SOURCE: Gillespie, Stuart. “The Early Years of the Dryden-Tonson Partnership: The Background to Their Composite Translations and Miscellanies of the 1680s.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 12, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 10-19.

[In the following essay, Gillespie offers a reinterpretation of the evidence concerning the translation projects undertaken by Dryden and Tonson in the 1680s.]

One of the most influential literary partnerships of the seventeenth century commenced when, in 1679, Jacob Tonson first printed the work of John Dryden. In the following seven years, four unusual productions emerged from their alliance to set a number of decisive directions for both men's later careers. The compilations Ovid's Epistles (1680), Plutarch's Lives (1683-86), Miscellany Poems (1684), and Sylvae: or, the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (1685) contained the first fruits of Dryden's work as translator of the classics; they established Tonson as a leading publisher of contemporary translation and settled for the future his “several hands” formula. Had it not been for the success of these ventures it is unlikely that Dryden would have felt able to return to his brand of classical translation from 1693 onwards, or that the Dryden-Tonson miscellanies, those monuments of seventeenth-century taste, could have continued to appear over the following decades. Although some of the facts about this chapter in literary history have been carefully pieced together by recent researchers, the correct interpretation of them remains open to doubt. Despite full investigation of Dryden's role in soliciting contributors for these volumes, for example, it is not clear how far the compilations reflect programs of his own, or whether his personal contributions were always conceived as part of a larger design.¹ On Tonson's side, one may choose between the image of a shrewd and opportunistic businessman taking advantage of new tastes or that of a creative entrepreneur developing them.² The contributors, assumed by early investigators to be assemblages of miscellaneous hired hands for the separate projects, have recently been tentatively linked together as a single, if evolving, circle of acquaintances;³ the succession of volumes of classical translation has been seen as the result of a series of happy accidents and, alternatively, as representing the gradual fulfillment of its sponsors' long-term plans.⁴ It is the purpose of the present article to provide a general reinterpretation of the evidence, old and new, on the background to the Dryden-Tonson translating projects and the figures associated with them in their early years.

Looking back in the mid-1690s on the recent English translating achievement, Dryden distinguished sharply between the conscientious and the unscrupulous among the booksellers who had promoted it. In the Life of Lucian Dryden describes the supply of contemporary translation as deriving principally from “persons more devoted to their own gain than the public honour,” persons who, “very parsimonious in rewarding the wretched scribblers they employ … care not how the business is done, so that it be but done.” On the other hand, he goes on, a quite different situation arises “when the bookseller has interest with gentlemen of genius and quality above the mercenary prospects of little writers, as in that of Plutarch's Lives, and this of Lucian.”⁵ Tonson's Plutarch, then, is singled out by Dryden from the mass of hack writing and shady bookselling sponsored by the generality of contemporary dealers in translation. How far does this present an accurate picture of the circumstances in which the first four Dryden-Tonson volumes of translation were assembled?

Jacob Tonson's imprint first appears in 1678, when he was only about twenty-two years old and had just completed his apprenticeship. He was responsible for less than a dozen titles up to 1680, the date of Ovid's Epistles. Prominent among them were works by several up-and-coming dramatists, such as Tate, Otway, and Aphra Behn. Tonson had also produced translations in the field of “polite” literature: of the Sieur de Prechac's The Heroine Musqueteer and du Breval's The Play is the Plot (both 1678). A further volume from the French was undertaken in partnership with his brother and three other booksellers, who took over the vending of John Evelyn's A Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modern, a version of Chambray's Parallèle de l'architecture (1650), and reissued it in 1680 as The Whole Body of Ancient and Modern Architecture. In both these areas, Tonson seems to have been producing prentice-work with the assistance of his elder brother: Richard Tonson had from 1676 published dramatists such as Otway, Davenant, and Aphra Behn, while the unmemorable translations, a cheap way of establishing a list,⁶ were sometimes associated with Richard's imprint. Tonson's work to 1680 is a measure of his good fortune in acquiring Dryden (from Henry Herringman, his regular publisher hitherto) with Troilus and Cressida. But both the interest in translation and, as we shall see, the connections with dramatists have a clear relevance to his movement into the field of the classics with Ovid's Epistles.

Whatever ambitions the young Tonson may have entertained at this date, there is every indication that the Ovid's Epistles volume itself was simply an experiment occasioned by the coming-together of a number of apparently propitious circumstances—and not the first step in a methodical rise to commercial preeminence. The speculative character of the venture is evident from the scanty record of translated verse publishing in England in the previous decade: it would be quite mistaken to think of Tonson as having merely fuelled an established market in the field. His own formula for it was particularly unusual in 1680. Although he may have been impressed by the sales of a work like Brome's composite Horace (1666, 1671, 1680), the best early Restoration example of translated verse by several hands, the general unpopularity of compilations of this kind prior to 1680 marks off Ovid's Epistles as a new type of work in terms of variety, modernity, and quality.⁷ But Tonson's interest in translation (and, perhaps, its relative cheapness) and his associations in dramatic circles must have helped persuade him to attempt the venture. There was, no doubt, some truth in Prior's jibe that the low ebb in the market for heroic drama contributed to the alacrity with which Dryden, Tate, Behn, Otway (all previously published by Tonson as dramatists) and the others responded to the call. “Since the united cunning of the Stage / Has balk'd the hireling Drudges of the Age” (a reference to the union of the two playhouses), Prior wrote in his squib on the Epistles,

Those who with nine months toil had spoil'd a Play,
In hopes of Eating at a full Third day,
Justly despairing longer to sustain
A craving Stomach from an empty Brain,
Have left Stage-practice, chang'd their old Vocations,
Atoning for bad Plays, with worse Translations.(8)

In 1680 Tonson created a new opportunity for talented writers of heroic plays in a genre requiring little cultivation of new skills—the verse epistle. Seven of the seventeen contributors to the first edition of Ovid's Epistles were playwrights (Settle, Caryll, Butler, and the four already mentioned); two others had established dramatic associations (Scrope, contributor with Dryden to Lee's Mithradates in 1677/8, and Rymer, drama critic and author of Edgar, published by Richard Tonson in 1678). The others were almost all either young unknowns (Richard Duke, for instance) or, occasionally, “gentlemen of quality” like those commended by Dryden for their parts in Plutarch's Lives (Sheffield is an example). Wherever the design for the volume originated, therefore, it is clear that Tonson relied heavily for its execution on the dramatic circles in which he moved. They provided the (perhaps slightly inadequate) justification for Dryden's reference in the preface to the work of the “many gentlemen whose wit and learning are well known” (Watson, I, 273), a claim which anticipates the remarks on Tonson's Plutarch in the Life of Lucian.

It is tempting to imagine that it was Dryden who first put forward the notion of the Epistles, at the beginning of his association with Tonson.⁹ The only support for this hypothesis, however, lies in Dryden's long-standing interest in Ovid. It is sometimes claimed that his contributions in 1680 should, on stylistic grounds, he dated several years previously.¹⁰ If this is accepted, then the origins of the project would seem to lie with him. Certainly a business arrangement in which the financially hard-pressed laureate could make use of manuscripts put by as unsuitable for publication under the Herringman regime would have been attractive to Dryden. But this must remain a speculation. It is difficult to reconcile with the fact that Tonson eventually included a version of Dido to Aeneas by John Somers as well as Dryden's (since there was no reason for him to commission duplicates); on the other hand, some of the other new appearances in Tonson's list after Dryden began work with him suggest that the publisher may have been urged by his new writer to produce versions of several of his favorite authors, perhaps including Ovid.¹¹

What of the commercial considerations from Tonson's point of view? Verse translation may not have been a novelty, but the format he adopted in 1680, as already noted, had few precedents. Dryden's explanation for it in his preface is that Ovid has been “translated by divers hands, that you may at least have that variety in English which the subject denied to the author of the Latin” (Watson, I, 268). He may here be attempting to present a necessity as a virtue, though the variety of the volume does constitute a genuine attraction. At least, he evidently felt that some comment on the unusual formula was called for. There are indications, too, of some uncertainty on Dryden's part as to the market at which the volume is aimed. Some of his comments on Ovid's appeal may have been made in the interests of securing a wider audience than a classical translation was normally expected to achieve: Dryden claims, for instance, that in the Epistles Ovid's “amorous expressions go no further than virtue may allow, and therefore may be read, as he intended them, by matrons without a blush” (Watson, I, 267-68).¹² But in any event, the volume was an outstanding commercial success, going through new editions in 1681, 1683, 1688, 1693, and subsequently; and its admirers included serious literary men like Oldham and Hoy.¹³ Tonson acquired Alexander Radcliffe's burlesque on the Epistles, Ovid Travestie (1680 and reprinted 1681) while The Wits Paraphrased, 1680, attributed to Matthew Stevenson, took as its target the Tonson translation itself.

It was not until 1683 that Tonson's next Dryden-associated translation, Plutarch's Lives, began to appear, and only in 1684 did they return to verse translation in the first volume of Miscellany Poems. But it is clear that Tonson was induced to plan further additions of composite translations to his list very soon after the Epistles. They were no doubt funded by the substantial profits from such books as Absalom and Achitophel (fifth edition 1682); Dryden must thus have been indirectly responsible for Tonson's ability to continue in this field, since an undertaking like the Lives would require considerable financial resources. Tonson recalled that Creech had agreed to contribute some sections to Plutarch's Lives just after the publication of the first edition of his Lucretius; this was in 1682.¹⁴ The composite series of short translated poems in the first miscellany—Ovid's Elegies, Horace's Odes, Virgil's Eclogues—are obvious successors to the Epistles and must originally have been planned as individual volumes; the miscellany compilation was decided upon partly because some of them were not, in the event, saleable as separate entities.¹⁵ John Fish's version of Ovid's Elegies, which would have spoiled the market for one of the collections, was issued in 1683. Clearly, then, the collecting of material for the Lives and Miscellany Poems, 1684, was taking place very soon after the appearance of the Epistles; but there is nothing to show that any miscellany was projected at this stage.

Several pieces of evidence from these years allow us to reconstruct the outlines of Dryden-Tonson's plans more generally and the parts played in them by their associates. First, it is at this time that Tonson begins to think in terms of a specialization in classical translation. His edition of Creech's Lucretius in 1683, with which he took over the book from Anthony Stephens in Oxford, is an example of his acquisition of promising young writers for this purpose, and the prefatory verses he wrote for it (which, it is worth noting, he hoped “should bee taken for Drydens”)¹⁶ show something of his sense of the potential for his new field. He points out that existing versions of classical poets are inadequate and call out for replacement—Brome's Horace, for instance:

Horace we have in Paraphrastick dress,
(They who enlarge his Poems, make 'em less)
Tho baulkt before wou'd see us once agen,
And courts th' assistance of thy juster Pen.

(sig. B1^v)

Creech's Horace was published by Tonson in 1684; there is advance publicity also in this poem for Creech's rendering of Theocritus of the same year, and a reference to Virgil which seems to be to the versions of two eclogues produced by Creech for Miscellany Poems, 1684. Tonson appeals here, further, for a general effort in classical translation: “Why should our Isle be by her Sons deny'd; / What, if obtain'd, wou'd prove her greatest Pride?” (sig. B1^r). The emphasis on the “justness” of the future Tonson translations as compared with their predecessors is paralleled in the address of “the Publisher to the Reader” (probably by Dryden) in the first volume of the Plutarch in the same year: Dryden and Tonson seem to have seen fidelity to the original as a selling-point in a market burdened with old-fashioned and inaccurate translations insofar as it offered the classics to non-Latin readers at all. The Tonson Lives, its purchasers were informed in the first volume, were not to be bracketed with the earlier English version (Sir Thomas North's, translated from the French of Amyot); in this work of modern scholarship, Plutarch is “turn'd from the Greek into English” in “the first attempt of doing it from the Originalls.”¹⁷

In Plutarch's Lives Tonson once again achieved a resounding success and once again inspired emulation. Reprinting commenced in 1694; but Matthew Morgan's Epistle Dedicatory to Gellibrand's edition of Plutarch's Morals, begun in 1684, allows the inference—from its self-effacing remarks on Tonson's great project—that Tonson's standards and his association with Dryden had already won for him a high standing in the field of translation during the publication of the first edition (1683-86). Tonson was also able to offer his customers a translation (of a very different kind, it is true) done “According to His Majesty's Command” in 1684: Dryden's History of the League. In this year, five of the eleven recorded additions to his list were wholly or mainly translations, and the remainder included Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse.¹⁸

We must now return to the question of the relationships among contributors to the volumes which followed Ovid's Epistles. Despite Arthur Sherbo's recent proposal¹⁹ that the Roscommon translating academy should be seen as providing a link between many of the collaborators in the early Tonson translations, the fact is that only one of the known members of this circle, Roscommon himself, contributed anything to a Dryden-Tonson volume of translation until Sylvae in 1685, the year of Roscommon's death, in which his work accompanied a piece probably by Richard Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale.²⁰ Moreover, Miscellany Poems, 1684, numbered among its nineteen contributors (not counting the unattributed pieces) eight of the associates in Ovid's Epistles,²¹ a volume almost certainly published before Roscommon's academy was formed in the early 1680s.²² There is, then, almost no direct evidence to show that Roscommon's circle played any significant part in Tonson's organization. But inferences can be drawn as to its relation to the Tonson ventures from other available material, and speculation is justified by three facts: that Chetwood's memoir of the academy refers to unnamed members,²³ that many of the contributors to the first two Tonson miscellanies (over a quarter in the case of Sylvae) are anonymous, and that Roscommon is connected with both Dryden and Tonson separately from, but at the same time as, the early 1680s volumes of translation. It is plausible to suggest that we are in fact dealing in these volumes with the work not of one but of a number of overlapping circles of contributors, one of which centered on Roscommon.

Chetwood named seven principal members of Roscommon's group: George Savile, Marquis of Halifax; Richard Maitland, later Earl of Lauderdale; Dorset; Lord Cavendish, later Duke of Devonshire; “Sir Charles Sc[arborou]gh”; a Colonel Finch; and Dryden. Translation of the classics, its main objective, was to be undertaken by specific allocations of work: Tacitus to Savile, Virgil to Maitland. Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse, Chetwood noted, also arose from the group's discussions.²⁴ We do not know when Dryden and Roscommon first met, but the Preface to Ovid's Epistles incorporates some of Roscommon's renderings of Horace in his version of the Ars poetica of the same year; this translation was issued by Dryden's regular publisher to 1679, Herringman. Dryden celebrates Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse, 1684, in his prefatory poem “To the Earl of Roscomon” which contains a plea for “Authors nobly born” to “bear their part” in English translation (pp. 53-56) and instances Sheffield (who had shared an Ovidian epistle with Dryden in 1680) and Roscommon himself as examples (pp. 59-60, 63-67). Since the only other “nobleman” to appear in the Tonson translations to 1684 is Rochester, who had died in 1680 (included in Miscellany Poems, 1684), and since Sheffield, as will be seen, was a friend of Halifax and Dorset, Dryden appears to be thinking here of the contribution to the effort to be made by the Roscommon group, not the established Tonson authors. Dryden's poem is much more optimistic over the future of classical translation than the Preface to Ovid's Epistles,²⁵ no doubt because both Tonson's and Roscommon's plans had now been more firmly formulated.²⁶

One other piece of contemporary testimony supports Chetwood's statements on the friendship between Halifax, Dorset, and Dryden, and shows that Sheffield kept company with these three Roscommon authors. Carte's Life of Ormonde contains an anecdote about a dining-circle of Ormond's (later retailed by Johnson in his Life of Dryden) in which Ormond (the second Duke) is said “once in a quarter of a year … to have [had] the Marquis of Halifax, the Earls of Mulgrave, Dorset and Danby, Mr. Dryden, and others of that set of men at supper.”²⁷ This would almost certainly have been in the early 1680s;²⁸ thus, at this time, of the figures mentioned by Chetwood, Halifax, Dorset, and Dryden were recognizably of a certain “set,” and the group also contained three Tonson authors: Sheffield, Dryden, and Danby.²⁹ In other words, Dryden had strong personal connections with the aristocratic group in Roscommon's circle, and the group embraced several Tonson writers. But there is no evidence that there was any other overlap between the Roscommon group and the “professional” authors who formed the backbone of the contributors to the early Tonson translations.

All the appearances are, indeed, that these “authors nobly born” were more important as providing stimulus and encouragement to Dryden in his translating endeavours than as actual contributors to his collections. Dryden described Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse as a “forcible” “motive” (Watson, II, 19) to his translating work in Sylvae; he was to make use of Lauderdale's (still unpublished) Aeneid for his version of 1697. But the contributors to Plutarch's Lives were preponderantly academics, with some previous Tonson authors (Creech, Rymer, Caryll, Duke) making up the measure, while the miscellanies of 1684 and 1685 draw heavily on the Epistles contributors and other contacts of Dryden's own. We should now examine the history of the latter two volumes more generally.

Whereas the organization of Plutarch's Lives seems to have been efficient, autocratic, and Drydenian,³⁰ the production of Miscellany Poems, 1684, as has already been noted in passing, was more in the nature of an accident. Some of Tonson's collections of translations by several hands had become idle copy; the bibliographical peculiarities of the volume show that he incorporated into the miscellany at least one such collection previously designed as an Ovid's Epistles-type compilation (Virgil's Eclogues) and an octavo edition of Dryden's satires which he had planned for separate publication (including Mac Flecknoe, the unauthorized edition of which, by Green in 1682, may explain why this collection never appeared independently). What plan there was for a miscellany developed only at a very late stage in its compilation.³¹ It is thus not possible to hold that either Dryden or Tonson was really responsible for the organization here: both men had assembled contributions, but they were planned as contributions to quite different books. It is worth noting, however, that all the Dryden translations of 1684—an Ovidian elegy, two Theocritan idylls, and two Virgilian eclogues—form part of composite versions of these series,³² so that Dryden's verse-translating work of this date is most unlikely to have been carried out independently of the Tonson schemes and only incorporated subsequently (as may have been the case with Ovid's Epistles and was certainly the case in some of the later miscellanies).³³ The 1684 title-page drew attention to these series of translations in the volume even though three Dryden satires and eighteen of his prologues and epilogues were also included, offering “Miscellany Poems. / Containing a New / TRANSLATION / OF / VIRGILLS Eclogues, / OVID'S Love Elegies, / Odes of HORACE, / And OTHER AUTHORS, / WITH SEVERAL / ORIGINAL POEMS.” These emphases support the other evidence that in 1684 Tonson was certain that he wished to offer classical translation to his readers but had not foreseen the necessity for doing so in a miscellany. The first miscellany's translations, unlike those of the later volumes, are in fact arranged in groups according to original author.

We have little indication of how the first miscellany fared on its appearance in the market-place, but its successor's rapid arrival must suggest that Tonson found himself to have hit on another winning formula, as do the signs of increasing confidence in that formula's effectiveness in Sylvae. For this volume, the translation emphasis was sustained and extended, with fewer original poems appearing; the variety of the miscellany layout was increased by a more haphazard arrangement of pieces throughout the book; and Dryden assumed greater prominence as organizer and contributor. Dryden's preface deals exclusively with the art of verse translation; he is the main contributor, all his translations being grouped together at the opening; almost all the original poems included are associated with him and his literary interests of the period.³⁴ Dryden appears to have been content to allow Tonson to complete the final arrangement of Sylvae; he writes in the preface that he has “not perus'd” some of the inclusions (Watson, II, 33). His letter to Tonson of August/September 1684, however, makes clear that he was in a position to dictate terms regarding both the general organization and his own contributions, having taken Tonson's views into account:

Your opinion of the Miscellanies is likewise mine: I will for once lay by the Religio Laici, till another time. But I must also add, that since we are to have nothing but new, I am resolvd we will have nothing but good, whomever we disoblige. You will have of mine four Odes of Horace, which I have already translated, another small translation of forty lines from Lucretius: the whole story of Nisus & Eurialus, both in the fifth, & the ninth of Virgils Eneids; & I care not who translates them beside me, for let him be friend or foe, I will please my self, & not give off in consideration of any man.³⁵

The Tonson letter to which Dryden here replies does not survive, but several important inferences can be drawn about the nature of their collaboration over Sylvae nevertheless. Dryden is able to veto contributions by others, and is no longer working to harmonize his efforts with those of other contributors—he will “please himself.” The doubt he expresses about other contributors' work overlapping with his own may mean, however, that Tonson had issued a general request for translations from Horace, Lucretius, and Virgil: other than Dryden's, Sylvae included four Horatian poems (two of them odes), a version from Lucretius' Book V, and two renderings of Virgil (one from the Aeneid). The only name not previously associated with Tonson to appear in Sylvae is that of Dryden's son Charles; this lends support to the hypothesis that Tonson made offers to his established authors for short translations from particular classics for inclusion in 1685.³⁶ Finally, Dryden agrees with Tonson on the “nothing but new” principle, a departure from their practice in 1684 when previously-published work by Dryden was included; hence, a plan to reprint (or perhaps revise) Religio Laici (1682) is dropped.

The early history of the Dryden-Tonson translations may be concluded with the reissue of the first two miscellanies in 1685 as Miscellany Poems. In Two Parts. By this time, Ovid's Epistles had popularized serious translation from the classics, Plutarch's Lives was still appearing as a prestigious monument of scholarship, and the miscellanies had made selected translations, arranged for random dipping, available to a wide public. Tonson's future in translation was assured. Dryden, though he was not to return to the field of classical verse until Juvenal and Persius in 1693, had become a leading figure in a plan to organize a collaborative effort to provide versions of ancient poets which, like his 1693 volume, were intended for “persons of understanding and good sense who, not having been conversant in the original, or at least not having made Latin verse so much their business as to be critics in it, would be glad to find if the wit of our … great authors be answerable to their fame and reputation in the world.”³⁷ The steps by which Dryden and Tonson had arrived at these positions may be summarized from the foregoing discussion.

Their first volume of translated verse, Ovid's Epistles, was from the bookselling point of view an experiment, perhaps suggested by Dryden, executed principally by Tonson's acquaintances in dramatic circles. Its success led Tonson to plan further publications of the same type and to specialize in translation, especially translation from the classics. The organization of his next project in the field, Plutarch's Lives, was largely undertaken by Dryden, who commissioned academics not likely to have been known to Tonson; the volume helped to earn Tonson the prestige which was his due among publishers of classical translation. Meanwhile, Tonson's plans for further composite translations being thwarted by his rivals in the field, he decided to print most of the materials he had collected in a single volume, thus—largely accidentally—embarking on the miscellany series. The contributors to the first miscellany included many previous Tonson authors; Dryden's translations were undertaken as elements in the composite series it contained; its translated poems were clearly intended to have an appeal similar to that of Ovid's Epistles. At this time, Dryden is involved in the Roscommon translating academy's work, which, though it provides little material for Tonson's volumes, is a stimulus to Dryden's own translating interests. In Sylvae Dryden becomes principal contributor and is able to contribute much what he wishes, but does not participate in the final selection and arrangement of items. Tonson's 1685 format reflects a settled confidence in the viability of the miscellany recipe, just as Dryden's preface, and poems, betoken a new commitment to classical translation. In both these fields, successes scarcely imaginable five years previously had provided Dryden and Tonson with good reason for optimism and paved the way for their greatest achievements, in the following decade.

Notes

1. Arthur Sherbo, in “The Dryden-Cambridge Translation of Plutarch's Lives,” EA, 32 (1979), 177-84, and “Dryden as a Cambridge Editor,” Studies in Bibliography, 38 (1985), 251-61, has provided thorough documentation on the contributors. Judith Sloman, in Dryden: The Poetics of Translation (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1985), speculates unconvincingly on the possible programs lying behind the volumes, seeing the designs as exclusively Dryden's (see especially Ch. 3).

2. W. J. Cameron, “Miscellany Poems 1684-1716,” Diss. Reading 1957, pp. 105-55, adduces much evidence in favour of the former view; Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1971), Ch. 1, inclines towards the latter; Harry M. Geduld, Prince of Publishers: A Study of the Work and Career of Jacob Tonson (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 87-101, sees some truth in both.

3. Arthur Sherbo claims that in the Dryden-Tonson composite translations and miscellanies to 1711 is to be found the “later history” of the Roscommon translating “group” (“Dryden as a Cambridge Editor,” p. 252). For an alternative account of the contributors' relations, see below.

4. Cameron, pp. 105-55, and T. T. Dombras, “English Poetical Miscellanies 1684-1716,” Diss. Oxford 1950, pp. 247-87, see the series as essentially unplanned from the publisher's side; Geduld, pp. 91-99, takes the opposite view of the miscellanies.

5. Life of Lucian, in Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1962; hereafter “Watson”), I, 214-15. The Life of Lucian is usually dated to 1696.

6. Geduld, p. 8, records a tradition that Tonson was forced into his partnership with Swale in 1679 because of his lack of capital. For a parallel instance of translation being used by a bookseller for quick profit in the 1670s (very much in the manner Dryden animadverts upon in the Life of Lucian), see Paul Hammond, John Oldham and the Renewal of Classical Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 18-19.

7. On the precursors of the Epistles, see Cameron, pp. 122-25 and 128-29.

8. A Satyr on the Modern Translators (1684), in Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. B. Wright and M. K. Spears (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), I, 19. For further details of the situation Prior describes, see W. J. Cameron, “John Dryden's Jacobitism,” in Restoration Literature: Critical Approaches, ed. Harold Love (London: Methuen, 1972), 277-308 (pp. 284-85).

9. As is suggested (without supporting evidence, however) by the editors of The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg et al. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1956-), I, 324.

10. In Works, ed. Swedenberg, I, 329, for example.

11. It may be significant, for example, that Cowley, the “darling” of Dryden's “youth” (Discourse of Satire, Watson, II, 150) upon whose work he was reflecting reverently in the Preface to Ovid's Epistles, appears in Tonson's list in 1681. But Tonson bought the rights to authors previously published by Herringman (such as Cowley) fairly indiscriminately in the 1680s (see Geduld, p. 57).

12. Volumes such as Ovid's Epistles would, of course, constitute access-routes into the classics for the non-Latin-trained female reader. But it is perhaps not necessary to take Dryden's reference to “matrons” literally.

13. Oldham's Passion of Byblis, 1680, was “occasion'd upon reading the late translations of Ovid's Epistles” (Satires upon the Jesuits, London, 1681, sig. A4^v); Hoy praised the volume in his Two Essays (versions of the first book of the Art of Love and Hero and Leander, London, 1684, sigs. A3^r-v).

14. See Tonson's letter to his nephew of 22 April 1728 quoted in G. Thorn-Drury, “Some Notes on Dryden,” RES, 1 (1925), 187-97 (pp. 196-97).

15. See Cameron, “Miscellany Poems,” pp. 143-49. The bibliographical features of the 1684 miscellany support this argument strongly: Virgil's Eclogues have separate pagination at the end of the volume, for example.

16. Tonson to his nephew, 22 April 1728, quoted from Thorn-Drury, p. 197.

17. Works, ed. Swedenberg, XVII, 237.

18. The five translations were Creech's Horace; Plutarch's Lives, vols II and III; Miscellany Poems; and the History of the League. The bias towards translation in the allocation of Tonson's resources is even more pronounced than these figures suggest. He was only reprinting one book (the ninth edition of a legal text, Wing C4928) in this year, and three of his other new titles were, in terms of the normal way of costing publications by gatherings, very minor undertakings: a speech by Richard Vaughan (Wing V138), a sermon by Sprat (Wing S5060), and the Dryden-Lee Prologue to Constantine the Great.

19. In “Dryden as a Cambridge Editor.”

20. For the attribution, see William Frost, “Temple, Sedley, Ogilby, and Creech (?) as Pre-Drydenian Translators of Virgil,” N & Q, 227 (1982), 511-13 (p. 513).

21. Duke, Rymer, Tate, Sheffield, Otway, Caryll, Dryden himself, and Scrope, who, however, had died in 1680. A ninth contributor, John Cooper, had figured in the 1681 edition of Ovid's Epistles.

22. The dating, accepted by Sherbo, is Carl Niemeyer's: see his “The Earl of Roscommon's Academy,” MLN, 49 (1934), 432-37 (pp. 435-36), and “The Life and Works of the Earl of Roscommon,” Diss. Harvard 1933, pp. 84-85.

23. The memoir, preserved in a manuscript copy in Cambridge University Library Baker MSS, Mm. 1. 47, mentions “some few others of less note & Abilities” than the named participants in the circle (p. 40).

24. Chetwood, p. 40.

25. Compare, in 1680, Dryden's lament that “the true reason why we have so few versions [of the classics] which are tolerable is … because there are so few who have all the talents which are requisite for translation”; “there is so little praise and so small encouragement for so considerable a part of learning” (Watson, I, 273).

26. For corroboration of the relationship between Dryden's classical and translating interests and his commitment to Roscommon's work in the recently-discovered Dryden poem To Mr. L. Maidwell on his new Method, see G. J. Clingham, “Dryden's New Poem,” EIC, 35 (1985), 281-93 (pp. 282-84).

27. Thomas Carte, An History of the Life of James Duke of Ormonde (London, 1736), II, 554.

28. Ormond died in 1688; the early 1680s is the period of Dryden's intimacy with him. He wrote to Tonson of sending him a copy of The History of the League in 1684 (The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward, Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1942, p. 22); Ormond was portrayed as Barzillai in Absalom and Achitophel and was the dedicatee of Plutarch's Lives in 1683. Roscommon's translation into French of William Sherlock's The Case of Resistance of the Supreme Powers (1684), a tract on the doctrine of passive obedience, was effected at Ormonde's request: see Carl Niemeyer, “A Roscommon Canon,” SP, 39 (1939), 622-36 (p. 631).

29. Tonson printed Danby in 1682 in The Arguments … of the Earl of Danby (Wing L922), but he is not known as a translator.

30. For Dryden's part in soliciting contributions, see Sherbo, “The Dryden-Cambridge Plutarch.”

31. For further details of the arrangement, see Cameron, “Miscellany Poems,” pp. 143-49.

32. Theocritus' Idylls do not form a series in 1684, but Dryden's versions are part of a collection of eleven translations from the Idylls in the first two miscellanies. See note 36, below.

33. Since, as we have seen, the collection of material for these series was begun soon after Ovid's Epistles, this raises the possibility that some of these Dryden translations were already several years old by 1684.

34. Other than his own songs “Sylvia the Fair” and “Go tell Amynta gentle Swain,” the original poems included an anonymous panegyric on Dickinson's Critical History (which inspired Religio Laici), a Latin poem by Charles Dryden, an anonymous elegy (by Tonson) on the death of Oldham (following Dryden's own “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” of 1684), and two commendatory poems on Religio Laici.

35. Letters of John Dryden, ed. Ward, p. 23.

36. In any case, the contents pages of Sylvae make it clear that though there had been no time to collect substantial numbers of translations from any single classic, Tonson was still thinking, at bottom, in terms of composite versions of individual works in 1685. The eight Theocritan idylls, in fact, seem to represent the leftovers from a commissioned collection depleted by the inclusion of three of the items in 1684. Dryden speaks in the Preface to Sylvae of having completed the Theocritus and Horace poems before the Lucretius and Virgil pieces (Watson, I, 18); the former are the obvious candidates for inclusion in compilations in the Ovid's Epistles mold among his 1685 translations, and it may be, therefore, that his “hot fit” of translation at this time began with the process of fulfilling his undertakings for Tonson before “pleasing himself.”

37. Discourse of Satire, Watson, II, 153.