Pierce Penileffe

HIS SVPPLICATION

of enemies, but he had also many friends. He vindicated the deceased Greene against the attacks of Gabriel Harvey; he completed and published Marlowe's unfinished tragedy of Dido; and he is praised by Lodge, Middleton, and Dekker. In 1597 a satirical comedy, The Isle of Dogs, procured him some months imprisonment, and he seems to have been in needy circumstances for the short remainder of his life. He died some time in 1601, leaving the character of “a man who had never paid shoemaker or tailor." Nash, like Greene, is a playwright and a poet, and opportunity will be found for speaking of him in both capacities. He is much less truly a poet than Greene, whom, on the other hand, he surpasses in vigour, and his outlook over life is considerably wider. A quarrelsome temper drove him into the Marprelate controversy, and he carried on a most embittered dispute with Gabriel Harvey for years, until the Archbishop of Canterbury imposed silence upon both. His irritable mood was further exasperated by poverty and the sense of wrong operating upon an abnormal self-esteem. In the most remarkable of his tracts, Pierce Pennilesse's Supplication to the Devil (1592), a general outbreak against all the classes which had provoked his envy or jealousy, he says of himself :

to the Diuell.

Barbaria grandis habere nihil.
Written by Tho. Nash, Gent.

LONDON,

printed by Abell Ieffes, for

L.B. 1'5 92.

Title page of "Pierce Penilesse," 1592

Having spent many years in studying how to live, and lived a long time without money; having tired my youth with folly, and surfeited my mind with vanity, I began at length to look back to repentance, and address my endeavours to prosperity. But all in vain; I sat up late and rose early, contended with the cold and conversed with scarcity; for all my labours turned to loss, my vulgar muse was despised and neglected, my pains not regarded, or slightly rewarded, and I myself in prime of my best wit laid open to poverty. Nash is a valuable writer for his illustrations of the manners of his time, and few of his pages are without strokes of quaint sarcastic humour. His only production of literary importance, however, is his romance, The Unfortunate Traveller; or, the Life of Jack Wilton (1593), and this not so much from any special merit as from being a remarkable forerunner of the picaresque English novel of the eighteenth century, and of the historical novel also, the action being laid on the Continent in the time of the Field of Cloth of Gold. The personages are uninteresting, but the incidents suffice to keep the reader's attention alive, and many scenes and descriptions are evidently taken from the writer's personal experience. The following lively picture of

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disputants before the Duke of Saxony at Wittenberg was probably drawn nearer home :

One pecked like a crane with his fore-finger at every half-syllable he brought forth, and nodded with his nose like an old singing man teaching a young chorister to keep time. Another would be sure to wipe his mouth with his handkercher at the end of every full point. And even when he thought he had cast a figure so curiously as he dived over head and ears into his auditor's admiration, he would take occasion to stroke up his hair, and trim up his mustachios twice or thrice over while they might have leisure to applaud him. A third wavered and waggled his head like a proud horse playing with his bridle, or as I have seen some fantastical swimmer at every stroke train his chin sidelong over his left shoulder. A fourth sweat and foamed at the mouth for very anger, his adversary had denied that part of his syllogism which he was not prepared to answer. A fifth spread his arms like an usher that goes before to make room, and thript with his finger and thumb when he thought he had tickled it with a conclusion. A sixth hung down his countenance like a sheep, and stuttered and slavered very pitifully when his invention was stepped aside out of the way. A seventh gasped and gaped for wind, and groaned in his pronunciation as if he were hard bound in some bad argument. Gross plodders were they all, that had some learning and reading, but no wit to make use of it. They imagined the Duke took the greatest pleasure and contentment to hear them speak Latin, and as long as they talked nothing but Tully he was bound to attend to them. A most vain thing it is in many universities at this day that they count him excellent eloquent who stealeth not whole phrases but whole pages out of Tully. If of a number of shreds of his sentences he can shape an oration, from all the world he carries it away, though in truth it be no more than a fool's coat of many colours.

It might well be expected that, considering the general spirit of curiosity abroad in the Elizabethan era, the growing opulence and refinement of the language, and the copious stores of valuable matter existing in other literature, the period would be distinguished by great achievements in translation. Such was, indeed, the case as regarded prose literature. The translators of poems in general wanted genius and an appreciation of metrical form; some of the prose translators were among the most cultivated and scholarly men of their nation; deeply penetrated with a sense of the excellence of their originals, and restrained by the imitation of them from the quaintness and extravagance which so frequently mar the best compositions of their own

age.

By far the most important and successful undertaking of the time in the Translation regions of translation was the gradual elaboration of the Authorised Version Scriptures of the Scriptures. Wycliffe and his followers had, as we have seen, bequeathed a noble rendering, but, apart from the changes rendered necessary by the process of time, it was needful to transform a version framed after the Latin Vulgate into a faithful representative of the original Greek and Hebrew. England was at first far behind other countries in this respect, no translation of any part of the Scriptures appearing the half-century following the introduction of printing, and the first that did appear being executed abroad. The imputation of heresy which attached to Wycliffe would naturally prevent the reprinting of his version, and the omission of the rulers of the Church to provide a substitute is sufficient proof of their resolution to keep the book from the people as long as they could. The spell was broken by a reformer, WILLIAM

TYNDALE, a man of heroic mould. With the aid of a Franciscan friar, and another anonymous helper, he succeeded in printing a portion of his own translation of the New Testament at Cologne in 1526, and the whole at Worms in the same or the following year. In 1530 he printed a translation of the Pentateuch at Marburg. Here he was on unsure ground, his knowledge of Hebrew cannot have been extensive, and he relied much on the old Wycliffite translation. He is said to have been assisted by Miles Coverdale, who had already been at work upon a complete translation, instigated and supported by Thomas. Cromwell. This came forth in October 1535, exactly a year before the martyrdom of Tyndale, who had issued two more editions of his Testament, and his translations were subsequently incorporated in the so-called Matthew Bible (1537). Coverdale was not competent to translate directly from the Greek and Hebrew, and his version was made from that of Pagninus with corrections derived from the Wycliffe Bible and Luther's and other German versions. Though published at Antwerp, it was probably printed at Zurich. Times had changed greatly in England since Tyndale's New Testament had been prohibited; Coverdale's Bible found a ready admission into the country, and the Matthew Bible of 1537 appeared with the royal licence. So long ago as 1530 Henry had appointed a Commission of Inquiry, which had reported in favour of making a translation, but against publishing it. At the instance of Convocation, the question was taken up again, and Cranmer, as his office required, took the lead. He divided, his secretary Ralph Morrice tells us, an old version of the New Testament, which must have been Wycliffe's, for Tyndale's was new, into nine or ten parts, which he distributed among bishops and other men of learning, requiring them to return these corrected by a certain day. The same course was, no doubt, taken with the Old Testament, though no record remains. The Bible thus prepared, happily based on Wycliffe's, but no less happily corrected by reference to the original texts or faithful renderings of these, was for some unknown reason directed to be printed at Paris; but when in December 1538 the French Government stopped the impression, at the solicitation of the Pope, the sheets already printed, with the types themselves, were smuggled over to England; the workmen followed, and the book quitted the press in April 1539. It had been largely executed at the expense of Cromwell, whose arms appeared on the title and upon those of the London editions of the following year, though they were defaced upon his fall and execution. This edition bears on the title-page the momentous words: "This is the Bible appointed to the use of the churches." Its Psalter remains unaltered in the Book of Common Prayer.

"The Great Bible," as Cranmer's Bible was fitly called, was frequently reprinted, usually in a smaller form, until the accession of Mary caused its prohibition. This temporary abeyance was, no doubt, thought a favourable opportunity to supersede it by an amended version. In 1558 Coverdale and three other scholars, William Whittingham, Anthony Gilby, and Thomas Sampson, met at Geneva, and the last three, probably directed by Coverdale, prepared the revised version known as the Gencvan Bible. This was recom

mended to the Puritan party by a marginal commentary, and to readers in general by the adoption of Roman type and by division into verses. It was published in April 1560, and coming in to fill the gap caused by the cessation of Bible printing in England since 1553, obtained a wide popularity. The bishops, to whom the Puritan views of the Genevan translators were in general unacceptable, brought out in 1568 a rival version, generally known as the Bishops' Bible, which nevertheless, in spite of its official character, did not obtain the popularity of the Genevan version. It must be borne in mind that the differences were not very material

With the same wise conservatism and recognition of the principle of continuity that Cranmer had shown, Archbishop Parker had directed the revisers "to follow the common English translation used in the churches, and not to recede from it but where it varieth manifestly from the Hebrew or Greek original." Practically, therefore, England had but one Bible. The desirability of perfect uniformity, nevertheless, was evident, but the revision needed to effect it was judiciously delayed until the accession of James I. seemed to present an opportunity, unfortunately lost, for allaying contentions in the Church, and also allowed the extension of Biblical revision to Scotland. The proposal, originally made by Dr. Reynolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and strongly supported by the King, was adopted at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604. Forty-six eminent scholars were appointed, divided into six committees, two meeting at Westminster, two at Oxford, and two at Cambridge; and suggestions from other quarters were not disdained. So much was biblical erudition then a monopoly of the clergy that only one layman appears among the translators, and he, Sir Henry Savile, a quasi-ecclesiastic as Warden of Merton and Provost of Eton. If any name deserves to be pre-eminently connected with this immortal work, it is that of LANCELOT ANDREWS, Bishop Lancelo of Winchester, unequalled in his own communion as a devotional writer, and Indrews President of the first committee, entrusted with the entire translation between Genesis and Second Kings. Bishop Smith, of Gloucester, also deserves exceptional mention as the author of the Preface, a most significant document, as evincing the immense advantage which the English Bible derived from the