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paratively dead. The halcyon days of scholars and poets ended with the St. Bartholomew; and thenceforward the darkness deepened over these two and all the brilliant company which had gathered round Catherine and Diane de Poictiers. In 1588 the full fury of the Catholic League fell upon Amyot, for standing by his king after the murder of the Guise. His diocese revolted at the instigation of Claude Trahy, a truculent monk; and the last works he published are his Apology and Griefs des Plaintes. In August 1589 he wrote to the Duc de Nivernais : 'Je suis le plus affligé, destruit et ruiné pauvre prebstre qui, comme je crois, soit en France'; in 1591 he was divested of his dignities; 1 and in 1593 he died. His long life reflects the changing features of his time. In youth he was a scholar accused of scepticism, in old age a divine attacked for heresy, and for some pleasant years between, a courtier pacing with poets and painters the long galleries of Amboise and Chenonceaux: as we may think, well within earshot of those wide bay-windows where the daughters of France 'entourées de leurs gouvernantes et filles d'honneur, s'edifioient grandement aux beaux dits des Grecs et des Romains, rememoriez par le doulx Plutarchus.' 2

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He was, then, a scholar touched with the wonder of a time which saw, as in Angelo's Last Judgment, the great works of antiquity lifting their limbs from the entombing dust of oblivion; and he was a courtier behind the scenes in a great age of political adventure. Was he also an accurate translator? According to De Thou, he rendered his original 'majore elegantiâ quam fide'; according to

1 Grand Almoner and Librarian of the Royal Library.

2 Brantôme.

Meziriac,1 he was guilty of two thousand blunders.2 The verdict was agreeable to the presumption of the seventeenth century, and was, of course, confirmed by the eighteenth; but it has been revised. Given the impossibility of finding single equivalents in the young speech of the Renaissance, for the literary and philosophic connotations of a language laboured during six hundred years; and given the practice of choosing without comment the most plausible sense of a corrupted passage, the better opinion seems to be that Amyot lost little in truth, and gained everything in charm. 'It is surprising,' says Mr. Long,3 and his word shall be the last, to find how correct this old French translation generally is.' The question of style is of deeper importance. Upon this Ste.-Beuve acutely remarks that the subtlety of Plutarch, as of Augustine, and the artless good-nature of Amyot belong each to its age; and, further, are more apparent to us than real in their authors. We may say, indeed, without extravagance, that the youth of Amyot's style, modifying the age of Plutarch's, achieves a mean in full and natural harmony with Plutarch's matter. In Amyot's own opinion, so great a work must appeal to all men of judgment en quelque style qu'il soit mis, pourveu qu'il s'entende'; 5 yet his preoccupation on this point was punctilious. He found in Plutarch a scabreuse aspérité ' épineuse et ferrée' are Montaigne's epithets-yet set himself ' à représenter aucunement et à adumbrer la forme de style et manière de parler d'iceluy ':" apologising to any

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1 Who undertook to translate Plutarch, but failed to do so.

2 Discours de la Traduction, 1635 (cf. Blignières, p. 435).

3 Plutarch's Lives; Aubrey Stewart, M.A., and the late George Long,

M.A., 1880, vol. i. P. xvii.

• Dedication to Henri I.

Causeries du Lundi, iv. 469.

6 Aux Lecteurs.

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who on that account should find his language less 'coulant' than of yore. But Amyot was no pedant; he would render his original, not ape him; he would write French, and not rack it. He borrowed at need from Greek and Italian, but he was loyal to his own tongue. Nous prendrons,' said he-and the canon is unimpeachable-les mots qui sont les plus propres pour signifier la chose dont nous voulons parler, ceux qui nous sembleront plus doux, qui sonneront le mieux à l'oreille, qui seront coutumièrement en la bouche des bien parlants, qui seront bons françois et non étrangers.' To render late Greek into early French is not easy; so he takes his time. Not a word is there save to further his conquest of Plutarch's meaning; but all his words are marshalled in open order, and they pace at leisure. For his own great reward Montaigne wrote: 'Je donne la palme avecque raison, ce me semble, a Jaques Amyot, sur tous nos escripvains François'; and he remains the earliest classic accepted by the French Academy. But for our delight he found Plutarch a language which could be translated into Elizabethan English.

If Amyot was the right man for Plutarch, North was the right man for Amyot. He was born the second and youngest son of Edward, first Baron North, about the year 1535, and educated, in all probability, at Peterhouse, Cambridge.1 His father was one of those remarkable men of law who, through all the ranging political and religious vicissitudes under Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI., Queen Jane, Mary, and Elizabeth-so disastrous to the older nobility-ever contrived to make terms with the winning side; until, dying in 1564, a peer of the

1 See Dictionary of National Biography, which gives fuller information than I have found elsewhere.

realm and Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, he was buried in Kirtling Church, where his monumental inscription may still be read in the chancel. His son Thomas was also entered a student at Lincoln's Inn (1557), but he soon preferred letters before law. He was generally, Leicester wrote to Burghley, 'a very honest gentleman, and hath many good things in him, which are drowned only by poverty.' In particular, we are told by his greatnephew, the fourth Baron, he was a man of courage,' and in the days of the Armada we find him taking command, as Captain, of three hundred men of Ely. Fourteen years before (in 1574) he had accompanied his brother Roger, the second Baron, in his EmbassyExtraordinary to Henri III.: a mission of interest to us, as it cannot but have encountered him with Amyot, and may have determined him to translate the Lives. He was already an author. In December 1557 he had published, with a dedication to Queen Mary, his translation of Guevara's Libro Aureo,1 a Spanish adaptation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and in 1570 The Morall Philosophie of Doni. 'a worke first compiled in the Indian tongue. For the rest, his immortal service to English letters brought him little wealth, but much consideration from his neighbours, his kinsmen, and his sovereign. In 1568 he was presented with the freedom of the city of Cambridge. In 1576 his brother gave him the 'lease of a house and household stuff.' He was knighted about 1591; he received the Commission of the Peace in Cambridgeshire in 1592; in 1601 he got a pension of £40 from the

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1 Subsequent editions, 1568, 1582, 1619.

2 Second edition, 1601. Reprinted as The Fables of Bidpai, with an Introduction by Joseph Jacobs, 1888.

Queen, duly acknowledged in his dedication of the lives added to the Plutarch of 1603. He died, it is likely, before this edition saw the light: a valiant and courteous gentleman, and the earliest master of great English prose.

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He also thought the Lives a book 'meete to be set forth in English.'1 Truly: but in what English? He writes of a Muse' called Tacita,2 as ye would saye, ladye Silence.' Should we? Turning to a modern translation, I find 'Tacita, which means silent or dumb.' The glory has clearly departed: but before seeking it again in North's unrivalled language, I must ask of him, as I have asked of Amyot, Was he an accurate translator? I do not believe there are a score of passages throughout his 1175 folio pages in which he impairs the sense of his original. And most of these are the merest slips, arising from the necessity imposed on him of breaking up Amyot's prolonged periods, and his subsequent failure in the attribution of relatives and qualifications. They are not of the slightest consequence, if the reader, on finding an obscurity, will rely on the general sense of the passage rather than on the rules of syntax; and of such obscurities I will boldly say that there are not ten in the whole book. Very rarely he mistakes a word as 'real' for 'royal'-and very rarely a phrase. For instance, in the Pericles he writes: At the beginning there was but a little secret grudge only between these two factions, as an artificial flower set in the blade of a sworde,' which stands for comme une feuille superficielle en une lame de fer.' In the Solon he writes: his familier 2 In the Numa.

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1 Dedication to Elizabeth.

3 The first edition of 1559, compared by me with Amyot's second edition of 1565. I had not the third, of 1567, from which North translated; but on several points I have referred to the copy in the British Museum.

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