finished off with a sword-thrust. Reverend George Walker, one of the Derry leaders during the siege, is killed as he tries to cross the Boyne. Now the battle rages and Talbot wades into the Boyne, intent only upon killing William. He, however, has not deigned to enter the conflict:28 Ut tamen omnino videt ista parte negatum Trajectum, subit insidijs contendere et astu. Ergo per occultos diverso tramite calles Maturare jubet Dimachos Equitesque volucres

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ Incustoditus si qua queat amne superno Transitus offendi paucove satellite septus. Viribus expugnent Illum, laevoque Stuartos Impete circumeant et vocibus aethera rumpant Terrificis, inimica prementes corda stupore Mandat, ut attonitus quo vergat nesciat hostis. Jussi iter expediunt male possessumque vetustum Pontem adeunt. Croceo tum forte notatus amictu Praesidio Ripae Dimachum globus adstitit, acris Magnanimique Ducis (Quicunque erat Ille) caterva, Semimares animos specioso in pectore versans. Sic caput humanum Cervici Pictor ovinae Jungat, ut haec Forti subnixa Caterva Tribuno est. Quos demum in melius, titulo donatus Equestri, Erudijt, fecitque viros Chiliarcha pericli Spretores, Furque his animi Formido recessit. Nunc vero immemores Decoris, vix prima Batavae Classica sustinuere tubae, licet impiger Illos In pugnas acuat Ductor, famamque futuram Ingerat exagitans, Chari et Discrimina Regis. Quaque vocat, prior Ipse propinquum fertur in hostem Congrediturque manu primoque in limine Ripae Obstruit incursus Batavae Legionis et Ausus. At comites, viso primi libamine Martis Perque humeros Ducis intrepidi manante cruore, Attoniti cessere retro et statione relicta Praecipitant cursum socijsque exempla pudenda Suggessere fugae, quibus indefensa relinquunt Jam latera et tergum venienti adoperta furori. But when he sees that passage is denied In that part, he attempts to fight by stealth And craft. So by another path he bids Dragoons and horsemen swift on secret routes To hasten and to see if they can find A crossing unopposed somewhere upstream Or guarded by few men. This, he commands, They should by force obtain and from the left Attack the Stuarts by encirclement: With frightening war cries they should burst the air And crush their enemies’ hearts with wonder so, Their frantic foes would not know where to turn. As ordered, they complete their journey and Approach Oldbridge, scarce yet in their control. By chance a cluster of Dragoons did guard The bank, marked by the yellow coats they wore, A keen and noble general’s platoon, (Whoe’er he was), but in their specious breasts They had the spirit of hermaphrodites. Thus might an artist paint a human head Upon a sheep’s neck, as this company

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Keith Sidwell Did hold up its brave Tribune from below! At last he, when with title ‘Knight’ endowed, Did teach them better and their Chiliarch made Them men who laughed at danger: mind’s thief Fear Retreated from them. Now, however, they, Unmindful of their honour, scarce sustained The first blasts of the Dutchman’s trumpet, though Their eager general hones them for the fight, Rousing them up by thoughts of future fame And by the dangers of their Sovereign dear. Whither he summons them, he first does plunge Into the nearby enemy, hand to hand, And on the river’s very edge does block The Dutchmen legion’s hazardous assault. His comrades, though, once they had seen the blood Flow down their fearless leader’s shoulders, first Libation to the god of war, turned back In terror and, their post abandoned, rode In haste away, affording to their friends A shameful paradigm of flight, whose flank And rear they now left undefended and Exposed completely to the coming wrath.

Now one part of the Stuart army tries to prevent the Orange forces from getting a foothold on the southern bank. The other part, anxious for the King’s safety, rush to his tent. James, unwillingly, follows his generals’ advice and leaves the camp. Once he is safe, there is a general flight. The news reaches Dublin, where the Irish react with lamentation, the British with joy. Next day, James rides to Cork and takes ship for France. Some Catholics leave for the country, while others, less advisedly, decide to stay. Farmers abandon their fields and head west with their stock, where the Stuart army now marches, to the safety of Connacht and the line of the Shannon. When William realises he is occupying an empty country, he is upset. The poet gives him a speech in which he regrets his usurpation of James’s throne, but sees that he must now continue on the course set. William’s chief justices prepare an edict promising safety of possession to those who will return, but those who do are soon disabused of the pretended justice of the document, when they are robbed by soldiers and then denied reparation by the authorities. William now enters Dublin and holds a council, where he decides to pursue the Stuart army and take Limerick. The council agrees to attempt Athlone first, and Douglas is chosen as general, but his assault fails to take the town. The Prince now heads west to Limerick and lays siege to the city. Bombardment is ineffective, so more artillery is ordered from the east. Patrick Sarsfield, the Earl of Lucan, learns of the

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ plan, intercepts the baggage-train, and destroys it. The assault on Limerick fails, and William marches his troops back to Leinster to winter quarters, hands command over to Ginkel, and sails for England. In spring (1691) the troops convene in Mullingar, then march to the Irish-held fort at Ballymore, which surrenders after a fight. Ginkel now moves to Athlone, which eventually falls, but not without strong resistance. St Ruth moves the Irish army to Aughrim, where he orders it to be ready for battle. At a crucial moment in the conflict, however, his head is blown off by a cannonball. Defeat comes when the dragoon commander holding a narrow path near the castle walls withdraws his forces, obviously bribed to do so, allowing the Dutch access to the causeway. Soon the Irish army is in flight, heading for Limerick, the only refuge left. Galway City signs a treaty of surrender with the Dutch, and Sligo capitulates finally when Granard arrives and allows O’Regan’s troops to leave with full military honours for Limerick. At Limerick, the Dutch are involved in a full siege, but the action is inconclusive, and they decide to try bribery. This is successful and allows them access to both sides of the city. However, Ginkel’s assault proves vain, and he has to decide whether to offer terms or continue the fight, which may stretch on until the next year. He decides to offer terms: those who wish may leave Ireland, on ships he will provide, or they may stay and enjoy their previous holdings. Agreement is reached and the army splits into two parts, those who wish to continue serving their King abroad, and those who wish, dishonourably, to accept the foreign yoke. Now father is split from son, wife from husband, brother deserts brother. Mothers lament the loss of their children and wish for their return. The helmsman calls the men to ship. As the shore recedes, they cast their eyes back:29 Et clamant uno ore: ‘Vale, sancta insula, nosque Auspicijs Magni et fato meliore Stuarti Ad Te mox Superi, satiati hac clade, reducant.’ And with one voice they cry: ‘Farewell, farewell, Island of saints, and may the gods above, With this defeat quite satiated, soon Under the banners – and with better fate – Of the Great Stuart bring us back again!’

The poet and his text Our poet was certainly a fluent versifier, with a good background not only in Latin literature and the Bible, but also in the Greek classics.

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Keith Sidwell Already noted is his opening recusatio involving the beginning of the Aeneid. But his range of intertextual reference is wider. For example, his description of the Curragh’s lack of stones includes a jesting reference to Ovid’s account of the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha in Metamorphoses (1.375-415), and his mockingly dark tale of the starving Derryman, Sander, is calqued on Ovid’s account of Actaeon’s death at the teeth of his own hounds (Met. 3.206-41): even the dogs’ names are mostly from that passage, the one exception being that he has satirically altered Melanchaetes to Melanchthon, the name of the wellknown Protestant reformer and associate of Luther. He also has a wide range of parallels available to him from classical history (for example, he likens ‘Rignius’ ’ heroic escape from the enemy at Athlone to the behaviour of a Roman prisoner of the Carthaginians at Satricum: Gilbert 142: 195-6). He also makes what are clearly direct references to Greek works (e.g. in Book 6, Gilbert 142: 207, he refers to Achilles’ revenge for Patroclus’ death in the Iliad, and at 225 reflects that his theme is more suitable to Sophoclean tragedy than to epic, also evoking the lament of Andromache over the dead Astyanax from Euripides’ Trojan Women). He can muster other less specific parallels from Greek mythology (Niobe, Gilbert 142: 225), but these might rather reflect his reading of Roman poetry. That he actually knew Greek appears to be confirmed by a scattering of Greek words (e.g. Chiliarcha, Gilbert 142: 163) and by his use of the proper Greek genitive form for the war goddess Enyo (Enyus, Gilbert 142: 217). His biblical parallels run from the Gospels to Exodus. His ekphrasis of the blanket that wraps up the baby Prince James as he goes into exile (Book 2, Gilbert 142: 51-3) is especially rife with these, but he can throw in at any moment a reference to Moses (Gilbert 142: 59) or the wisdom of Solomon (57) to enhance the solemnity of his point or cast deep scorn on the enemy. Perhaps what strikes one most forcefully, however, is his pride in the accomplishments of Irish writers. As I have already argued, he knew O’Meara’s Ormonius and used it in some ways as a model. But he steps aside from the narrative to mention the poetic gifts of the fallen hero More at Aughrim (in Book 6, Gilbert 142: 201). And his account of the siege of Galway includes a (slightly gratuitous) mention of Roderick O’Flaherty’s Ogygia (Gilbert 142: 208). This is a man who has followed closely the Latin literature of his fellow Irishmen. But he also knew Irish, as is confirmed by his ability to translate Balldearg O’Donnell’s Christian name (‘strawberry mole’) accurately into the Latin neologism Rubrinaevus (Gilbert 142: 221).

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ He reveals, in turn, a good deal more of himself and his opinions, both religious and political, than one might expect from the genre he has chosen. Whoever the poet turns out to have been, we know he was a lawyer, and he displays a thoroughly legalistic – if understandably partial – attitude to the constitutional and political situation he describes. He also knows the names of legal men involved in the Irish campaign and speaks fondly and with respect of them in some detail (Book 3, Gilbert 142: 93-5). One cannot but wonder how he thought he would survive the treason charge against him if anyone competent had requested sight of his magnum opus. From his perspective, perhaps, he was only speaking plain truth, but the poem contains from the Williamite point of view opinions, especially of William and Mary themselves, which can only have been interpreted as treasonable. Nonetheless, or perhaps one ought to say, precisely for this reason, his is a voice that ought to be heard. It is an angry voice, still spitting with fury at the crass injustice of what he has witnessed, still nonetheless convinced that in the longer term Providence will right these wrongs and restore the Stuart monarchy and the true faith. He has been too long silent and even if, in his own words, the poem’s circumstances of composition depend upon (Gilbert 142: 2) captivæ nostræ  Musæ, Stridula discordi quæ nunc canit aspera nervo. our imprisoned Muse, who sings Harsh music, stridulous on discordant string

the poet nonetheless sings a song in the truth of which he believed, the notes of which have been for too long drowned out by the even harsher music (and perhaps even more discordant string) of the then (and future) victors. Notes 1. The title refers to a banner with this slogan placed over Dublin Castle to greet King James II’s arrival in the city on 24 March 1689 (Simms 2000: 64). The poem exists only in one manuscript, Gilbert MS 141, Dublin City Public Library. J.T. Gilbert, into whose collection the manuscript came in the nineteenth century, had a copy made (now Gilbert MS 142, also housed in the Dublin City Public Library). This copy has recently been digitised and was made available to me through the kind auspices of Dr Máire Kennedy, the Divisional Librarian. I thank Dr Kennedy for permission to print extracts from the poem here. My readings in this paper are based on this copy, except for Book 1, which I have transcribed from the original and checked against the copy. All page references are to MS 142. I am grateful to Noreen Humble and Pádraig Lenihan for reading a draft of this piece.

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Keith Sidwell 2. That he is to be pictured in prison in Dublin Castle when he wrote emerges from the highly unusual personal proem (Gilbert 142: 1-3: see below pp. 254-5), and that he is to be thought of as still in prison when he finished the poem is shown by the phrase vincta Camena, ‘my Muse enchained’ (Gilbert 142: 227). For O’Meara’s Ormonius, see the edition of Edwards and Sidwell 2011; Edwards and Sidwell 2009; Sidwell 2007; 2010; 2012 (also Houghton in this volume, n. 9). 3. Pádraig Lenihan, of NUI Galway (for whom see further below), is currently working on this identification. 4. For example, twice on Gilbert 142: 17 there are specified gaps for omitted names, the first of five letters, the second of seven. Here there is no other clue, but elsewhere the initial letter is given and sometimes also the grammatical ending. For instance at Gilbert 142: 27 we read A..o, which agrees with sinu later in the line. 5. The author comments, for example, at Gilbert 142: 77, immediately after the English acceptance of William as King, Panditur interea peregrinis Aula Tyrannis | Regiaque incesto resplenduit Anglica luxu, | Fassa suum, quemcunque fovet Fortuna, Monarcham (‘Meanwhile to foreign tyrants is the court | Laid open, and the English Palace shines | With sinful pomp, confessing King whome’er | Fortune does cherish’). 6. Gilbert 1892: 275-82. 7. Simms 2000: 272 (bibliography) and 225 (Aughrim). However, Simms’ reference to a Historical Manuscripts Commission report mentioning the work in its bibliography is erroneous (information provided by P. Lenihan in correspondence). 8. Lenihan 2003: 193-4. 9. See Harris and Sidwell 2009. 10. Gilbert 142: 2, Emeritis ea commoda cedo poetis (‘These rewards | I yield to veteran poets’). 11. E.g. Gilbert 142: 11, Satrapam and Angligenûm Genus; 98, Ormoniae pars sana Domus (‘The sane part of the Ormond realm’); but the usual word Ormondus is used at 181. For commentary on these words in Ormonius, see Edwards and Sidwell 2011: 406-8 (Satrapas), 423 (Angligenus) and 393-4 (Ormonius / Ormonia). 12. Gilbert 142: 163. 13. See Barry 2004 on Dermot O’Meara. For Edmund, see Logan 1958. 14. Edwards and Sidwell 2011: 88-9. 15. Gilbert 142: 16. 16. See Edwards and Sidwell 2011: 21-5. 17. I am grateful to Laurie O’Higgins for directing my attention to Lucan’s influence on the passage about Schomberg’s camp at Gilbert 142: 142 (see further below). On Lucan in Jacobite epic, see also Houghton in this volume. 18. Gilbert 142: 1. 19. Et mea [unclear text, overwritten in different ink] stitit ad Regale Tribunal. Gilbert MS 142 has a blank and a note (fn. 1) explaining that the text ‘poena reos’ was erased from the original. mea poena might mean ‘my penalty’ or (if personified) ‘My Fury’ (but the letter is lower case). Given what follows, I have rendered it ‘vengeance’. 20. Gilbert 142: 3. 21. Pádraig Lenihan suggests to me ‘the reference here may be to William

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ Cavendish Earl of Devonshire one of the so-called “immortal seven” aristocrats who invited William: he looks squinty-eyed in one of his portraits’. 22. Gilbert 142: 59. 23. Gilbert 142: 59 reads junctis, a mistake for juncis (‘reeds’), which I read here: it makes more sense since Moses is the referent here, and he was left in a basket in the water (Exodus 2:3-5). 24. Gilbert 142: 81. 25. Gilbert 142: 111. 26. Gilbert 142: 123. 27. Gilbert 142: 142. 28. Gilbert 142: 163-4. 29. Gilbert 142: 229.

Bibliography Barry, J. (2004) ‘Dermot O’Meara, Physician and Author’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 41: 801-8. Oxford. Childs, J. (2007), The Williamite Wars in Ireland, 1688-1691. London and New York. Edwards, D. and Sidwell, K. (2009) ‘The Tipperary Hero: Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius’, in Harris and Sidwell 2009: 59-85. Edwards, D. and Sidwell, K. (eds) (2011) The Tipperary Hero: Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius (1615). Turnhout. Gilbert 141 = Gilbert MS 141. Dublin City Public Library. Gilbert 142 = Gilbert MS 142. Dublin City Public Library. Gilbert, J.T. (ed.) (1892), A Jacobite Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1688-91. Dublin. Harris, J. and Sidwell, K. (eds) (2009) Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters. Cork. Lenihan, P. (2003) 1690: Battle of the Boyne. Stroud. Logan, P. (1958) ‘Dermot and Edmund O’Meara, Father and Son’, Journal of the Irish Medical Association 43: 312-17. Sidwell, K. (2007) ‘Challenging Vergil: The Storm Scene in Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius’, in A. Coroleu, V. Oberparleiter, I. Hohenwallner and R. Kritzer (eds), Bezugsfelder: Festschrift für Gerhard Petersmann zum 65. Geburtstag, 204-13. Horn and Wien (Grazer Beiträge: Supplementband IX). Sidwell, K. (2010) ‘Intimations of Irish: O’Meara’s Ormonius and the Display of Vernacular Learning’, Renæssanceforum 6: 141-8. Sidwell, K. (2012) ‘Old English or Gael? Personal, Cultural and Political Identity in Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius’, Renæssanceforum 8: 155-65. Simms, J.G. (2000) Jacobite Ireland. Dublin.

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‘Now or never, now and forever’: an unpublished, anonymous Irish Jacobite epic on the Williamite War (1688-91)1 Keith Sidwell A ‘Muse enchained’ In late 1691, or early 1692, so at least the poem’s text would have us believe, a former officer of the Judge on King’s Bench under James II sat in chains in a cell in Dublin Castle, attainted for treason, contemplating the events which had brought the supporters of the Stuart dynasty (whom we now call ‘Jacobites’, but who are always referred to in the text as Stuartani or by some phrase including the word Stuartus) to their recent crushing defeat. His response to the stressful circumstances in which he now found himself was apparently to obtain a copious supply of paper, quills and ink and set himself to composing a poem in Latin hexameters. We do not know how long his lucubrations took. Suffice it to say that he managed to compose an account of the whole of the Jacobite War 1689-91, prefaced by a long, less detailed, but imaginatively executed, introduction to the background – in particular, the religious background – of the war on Irish soil and the capitulation of the Irish at Limerick, which totals over 5,500 lines and thus exceeds by almost a third the size of the only other long Irish Latin hexameter poem of the seventeenth century, Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius (London: Thomas Snodham, 1615).2 The poem was never published. That it survived at all, given its highly partisan and often splenetically expressed views, is remarkable to say the least, if its author really was in prison attainted for treason in a Dublin now firmly under the control of William. But since at present his name and hence both his early history and his eventual fate are unknown to us, though enough evidence is certainly in the text given to identify him, we cannot be absolutely certain that the ‘prison motif’ is not a carefully crafted fiction designed to gain the reader’s sympathy (which, if a ploy, certainly works).3 However, there is one feature which is difficult to explain if the author was not slightly

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ nervous about his verses: at various points he forbears to give in full the name of persons whom he is attacking (although he appears to have left in the lines where this occurs an exact number of dots indicating the numbers of letters omitted and his scansion ought to allow us eventually to reconstruct his points of reference).4 This certainly might be explained by a desire not to be caught red-handed defaming influential living individuals, but it is still difficult to see how this might have saved him from a treason charge when he consistently calls the Prince of Orange ‘the Tyrant’!5 In the only extant copy (see n. 1), the writing is very clear and, in my view, with its regular twenty-five lines per page and very little sign of erasure and correction, far too well organised to constitute a first draft. Indeed, my first thought upon viewing the original was how closely it resembled the printed version of Ormonius in this respect. Further, it is divided into six books of very unequal length (see below). It has no title, no prefatory letter and no book headings, but on the other hand, blank spaces and pages are left at the end of books and between them. It does seem possible that it was being prepared for printing, and if so, then some interesting questions arise about its intended dedicatee and audience. In the catalogue of the Dublin City Public Library, the work is entitled Poema de Hibernia, though this comes nowhere near indicating its sheer size and scope, to say nothing of its genre. The manuscript has a number of handwritten notes, which might be the annotations of Gilbert (this will be able to be confirmed, since Gilbert did write some notes at the end of the original), though it is more likely that they belong much earlier, since they identify figures named or alluded to in the text. However, neither Gilbert nor most later scholars have bothered much with the poem as an historical source; and as a piece of literature, it has been completely neglected. Gilbert himself in 1892 published a small part of the Latin text of Book 6 (the account of the Battle of Aughrim).6 J. G. Simms mentions the poem in the bibliography to his classic work Jacobite Ireland, but uses it only once, in his account of the treachery of Henry Luttrell at Aughrim.7 It was apparently unknown to John Childs, who does not list it in the bibliography of his 2007 monograph The Williamite Wars in Ireland 1688-1691, despite the fact that Pádraig Lenihan had paid it some attention in his 2003 book 1690: Battle of the Boyne and has continued to work on it since then.8 So it is with great pleasure that I can announce here that Pádraig Lenihan and I now plan to produce a joint edition of the poem, with a translation by myself, which will receive its first preview here, and an introduction and historical and literary notes by both of us, which will aim to situate

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Keith Sidwell the work both as a piece of historical and ideological writing and as a product of the late seventeenth-century respublica litterarum, to which Ireland’s contribution has only recently begun to be documented.9 The poem’s genre Two questions leap immediately to mind upon the realisation that this is a Jacobite version of events. At the moment of defeat, why would one think of the epic or didactic genre rather than, say, elegiacs, where at least the theme of lamentation forms part of the tradition? And how, if the work is construed as epic, does one actually approach composition as a member of the losing side? To the first, one might answer as follows. Given that our poet (not a professional, as he makes clear in the proem to Book 1, where he contrasts himself with ‘veteran poets’) had decided to spend his (in his assertion, involuntarily) free time writing Latin verse, I suggest that he had the model of O’Meara’s Ormonius before his mind’s eye.10 I say this partly because he uses some words which were most unusual before O’Meara (such as Angligenus and Satrapas), and also because alongside the usual word-group for the Ormonds Ormond- he also uses what I have recently conjectured to be the O’Mearan invention Ormonia.11 But the proof that he had read O’Meara’s poem comes in a passage from Book 6, where our author describes the death of one Francis Meara (= O’Meara), whom he apostrophises as follows:12 Ergo, Meare, jaces tandem, cui docta Parentum Praeluxit series insignis Apolline utroque Seu graviore Ducum Heroum canere arma cothurno Sive Machaonijs mortem exarmare medelis. And so you die at last, O’Meara, whose Learnèd array of ancestors shone forth Famed in the two Apolline arts, to sing In graver buskin hero generals’ arms, Or disarm death using Machaon’s cures.

Francis O’Meara was the son of Edmund O’Meara, a doctor, and the grandson of Dermot O’Meara, the epic poet who sang the battles of Thomas Butler, tenth Earl of Ormond, and also a doctor, who published in 1619 in Dublin a treatise on hereditary diseases, which was republished by his son Edmund along with his own medical writings in 1655.13 There seems no doubt at all, then, that our writer knew Ormonius and that it came to mind, if not as a precise model exactly (since there is no single ‘hero’ in this poem, unless it be the Stuart monarchy itself), at

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ least as a template for the production of what is also a loyalist poem (and in fact only might seem otherwise because the legitimate monarch, James II, lost the war and the propaganda battle which preceded and followed). But these are not the only ways in which the poem evokes and utilises the model provided by O’Meara. Another Ormonian feature is the use of the idea that rebellion arises from the influence of malign powers in Hades, detailed by O’Meara in his prefatory letter Ad Lectorem.14 Thus Shaftesbury’s interference in a dream reported by a Protestant conspirator in Book 1 is directly attributed by him to the Furies who feature so prominently in Ormonius.15 Moreover, although the poem does not have, like Ormonius, a single hero around whose military achievements it is built, it does nonetheless contain many vignettes of brave Irish fighters. In this respect, it follows, as Ormonius does, the tradition of the Gaelic cathréim (‘battle career’) and is certainly designed to combat the view commonly held among contemporaries that the Irish gave up without a fight. The second question can partly be answered on the basis of the preceding insight. As an imitation of Ormonius its genre could be readily interpreted as didactic rather than epic.16 In fact, the work begins with a recusatio specifically ruling out the possibility that a man in the poet’s current plight could attempt the composition of an epic (see the excerpt given below in the résumé of Book 1). The contents and the general treatment of the material might also chime in with this classification. The desire to give an account of events as they unfolded is combined with a fervent hope and belief that this cannot be the final outcome planned by a just deity. The poem might be construed, then, as an attempt to teach its intended reader the facts of the matter in hand and the proper way to interpret them. This would work well if in fact the poem had been intended as a contribution to the political arguments about the legitimacy of the succession of James III and the practical attitude to be adopted by the French in its regard. But perhaps the greater part is to be supplied by asking ‘what ancient voice would be best suited to an epic poem in which right remains firmly aligned with the losing side and which portrays the battle between a father-in-law and a son-in-law for power?’ The answer that surely springs immediately to mind once the issue is framed thus is ‘Lucan’.17 That this was indeed the Irish poet’s intended model seems certain on a number of grounds. First, his invocation to the Muses (Gilbert 142: 2) contains a clear allusion to Lucan’s (1.64-5). Secondly, he models several structural elements on Lucan (e.g. Shaftesbury’s speech after his temporary furlough from Hell cited above recalls the circumstances of Julia’s to Pompey in Lucan 3.8ff.). Thirdly, his use of

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Keith Sidwell digressions, long speeches, apostrophe and directly indignant interruptions of the narrative seem calculated to replicate some of Lucan’s most obvious narrative techniques. Finally, his clear predilection for high rhetorical effects, especially the use of gruesome and ironic detail (see below on Sander from Book 4 and Schomberg’s camp from Book 5), suggests that he has paid very close attention to the way Lucan wrote and wishes quite clearly to be seen as following in his footsteps. Needless to say, the intertextual strength of such a strategy lies in appropriation of the ancient poem’s outright condemnation of the aggressor, Caesar – for whom, in this case, read the son-in-law, William of Orange. An outline of the poem So much in general. Let me now lay out the plan of the poem, which I shall do in some detail, since the vast bulk of it does not appear to have received any attention at all before. In order to give some taste of the poet’s Latin style, I shall insert brief excerpts into my résumés, accompanied by my verse translation. Book 1 (Gilbert 142: 1-29): The poem opens thus:18 Arma virosque canant alij qui libera laxo Rura terunt gressu, et campis spatiantur apertis: Dum me carcer habet manicis pedicisque coactum, Carnificem lictore mihi minitante crucemque, Quae profugo pro Rege fero: quo nomine lætor, Nec piget ista pati: suntque acceptissima ob ipsum. Res quocunque cadat: pleno iuvat ore fateri Obsequium: famulabar enim calamoque Coronam Vindice ad Acta Fori Majestatemque Stuartam (Cum violari Illam laedive vel ore vel actu Contigit) exagitans ea crimina Iure tuebar, Et mea †poena reos† stitit ad Regale Tribunal.19 Hinc mihi causa mali. versa vice mulctor et Ipse Proditione reus (sic Fata tulere) recenti. Arms and the men let others sing who tread Their free estates with easy step and walk In open fields. While prison holds me bound By manacles and by shackles, and with cross And hangman does the lictor threaten me (I bear these troubles for my exiled King, A name that I delight in, nor regret These sufferings, made acceptable by him. However things turn out), it pleases me With all my voice obedience to confess: For I did serve and with my vengeful quill Protect the Stuart Majesty in the Courts

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5

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ (Whenever it did chance that this was harmed Or violated, be it by word or deed), Dealing by means of law with charges such; My vengeance stood defendants at King’s Bench. Hence my disaster’s cause: the tables turned, I am myself arraigned, of treason fresh Accused (the Fateful Sisters so decreed).

After this highly personal opening, the author announces his theme:20 Sed quid ego tam dura pati me trister, et ipsos Summos posse viros paria in dispendia trudi Non videam? Non Regis opes ereptaque plorem Sceptra Stuartanis manibus? retroque recurram Indagemque mali causas et semina tanti? But why should I lament my sufferings hard, And see not that the chiefest men may fall Into an equal loss? Should I not mourn The King’s resources and the sceptre torn From Stuart hands and turn back to enquire The causes and the seeds of such great wrong?

He now outlines what he sees as the basic cause, namely the turn from Catholicism to sectarianism, and briefly mentions Charles I’s martyrdom (a death the poet asserts will eventually not go unavenged by God). He goes on to give an account of various events, leading to the eventual accession and coronation of James II (1685). The narrative continues with a brief account of the Monmouth rebellion and the riven religious state of the nation, which led to the successful plot against the King (1688). The birth of a legitimate (Catholic) heir to James and his wife, Mary of Modena, led to the circulation of rumours among disaffected Protestants that the child was in fact suppositious. The author now pictures a debate among the conspirators, one of whom (‘a squinty-eyed fellow’)21 reports a visitation to him in a dream of Lord Shaftesbury, freshly returned from Hell. Shaftesbury represents himself as an ardent Protestant and Republican, warns direly of the plans James has for legitimising the Catholic Church, and reports that he has been sent to the upper world by his peers in order to foment revolution to prevent these goals being achieved. He relates how in his exile, willingly taken at the Prince of Orange’s court, he had explained to the Prince what action he must take, to find his plans eloquently backed by an ambitious Mary, daughter of James II, who awoke in her husband a great thirst for war. The squinty spokesman urges his companions to action and they agree to send a message to the Prince of Orange stating their position and urging him to hurry to their aid.

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Keith Sidwell Book 2 (Gilbert 142: 31-69): The appointed messenger arrives at the Prince’s court and explains at length the case of the revolutionaries: ‘James is intent upon re-establishing Catholicism in England and Louis XIV aims at a grand alliance with James, involving a marriage to keep England Catholic. Prince William, take the throne, or if you will not, at least prevent James from fulfilling his plans for religious reform.’ The Prince replies that before a month has passed he will sail for England. The messenger returns secretly to England to bring the message from William to his fellow conspirators, who make preparations for armed insurrection. James calls a council, which agrees unanimously that he must send his wife and newborn son to a safe haven in France. They advise raising an army to face William, protect the true religion and defeat the forces of Republicanism. James declares war, and Mary and the child are put on board ship. The cloak that covers the baby, embroidered by Mary as a girl in Modena, is described in detail, with its biblical scenes, which in retrospect portend the current circumstances of mother and child. On board, an old man is moved to a long speech in which he wishes the child safe passage and predicts that the new king will eventually become hated by his subjects because he will impose exorbitant taxes to fight foreign wars. He prays that this baby will, when grown, return as leader to the English people:22 Tu modo, ceu Moses juncis23 commissus et undis Dux olim redeas populoque salutifer Anglo. Nunc prius aequor ara, Noachus velut alter, et isto Semina navigio Fidei Te sera foventem Et praemittentem speratae vimen olivae Excipiunt reducem melioris saecla metalli. Macte infans, Procede Puer rediture Vir, acri Marte redempturus rapti moderamina sceptri, Ulturusque nefas factum Tibi Vindice ferro. Now may you, like a Moses to the reeds And waves committed, at some time return Our general, saviour to the English plebs. Now first plough thou the main, a second Noah. An age of better metal shall receive Thee, warming in this bark the seeds so late Of Faith and holding forth before Thyself The stem of hoped-for victory. Child adored, Proceed, as man soon destined to return, Control of Thy snatched sceptre to redeem By war ferocious, and with vengeful sword To pay in kind the wrong now done to Thee!

He then berates the kings of Christendom: ‘Why are they fighting other

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ Christians when they ought to be their true enemies (the Turks, Moors and Tartars), or trying like their great predecessors in the First Crusade to gain control of the Holy Land?’ Book 3 (Gilbert 142: 71-100): Now Mars hurries to The Hague to assure William of a multitude of allies (whom he lists). Without delay the Prince gives the order to sail for England. The army assembled is huge. England capitulates at once and hands over the reins of power to William. The Stuarts have no means of fighting back, since their troops have gone over to William. Only the Irish stand apart, but they are butchered or imprisoned or sent into exile at the new king’s command. King James is captured, imprisoned and mocked by his gaoler. But he escapes and crosses the sea to France. Now, however, William decides to subdue Ireland. The scene now shifts to there, where the people prepare to defend James’s crown and the (Catholic) faith and prevent Ireland’s ruin. The Irish troops assemble at the command of Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnell, the Viceroy, at the Curragh of Kildare, of which a fond description is given:24 Est Locus Almus Apex ubi se Kildarius astris Inserit et socium lambunt fastigia caelum. Quem prope campus adest, immensi iugeris aequor Vomere quem nulli vel adunci vulnere aratri Sulcavere boves, nullae secuere lacunae. Non illic surgunt virgulta lapisve superstes Limes agro positus. Nullis hic terminus arvis. Terra patens, praebens promiscua Pascua, nullo Limine septa scrobis, sed toti libera Regno. Si foret hic lapidum jactu reparanda virûm stirps Perdita diluvijs, hic frustraretur inanis Deucaliona labor, silices nec Pyrrha novandis Hoc reperire queat mulieribus irrita campo. There is a bounteous place where Kildare’s tower Reaches the stars, whose roof-beams lick the sky, Its friend. Near this there is a plain, a sea Of acreage vast, which oxen have not scored With wound of curvèd plough, nor ditches cut. There do no thickets rise nor stones remain To mark the field’s edge – these fields have no end. The land lies open, pasture pure provides, Hedged by no boundary dike, but free for all. Were humankind, destroyed by floods, to need To be replenished here by casting stones, Here would the useless task Deucalion trick, And on this plain would Pyrrha all in vain Seek for the flints new womankind to make.

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Keith Sidwell The poet now gives a long list (pp. 82-100) of the troops mustered there, often including the name of the leader or the place of origin of the soldiers (or both) and sometimes anecdotes about their forebears. When the army is assembled, it marches north to Ulster, where it meets general success. Book 4 (Gilbert 142: 101-35): But Derry will not open its gates and in defiance flies William’s flag. Lt.-General Richard Hamilton, commander of King James’s troops, holds a council, which decides on a siege, but he first offers peace terms. The leaders of Derry debate the offer and are divided. They play for time, saying that if James himself will come to Derry and make terms in person, they will open the gates. But while James hastens to Derry, the people work to fortify the town. James arrives in Derry, but the citizens now claim they must obey the wishes of their London patrons and give allegiance to the Prince of Orange. James returns to camp and calls a council, where he instructs Hamilton to take the city by force, then moves to Dublin to hold a Parliament. Hamilton invests Derry and cuts off supply routes, captures Culmore fort, and has a boom constructed to block access to Derry from the sea up the Foyle. The arrival of the French generals Maumont and Pusignan livens up the battle for the city, especially around Pennyburn Mill. To the south, Hamilton is less successful at Windmill Hill. The poet expostulates at the loss of kindred blood:25 Heu! Quanta agnati est vis sanguinis. Exime fastis Hanc labem nostris, Aetas ventura, nefandam Nec patere affines opponi affinibus, oro. Alas! What quantity of kindred blood Was spilt! O age to come, erase this blot Nefarious from our annals and, I pray, Let not our kinsmen fight against our kin.

The poet now relates the hard fighting to both north and south of the city, where the deaths of Maumont and Pusignan occur. Hamilton now moves his camp back, but the leaders’ desire for victory lessens and many make excuses to go off to Dublin to Parliament. The camp empties and many citizens of Derry arrive there claiming they wish to defect. Hamilton gives them food and allows them to go wherever they wish. The Derry leader uses this kindness to evacuate the old, mothers and children and young women, who are fed and spared by Hamilton. The poet lambasts Hamilton for letting slip the opportunity to starve Derry into submission. In a piece of black humour, he cites the example of one Sander, a citizen of Derry who used to hunt with his dogs, but now grew so hungry that he had to eat them:26

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ Tabescens exinde parat vim Sander apertam Occluditque fores. Patulae transenna fenestrae Monstrat iter catulo, qui jam sua corpora saltu Subjectam in plateam librans excurrit, Herusque Obvius egreditur, sequiturque miserrimus unum Venaturque canem languens, moriturque sequendo. Ast ubi jam catulus post terga silentia sensit, Emensos relegit gressus Dominoque propinquat. Cujus, ut obstructae sensit spiracula vitae (Et genialis odor motusque sonusque repressus) Incumbit praede et Domini depascitur artus, Visceribusque suis sepelit cum Actaeone Sandrum. Non tamen Ipse diu est a tanta clade superstes, Sed cadit infoelix alienae victima mensae, Ultorem facturus Heri per fercula laetum. Tales exegit vindex Rhamnusia poenas. Then, fading fast, Sander planned open force And shut the doors. A gaping casement showed The dog a route. He launched his body through And landing in the square below, ran off. His master goes to find him, poor, poor man, And follows in pursuit his one last hound, But faints and dies while in pursuit of him. The dog now sensed the silence at his back, Retraced his steps and came close to his Lord. He realised the breath of life was stayed (His genial smell, movement and voice were gone), And bending to his prey fed on his limbs, Th’ Actaeon Sander burying in his gut. He did not, though, escape long such a fate: He fell, unhappy, victim to the board Of someone else, destined to make his Lord’s Avenger happy through a covered dish. Such was the penalty Nemesis did exact.

Now Major-General Percy Kirk, sent by William, lands a relief force at Inch Island in Lough Swilly. A small boy smuggles a letter sewn into his clothing to the fleet to explain the situation. Kirk easily breaks through the boom and lands supplies in Derry city. The Royal army in council decides that it should leave and does so swiftly. The poet ends the book with the speech of an ordinary soldier, Murray by name, who severely criticises Hamilton’s handling of the siege. Book 5 (Gilbert 142: 136-56): The poet describes the Stuart army’s retreat, via Omagh, Charlemont and Armagh to Ardee, where they encamp. Rumour now reports to Dublin the Duke of Schomberg’s arrival with the Williamite fleet at Bangor and this gives new spirit to the northern rebels. Carrickfergus and Charlemont are taken by the

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Keith Sidwell enemy, and they now move to Dundalk, where they winter, near the Stuart camp. James’s Dublin troops and Royal Guard now join the main army at the River Fane. Meanwhile, Schomberg’s forces are ravaged by the flux, the results of which are graphically described:27 Schombergi interea socios bacchatur in omnes Foeda Lues laxae fluor immedicabilis alvi, Ilia corrodens mordacis acumine morbi Cui non secretae jam suffecere latrinae: Quaeque etenim in turpes est versa platea cloacas Naribus officiens gradientum, oculisque videntum Lubrica quo nequeunt vestigia figere saxis. Meanwhile there raged ’gainst Schomberg’s allies all Foul plague, a flux of bowel, untreatable, Gnawing intestines with sharp bites of pain. Secluded garde-robes would not now suffice: Each square became an open sewer to thwart The noses of those walking and the eyes Of those who looked. Nor could they on the rocks Firm fix their slippery footsteps as they trod.

They are also infested with lice, and fever follows as a result. The poet imagines Schomberg’s anxieties, and comments that these would have been fulfilled had Marshall von Rosen, James’s commander, been allowed to attack, as he wished to. But Rosen grows impatient with the delay, and leaves the Royal army. Schomberg now orders his ravaged troops to retreat to recover for a spring offensive, but no attempt is made to harry their withdrawal. Now (1690) William decides to come to Ulster himself and sails to Bangor from London. The poet lists his forces (pp. 149-55). The Stuart army, encamped on the River Fane, harries William’s forces, but when the King realises the size of the enemy army, he moves south to put the River Boyne between the two contingents. He encamps at Oldbridge and fortifies his position by the ford. Book 6 (Gilbert 142: 157-229): The day of battle dawns. The Dutch troops wade into the river, following Schomberg, but he is shot and then finished off with a sword-thrust. Reverend George Walker, one of the Derry leaders during the siege, is killed as he tries to cross the Boyne. Now the battle rages and Talbot wades into the Boyne, intent only upon killing William. He, however, has not deigned to enter the conflict:28 Ut tamen omnino videt ista parte negatum Trajectum, subit insidijs contendere et astu. Ergo per occultos diverso tramite calles Maturare jubet Dimachos Equitesque volucres

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ Incustoditus si qua queat amne superno Transitus offendi paucove satellite septus. Viribus expugnent Illum, laevoque Stuartos Impete circumeant et vocibus aethera rumpant Terrificis, inimica prementes corda stupore Mandat, ut attonitus quo vergat nesciat hostis. Jussi iter expediunt male possessumque vetustum Pontem adeunt. Croceo tum forte notatus amictu Praesidio Ripae Dimachum globus adstitit, acris Magnanimique Ducis (Quicunque erat Ille) caterva, Semimares animos specioso in pectore versans. Sic caput humanum Cervici Pictor ovinae Jungat, ut haec Forti subnixa Caterva Tribuno est. Quos demum in melius, titulo donatus Equestri, Erudijt, fecitque viros Chiliarcha pericli Spretores, Furque his animi Formido recessit. Nunc vero immemores Decoris, vix prima Batavae Classica sustinuere tubae, licet impiger Illos In pugnas acuat Ductor, famamque futuram Ingerat exagitans, Chari et Discrimina Regis. Quaque vocat, prior Ipse propinquum fertur in hostem Congrediturque manu primoque in limine Ripae Obstruit incursus Batavae Legionis et Ausus. At comites, viso primi libamine Martis Perque humeros Ducis intrepidi manante cruore, Attoniti cessere retro et statione relicta Praecipitant cursum socijsque exempla pudenda Suggessere fugae, quibus indefensa relinquunt Jam latera et tergum venienti adoperta furori. But when he sees that passage is denied In that part, he attempts to fight by stealth And craft. So by another path he bids Dragoons and horsemen swift on secret routes To hasten and to see if they can find A crossing unopposed somewhere upstream Or guarded by few men. This, he commands, They should by force obtain and from the left Attack the Stuarts by encirclement: With frightening war cries they should burst the air And crush their enemies’ hearts with wonder so, Their frantic foes would not know where to turn. As ordered, they complete their journey and Approach Oldbridge, scarce yet in their control. By chance a cluster of Dragoons did guard The bank, marked by the yellow coats they wore, A keen and noble general’s platoon, (Whoe’er he was), but in their specious breasts They had the spirit of hermaphrodites. Thus might an artist paint a human head Upon a sheep’s neck, as this company

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Keith Sidwell Did hold up its brave Tribune from below! At last he, when with title ‘Knight’ endowed, Did teach them better and their Chiliarch made Them men who laughed at danger: mind’s thief Fear Retreated from them. Now, however, they, Unmindful of their honour, scarce sustained The first blasts of the Dutchman’s trumpet, though Their eager general hones them for the fight, Rousing them up by thoughts of future fame And by the dangers of their Sovereign dear. Whither he summons them, he first does plunge Into the nearby enemy, hand to hand, And on the river’s very edge does block The Dutchmen legion’s hazardous assault. His comrades, though, once they had seen the blood Flow down their fearless leader’s shoulders, first Libation to the god of war, turned back In terror and, their post abandoned, rode In haste away, affording to their friends A shameful paradigm of flight, whose flank And rear they now left undefended and Exposed completely to the coming wrath.

Now one part of the Stuart army tries to prevent the Orange forces from getting a foothold on the southern bank. The other part, anxious for the King’s safety, rush to his tent. James, unwillingly, follows his generals’ advice and leaves the camp. Once he is safe, there is a general flight. The news reaches Dublin, where the Irish react with lamentation, the British with joy. Next day, James rides to Cork and takes ship for France. Some Catholics leave for the country, while others, less advisedly, decide to stay. Farmers abandon their fields and head west with their stock, where the Stuart army now marches, to the safety of Connacht and the line of the Shannon. When William realises he is occupying an empty country, he is upset. The poet gives him a speech in which he regrets his usurpation of James’s throne, but sees that he must now continue on the course set. William’s chief justices prepare an edict promising safety of possession to those who will return, but those who do are soon disabused of the pretended justice of the document, when they are robbed by soldiers and then denied reparation by the authorities. William now enters Dublin and holds a council, where he decides to pursue the Stuart army and take Limerick. The council agrees to attempt Athlone first, and Douglas is chosen as general, but his assault fails to take the town. The Prince now heads west to Limerick and lays siege to the city. Bombardment is ineffective, so more artillery is ordered from the east. Patrick Sarsfield, the Earl of Lucan, learns of the

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ plan, intercepts the baggage-train, and destroys it. The assault on Limerick fails, and William marches his troops back to Leinster to winter quarters, hands command over to Ginkel, and sails for England. In spring (1691) the troops convene in Mullingar, then march to the Irish-held fort at Ballymore, which surrenders after a fight. Ginkel now moves to Athlone, which eventually falls, but not without strong resistance. St Ruth moves the Irish army to Aughrim, where he orders it to be ready for battle. At a crucial moment in the conflict, however, his head is blown off by a cannonball. Defeat comes when the dragoon commander holding a narrow path near the castle walls withdraws his forces, obviously bribed to do so, allowing the Dutch access to the causeway. Soon the Irish army is in flight, heading for Limerick, the only refuge left. Galway City signs a treaty of surrender with the Dutch, and Sligo capitulates finally when Granard arrives and allows O’Regan’s troops to leave with full military honours for Limerick. At Limerick, the Dutch are involved in a full siege, but the action is inconclusive, and they decide to try bribery. This is successful and allows them access to both sides of the city. However, Ginkel’s assault proves vain, and he has to decide whether to offer terms or continue the fight, which may stretch on until the next year. He decides to offer terms: those who wish may leave Ireland, on ships he will provide, or they may stay and enjoy their previous holdings. Agreement is reached and the army splits into two parts, those who wish to continue serving their King abroad, and those who wish, dishonourably, to accept the foreign yoke. Now father is split from son, wife from husband, brother deserts brother. Mothers lament the loss of their children and wish for their return. The helmsman calls the men to ship. As the shore recedes, they cast their eyes back:29 Et clamant uno ore: ‘Vale, sancta insula, nosque Auspicijs Magni et fato meliore Stuarti Ad Te mox Superi, satiati hac clade, reducant.’ And with one voice they cry: ‘Farewell, farewell, Island of saints, and may the gods above, With this defeat quite satiated, soon Under the banners – and with better fate – Of the Great Stuart bring us back again!’

The poet and his text Our poet was certainly a fluent versifier, with a good background not only in Latin literature and the Bible, but also in the Greek classics.

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Keith Sidwell Already noted is his opening recusatio involving the beginning of the Aeneid. But his range of intertextual reference is wider. For example, his description of the Curragh’s lack of stones includes a jesting reference to Ovid’s account of the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha in Metamorphoses (1.375-415), and his mockingly dark tale of the starving Derryman, Sander, is calqued on Ovid’s account of Actaeon’s death at the teeth of his own hounds (Met. 3.206-41): even the dogs’ names are mostly from that passage, the one exception being that he has satirically altered Melanchaetes to Melanchthon, the name of the wellknown Protestant reformer and associate of Luther. He also has a wide range of parallels available to him from classical history (for example, he likens ‘Rignius’ ’ heroic escape from the enemy at Athlone to the behaviour of a Roman prisoner of the Carthaginians at Satricum: Gilbert 142: 195-6). He also makes what are clearly direct references to Greek works (e.g. in Book 6, Gilbert 142: 207, he refers to Achilles’ revenge for Patroclus’ death in the Iliad, and at 225 reflects that his theme is more suitable to Sophoclean tragedy than to epic, also evoking the lament of Andromache over the dead Astyanax from Euripides’ Trojan Women). He can muster other less specific parallels from Greek mythology (Niobe, Gilbert 142: 225), but these might rather reflect his reading of Roman poetry. That he actually knew Greek appears to be confirmed by a scattering of Greek words (e.g. Chiliarcha, Gilbert 142: 163) and by his use of the proper Greek genitive form for the war goddess Enyo (Enyus, Gilbert 142: 217). His biblical parallels run from the Gospels to Exodus. His ekphrasis of the blanket that wraps up the baby Prince James as he goes into exile (Book 2, Gilbert 142: 51-3) is especially rife with these, but he can throw in at any moment a reference to Moses (Gilbert 142: 59) or the wisdom of Solomon (57) to enhance the solemnity of his point or cast deep scorn on the enemy. Perhaps what strikes one most forcefully, however, is his pride in the accomplishments of Irish writers. As I have already argued, he knew O’Meara’s Ormonius and used it in some ways as a model. But he steps aside from the narrative to mention the poetic gifts of the fallen hero More at Aughrim (in Book 6, Gilbert 142: 201). And his account of the siege of Galway includes a (slightly gratuitous) mention of Roderick O’Flaherty’s Ogygia (Gilbert 142: 208). This is a man who has followed closely the Latin literature of his fellow Irishmen. But he also knew Irish, as is confirmed by his ability to translate Balldearg O’Donnell’s Christian name (‘strawberry mole’) accurately into the Latin neologism Rubrinaevus (Gilbert 142: 221).

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ He reveals, in turn, a good deal more of himself and his opinions, both religious and political, than one might expect from the genre he has chosen. Whoever the poet turns out to have been, we know he was a lawyer, and he displays a thoroughly legalistic – if understandably partial – attitude to the constitutional and political situation he describes. He also knows the names of legal men involved in the Irish campaign and speaks fondly and with respect of them in some detail (Book 3, Gilbert 142: 93-5). One cannot but wonder how he thought he would survive the treason charge against him if anyone competent had requested sight of his magnum opus. From his perspective, perhaps, he was only speaking plain truth, but the poem contains from the Williamite point of view opinions, especially of William and Mary themselves, which can only have been interpreted as treasonable. Nonetheless, or perhaps one ought to say, precisely for this reason, his is a voice that ought to be heard. It is an angry voice, still spitting with fury at the crass injustice of what he has witnessed, still nonetheless convinced that in the longer term Providence will right these wrongs and restore the Stuart monarchy and the true faith. He has been too long silent and even if, in his own words, the poem’s circumstances of composition depend upon (Gilbert 142: 2) captivæ nostræ  Musæ, Stridula discordi quæ nunc canit aspera nervo. our imprisoned Muse, who sings Harsh music, stridulous on discordant string

the poet nonetheless sings a song in the truth of which he believed, the notes of which have been for too long drowned out by the even harsher music (and perhaps even more discordant string) of the then (and future) victors. Notes 1. The title refers to a banner with this slogan placed over Dublin Castle to greet King James II’s arrival in the city on 24 March 1689 (Simms 2000: 64). The poem exists only in one manuscript, Gilbert MS 141, Dublin City Public Library. J.T. Gilbert, into whose collection the manuscript came in the nineteenth century, had a copy made (now Gilbert MS 142, also housed in the Dublin City Public Library). This copy has recently been digitised and was made available to me through the kind auspices of Dr Máire Kennedy, the Divisional Librarian. I thank Dr Kennedy for permission to print extracts from the poem here. My readings in this paper are based on this copy, except for Book 1, which I have transcribed from the original and checked against the copy. All page references are to MS 142. I am grateful to Noreen Humble and Pádraig Lenihan for reading a draft of this piece.

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Keith Sidwell 2. That he is to be pictured in prison in Dublin Castle when he wrote emerges from the highly unusual personal proem (Gilbert 142: 1-3: see below pp. 254-5), and that he is to be thought of as still in prison when he finished the poem is shown by the phrase vincta Camena, ‘my Muse enchained’ (Gilbert 142: 227). For O’Meara’s Ormonius, see the edition of Edwards and Sidwell 2011; Edwards and Sidwell 2009; Sidwell 2007; 2010; 2012 (also Houghton in this volume, n. 9). 3. Pádraig Lenihan, of NUI Galway (for whom see further below), is currently working on this identification. 4. For example, twice on Gilbert 142: 17 there are specified gaps for omitted names, the first of five letters, the second of seven. Here there is no other clue, but elsewhere the initial letter is given and sometimes also the grammatical ending. For instance at Gilbert 142: 27 we read A..o, which agrees with sinu later in the line. 5. The author comments, for example, at Gilbert 142: 77, immediately after the English acceptance of William as King, Panditur interea peregrinis Aula Tyrannis | Regiaque incesto resplenduit Anglica luxu, | Fassa suum, quemcunque fovet Fortuna, Monarcham (‘Meanwhile to foreign tyrants is the court | Laid open, and the English Palace shines | With sinful pomp, confessing King whome’er | Fortune does cherish’). 6. Gilbert 1892: 275-82. 7. Simms 2000: 272 (bibliography) and 225 (Aughrim). However, Simms’ reference to a Historical Manuscripts Commission report mentioning the work in its bibliography is erroneous (information provided by P. Lenihan in correspondence). 8. Lenihan 2003: 193-4. 9. See Harris and Sidwell 2009. 10. Gilbert 142: 2, Emeritis ea commoda cedo poetis (‘These rewards | I yield to veteran poets’). 11. E.g. Gilbert 142: 11, Satrapam and Angligenûm Genus; 98, Ormoniae pars sana Domus (‘The sane part of the Ormond realm’); but the usual word Ormondus is used at 181. For commentary on these words in Ormonius, see Edwards and Sidwell 2011: 406-8 (Satrapas), 423 (Angligenus) and 393-4 (Ormonius / Ormonia). 12. Gilbert 142: 163. 13. See Barry 2004 on Dermot O’Meara. For Edmund, see Logan 1958. 14. Edwards and Sidwell 2011: 88-9. 15. Gilbert 142: 16. 16. See Edwards and Sidwell 2011: 21-5. 17. I am grateful to Laurie O’Higgins for directing my attention to Lucan’s influence on the passage about Schomberg’s camp at Gilbert 142: 142 (see further below). On Lucan in Jacobite epic, see also Houghton in this volume. 18. Gilbert 142: 1. 19. Et mea [unclear text, overwritten in different ink] stitit ad Regale Tribunal. Gilbert MS 142 has a blank and a note (fn. 1) explaining that the text ‘poena reos’ was erased from the original. mea poena might mean ‘my penalty’ or (if personified) ‘My Fury’ (but the letter is lower case). Given what follows, I have rendered it ‘vengeance’. 20. Gilbert 142: 3. 21. Pádraig Lenihan suggests to me ‘the reference here may be to William

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15. ‘Now or never, now and forever’ Cavendish Earl of Devonshire one of the so-called “immortal seven” aristocrats who invited William: he looks squinty-eyed in one of his portraits’. 22. Gilbert 142: 59. 23. Gilbert 142: 59 reads junctis, a mistake for juncis (‘reeds’), which I read here: it makes more sense since Moses is the referent here, and he was left in a basket in the water (Exodus 2:3-5). 24. Gilbert 142: 81. 25. Gilbert 142: 111. 26. Gilbert 142: 123. 27. Gilbert 142: 142. 28. Gilbert 142: 163-4. 29. Gilbert 142: 229.

Bibliography Barry, J. (2004) ‘Dermot O’Meara, Physician and Author’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 41: 801-8. Oxford. Childs, J. (2007), The Williamite Wars in Ireland, 1688-1691. London and New York. Edwards, D. and Sidwell, K. (2009) ‘The Tipperary Hero: Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius’, in Harris and Sidwell 2009: 59-85. Edwards, D. and Sidwell, K. (eds) (2011) The Tipperary Hero: Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius (1615). Turnhout. Gilbert 141 = Gilbert MS 141. Dublin City Public Library. Gilbert 142 = Gilbert MS 142. Dublin City Public Library. Gilbert, J.T. (ed.) (1892), A Jacobite Narrative of the War in Ireland, 1688-91. Dublin. Harris, J. and Sidwell, K. (eds) (2009) Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters. Cork. Lenihan, P. (2003) 1690: Battle of the Boyne. Stroud. Logan, P. (1958) ‘Dermot and Edmund O’Meara, Father and Son’, Journal of the Irish Medical Association 43: 312-17. Sidwell, K. (2007) ‘Challenging Vergil: The Storm Scene in Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius’, in A. Coroleu, V. Oberparleiter, I. Hohenwallner and R. Kritzer (eds), Bezugsfelder: Festschrift für Gerhard Petersmann zum 65. Geburtstag, 204-13. Horn and Wien (Grazer Beiträge: Supplementband IX). Sidwell, K. (2010) ‘Intimations of Irish: O’Meara’s Ormonius and the Display of Vernacular Learning’, Renæssanceforum 6: 141-8. Sidwell, K. (2012) ‘Old English or Gael? Personal, Cultural and Political Identity in Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius’, Renæssanceforum 8: 155-65. Simms, J.G. (2000) Jacobite Ireland. Dublin.

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Index References to the pages of this book are given in bold type. Ancient authors and texts Aelian: 21 Apuleius Metamorphoses 11.5: 160 Ausonius Epigrammata 44: 33 Ordo urbium nobilium: 175 Bible Exodus: 264; 2: 267 Isaiah: 117; 7: 117-18; 34: 70; 40:4: 83 Job 5: 163 Numbers 24: 71 Proverbs 14: 163 Psalms 2: 163; 8: 156-7; 10: 163; 13: 163; 19: 171; 22: 163; 23: 160-1; 59: 163; 82: 171; 114: 71, 88 Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae: 88, 217 Catullus: 28-9, 155; 1: 39; 5: 39, 42; 7: 39; 14a: 39; 16: 29-30, 170; 61: 137; 64: 151, 159 Cicero: 243 Claudian, In Rufinum: 73 Ennius, Annales (Skutsch) 363: 200 Euripides, Trojan Women: 264 Hesiod, Works and Days 371: 247 Homer Iliad: 119, 264; 2.235: 80; 2.484-93: 198; 7.96: 80 Odyssey: 223

Horace Ars poetica 133-4: 76; 156-78: 108; 286-7: 84; 343-6: 97; 476: 168 Epistles 1.1: 105; 1.8: 117; 1.11: 110; 1.15: 170; 1.19: 72 Epodes: 155, 159, 163; 6: 163; 8: 169, 170; 9: 169; 12: 169 Odes (Carmina): 155-6, 163; 1.1: 33, 95, 163; 1.2: 90; 1.3: 159; 1.4: 227; 1.5: 103, 136; 1.9: 167; 1.12: 159, 163, 165; 1.16: 170; 1.20: 107; 1.21: 162; 1.22: 39, 112; 1.23: 162; 1.29: 108; 1.31: 165; 1.32: 33; 1.34: 83; 1.35: 166; 1.37: 168; 2.2: 108; 2.5: 39; 2.9: 166; 2.13: 170; 2.14: 98; 2.18: 165; 3.1-6: 94, 164; 3.1: 171; 3.2: 40, 168; 3.3: 93; 3.4: 164, 165-6; 3.6: 167; 3.16: 163; 3.21: 96; 3.26: 33; 4.2: 70, 90-1, 93, 138, 168; 4.4: 164, 166; 4.5: 91; 4.7: 99; 4.8: 96; 4.9: 96, 164; 4.10: 99; 4.13: 103; 4.14: 91-2, 93, 164, 166; 4.15: 164 Satires 1.5: 115; 1.6: 242; 2.1: 105 Juvenal: 144, 155; 3: 123; 10: 123 Livy 1.48: 200 Lucan 1.1-32: 191, 192, 193, 194, 199, 204; 1.33-4: 204; 1.44: 204; 1.57-8: 79; 1.64-5: 253; 1.81: 204; 1.144-5: 166; 1.205-10: 197; 1.230: 204;

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Index 1.680: 204; 1.681: 194; 2.4: 194; 2.46: 204; 2.116: 194; 3.8ff.: 253; 5.620: 194; 7.95: 194; 7.145: 194; 7.551: 204; 7.557: 204; 7.568: 194; 9.656: 194 Lucretius 1.3-20: 159; 1.73: 151; 1.101: 194; 1.926-8: 72; 2: 81; 5.82: 115 Martial: 155, 243; 1.1: 39; 1.3: 39; 1.4: 39; 1.35: 29; 1.39: 39; 1.107: 38; 1.113: 39; 8.55: 38; 8.76: 27; 11.67: 107; 14.195: 27 Menander, Sententiae 810: 21 Nemesianus, Cynegetica 8-9: 72 Oppian, Cynegetica 20-1: 72 Ovid: 155 Amores: 163; 1.5: 40, 42, 62; 1.15: 163; 3.15: 27 Fasti 2.451-2: 106 Heroides 15: 33 Metamorphoses 1.7: 82; 1.79: 165; 1.375-415: 264; 2.782: 79; 3.206-41: 264 Tristia 1.7: 242 Persius: 243 Pindar Nemean Odes 1: 70 Olympian Odes 2: 70 Propertius 1.3: 40, 42; 3.3: 41 Seneca: 88 Hercules furens 102: 163 Naturales Quaestiones 6.18.5: 75 Troades 958: 160 Sophocles: 264 Statius: 155 Silvae 1.2.87-8: 132 Thebaid 2.37: 84; 7.625: 84 Tibullus 1.1: 62; [3.4]: 106

Virgil: 73 Aeneid 1: 80; 1.1-11: 78, 192, 197; 1.36: 80; 1.52-4: 75; 1.124-30: 94; 1.209: 204; 1.223: 75; 1.282: 204; 1.287: 192; 1.305: 192; 1.530: 222; 1.544-5: 193; 1.604: 168; 2.90: 80; 2.98-9: 80; 2.106: 193; 2.114: 80; 2.197-8: 204; 2.255: 193; 2.573: 168; 2.779: 204; 2.781-2: 82; 3.161: 222; 3.658: 194; 3.678: 83; 4.83: 133; 4.181: 194; 4.336: 247; 4.465-6: 168; 5: 115; 5.262: 204; 5.700: 192; 6.285-9: 194; 6.621-2: 193; 6.782: 204; 6.792-3: 195; 6.845-6: 200; 6.847-53: 136; 6.851: 105; 7: 80; 7.53: 136; 7.100-1: 159; 7.461: 204; 7.558: 204; 7.563: 222; 7.612-13: 205; 7.641-6: 198; 8.19: 192; 8.199: 193; 8.703: 194; 8.722: 82; 8.724: 223; 9: 115; 9.446-9: 115; 9.617: 80; 10.97-9: 84; 10.163-5: 198; 10.437: 204; 11.126: 202; 11.336-7: 80; 11.343-4: 80; 12.923: 197; 12.946-7: 204 Eclogues 1.66: 1; 2.64: 223; 4.29: 222; 6: 58; 6.1-12: 41, 236; 6.36: 82; 7.61: 223; 8.63: 41; 9.40-1: 223; 9.47-8: 160; 10.72-3: 160 Georgics: 155; 1.10-12: 223; 1.489-92: 204; 1.505: 193; 2.391: 222; 2.458ff.: 85; 2.458-9: 81; 2.475-7: 76; 2.534: 204; 3.1-48: 75; 3.8-9: 84; 3.291-3: 72; 3.429: 222; 4: 75

Early modern individuals and texts Aepinus, Johannes: 231, 232-3 Alesius, Alexander: 245

270

Index Alsop, Anthony, Odae 1.11: 136 Amerbach, Viet: 235 Ammonio (Andrea della Rena), Elegia de obitu Regis Henrici VII et felici successione Henrici octavi: 2 Andrewes, Lancelot: 53 anonymous epic on Williamite War: 250-67 Barret, John: 21 Behn, Aphra: 87 Benwyn, Dafydd: 211 Bérault, Nicolas: 21 Bertie, Norreys: 133-4 Best, Thomas: 135 Boece, Hector: 26 Bonner, Edmund: 234, 240-6 Boswell, James: 105, 109-15 Bourbon, Nicolas: 25-6 Nugae: 31 Nugarum libri octo: 31 Brahe, Tycho: 143 Buchanan, George: 2, 142-54, 155-72 Alcestis: 146, 155 Baptistes: 146, 155, 160 De Iure Regni: 147 De Sphaera: 147, 148, 155 Elegiae: 155, 164; 1 (Quam misera sit condicio docentium litteras ): 144; 2 (Maiae Calendae): 145; 3 (Pro Lena): 143; 5: 145 Epigrammata: 155, 164 Epithalamium: 147-8 Franciscanus: 144, 145, 148, 155 Fratres Fraterrimi: 145-6, 155; 5: 145, 172; 18: 153; 28 (Adventus in Galliam): 147; 30: 172 Genethliacon (on the birth of the future James VI): 148 Hendecasyllabi: 155, 164 Iambi: 155, 164, 169-70 Iusta 29: 150 Jephthes: 146, 147, 155, 160 Medea: 146, 155

Miscellanea: 148, 155-6, 164; 1: 147, 164-8; 2: 164; 3: 147, 164; 4: 164; 8: 164; 9: 164; 11 (Calendae Maiae): 145, 151, 164; 13: 145; 15: 145; 23: 147, 168; 24 (on the death of John Calvin): 148; 28: 164 Psalmorum Davidis Paraphrasis Poetica: 143, 148, 155-6; 8: 156-60; 10: 150; 19: 171; 23: 160-3; 82: 171 Rerum Scoticarum Historia: 147, 195 Silvae: 155, 164; 1: 145; 2: 145; 3 (Desiderium Lutetiae): 152 Somnium: 155 Translation of Linacre’s Rudiments: 144 Vita: 142 Budé, Dreux: 18 Budé, Guillaume: 16, 17, 18, 22 Camden, William: 39, 219 Britannia: 39, 173-89, 219 Campion, Thomas: 3, 36-50 A New Way of making Fowre Parts in Counter-Point: 37 Ad Thamesin: 37 A Booke of Ayres: 37, 41; 1.1: 36, 42; 1.8: 42; 1.18: 39, 42 Two Bookes of Ayres: 37, 41; 1.2: 39; 2.10: 42; 2.18: 42 The Third Booke of Ayres: 37; 17: 42 Descriptions of Maskes: 42 Elegiae: 37; 1: 43 Epigrammata: 37; 1.1: 38-9; 1.34: 38; 1.41: 39; 1.43: 39; 1.69: 39; 1.70: 39; 1.73: 39; 1.76: 39; 1.82: 39; 1.94: 39; 1.96: 39; 1.97: 39; 1.103: 38; 1.124: 39, 42; 1.144: 39; 1.148: 39; 1.167: 37; 1.168: 39; 1.170: 40; 1.187: 39; 1.188: 39; 1.210: 38; 2.2: 38, 40-1; 2.3: 39; 2.4: 39; 2.8: 38; 2.12: 39-40, 42; 2.19: 39; 2.24: 38; 2.27: 38; 2.47: 39;

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Index 2.54: 38, 40; 2.60: 42; 2.88: 38; 2.89: 42; 2.136: 38, 39, 42; 2.172: 38; 2.186: 39 Observations in the Art of English Poesie: 43, 49 Songs of Mourning: 37, 42 Umbra: 37 Carmeliano, Pietro, Suasoria Laeticiae: 2-3 Castiglione, Baldassare, Il Cortegiano: 211 Cayado, Henrique, Eclogae: 2 Charles I: 53, 192, 255 Letter to the University for choice of ye Channcellor: 55-6 Charles II: 102 Charles V: 145, 166 Chéradame, Jean: 18, 21-2 Aristophanis facetissimi comoedie nouem: 21 Clement, John: 19-20 Clerk, John: 20-1 Cossé-Brissac, Charles: 147, 168 Cowley, Abraham: 3, 69-86, 87-104 A Proposition for the Advancement of Learning: 85 Anacreontiques: 71 Civil War 2.365-96: 74 Davideis: 69-86, 88; Preface of the Author: 71-2; Proposition: 73; 1.1-12: 75, 77-8; 1.19-24: 78; 1.27-8: 72; 1.39-40: 77; 1.43: 80; 1.47-8: 80; 1.71-100: 74; 1.105-6: 78; 1.120: 78; 1.167-8: 79; 1.274-7: 80; 1.318-19: 80; 1.347-62: 74; 1.357: 78; 1.392-3: 78; 1.426: 79; 1.447-51: 81; 1.451: 76; 1.455-60: 82; 1.482: 75; 1.483-515: 83; 1.881-4: 81; 3.125-38: 74; 3.277: 76; 3.301: 76; 3.785-812: 75 Davideis: liber unus 1-11: 77; 19-24: 78; 30: 72; 42-5: 77-8; 49: 80; 53-4: 80; 81-103: 74; 86-7: 84; 122: 78; 135: 78; 184-5: 79; 315-18: 80; 325-7:

80; 364-5: 81; 392-409: 74; 404: 78; 447: 78; 483: 79; 503-7: 82; 516-21: 82; 555-94: 83; 1028-30: 81; Numbers 24: 71; Psalm 114: 71 Essays in Verse and Prose: On Agriculture: 85 Hymn to Light: 71 Naufragium Ioculare: 69 Of Solitude: 101 Plantarum Libri Sex: 70, 87-104; 3: 87-9; 3 (Violet): 89-94; 3 (Rose): 94-7; 4: 87-9; 4 (Amaranthus): 97-100; 6.4: 84 Pindarique Odes: 70-1, 83 Poemata Latina: 88; Ode: 88; Solitudo: 88 Poems: 84 The Motto: 81 The shortnesse of Life and uncertainty of Riches: 101 Unus liber Miscellaneorum: 70 Upon the Chair made out of Sir Francis Drake’s Ship: 71 Craig, Thomas: 173 Cranmer, Thomas: 245 Crayford, Robert: 21 Croke, Richard: 26 Cromwell, Thomas: 233-4, 235 Dafydd, Meurug: 211 Danvers, John: 53 de Bèze, Theodore, Iuvenilia: 31 De Brie, Germain: 24-5 Diodati, Charles: 54, 62, 69 Dobson, William: 137-8 Doncanus Hibernus: 230-49 Ad Edmundum Bonerum carmen gratulatorium: 240-6 Ad Thomam Crumuellum de dignitate consiliarii carmen heroicum: 233-4, 235-40 Du Bois, François: 16 du Maine, Guillaume: 18, 22 Dryden, John Aeneid: 84 Eclogue 4: 117

272

Index MacFlecknoe: 76 Dunbar, William: 144 Elizabeth I: 4 Emilio, Paolo: 16 De rebus gestis Francorum: 16 Eobanus Hessus, Helius: 25, 32 Erasmus, Desiderius, Ode  de laudibus Britanniae Regisque Henrici septimi ac reg. liberorum: 2 Fitzgeffrey, Charles: 43 Fitzpatrick, John: 132 Flemming, Robert, Lucubraciunculae Tiburtinae: 2 Fletcher, Phineas, Locustae vel Pietas Iesuitica /The Locusts, or, Apollyonists: 71 Fletcher, William: 137 Forbes, William: 137 Foulis, James: 145 Francis, Philip: 138 Frederick, Prince of Wales: 127, 130 Freind, William: 136 Gage, Elizabeth: 218 Garcaeus, Johannes: 231 Gigli, Giovanni Epithalamium: 2 Genethliacon: 2 Gil, Alexander: 54 Gonnell, William: 19-20 Graham, John: 190-207 Gratulatio (Oxford, 1736): 125-41 Gray, Thomas: 136 Greene, Edward Burnaby: 138 Gregory, David: 136 Hacket, John: 52 Hall, Joseph: 63 Harbin, Swayne: 135 Harington, John: 219 Heywood, Theede: 135 Henry VIII: 16, 31, 145, 235, 244-5 Herbert, George: 3, 51-68

Affliction: 63-4 A Priest to the Temple, or The Countrey Parson: 63-4 In Obitum Henrici Principis Walliae: 53, 56-7 In Obitum Serenissimae Reginae Annae: 53, 57 Jacula Prudentium: 51 Jordan (I): 56, 57, 59 Lucus: 53 Memoriae Matris Sacrum: 52, 53 Musae Responsoriae: 53, 59-61, 64; 16: 59; 37: 59 Passio Discerpta: 53 Sonnets to his mother Magdalen: 51, 53; My God, where is that ancient heat: 56 The Quidditie: 56, 57 The Temple: 53, 56, 61 Histoire du Prince Titi: 130 Hobbes, Thomas, Behemoth: 55 Hoby, Elizabeth: 4 Hoby, Thomas, The Courtier: 211 Howard, George: 133 Hume, David, Camdenea: 173 Hyrde, Richard: 16, 19 James VI/I: 53, 155 A Proclamation for the Uniting of England and Scotland: 178-9 Basilicon Doron: 182 Lepanto: 71 James VII/II: 193, 255 Johnson, Samuel: 105-24, 126 Ad Lauram Parituram Epigramma: 106 Dictionary of the English Language: 105 From the Greek Anthology 7.538: 119; 9.133: 120; 9.577: 120; 11.391: 120; Gnîqi seautÒn: 115-17 In Rivum A Mola Stoana Lichfeldiae Diffluentem: 114-15 Insula Sancti Kennethi: 113-14 In Theatro: 107-8

273

Index Mea Nec Falernae: 106-7 Messia: 117 Nugae Anapaesticae in Lecto Lusae: 109 Oda: 111-12 On Losing the Power of Speech: 120-1 On Recovering The Use of His Eyes: 121 Poem on New Year’s Day, 1784: 122 Poem with no title or date: 122 Prayer on Christmas Day: 121-2 Rambler: 105 Skia: 110-11 To Dr Thomas Lawrence: 108 Verses On a Grotto By the River Thames: 118-19 Johnston, Arthur: 2 Johnston, John: 173-89 Inscriptiones historicae regum Scotorum: 175 Per< stef£nwn Sive De Coronis Martyrum in Britannia: 179-80 Urbes Britanniae: 173-89; Aberdonia: 184; Æra, siue Æria: 182-3; Beruicum: 177-8; Eboracum: 176-7; Edinburgum: 180-1; Fanvm Regvli, siue Andreapolis: 181; Glascua: 180; Hadingtonia: 179; Innernessus, & Innerlothea: 177; Perthvm: 182; Taodvnvm, sive Deidonvm: 187; Urbes Fifae Littorales: 183-4 Jones, Francis: 135 Jonson, Ben: 178 To King James: 84 Justa Edouardo King naufrago: 6, 55 Landor, Walter Savage, Gebir/ Gebirus: 3 Lascaris, Janus: 16, 17 Epigrammata: 17 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques: 16 Leland, John: 15-35

Carmina 6: 49; 7: 27; 12: 22; 16: 19; 17: 27; 24: 25; 25: 21; 28: 17-18; 30: 28-9, 30; 32: 27-8; 34: 20; 37: 22-3; 38: 22; 42: 18; 45: 21; 48: 22; 55: 30; 59: 24-5; 63: 30; 67: 16, 18; 70: 20; 71: 25; 77: 23-4; 83: 21; 84: 19; 94: 19, 24, 30; 97: 19; 100: 23, 30; 103: 19, 21; 104: 21; 105: 19; 106: 25; 109: 19; 110: 19; 115: 17; 123: 17; 128: 31; 131: 25; 136: 16, 19; 138: 16, 18; 141: 18; 146: 30; 148: 25-6; 152: 21; 154: 18; 156: 18; 158: 25; 168: 26; 170: 26; 176: 18, 19; 180: 19; 186: 18; 193: 25, 26-7, 31; 195: 19; 198: 1, 32; 237: 29-30; 239: 32; 254: 32; 260; 26 Commentarii de scriptoribus Britannicis: 15 Cygnea cantio: 31 De Viris Illustribus: 15, 27, 32 Peroratio ad candidum lectorem: 31 Leyson, Thomas: 212-13, 218, 220 Poem in praise of St Donat’s (in Latin): 208, 212, 213 Linacre, Thomas: 18, 19 De sanitate tuenda: 20 Methodus medendi: 20 Lipsius, Justus, De Constantia Libri Duo: 215, 225 Lloyd, John: 137 Lupset, Thomas: 19-20, 21, 22, 24 Lyttleton, Charles: 132 MacLean, Roderick: 145 Macrin, Salmon: 25 Carminum liber: 30-1 Carminum libri quattuor: 33 Odarum libri sex: 33 Major, John: 144 Mantuan [Battista Spagnoli]: 25 Contra poetas impudice scribentes carmen: 29 Marullo, Michele: 25, 28-9 Epigrammata 1.62: 29

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Index Marvell, Andrew: 3 On a Drop of Dew/Ros: 71 The Garden/Hortus: 71 Mary Queen of Scots: 147-8, 155 May, Thomas Continuation/Supplementum: 71 Melanchthon, Philip: 231-3, 235, 245, 264 Melville, Andrew: 2, 181 Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria: 53 Melville, James: 181 Miles, Thomas: 16, 18 Milton, John: 3, 51-68 Ad Patrem: 52, 54, 59, 65 An Apology against a Pamphlet: 63 Comus: 69 De Idea Platonica: 54 Elegiae 1: 54, 58, 65; 2 (In Obitum Praeconis Academici Cantabrigiensis): 57; 3: 61-2; 6: 51, 54, 66 Epitaphium Damonis: 62, 69 In Obitum Procancellarii Medici: 57 In Quintum Novembris: 55 Italian sonnets: 54 Lycidas: 6, 56, 58, 69 Naturam non pati senium: 54 Of Education: 63-4, 65 On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity: 54 Paradise Lost: 58, 69, 71, 72, 75, 137 Poem for John Gostlin: 58 Poems: 69 Prolusions: 52, 55, 65 Samson Agonistes: 69 The Reason of Church Government: 63 More, Thomas: 19, 24-5 Epigrammata: 25 Utopia: 20, 25 Murray, Thomas, Naupactiados: 71 Musae Etonenses: 6

Niblett, Stephen: 131 Nuntius Scoto-Britannicus: 173 O’Flaherty, Roderick, Ogygia: 264 O’Meara, Dermot, Ormonius: 203, 250, 252, 253, 264 Owen, John: 4, 219 Parkhurst, John, Ludicra sive epigrammata iuvenilia: 31-2 Petrarch [Francesco Petrarca]: 5 Peyton, Augustine: 18 Philp (or Philip), James: 190-207 Grameid: 190-207 Pole, Reginald: 20, 24 Poliziano, Angelo: 25 Pont, Timothy: 174 Pontano, Giovanni Gioviano: 25, 26-7, 28-9 Hendecasyllabi/Baiae: 29 Parthenopaeus sive Amores: 29 Pruritus: 29 Pope, Alexander Essay on Man: 119 Iliad: 119 Imitations of Homer: 119 Messiah: 117 Potter, Thomas: 132-3 Powel, David The Historie of Cambria: 211 Rhys, Siôn Dafydd: 208-9, 213, 217, 220 Cambrobrytannicae Cymraecaeve linguae institutiones et rudimenta: 208, 211-12 De italica pronunciatione et orthographia libellus: 209 Poem in praise of St Donat’s (Welsh translation): 213-14 Rich, Henry: 55-6 Rose, William: 19 Rosset, Pierre: 31 Ruel, Jean: 16, 21 De natura stirpium: 16 Russell, John: 22

Newey, John: 135

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Index Sabrinae Corolla: 6 Sannazaro, Iacopo: 25 Scaliger, Joseph Justus: 115 Secundus, Johannes, Basia: 138 Seidel, Johannes: 137 Severs, Robert: 30 Sibbald, Robert, Nuncius Scoto-Britannicus: 185 Siôn, Llywelyn: 211 Smith, Andrew: 22 Sparcheford, Laurence: 23-4 Spence, Joseph: 129 Stanihurst, Richard: 230 Stradling, Anne (née Stroud): 216-17, 219, 225 Stradling, Edward: 209-12, 220-1 The Winning of the lordship of Glamorgan: 209 Stradling, John: 214 Beati Pacifici: A Divine Poem: 219 De Vita et Morte Contemnenda, Libri Duo: 215-18 Epigrammatum Libri Quatuor: 219; 1.8: 220; 1.11: 220; 1.12: 220; 1.25: 220; 1.40: 221; 1.54: 219; 1.60: 220; 1.61: 220; 1.74: 219; 1.119: 224-5; 1.120: 221-3; 2.9: 221; 2.13: 219; 2.65: 219; 2.101: 219; 3.3: 221; 4.8: 219; 4.62: 221; 4.90: 219; 4.98: 221; 4.123: 220-1 Two Bookes of Constancie: 215, 225

Talbot, George: 135-6 Tate, Nahum: 87 Tayler, John: 22 Thistlethwayte, Alexander: 134 Thrale, Hester: 112-13 Tollet, Elizabeth: 126 Toussain, Jacques: 18 Trevor, John: 134-5 Tunstal, Cuthbert: 17 Turner, Edward: 132 Vida, Marco Girolamo: 25 Christiad: 196 Vergil, Polydore: 26 Wallop, John: 131-2 Walpole, Horace: 134, 136-7 Walpole, Robert: 131 West, Richard: 136-7 Weston, Elizabeth Jane: 4 Widow, Robert: 32 Winter, Thomas: 20-1, 22, 24 Winther von Andernach, Johann: 18 Wolsey, Thomas: 20, 22 Wotton, Edward: 19-20 Wotton, Henry, The Elements of Architecture: 224 Wynn, William: 137 Zieger, Thomas: 245

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