GLISH POETRY: AN UNPUBLISHED CONTINUATION

(In enumerating so many of these petty Epigrammatists, I may have been
perhaps too prolix,--but I did it to shew the taste & turn of writing at
this time; & now proceed to observe, that, in the year, 1614,)[1] the
vogue which satire had acquired from Hall and Marston, probably
encouraged Barten Holiday of Christ-Church in Oxford, to translate
Persius, when he was scarcely twenty years of age. The first edition is
dated 1616. This version had four editions from its publication to the
year 1673 inclusive, notwithstanding the versification is uncommonly
scabrous. The success of his Persius induced Holiday to translate
Juvenal, a clearer & more translatable satirist. But both versions, as
Dryden has justly observed,[2] were written for scholars, and not for
the world: and by treading on the heels of his originals, he seems to
have hurt them by too near an approach. He seized the meaning but not
the spirit of his authors. Holiday, however, who was afterwards
graduated in divinity and promoted to an archdeaconry, wrote a comedy
called the _Marriage of the Arts_, acted before the court at
Woodstock-palace, which was even too grave and scholastic for king James
the first.

I close my prolix review of these pieces by remarking, that as our old
plays have been assembled and exhibited to the public in one uniform
view,[3] so a collection of our old satires and epigrams would be a
curious and useful publication. Even the dull and inelegant productions,
of a remote period which have real Life for their theme, become valuable
and important by preserving authentic pictures of antient popular
manners: by delineating the gradations of vice and folly, they furnish
new speculation to the moral historian, and at least contribute to the
illustration of writers of greater consequence.

_Sect._ XLIX.

The _Sonnet_, together with the _Ottava Rima_, seems to have been the
invention of the Provincial bards, but to have been reduced to its
present rhythmical prosody by some of the earliest Italian poets. It is
a short monody, or Ode of one stanza containing fourteen lines, with
uncommonly frequent returns of rhymes more or less combined. But the
disposition of the rhymes has been sometimes varied according to the
caprice or the convenience of the writer. There is a sonnet of the
regular construction in the Provincial dialect, written by Guglielmo de
gli Amalricchi, on Robert king of Naples who di