he critics as "drones and no bees, lubbers and no
learners," but the fault he finds in these "croaking paddocks and
manifest overweeners of themselves" is that they are "out of reason
curious judges over the travail and painstaking of others" instead of
being themselves producers.[282] Apparently there was little fear of the
indifference which is more discouraging than hostile criticism, and
though, as is to be expected, it is the hostile criticism that is most
often reflected in prefaces, there must have been much kindly comment
like that of Webbe, who, after discussing the relations of Phaer's
_Virgil_ to the Latin, concludes, "There is not one book among the
twelve which will not yield you most excellent pleasure in conferring
the translation with the copy and marking the gallant grace which our
English speech affordeth."[283]

Such encouragements and incentives are enough to awaken the envy of the
modern translator. But the sixteenth century had also its peculiar
difficulties. The English language was neither so rich in resources nor
so carefully standardized as it has become of later times. It was often
necessary, indeed, to defend it against the charge that it was not equal
to translation. Pettie is driven to reply to those who oppose the use of
the vernacular because "they count it barren, they count it barbarous,
they count it unworthy to be accounted of."[284] Chapman says in his
preface to _Achilles' Shield_: "Some will convey their imperfections
under his Greek shield, and from thence bestow bitter arrows against the
traduction, affirming their want of admiration grows from the defect of
our language, not able to express the copiousness (coppie) and elegancy
of the original." Richard Greenway, who translated the _Annals_ of
Tacitus, admits cautiously that his medium is "perchance not so fit to
set out a piece drawn with so curious a pencil."[285] One cannot,
indeed, help recognizing that as compared with modern English
Elizabethan English was weak in resources, limited in vocabulary, and
somewhat uncertain in sentence structure. These disadvantages probably
account in part for such explanations of the relative difficulty of
translation as that of Nicholas Udall in his plea that translators
should be suitably recompensed or that of John Brende in his preface to
the translation of Quintus Curtius that "in translation a man cannot
always use his own vein, but shall be compelled to tread in the author's
steps, wh