82   EARLY THEORIES OF TRANSLATION

holy scriptures and theology so ripe that they are able aptly, cunningly, and with much grace either to endite or translate into the vulgar tongue for the public instruction and edifying of the unlearned multitude." 1

The greatness of the field was fitted to arouse and sustain the ardor of English translators. In contrast with the number of manuscripts at command in earlier days, the sixteenth century must have seemed endlessly rich in books. Printing was making the Greek and Latin classics newly accessible, and France and Italy, awake before England to the new life, were storing the vernacular with translations and with new creations. Translators might find their tasks difficult enough and they might flag by the way, as Hoby confesses to have done at the end of the third book of The Courtier, but plucking up courage, they went on to the end. Hoby declares, with a vigor that suggests Bunyan's Pilgrim, "I whetted my style and settled myself to take in hand the other three books"; 2 Edward Hellowes, after the hesitation which he describes in the Dedication to the 1574 edition of Guevara's Familiar Epistles, "began to call to mind my God, my Prince, my country, and also your worship," and so adequately upheld, went on with his undertaking; Arthur Golding, with a breath of relief, sees his rendering of Ovid's Metamorphoses at last complete.

Through Ovid's work of turned shapes I have with painful pace Passed on, until I had attained the end of all my race. And now I have him made so well acquainted with our tongue, As that he may in English verse as in his own be sung."'

Sometimes the toilsomeness of the journey was lightened by companionship. Now and then, especially in the case

1 Letter prefixed to John, in Paraphrase of Erasmus on the New Testa-

ment, London, 1548.

2 Dedication, 1588.

To the Reader, in Shakespeare's Ovid, ed. W. H. D. Rouse, 1904.

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY   83

of religious works, there was collaboration. Luther's Commentary on Galatians was undertaken by "certain godly men," of whom "some began it according to such skill as they had. Others godly affected, not suffering so good a matter in handling to be marred, put to their helping hands for the better framing and furthering of so worthy a work."1 From Thomas Norton's record of the conditions under which he translated Calvin's Institution of the Christian Religion, it is not difficult to feel the atmosphere of sympathy and encouragement in which he worked. "Therefore in the very beginning of the Queen's Majesty's most blessed reign," he writes, "I translated it out of Latin into English, for the commodity of the Church of Christ, at the special request of my dear friends of worthy memory, Reginald Wolfe and Edward Whitchurch, the one Her Majesty's Printer for the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin tongues, the other her Highness' Printer of the books of Common Prayer. I performed my work in the house of my said friend, Edward Whitchurch, a man well known of upright heart and dealing, an ancient zealous Gospeller, as plain and true a friend as ever I knew living, and as desirous to do anything to common good, specially to the advancement of true religion. . . . In the doing hereof I did not only trust mine own wit or ability, but examined my whole doing from sentence to sentence throughout the whole book with conference and overlooking of such learned men, as my translation being allowed by their judgment, I did both satisfy mine own conscience that I had done truly, and their approving of it might be a good warrant to the reader that nothing should herein be delivered him but sound, unmingled and uncorrupted doctrine, even in such sort as the author himself had first framed it. All that I wrote, the grave, learned, and virtuous man, M.

Bishop of London's preface To the Reader, in A Commentary of Dr. Martin Luther upon the Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians, London, 1577.