er help was offered to students in the shape of various literal
translations from the classics. The translator of Seneca's _Hercules
Furens_ undertook the work "to conduct by some means to further
understanding the unripened scholars of this realm to whom I thought it
should be no less thankful for me to interpret some Latin work into this
our own tongue than for Erasmus in Latin to expound the Greek."[321]
"Neither could I satisfy myself," he continues, "till I had throughout
this whole tragedy of Seneca so travailed that I had in English given
verse for verse (as far as the English tongue permits) and word for word
the Latin, whereby I might both make some trial of myself and as it were
teach the little children to go that yet can but creep." Abraham
Fleming, translating Virgil's _Georgics_ "grammatically," expresses his
original "in plain words applied to blunt capacities, considering the
expositor's drift to consist in delivering a direct order of
construction for the relief of weak grammatists, not in attempting by
curious device and disposition to content courtly humanists, whose
desire he hath been more willing at this time to suspend, because he
would in some exact sort satisfy such as need the supply of his
travail."[322] William Bullokar prefaces his translation of Esop's
_Fables_ with the words: "I have translated out of Latin into English,
but not in the best phrase of English, though English be capable of the
perfect sense thereof, and might be used in the best phrase, had not my
care been to keep it somewhat nearer the Latin phrase, that the English
learner of Latin, reading over these authors in both languages, might
the more easily confer them together in their sense, and the better
understand the one by the other: and for that respect of easy
conference, I have kept the like course in my translation of Tully's
_Offices_ out of Latin into English to be imprinted shortly also."[323]

Text books like these, valuable and necessary as they were, can scarcely
claim a place in the history of literature. Bullokar himself,
recognizing this, promises that "if God lend me life and ability to
translate any other author into English hereafter, I will bend myself to
follow the excellency of English in the best phrase thereof, more than I
will bend it to the phrases of the language to be translated." In
avoiding the overliteral method, however, the translator of the classics
sometimes assumed a regrettable freedom, not