,
but thought for thought, and for the rudeness of his original he has
substituted a more lofty style.[316] His English translators reverse the
latter process. Hellowes affirms that his translation of the _Epistles_
"goeth agreeable unto the Author thereof," but confesses that he wants
"both gloss and hue of rare eloquence, used in the polishing of the rest
of his works." North later translated from the French Amyot's
epoch-making principle: "the office of a fit translator consisteth not
only in the faithful expressing of his author's meaning, but also in a
certain resembling and shadowing out of the form of his style and manner
of his speaking,"[317] but all that he has to say of his _Dial of
Princes_ is that he has reduced it into English "according to my small
knowledge and tender years."[318] Here again, though the translator may
sometimes have tried to adopt newer and more difficult standards, he
does not make this explicit in his comment.

Obviously, however, academic standards of accuracy were not likely to
make their first appearance in connection with fashionable court
literature; one expects to find them associated rather with the
translations of the great classical literature, which Renaissance
scholars approached with such enthusiasm and respect. One of the first
of these, the translation of the _Aeneid_ made by the Scotch poet, Gavin
Douglas, appeared, like the translations of Barclay and Berners, in the
early sixteenth century. Douglas's comment,[319] which shows a good deal
of conscious effort at definition of the translator's duties, is an odd
mingling of the medieval and the modern. He begins with a eulogy of
Virgil couched in the undiscriminating, exaggerated terms of the
previous period. Unlike the many medieval redactors of the Troy story,
however, he does not assume the historian's liberty of selection and
combination from a variety of sources. He regards Virgil as "a per se,"
and waxes indignant over Caxton's _Eneydos_, whose author represented it
as based on a French rendering of the great poet. It is, says Douglas,
"no more like than the devil and St. Austin." In proof of this he cites
Caxton's treatment of proper names. Douglas claims, reasonably enough,
that if he followed his original word for word, the result would be
unintelligible, and he appeals to St. Gregory and Horace in support of
this contention. All his plea, however, is for freedom rather than
accuracy, and one scarcely knows how to