IN that little colony of earliest Americans, seated at Jamestown, and for more than twenty years struggling against almost every menace of destruction from without and within, were several other writers who have some claim to our notice. One of these was George Percy. Every slight glimpse we get of him through the chinks of contemporary reference tends to convince us that the uncommon respect in which he was held by his associates was rendered to him quite as much because he was a modest, brave, and honorable man, as because he was a brother

of the great Earl of Northumberland. He composed a “Discourse of the Plantations of the Southern Colony in Virginia by the English,” of which, however, only a fragment is preserved—the fragment occupying six folio pages in Purchas’s “Pilgrims.” The portion of his book thus preserved relates the history of the colony from its departure out of England down to September, 1607; and is written in that style of idiomatic and nervous English prose which seems to have been the birthright of so many active Englishmen in the Elizabethan age. His descriptions of the beauty and fertility of Virginia as it appeared to the sea-sad eyes of the colonists in that happy month of their arrival, throw by contrast a deeper gloom upon the picture which he soon has to paint of the miseries besetting their first summer in Virginia—a summer which dragged over them slowly its horrible trail of homesickness, discord, starvation, pestilence, and Indian hostility. “Our men were destroyed with cruel diseases, as swellings, flixes, burning fevers, and by wars; and some departed suddenly. But for the most part they died of mere famine. There were never Englishmen left in a foreign country in such misery as we were, in this new discovered Virginia. We watched every three nights lying on the bare cold ground, what weather soever came; warded all the next day which brought our men to be most feeble wretches. Our food was but a small can of barley sod in water to five men a day; our drink cold water taken out of the river, which was at a flood very salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men. Thus we lived for the space of five months in this miserable distress, not having five able men to man our bulwarks upon any occasion. If it had not pleased God to put a terror in the savages’ hearts, we had all perished by those wild and cruel pagans, being in that weak estate as we were; our men night and day groaning in every corner of the fort most pitiful to hear. If there were any conscience in men, it would make their hearts to bleed to hear the

pitiful murmurings and outcries of our sick men, without relief every night and day for the space of six weeks; some departing out of the world, many times three or four in a night, in the morning their bodies trailed out of their cabins like dogs to be buried.”¹

     During the first decade of American literature a little book was written in Virginia, which, as is believed by some authors, soon rendered an illustrious service to English literature by suggesting to Shakespeare the idea of one of his noblest masterpieces, “The Tempest.” It was in May of the year 1610 that sixty tattered and forlorn colonists—the last remnants of five hundred who were alive there six months before—crawled out from the block-house at Jamestown, and moved toward the river-bank to greet with a sickly welcome the unexpected arrival of Sir Thomas Gates. This brave commander with two small vessels and a hundred and fifty companions, had at last found his way into the James River after a voyage of almost incredible difficulty and peril. Just eleven months before, he had set sail from England for Virginia, with a fleet of nine ships and in charge of five hundred emigrants. On their passage, when they had been seven weeks at sea and were drawing near to the Virginia coast, they encountered a frightful tempest in which the fleet was scattered; and the admiral’s ship, the Sea-Adventure, containing Sir Thomas

Gates, Sir George Somers, and other distinguished and undistinguished company, was driven ashore upon one of the Bermudas. Not being heard from for many months, that ship with all on board was given up for lost. Indeed the ship itself was lost, battered to pieces upon the rocks; but out of its fragments the passengers constructed the two clumsy pinnaces in which, as just related, they at last completed their voyage to Jamestown. Among those who had borne a part in this ghastly and almost miraculous expedition was William Strachey, of whom but little is known except what is revealed in his own writings. He was a man of decided literary aptitude. Soon after his arrival here he was made secretary of Virginia, and, as he tells us, he “held it a service of duty . . . to be remembrancer of all accidents, occurrences, and undertakings”¹ connected with the colony during the time of his residence in it. Accordingly in July, 1610, when he had been in Virginia less than three months, he wrote at Jamestown and sent off to England “A True Reportory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Kt., upon and from the islands of the Bermudas; his coming to Virginia; and the estate of that colony then and after under the government of the Lord La Ware.”² Whoever reads this little book will be quite ready to believe that it may have brought suggestion and inspiration even to the genius of William Shakespeare. It is a book of marvellous power. Its account of Virginia is well done; but its most striking merit is its delineation of his dreadful sea-voyage, and particularly of the tempest which, after the terror and anguish of a thousand deaths, drove them upon the rocks of the Bermudas. Here his style becomes magnificent; it has some sentences which for imaginative and pathetic beauty, for vivid implications of appalling danger and disaster,

can hardly be surpassed in the whole range of English prose. It was upon St. James’s day, July the twenty-fourth, 1609, “the clouds gathering thick upon us, and the winds singing and whistling most unusually,” that “a dreadful storm and hideous began to blow from out the north-east, which, swelling and roaring as it were by fits, some hours with more violence than others, at length did beat all light from heaven, which, like an hell of darkness, turned black upon us, so much the more fuller of horror as in such cases horror and fear use to overrun the troubled and overmastered senses of all. . . . For surely, . . . as death comes not so sudden nor apparent, so he comes not so elvish and painful to men . . . as at sea. For four and twenty hours the storm, in a restless tumult, had blown so exceedingly as we could not apprehend in our imaginations any possibility of greater violence; yet did we still find it, not only more terrible but more constant, fury added to fury; and one storm, urging a second more outrageous than the former . . . sometimes strikes in our ship amongst women and passengers not used to such hurly and discomforts, made us look one upon the other with troubled hearts and panting bosoms, our clamors drowned in the winds, and the winds in thunder. Prayers might well be in the heart and lips, but drowned in the outcries of officers; nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seen that might encourage hope. It is impossible for me, had I the voice of Stentor, and expression of as many tongues as his throat of voices, to express the outcries and miseries, not languishing, but wasting our spirits. . . . Our sails wound up lay without their use; . . . the sea swelled above the clouds and gave battle unto heaven. It could not be said to rain the waters like whole rivers did flood in the air. And this I did still observe that, whereas upon the land, when a storm hath poured itself forth once in drifts of rain, the wind, as beaten down and vanquished therewith, not long after endureth; here the glut of water . . . was no

sooner a little emptied and qualified, but instantly the winds, as having gotten their mouths now free and at liberty, spake more loud, and grew more tumultuous and malignant. What shall I say? Winds and seas were as mad as fury and rage could make them. . . . There was not a moment in which the sudden splitting or instant oversetting of the ship was not expected. Howbeit, this was not all. It pleased God to bring a greater affliction upon us; for in the beginning of the storm we had received likewise a mighty leak; and the ship, in every joint almost having spewed out her oakum, . . . was grown five foot suddenly deep with water above her ballast, and we almost drowned within whilst we sat looking when to perish from above. This, imparting no less terror than danger, ran through the whole ship with much fright and amazement, startled and turned the blood, and took down the braves of the most hardy mariner of them all, insomuch as he that before happily felt not the sorrow of others, now began to sorrow for himself. . . . Once so huge a sea brake . . . upon us, as it covered our ship from stern to stem, like a garment or vast cloud; it filled her brimful . . . from the hatches up to the spar-deck. . . . During all this time the heavens looked so black upon us that it was not possible the elevation of the Pole might be observed; nor a star by night, nor sun-beam by day, was to be seen. Only upon the Thursday night, Sir George Somers being upon the watch, had an apparition of a little round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze, half the height upon the main mast, and shooting sometimes from shroud to shroud, tempting to settle as it were upon any of the four shrouds; and for three or four hours together, or rather more, half the night, it kept with us, running sometimes along the main-yard to the very end and then returning. . . . But it did not light us any whit the more to our known way, who ran now, as do hoodwinked men, at all adventures. . . . East and by south we steered away

as much as we could to bear upright, . . . albeit we much unrigged our ship, threw overboard much luggage, many a trunk and chest, . . . and staved many a butt of beer, hogsheads of oil, cider, wine, and vinegar, and heaved away all our ordnance on the starboard side, and had now purposed to cut down the main mast. . . . For we were much spent, and our men so weary as their strengths together failed them with their hearts, having travailed now from Tuesday till Friday morning, day and night, without either sleep or food. . . . And it being now Friday, the fourth morning, it wanted little but that there had been a general determination to have shut up hatches, and, commending our sinful souls to God, committed the ship to the mercy of the sea. . . . But see the goodness and sweet introduction of better hope, by our merciful God given unto us. Sir George Somers, when no man had dreamed of such happiness, had discovered and cried land. Indeed the morning, now three quarters gone, had won a little clearness from the days before; and it being better surveyed, the very trees were seen to move with the wind upon the shore-side. . . . By the mercy of God unto us, making out our boats, we had ere night brought all our men, women, and children . . . safe into the island. We found it to be the dangerous and dreaded island, or rather islands, of the Bermudas. . . . They be so terrible to all that ever touched on them, and such tempests, thunders, and other fearful objects are seen and heard about them, that they be called commonly the Devil’s Islands, and are feared and avoided of all travellers alive, above any other place in the world; . . . it being counted of most that they can be no habitation for men, but rather given over to devils and wicked spirits.”

     At the very time when William Strachey, in some rude cabin near the banks of the James River, was writing his

most eloquent and thrilling book about Virginia and the awful voyage thither, there lived, in a comfortable parish in the north of England, a noble-minded clergyman, Alexander Whitaker, a man of apostolic zeal for the gospel, and of apostolic sorrow for all men who were still beyond the reach of the gospel; a man to whom his creed was so vivid and tremendous a fact that he stood ready to be a missionary for it, and a martyr, even at the world’s end. His father was the celebrated divine, William Whitaker, master of Saint John’s College, Cambridge; he himself had taken his degrees at that university; and he was happily settled, in full parochial composure, a man of property, usefulness, and good repute. But to him, such appeals from Virginia as those of William Strachey, came as a wailing cry of his own brethren for help, all the more persuasive for the fascinating doom of danger and pain for Christ’s sake, to which those appeals invited him. Accordingly in the following year, 1611, in the company of Sir Thomas Dale, this prosperous priest “did voluntarily leave his warm nest, and to the wonder of his kindred and amazement of them that knew him, undertook this heroical resolution to go to Virginia, and help to bear the name of God unto the heathen.”¹ Thenceforward, and for more than three years, even until his death by drowning sometime before the year 1617, Alexander Whitaker lived in Virginia a brave and blameless life, a true missionary for Christ,—the pure and beautiful light of his message going with him everywhere, across plantation and through wilderness, into the colonist’s hut and the wigwam of the savage; and when at last he was seen no more of men, the tradition of him lingered there as a hallowing influence, and his name still lives in our early history under the tender and sacred title of “the Apostle of Virginia.”² After he had been in America two years, and

had made himself master of his subject, he put his experience, and his benign hopes, and his passionate sense of Christian duty, into a book which furnishes the next event to be mentioned in our literary annals, “Good News from Virginia,” published in London, in 1613. The habits of the pulpit clung to him at his writing-table; and the book which he wrote for the enlightenment of England concerning Virginia, has the form and tone of a hortatory sermon; a “pithy and godly exhortation,” as old Crashawe called it,¹ “interlaced with narratives of many particulars touching the country, climate, and commodities.” He prefixes to it a biblical text; he expounds from that text the Christian doctrine of trying to do good to others even by a sacrifice of ourselves; and he points out the great opportunity which England has of illustrating this doctrine in the case of her forlorn colony in the new world,—a colony which he compares “to the growth of an infant which hath been afflicted from his birth with some grievous sickness, that many times no hope of life hath remained, and yet it liveth still.”² In presenting to the mother-land the claims of Virginia upon her interest and pity, he gives a clear and well-wrought sketch of the country, the climate, and the Indians, expressing himself throughout the whole book in the diction of an earnest, simple-minded, scholarly man, although without any shining superiorities in thought or style. His own heart is full of grief for the Indians, to whose blighted and desolate natures he would bring the comfort of heavenly truth; and he sees not why other Christian Englishmen should not feel as he does: “Let the miserable condition of these naked slaves of the devil move you to compassion toward them. They acknowledge that there is a great God, but know him not; wherefore they serve the devil for fear, after a most base manner. . . . They live naked in body, as if the shame of their sin deserved no covering. . . . They esteem it

a virtue to lie, deceive, and steal, as their master teacheth them. . . . If this be their life, what think you shall become of them after death, but to be partakers with the devil and his angels in hell for evermore?”¹ Having in this book tried to induce England to bring only her noblest moods to her consideration of the affairs of Virginia, having appealed to piety, compassion, magnanimity, even the love of gain, at last, like a true-born Englishman, from the wilderness of America where his English heart still beat within him, he stretched his hand homeward and touched the chord of national pride: “Shall our nation, hitherto famous for noble attempts, and the honorable finishing of what they have undertaken, be now taxed for inconstancy? . . . Yea, shall we be a scorn among our neighbor princes, for basely leaving what we honorably began? . . . Awake, you true-hearted Englishmen: . . . remember that the plantation is God’s, and the reward your country’s.”²

     On the nineteenth of April, 1619, there arrived at Jamestown a ship from England having on board a new governor for Virginia, Sir George Yeardley, and in his train as secretary for the colony a man of considerable distinction at that time in Europe, Master John Pory. This man was then about forty-nine years of age. He had received his education at Cambridge, and had started out in life with bright tokens of coming usefulness and renown. He had many accomplishments; he was, besides, a wit and a boon companion; his style of writing was facile and sparkling; and he had the gift of making friends in high places, who conceived great hopes of him and were glad to help him to realize them. He became a member of Parliament; for several years he was much employed abroad in the diplomatic service of his country; but before middle life

there had become manifest in him certain traits of moral infirmity which, while they did not end his career, cast a shadow across it and dwarfed it in efficiency and honor. Evidently, his convivial habits came to predominate over his resolution for work; he developed a restlessness of temper, an uneasy curiosity, a fickle will, a scorn of plodding tasks, which turned him into a sort of genteel vagabond, sent him wandering over Europe and the East, and threw him into rather frequent familiarity with the pawnbroker and the sponging-house. More unfortunate than all, as was gently said of him by one of his acquaintances, he “followed the custom of strong potations.” He never altogether lost his hold upon his influential friends; and doubtless it was in the hope of giving him a fresh start in life that they procured for him the fine appointment of secretary of Virginia and sent him over with Sir George Yeardley to work out a better career for himself in the new world. His attractive manners, his vivacity of speech, his various learning, his great political experience, his manifold knowledge of the world, rendered him an important personage in the new settlements along the James River. He was at once added to the colonial council; and on the meeting of the general assembly he was given the speakership—an office which his brisk talent and his parliamentary experience enabled him to fill with unusual acceptance. But he ceased from all his offices in 1621, and in 1622 he left the colony for England, on his way dropping in upon the staid young community of Pilgrims at Plymouth and paying them a visit which proved to be mutually agreeable. During his residence in Virginia he had made three excursions among the Indians, of which he has left a very lively account,¹ spicing it with anecdotes that reveal the author’s alertness for the grotesque and amusing aspects of the savage character. For example, he introduces us to a certain Namenacus, the king of

Pawtuxent, a crafty, complimentary, and murderous potentate, who, hoping to have the pleasure of assassinating Pory and his companions, very characteristically began his acquaintance with them by dramatic assurances of his guileless friendship. “He led us into a thicket where, all sitting down, he showed us his naked breast, asking if we saw any deformity upon it. We told him, ‘No.’ ‘No more,’ said he, ‘is the inside, but as sincere and pure. Therefore come freely to my country and welcome.’” Upon a subsequent interview, the king “much wondered at our Bible, but much more to hear it was the law of our God; and the first chapter of Genesis, expounded of Adam and Eve, and simple marriage. To which he replied, ‘He was like Adam in one thing, for he never had but one wife at once.’”

     The most sprightly specimen of Pory’s writings is a letter which he sent from Virginia to the celebrated English diplomatist and statesman, Sir Dudley Carleton, and which may be accepted likewise as a pleasant example of the best epistolary style of the period—colloquial, gossiping, playful, just a little stiff here and there with the embroidery of seventeenth century formalism; deeply interesting also for its life-like sketches of the wilderness, the Indians, and the daily life of the infant colony.¹ He is in raptures over the fertility of the country. “Vines here are in such abundance, as wheresoever a man treads they are ready to embrace his foot. I have tasted here of a great black grape as big as a Damascene, that hath a true Muscatel taste; the vine whereof, now spending itself to the tops of high trees, if it were reduced into a vineyard and there domesticated, would yield incomparable fruit.” Animals brought from Europe, he discovers, do not degenerate in America. “For cattle, they do mightily increase here, both kine, hogs, and goats, and are much greater in stature than the race of them first brought out of England.” But

Pory had the eye of a humorist, and he amused himself in watching the germs of a jubilant and lusty social display in this raw community of pioneers: “Now that your lordship may know that we are not the veriest beggars in the world, our cow-keeper here of James City on Sundays goes accoutred all in fresh flaming silk; and a wife of one that in England had professed the black art, not of a scholar, but of a collier of Croydon, wears her rough beaver hat, with a fair pearl hat-band and a silken suit thereto correspondent.” And it is pleasant to hear him tell how he contrived to adapt himself to such a life and to get rid of his time in a dull place like this: “At my first coming hither, the solitary uncouthness of this place, compared with those parts of Christendom or Turkey where I had been, and likewise my being sequestered from all occurrents and passages which are so rife there, did not a little vex me. And yet in these five months of my continuance here, there have come at one time or another eleven sail of ships into this river; but freighted more with ignorance than with any other merchandise. At length being hardened to this custom of abstinence from curiosity, I am resolved wholly to mind my business here, and next after my pen to have some good book always in store, being in solitude the best and choicest company. Besides among these crystal rivers and odoriferous woods I do escape much expense, envy, contempt, vanity, and vexation of mind.”

     We now come to the last one of this group of early writers—Argonauts of the first two decades of Virginia—who, achieving more than they knew, laid in America the foundations of the new English literature. The writer whom we are about to study, George Sandys, was perhaps the only one of all his fellow-craftsmen here who was a professed man of letters. Like William Strachey and John Pory before him, he held an official appointment in

the colony, where he arrived in the autumn of 1621, in the company of Sir Francis Wyat, who at that time began his administration as governor. In personal character George Sandys was a man very different from his literary predecessor, the jocular and bibulous Bohemian, John Pory. His social connections in England were high; his father being the celebrated Edwin Sandys, archbishop of York; and an elder brother being the noble-natured politician Sir Edwin Sandys, who was the friend of Richard Hooker, and was so dreaded by James the First that the latter once objected to his election as treasurer of the Virginia Company in these vigorous words: “Choose the devil if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys.” At the time of his arrival in America George Sandys was forty-four years old, and was then well known as a traveller in Eastern lands, as a scholar, as an admirable prose-writer, but especially as a poet. His claim to the title of poet then rested chiefly on his fine metrical translation of the first five books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the second edition of which came from the press in that very year 1621 in which the poet sailed away to America in the retinue of Sir Francis Wyat. This fragment was a specimen of literary workmanship in many ways creditable. The rendering of the original is faithful; and though in some places the version labors under the burden of Latin idioms and of unmusical proper names, it often rises into freedom and velocity of movement, and into genuine sweetness, ease, and power. ‘How great a pity,’ perhaps some of his readers thought in 1621, ‘that a man of such gifts and accomplishments should banish himself to the savagery of the Virginia wilderness, when by staying at home he might give us, in a version so pure and masterful, the remaining ten books of the Metamorphoses.’ But there was one great poet then in England, Michael Drayton, who did not take so melancholy a view of the departure of George Sandys for Virginia. He, too, wished the translation of Ovid completed by that same deft and scholarly hand; but he saw no reason

why the lamp of letters should not burn on the banks of the James River, as well as on those of the Thames. Therefore he addressed to his dear friend a poetic epistle in which he exhorts him to keep up his literary occupations, even in the rough desert to which he has gone:

     These exhortations were not wasted on the gentle poet. His vocation to the high service of letters was too distinct to be set aside even by the privations of pioneer life in Virginia and by the oppressive tasks of his official position there. And yet those privations and those tasks proved to be greater, as it chanced, than any human eye had foreseen; for, only a few months after his arrival, namely in March, 1622, came that frightful Indian massacre of the white settlers along the James River, which nearly annihilated the colony; which drove in panic into Jamestown the survivors from the outlying settlements; which turned the peaceful plantation, just beginning to be prosperous, into an overcrowded camp of half-fed but frenzied hunters, hunting only for red men with rifle and bloodhound, and henceforward for several years living only to exterminate them from the earth. It was under these circumstances—the chief village thronged with panic-struck and helpless people; all industry stopped; suspicions, fears, complaints, filling the air; his high official position entailing upon him special cares and responsibilities; without many books, without a lettered atmosphere or the cheer of lettered

men—that the poet was to pursue his great task, if he was to pursue it at all. It is not much to say that ordinary men would have surrendered to circumstances such as these. George Sandys did not surrender to them; and that he was able, during the next few years, robbing sleep of its rights, to complete his noble translation of the fifteen books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is worthy of being chronicled among the heroisms of authorship. It is probable that Sandys returned to England in 1625; at any rate, in the year 1626 he brought out in London, in a folio volume, the first edition of his finished work; and in his dedication of it to King Charles, he made a touching reference to the disasters in Virginia from which he had only just escaped, and to the great difficulties he had overcome in the composition of the book that he thus laid at his sovereign’s feet. He speaks of his translation as “this . . . piece limned by that unperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night and repose. For the day was not mine, but dedicated to the service of your great father and yourself; which, had it proved as fortunate as faithful in me, and others more worthy, we had hoped, ere many years had turned about, to have presented you with a rich and well peopled kingdom; from whence now, with myself, I only bring this composure:

It needeth more than a single denization, being a double stranger; sprung from the stock of the ancient Romans, but bred in the new world, of the rudeness whereof it cannot but participate, especially having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the Muses.”

     This production, handed down to us in stately form through two centuries and a half, is the very first expression of elaborate poetry, it is the first utterance of the conscious literary spirit, articulated in America. The writings which precede this book in our literary history—the writings of Captain John Smith, of Percy, of Strachey, of

Whitaker, of Pory—were all produced for some immediate practical purpose, and not with any avowed literary intentions. This book may well have for us a sort of sacredness, as being the first monument of English poetry, of classical scholarship, and of deliberate literary art, reared on these shores. And when we open the book, and examine it with reference to its merits, first, as a faithful rendering of the Latin text, and second, as a specimen of fluent, idiomatic, and musical English poetry, we find that in both particulars it is a work that we may be proud to claim as in some sense our own, and to honor as the morning-star at once of poetry and of scholarship in the new world. For an illustration of the vigor and melody of his verse, we may select a brief passage from the sixth book, relating the woful story of Philomela. King Tereus has perpetrated an ineffable crime of cruelty and lust upon Philomela, who is the sister of his wife Procne; and the latter, having at last discovered the horrid fact, passes into a rage against her husband which stimulates all her faculties to the invention of some form of revenge that may be worthy, in its exquisite torment and in its annihilating doom, of the monster whom she intends to punish

     Her innocent sister, the terror-smitten and passive victim of the appalling crime, she sees weeping, and gently chides her for so doing:

     In the terrible calm of her white wrath, while she is thus

waiting for some device of perfect retribution with which to overwhelm her husband, suddenly enters her own beloved son Itys. But Itys is his son, likewise; the one ob ject in all the world most dear to him. In the instant there flames through her soul the most fierce and hideous inspiration that ever possessed a mother’s mind: by a bloody sacrifice of that son she can thrust the knife of anguish deepest into the heart of her husband. The whole plan evolves itself before her in a flash; and even the warmth of her own love for her darling child is frozen well-nigh dead in comparison with the intolerable heat of her purpose of vengeance. And yet:

     But, in a moment, the sight of her sister once more, standing in the woe of her speechless shame and pain, recalls her to her unpitying purpose, and she breaks out into a renewed cry of vengeance against her husband through the sacrifice of their son. Him she now clutches with a maniacal fury,

     The king unwittingly accepts her invitation; he comes to the feast; and seated on his grandsire’s throne, devours, unknowingly, the tender flesh of his own son. Then, when exhilarated by the feast, he

     Immediately upon its publication the work attained in England a great celebrity, and during the seventeenth century passed through at least eight editions. The author lived on to a good old age, devoting himself not only to original poetry but to the translation of the Psalms and of other poetical books of the Bible; and at last died, beloved and honored, at Bexley Abbey, in Kent, in 1644. His fame did not pass away with his earthly life. Eighteen

years afterward Thomas Fuller, in terms of affectionate praise, enrolled him among the worthies of England: “He most elegantly translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses into English verse; so that as the soul of Aristotle was said to have transmigrated into Thomas Aquinas, . . . Ovid’s genius may seem to have passed into Master Sandys.” He “was altogether as dexterous at inventing as translating; and his own poems as sprightful, vigorous, and masculine.”¹ John Dryden spoke of Sandys as “the best versifier of the former age,”² and is said to have declared that had Sandys finished the translation of Virgil which he had begun, he himself would not have attempted it after him. Pope, whose critical ear for verse was most exacting, and whose praise was never easily won, said that he “liked extremely”³ Sandys’s translation of Ovid.