SOURCE: Attenborough, J. M. “George Sandys, Traveler and Poet.” Westminster Review CLXIII (January-June 1905): 643-55.

[In the following essay, Attenborough provides an overview of Sandys's life and works.]

All frequenters of the second-hand book-shop must be familiar with the noble seventeenth-century folio volumes which bear on their backs the joined names of Ovid and George Sandys. Those who have had the curiosity to reach one down from its place have been well rewarded by the sight of its strange and magnificent illustrations. The few who have borne away a copy cannot fail to have been delighted by the once-praised but now-forgotten verses which fill its long columns. The verse, apart from its own intrinsic charms, has a twofold historic interest. It stands at the head of the “smooth versification” tradition, and gained for its author the description from Dryden of “the best versifier of the former age”; and it is the first fruits of North America's contribution to English poetical literature. Sandys went out in 1625 to the colony of Virginia as treasurer, and it was during his time of office there that his version, or at any rate the greater part of it, was made. “Sprung from the stock of the ancient Romans” he describes it, in his dedication to Prince Charles, “but bred in the New World, with wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the Muses.” Sandys' Ovid was the first of two noble poetical folios, and the second of three folio volumes, which he gave to English literature. The first volume, which is as familiar to lovers of old books as the Ovid, records his twelve months of travel in the East, and the last contains his remaining poetical works—consisting mainly of verse paraphrases of the Old Testament.

Sandys' name has seldom gained a place in the poetical sections of histories of English literature; and his fame to-day, so far as these histories give him fame, rises from his Travels. In the new Cyclopœdia of English Literature, for example, he is to be found only among the prose writers. But the literary historian who, knowing them, neglects his poetical efforts, is not only (as one may think) dead to distinguished poetical merits, but pronounces of no worth a long line of ancient testimonies to their quality and their historic importance. Such contemporary judges as Drayton, Waller, Carew and Lord Falkland eulogised Sandys' verse in glowing words; Dryden, as we have seen, set the great seal of his praise upon it; Pope confessed to having read it with delight, and asserted that “English poetry owes to it much of its beauty;” while, later still, Joseph Warton, one of the finest poetical judges of the eighteenth century, observes that Sandys did more to “polish and tune the English language” than either Waller or Denham. It was the traditional doctrine in Warton's time that these two writers provided the first models of smooth and harmonious couplet versification, and were, indeed, the “fathers of English poetry” in the then current conception of it. But it is true, as Warton meant to imply, that Sandys, if he has written no single poem so consistently smooth in rhythm and concise in form as “Cooper's Hill” or “The Battle of the Summer Islands” has left a far greater bulk of couplet poetry that belongs essentially to the “correct” Augustan type than either of them. Finally, the late Mr. G. A. Simcox has exalted Sandys above his contemporaries as a writer of “clear, smooth and vigorous verse,” while Mr. Courthope, in his Life of Pope, has given him words of higher admiration still, declared him Pope's authentic predecessor, echoed Joseph Warton's testimony, and honoured the old poet “after many days” by a long quotation.

Sandys' Ovid has not been reprinted since the seventeenth century, for at the end of that age his noble folios were superseded by the still more magnificent volumes which contained the duller but more “correctly” versed translation which Dryden edited, so that there is excuse for unfamiliarity with it. His paraphrases, after an equally long interval, were re-edited thirty years ago by the Rev. R. Hooper for the Library of Old Authors, but, despite Mr. Hooper's protests against the neglect into which they had fallen, the two volumes which contained them met with little demand. No doubt their scriptural subject manner disinclined the literary critic to test their quality, for Johnson's judgment of the poorness of religious poetry in general is certainly only too well justified. The history of English poetry, as a recent editor has said, seems clearly to demonstrate the inferiority of holy water as a source of inspiration to the Pierian spring.

No one who can make the boast that his literary studies have embraced, as we trust it has been shown that they ought to have embraced, the works of Sandys, would assert that he belongs to the yearly narrowing circle of our neglected greater poets. Indeed, if the title to be ranked a poet can only be raised on originality of thought, he has small claim to it at all. His original verse does not altogether amount to a thousand lines in the four old volumes that contain his complete works. And yet he will be found to possess the power of ingratiating himself as a verseman not a little by readers of a suitably attempered spirit; those readers, that is, of composed mind who, in an age in which the classical tradition is said to be “played out,” and poetical decadents, “satiate with variety of sensation,” are striving on all sides to “suggest” their vague mysterious moods by strange imagery and magical music, can, “like their sires in George's days,” read with pleasure verse which has nothing curious or subtle either in matter or music, but which imitates clear thoughts and simple feeling in language which is consistently cultured, sincere and nobly, if plainly, rhythmical. In literary spirit Sandys belongs on the whole more to the eighteenth than to the first half of the seventeenth century, in which he lived, though he has the richer and more vivid imagination of the earlier age. He eschewed alike the strange conceits and the crabbed versification, the novelties of fancy and diction, which were the fashion in his day. He belongs essentially to that Court tradition, which set itself to the work of simplifying thought and harmonising verse, resulting at last in the Augustan school; and he, rather than any other writer, deserves, in virtue of the quantity of his verse, to be regarded as the chief representative of that tradition.

In its division into secular and “sacred” stages—the first half concerned with Ovid and the second with the Old Testament—Sandys' poetical career followed the orthodox model of the age. But, unlike such men as Donne, Herrick and Waller, Sandys seems never to have led a youth of passion, gaiety, and gallantry; and when his Muse had become a sacred vestal she never felt constrained, as did the Muses of those contemporaries, to sound notes of regret for early “follies.” He loved Ovid, partly as a scholar and a philosopher, and partly from the taste for the strange and heroic which made him a rival of Ralegh as a traveller, drawn to him not at all by a light or voluptuous spirit. He seems, indeed, never to have written a line of original love poetry. His character may be said, on the whole, to have resembled Ralegh's more closely almost than any other famous Englishman's has done, for he too united in a strange synthesis the deep gravity, approaching to melancholy of disposition, the love of learning, the profound religious feeling, the curiosity and courage of the traveller, and, it would seem from contemporary testimony, much of the worldly ambition and the haughty and rather quarrelsome spirit, which were all so conspicuously present in the great Elizabethan. The youngest son of the celebrated Puritan Archbishop of York—he was born at Bishopthorpe Palace “at six of the clock in the morning in 1577”—the grave Elizabethan seriousness and piety were rooted in him both by inherited disposition and early training, and the character which he bore on his adventurous travels in the East in the year 1610 was as sober, reflective and finely melancholy in cast, as when he retired to end his life of seventy years in meditation, and to finish earning the memorial “poetarum Anglorum sui saeculi facile princeps” by “attuning the songs of Zion to the British lyre” at Boxley Abbey in Kent.

Sandys' Travels was one of the most popular books of the seventeenth century. Ten editions of it were issued between the first in 1615 and the century's conclusion. It contains, in a strange but fascinating union, history, adventure, description, poetry, biography, and theology. It charmed at first, no doubt, largely by its descriptive and historical parts, by the fresh information it gave about lands whose strange past the Western imagination loved to picture, and whose present state was involved in uncertainty, through the conflicting stories feigned by “lying travellers.” The East is, of course, no longer an unfamiliar land, but Sandys' work, even as a record of personal observation, may still be found able to please. A book of old travels, when it loses its value as belonging to the literature of knowledge, gains a new value as belonging to the literature of sentiment. Not only may the mere style, like good wine, improve from age, but its narratives may acquire an exquisite flavour of imaginative delight, and he is much to be pitied who cannot prove it. The pictures of bygone sights seen and people met carry one back to a time and to a stage in the unceasing flux of things, which no power can ever restore; they give, in the language of Wordsworth's sonnet, “the appropriate calm of blest eternity” to moments in the development and relationship of an infinite number of fleeting appearances, which have passed for ever. When one reads such a book as Sandys', especially if on yellow faded pages, reflections such as these bring one under the full spell of the past and give a poetic melancholy to its story. Every impression he gives has a charm when we think that no one can ever catch Time and the course of things at the point in those lands at which Sandys caught it, that the outward factors, the men, the manners and the seventeenth-century scenes, that made his experience, have vanished as irrecoverably as the cloud shapes that covered them.

And as time and the progress of men and things can never be again where an old traveller reflects them, so the intellectual and imaginative outlook which gives its character to his thoughts and stories can never be reborn. There is a fascination in reading Sandys' old scientific reflections, in hearing him gravely retell Plutarch's strange story of the mysterious seaward voices which announced the death of Pan, narrate how he and his companions fled the shores of Mitylene at midnight “in a great dismay,” because one of them had seen the devil in a vision, or admire the efficacy of “the curse of Noe upon Cham in the posterity of Chus, from which, and not from their seed, the heat of the climate, or the soil, as some have supposed, the negro races are of the colour of old Night.”

But apart from its imaginative appeal, Sandys' book can hardly fail to be found interesting still, in many parts, even as a contribution to the literature of knowledge. Few later writers have drawn more vivid pictures. “He hath given,” said old Winstanley, “so lively a description of the rareties of the East as may spare others' pains in going thither to behold them.”

Sandys left London in the middle of 1610, and he begins his journal from August 20, when he left Venice. He sailed down the Adriatic, round Greece and through the Ægean Sea to Constantinople, going thence to Alexandria and Cairo. From Cairo he went by caravan to Jerusalem, and traversed the Holy Land to Sidon, returning home by Cyprus, Crete, Naples, and Rome, where he closes his narrative. The tour, which occupied over a year, could only be made with great hardship and difficulty, and, in the face of much danger from disease, from pirates by sea, and robbers by land. But Sandys endured all the pains of the journey with the greatest courage and resolution, refusing always to be daunted from seeing what he had set his mind upon, and not fearing frequently to lie “without mattress and without sleep, couched on the wet earth and washed with rain.” He travelled, with a few natives only as companions, in a small open fishing vessel—“no bigger and like in proportion to a Gravesend tilt-boat”—through the perilous Ægean from Smyrna to Constantinople, and he frequently trusted himself to solitary expeditions in the Syrian desert. He narrowly escaped with his life in a fight among his boatmen on the shores of Thrace, and the Bedouins fell upon his caravan in Egypt, but he seems to have received no hurt either from man or climate all through his course. His finest original poem, written shortly before his death, ends with a noble thanksgiving for his preservation both in the East, and later among the Indians of the New World.

Sandys' thorough descriptions of the Turkish Empire, Egypt, and the Holy Land were the first really careful and trustworthy accounts of those countries that had then appeared in English. Other Eastern travellers, he says, had either “divulged toys,” or else they

          “still add to what they hear,
And of a mole-hill do a mountain rear.”

Few books of travel which have appeared in England have greater charms of a literary kind. It is written in a dignified, scholarly, and often nobly rhetorical style; the matter is never really dull, and if the sentences are sometimes, as in the case of all contemporary works, long, cumbrous, and obscure through too great compression, one meets often with delightfully clear and pointed pieces of description or comment. “They dwell in tents,” he says of the Arabs, “which they remove like walking cities, for opportunity of prey and benefit of pasture.” The inhabitants of an Ægean isle he calls “a happy people that live according to nature, and want not much in that they covet but little.” Of the Turks he tells us: “Some there be among them that write histories, but few read them, thinking that none can write truly of past times, since none dare write truth of the present.” And he says finely of their reception of the Sultan in the streets: “But what most deserveth admiration amongst so great a concourse of people is their general silence, insomuch as had you but only ears, you might suppose that men were then folded in sleep and the world in midnight.” The pages are continually broken up with poetical quotations, chiefly from the classical writers, which are accompanied always by verse translations, often of quite exquisite quality, by Sandys himself. As he takes the reader through the Ægean, the pages are sprinkled over with pleasant verses, as the delightful islands themselves “lily on lily overlace the sea.” Now and then he rises to the full heights of enthusiastic eloquence, as in the apostrophe to England with which he begins the homeward journey.

“Now shape we our course for England. Beloved soil; as in site ‘wholly from all the world disjoined’ so in thy felicities. The summer burns thee not, nor the winter benumbs thee: defended by the sea from wasteful incursions and by the valour of thy sons from hostile invasions. All other countries are in some things defective when thou, a provident parent, dost minister unto them whatsoever is useful, foreign additions but only tending to vanity and luxury. Virtue in thee at the least is praised and vices are branded with their names, if not pursued with punishments. That Ulysses, who knew many men's manners and saw many cities, if as sound in judgment as ripe in experience, would confess thee to be the land that floweth with milk and honey.”

But Sandys' finest passages, alike in his prose and his verse, are those which spring from the grave mood of melancholy which has filled with superb writing the greater pages of Ralegh, that perpetual sense of change and flux and non-abiding, which turns the mind from the glories of this world. The dedication to Prince Charles, descriptive of the altered and decayed state of the East, which he has pictured, he says, “to draw a right image of the frailty of man and the mutability of whatsoever is worldly,” is a noble piece of rhetoric quite worthy of Sir Walter. He loves to conclude his stories of great Eastern warriors and kings with the note of the Old Preacher; to tell such tales as that of the dying wish of Saladin; and to point the eternal moral by the side of the pyramid and the ruin.

The Ovid first appeared in complete form in 1626. Sandys had meanwhile, in 1621, obtained his post of treasurer, and gone out to Virginia. He had, it would seem, published several books of the version before his appointment, but the greater part of it was “limned,” he tells King Charles in his preface, “by that imperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night and repose” in the New World. It well deserved the chorus of eulogies which it received from contemporary authors, and Dryden's later praise that it was the work of “the best versifier of the age,” though Sandys became a greater master of the art of versification before he composed the poems that filled his last folio. In most of the early seventeenth-century writers of heroic rhyme there is little either of smoothness or of harmony. Such men as Quarles and Jonson run on their sense through long stretches of harsh verse, often by the aid of parenthetical passages, coming to a full pause anywhere in the line that is convenient, regardless of metrical effect, in a manner which makes one long for the short decisive harmonies, the perfect response of unbroken line to line, “the verse well disciplined, complete compact” of which Pope set the faultless model. Rhyme in verse written on their principle is almost valueless. Sandys, in his Ovid, has made an immense advance from the average contemporary writer towards the verse of Pope. He sometimes runs on for considerable spaces with smooth unbroken lines, ending the sentence with the couplet in true Augustan fashion; and though he does continually break off in a line, he generally so “manages the pauses” as to maintain a rhythmical flow and avoid loose disjointed endings. No one, Mr. Courthope has said, before Pope so well understood the nice art of placing and varying the cæsura. Then he knows well how to conclude his passages with a flowing final line, well balanced against the previous one, and bringing the music to a full close. Like Chapman—of whom he had certainly been a student—he is fond of giving a flow to his lines by compound epithets, and he continually also sounds the last syllables of past participles, sometimes very curiously as, e.g., in the following couplet:

“From Tantalus deceitful water slips
And catcht at fruit avoids his touched lips.”

The Ovid, however, does not afford the best example of Sandys' versification. In it he often, as Dryden has remarked, nearly “leaves Ovid prose where he finds him verse” by passages made up too largely of lines broken into brief epigrammatic sentences. His style becomes, to quote Cowley, “short lunged.” But this was not through want of skill, but through the desire for a literal rendering. His ambition was to put “smooth-sliding Ovid” into the same number of English lines as he has Latin, and he has succeeded at the expense of sometimes changing the smooth to a jetting pace. Nevertheless, the version on the whole is a triumph of versification. Often, as in the story of Midas, it is as smooth and harmonious as any writer of to-day could make it.

“He, lifting up his shining arms thus prayed,
‘Father Lenæus, O afford thy aid.
I have offended—pity thou—and me
From this so glorious a mischief free.’
The gentle power the penitent restored,
And for his faith affords what he implored.
Lest ill-wished gold about him still abide,
‘Go,’ said he, ‘to those crystal streams that slide
By potent Sardis; keep the banks that lead
Along the incountering current to his head;
There, where the gushing fountain foams, dive in
And with thy body wash away thy sin.’
The King obeys, who in the fountain leaves
That golden virtue which the spring receives.
And still those ancient seeds the waters hold
Which gild their shores with glittering grains of gold.”

Almost every page has some beautiful jewel couplet in which all the charm of all the Muses seems to flower and to haunt one's sense. Pope and Johnson have told us which of their couplets pleased them most in music. Sandys has dozens that either might have envied.

“The dying swan, adorned with silver wings,
So in the sedges of Maeander sings.”

Or,

“For wandering in the ort-yard, simply, she
Pluckt a pomegranate from the stooping tree.”

Or,

“His bridle slackening with his dying force
He, leisurely, sinks sidelong from his horse.”

Or (of Hyacinth bathing),

“Like marble statues which the life surpass,
Or like a lily in a crystal glass.”

Further, its narratives have a true enthusiastic spirit, some afterglow of the Elizabethan ardour for which one feels in vain in the later translation.

How long Sandys remained in America is uncertain, but it is thought seven or eight years. The government of the colony was taken over by the Crown in 1624, and Sandys then became a member of the Colonial Council, but he seems to have quarrelled with his colleagues and also with the neighbours of his plantation, for the governor of the colony, Francis West, complained to the Privy Council in 1628 that he was defying the rights of other settlers. He became a gentleman of the Privy Chamber on returning home, and in 1638 he is found acting as agent in London to the Colonial Legislative Assembly. It is certain that he spent his last ten years “living at ease” and cultivating the Muses at the houses of his nieces at Carswell in Oxfordshire and Boxley in Kent, at which latter seat his life ended on March 4, 1643. His society was much sought by his Oxford neighbour Lord Falkland, who has left monuments of his admiration of the poet in three long copies of verses.

“For though the most bewitching music could
Move men no more than rocks, thy music would,”

wrote the elegant earl in one of them, showing his mastery of the magnificent style of compliment which the seventeenth century courtiers so loved to practise.

The Psalms appeared in 1636, and the whole of the Paraphrases, with the exception of the Song of Solomon which followed three years later, in 1638. Between these two last volumes he published his translation of Grotius's finely rhetorical tragedy on the Passion, each of the four works being dedicated to the King, whose melancholy end Sandys fortunately did not, by five years, survive to witness. “Directed,” he says in the last words of his last dedication, “by your propitious aspect have I safely steered between so many rocks, and now, arrived at my last harbour, have broken up my ruinous vessel.”

Sandys' finest verse is in these later, long neglected poems. The Old Testament books other than the Psalms which appear in his Paraphrases are Job, Ecclesiastes and the Lamentations, works to the grave and melancholy notes of which his soul was so well attuned. He has dealt with all of them in the spirit of a poet, and not in that of a Sternhold or a Nahum Tate. Though they are paraphrases they would not deserve the motto which Scaliger chose for his verses, “ex alieno ingenio poeta, ex suo tantum versificator,” for they have all the warmth, the freedom and, it seems, the originality of independent poems. He set himself, he tells us, the high task of “resolving poesy with poesy.” No works in our literature are duller than the great bulk of eighteenth-century verse paraphrases of the Old Testament. One feels at once that they are mere “words,” and imaginatively sees composing them a bewigged author,

“with serious prosaic face,”

the reality of Prior or Young. Sandys, though he too only versifies old material, is able by means of a kindred spirit and sympathy to make it live again in its new form, and his readers in truth not merely admire fine language, but feel the power of poetry. The verse proceeds as to its form with a regular flow which is a revelation to a student who comes to it for the first time No longer confined in Ovid's Latin tethers Sandys gives his readers long harmonies of unbroken couplets, which, except that the accents sometimes fall on weak words and the lines have not the consistent combination of agreeing syllables which Pope calls “softness,” might almost be mistaken for Pope's own music.

As an example both of the spirit and the versification of his paraphrases at their best, one may give his rendering of Job's denunciation of the day of his birth in the third chapter of the book:

“Let the eclipséd moon her throne resign,
Instead of stars let blazing meteors shine.
Let it not see the dawning fleck the skies,
Nor the gray morning from the ocean rise;
Because the door of life it left unclosed,
And me a wretch to cruel fates exposed.
Oh, why was I not strangled in the womb,
Nor in that secret prison found a tomb?
Or since untimely born, why did not I
(The next of blessings) in that instant die?
Why kneel'd the mid-wife at my mother's throes
With pain produced, and nurse for future woes?
Else had I an eternal requiem kept,
And in the arms of peace for ever slept;
With kings and princes rank'd, who lofty frames
In deserts rais'd to immortalise their names;
Who made the wealth of provinces their prey;
In death as mighty and as rich as they;
Then I, as an abortive, had not been,
Nor with the hated light such sorrows seen;
Slept where none are by violence opprest,
And where the weary from their labours rest.
No prisoners there, enforced by torments, cry
But fearless, by their old tormentors lie:
The mean and great on equal bases stand,
No servants there obey, nor lords command.
Why should afflicted souls in anguish live
And only have immunity to grieve?
Oh, how they wish for Death to close their eyes!
But ah! in vain since he the wretched flies.
For whom they dig, as pioneers for gold
Which the dark entrails of the earth enfold;
And, having found him, as their liberty
With joy encounter and contented die.”

This is versification that Waller could not much have improved, and such poetry as his thin temperate inspiration never raised him to.

The version of the Psalms, which has always been regarded by those who are familiar with it as the finest of all its numberless class, is, for the most part, in stanza form. It was set to music by the celebrated Henry Lawes, the “Harry” of Milton's famous sonnet. Musicians tell us now that “Harry” has been overrated, and his psalm-tunes certainly do not bring one's soul into one's ears. Some of the stanzas Sandys seems to have originated himself, among them a singularly sweet one, with a wailful close, for sad themes.

“Lord for Thy promise sake defend
And Thy all-saving shield extend.
                    Oh, hear my cries
                    Which with wet eyes
And sighs to Thee ascend.”

It is doubtful whether he is not the inventor also of the form of the following verse, which became so popular in the eighteenth century:

“Thou Ruler of the rolling spheres,
I, through the glasses of my tears,
                    To Thee my eyes erect.
As servants mark the master's hands,
As maids their mistresses' commands,
                    And liberty expect.”

And he is also one of the earliest users at least of the form of “In Memoriam.” He has couplets of eight, of seven, and of six syllables, and in the management of the eight-syllable iambic measure, that instrument which our seventeenth-century poets could tune so wonderfully to such different themes, now evoking from it a blithe, gay music, as in Cowley's Anacreontics, and now a superb dignity, as in Dryden's great Horatian ode, he is specially felicitous. Indeed, Archdeacon Todd, the well-known early nineteenth-century editor, asserted that he had never been surpassed in his mastery of it. “Take,” as old Winstanley is fond of saying, “a taste of his quality” in the delightful little dedication to the Queen which he joins with that to Charles:

“O you who like a fruitful vine
To this our royal cedar join,
Since it were impious to divide
In such a present hearts so tied;
Urania your chaste ears invites
To these her more sublime delights.
Then, with your zealous lover, deign
To enter David's numerous fane.
Pure thoughts his sacrifices are,
Sabæan incense, fervent prayer;
This holy fire fell from the skies,
The holy water from his eyes.
Oh, should you with your voice infuse
Perfection, and create a Muse!
Though mean our verse, such excellence
At once would ravish soul and sense;
Delight in heavenly dwellers move,
And, since they cannot envy, love,
When they from this our earthly sphere
Their own celestial music hear.”

A rather noteworthy point about Sandys' use of the eight-syllable measure is that he seldom or never varies it with a trochaic seven-syllable line, though he has rendered many of the Psalms most felicitously in these last “numbers.”

Sandys chose eight-syllable verse for his Song of Solomon, and the soft musical couplets into which he turns the delicious love pastoral are worthy of the prose in which he found it. The full oriental fragrance breathes from his lines, and they glow with all the heat of the original. Sandys knew well the scenery of the poem, and he had no doubt often, as a young man, entered imaginatively into its rich passion amid Eastern orchards and under deep Eastern skies.

The experience of his Eastern travels left a deep impression on Sandys' character to the last. The memory of the sacred places he had seen, and the sense of the dangers he had safely passed through, immensely deepened the piety which he inherited from his parental stock. His life would indeed have provided, and perhaps has provided, old Roman Catholic controversialists with a striking example of the value of pilgrimages. When he saw the Holy Sepulchre “he burst forth,” to quote Thomas Warton, “into a devout song at the awful and inspiring spectacle.” The song may be found in the Travels, and it is historically interesting from the fact that Milton took from it hints for his Ode on the Passion. He seems specially to have cherished his Eastern memories in the latest years of his life. In the noble original poem of thanksgiving for his preservation through life, which he published at the end of his 1637 volume, he recalls the fact that he was inspired to sing the divine praises amid Judah's hills, and hang a devout offering on the sepulchre. And his last work of all, his version of Grotius' tragedy of the Passion, was no doubt the fruit of his own early journey along the Via Dolorosa, the scenes of which would rise naturally into more vivid outline as he enjoyed the calm of thought among the still surroundings of his retirement.

Grotius's once famous play, which is classical in form, and altogether of the school of Seneca, contains some fine speeches and choruses of the old pompous and flamboyant order, and they lose nothing rhetorically in Sandys' couplets. Casaubon pronounced it the perfect model of tragedy.

But modern taste, after the simple brevity of the New Testament narrative, finds it hard to endure a rhetorical treatment of such a subject, even when, as in the case of Sandys and Grotius, the rhetoric springs from deeply religious feeling. One meets with something of a shock the following form of the words, “This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise”:

“With me a happy guest thou shalt enjoy
Those sacred orchards where no frosts destroy
The eternal spring, before the morn display
The purple ensign of the ensuing day.”

The choruses, now “of Jewish women” and now “of Roman soldiers,” Sandys turns into his eight-syllable rhymes, and often with happy point, as when he tells how

“She who did commiserate
With impious grief her city's fate,
Grew in the moment of her fault
A statue of congealéd salt.”

Or how

“Jordan from two bubbling heads
His oft-returning waters leads,
Till they their narrow bounds forsake
And grow a sea-resembling lake.”

Needless to say, Grotius recognised no “development of doctrine,” and put into the mouth of his characters the Protestant theology of the seventeenth century. On the whole the drama is the least pleasing to a modern taste of all Sandys' works. It is too artificial in form, too exuberantly rhetorical, its world of thought and emotion is too distant. One laments in surveying it—looking at it from a literary standpoint—that the inspiration of Italy and the Isles of Greece did not live longer in the poet's mind than that of Jerusalem, and that he did not give us another classical version that would have been a perennial delight. But one would rather have his tragedy than a Virgil, for had he followed up a version of the first book of the Aeneid that he gave the world with his Ovid, ending it abruptly with the motto, “splendidis longe valedico nugis,” Dryden would never have tried to rival it. We know this from Dryden himself, and it is a warrant of deserving with which one may well close an appreciation of an old writer whose bays have long since ceased to thrive.