The type of poem referred to in this chapter as the ‘moralizing lyric’ has been produced continuously in English at least from the time of Tottel’s miscellany down to the present day; it is the tradition to which Kipling’s enduringly popular, if critically unfashionable and easily pastiched poem, ‘If –’ belongs:

Both Latin and English poetry in this tradition was popular in early modernity: several pieces of this type are among the most widely circulated poems of the period, including Walter Raleigh’s (c.1552–1618) ‘E’en such is time’ and Henry Wotton’s (1568–1639) ‘The Character of a Happy Life’, the latter of which I give below:

The great popularity of poems of this kind in early modernity is demonstrated primarily by manuscript circulation – Wotton’s poetry was not published until 1651 but was circulating very widely in manuscript in the preceding decades. Peter Beal’s Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts (CELM) records 63 copies of ‘The Character of a Happy Life’ and a huge 116 copies of Raleigh’s ‘E’en such is time’.Footnote ² In seventeenth-century manuscripts, the single most widely excerpted poem by George Herbert, a poet appreciated today for his devotional lyrics, is the long didactic poem ‘The Church-Porch’, written in 77 highly quotable stanzas.Footnote ³ The poem ends:

Lyrics of this sort deal in the concise, memorable, rousing and often beautiful expression of conventional wisdom: that riches do not bring happiness or real freedom; that worldly fame and importance are transitory; that virtue is its own reward.

I have chosen to begin with poetry of this sort for several reasons: unlike some other poetic forms discussed in subsequent chapters, which have a discernible ‘vogue’ and then fall out of fashion or evolve to a significant degree, lyrics of this kind were consistently popular throughout the whole of the period covered by this book – and indeed remain so. They represent a very stable poetic form, in which key examples, composed between the 1530s and the early eighteenth century, from Wyatt to Watts (and indeed well beyond that, far beyond the scope of this book), recognizably belong together. The impersonal tone and moral seriousness of these lyrics set them apart from shorter-lived poetic trends, such as Petrarchan romance, ‘metaphysical’ wit or Restoration satire, even where they borrow stylistically from the fashions of their day; and though several of the most popular examples were associated with specific events – such as Raleigh’s ‘E’en such is time’, widely believed to have been composed immediately before his execution – they have a ‘generalizing’ authority which does not depend upon the identity or circumstances of authorship. Indeed, they frequently circulated anonymously or under a range of attributions. Finally, though far from least important, these poems include some of the best lyric poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many of them retain their power to console nearly five centuries later.

Such poetry has not attracted a great deal of critical comment and has barely been discussed at all in terms of wider literary traditions. As Arthur Marotti has remarked, the poems found most frequently in manuscript collections form ‘an interesting combination of texts that it would be difficult to anticipate from the printed volumes of the period or from the literary histories that are based on the products of print culture’: a polite way of pointing to the disjunction between the early modern literature we write about, and what was actually read.Footnote ⁴ (Marotti in his turn largely ignores Latin poetry; and this book, likewise, has set aside several not insignificant genres, such as secular love poetry.) The ‘plain’ style of most of these poems perhaps strikes many readers as neutrally, almost transparently ‘English’, and has contributed to critical neglect.Footnote ⁵ But this most ostensibly English of forms has its roots in the translation and imitation of classical poetry, and emerged in the sixteenth century in both Latin and English, with influence moving in both directions. As a starting point for this book, it demonstrates what can be learnt by a serious attention to literary bilingualism: repeatedly, it is the Latin versions of this form, including translations of the best-known English examples into Latin, which point to the classical texts that underpin these poems, and the (broadly) Latin lyric context to which they were understood to belong by contemporary readers.

Poems of this kind have connections both with devotional or religious verse (including scriptural paraphrase), and with the tradition of didactic monostichs, distichs and epigrams, though they form a distinct category of their own.Footnote ⁶ They are longer than the average epigram, typically ranging from around 10 to 50 lines. Latin examples are often (though far from always) in lyric metres; they are not usually part of a sequence or ‘conversational’ exchange of poems as epigrams often were; they typically do not refer explicitly to specific contemporary events or individuals, though they may well have implicit contemporary purchase and in manuscript sources are quite often given sharper historical force by details of titling or attribution; unlike the typical epigram, they are not characterized by a single ‘point’ (whether satiric, topical or moralizing), even though they do have a clear didactic message; in terms of classical models, they look towards the long and complex tradition of ‘Horatian’ lyric rather than to the epigrammatic tradition represented, in early modernity, by the twin streams of Martial and Cato (discussed in Chapter 7).

This enduringly popular mode of verse has its roots in classical poetry, but classical poetry grouped in ways which are not standard for modern classicists, and are therefore barely represented in modern classical scholarship or (more problematically) in recent work on ‘classical reception’. In early modern England, a cluster of models, centred around Horace but extending well beyond him, were understood to ‘belong’ together thematically: these included Horace’s moralizing lyrics, especially Odes 2 and the second epode, and sometimes incorporating extracts from the satires, epistles or the epodes condemning civil war; several of Seneca’s tragic choruses; the lyric portions (‘metra’) of Boethius’ prosimetric work De consolatione philosophiae; some of the longer and non-satiric of Martial’s epigrams (especially 10.47); and a few single poems such as Claudian’s ‘Old Man of Verona’ (Carmina Minora 20). In the seventeenth century, this set of classical and late antique texts was increasingly augmented by contemporary Latin authors, especially (in England from the 1630s onwards) the Horatian Latin lyric of the Polish Jesuit poet, Casimir Sarbiewski. In practice, this set of texts often also included scriptural verse paraphrase, most often of key psalms (such as Psalm 1).Footnote ⁷ A ‘reception history’ or history of translation of any single classical author, even where such exists, is likely to miss the cultural importance – the contemporary obviousness – of a cluster of this sort, where the similarities between the texts, rather than the differences in style, tone or historical context, are what lends them authority.

Of the relevant classical authors, Horace has attracted by far the greatest critical attention. The modern perception of Horace, however, tends to be one of a lyric poet of evanescent pleasure, of ‘wine, women, and song,’ and of a distinctively dispassionate and sometimes ironic tone.Footnote ⁸ Although there are traces of this Horace in early modern English poetry, Horatian imitation in this period is dominated by a quite different version of the Roman poet – as above all a great moralist, both in lyric (the Odes and Epodes) and hexameter (Satires and Epistles), and a moralist rooted strongly in the everyday realities of courtly life, the demands of patronage, and the pleasures and compromises of panegyric.Footnote ⁹ Though it is barely mentioned in most modern accounts, a large number of Horace’s odes are technically classifiable as hymns, or contain hymnic passages, and the association of Horace with lyric address to the divine, though not central to this chapter, is of the utmost importance in early modernity, linking him closely with the psalmist David: this aspect of the Latin lyric tradition is discussed in Chapters 3 (on psalm paraphrase), 4 (on the development of formal panegyric lyric) and 6 (on devotional lyric).

Moralizing Lyric in Tottel’s Miscellany

Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes (often referred to as ‘Tottel’s miscellany’), first printed in 1557, was a publishing sensation, and proved profoundly influential.Footnote ¹⁰ The collection itself is so heterogeneous that it has been described by some critics as ‘disorienting’, though this is arguably much less the case for anyone accustomed to reading personal manuscript miscellanies: Tottel resembles a print version of such collections.Footnote ¹¹ The poetry of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and of Thomas Wyatt, both of whom were writing in the 1530s and 1540s, is significantly represented in the anthology; and though Mary Thomas Crane has rightly stressed the ‘uniform moral message’ of the collection as a whole, criticism has focused on Surrey's and Wyatt’s contributions, with the majority of attention devoted to their sonnets and love lyrics.Footnote ¹²

Neither the moralizing verse of Tottel’s miscellany, nor its substantial element of translation and imitation (that is, of paraphrase broadly understood), has received much critical regard. In practice, however, these two elements – of moralizing verse, and of verse which reworks an existing poem – frequently overlap: Songes and Sonettes includes no fewer than three versions of Odes 2.10 on the ‘golden mean’, probably the most famous of all Horace’s moralizing odes. None of the three versions, however, is titled with reference to Horace, but only in general moralizing terms: ‘Praise of mean and constant estate’ (no. 32), ‘Of the golden mean’ (no. 253), and ‘The mean estate is to be accounted the best’ (no. 163).Footnote ¹³ A fourth poem with an almost identical title, ‘Of the meane and sure estate’ (no. 128), is not in fact another version of Odes 2.10 but rather Wyatt’s translation of the final part of the second chorus from Seneca’s Thyestes, on how true kingship lies not in power but in self-government and virtuous obscurity:

The overlap in titles reflects connections between the texts. Seneca’s moralizing choruses are dependent upon and consciously reminiscent of Horace in metre, theme and often also in specific allusions.Footnote ¹⁵ In Tottel, the similar titles and thematic overlap point to an ‘Horatio-Senecan’ zone of classical imitation which would have been obvious to early modern readers, but is far removed from mainstream scholarly perspectives on either Horace or Seneca today.Footnote ¹⁶

The title given to Wyatt’s poem, ‘Of the meane and sure estate’, points towards two meanings of the word ‘mean’: ‘lowly’ and ‘middle’ (as in the ‘golden mean’ of Horace Odes 2.10).Footnote ¹⁷ The overlap reflects a ‘blurring’ of the source texts too. Horace Odes 2.10 uses imagery of the tall pine tree, towers and mountaintops:

Several of the imitations in Tottel expand upon the social and political connotations of this imagery, as in Poem 163 (‘The meane estate is to be accompted the best’) which comments explicitly: ‘The higher hall the greater fall / such chance have proude and lofty mindes’ (19–20).Footnote ¹⁸ In poems of this kind, the imagery is informed by the tradition of interpretation and response to Horace, including Seneca’s chorus. The line ‘The higher hall the greater fall’ uses a Senecan commonplace to make explicit what is only hinted at in Horace. Similarly, several of the poems on the benefits of virtuous obscurity over wealth and high office – the essential theme of Seneca’s kingship chorus – introduce imagery of sailing influenced by Horace.Footnote ¹⁹

The theme of Seneca’s chorus is perhaps the single most common one for moralizing lyric of this kind: there are multiple examples in Horace, the most widely imitated of which is Epodes 2, often interpreted in early modernity without reference to its ironizing conclusion, and it is also the central message of Claudian’s much imitated poem, ‘The Old Man of Verona’ (Carmina Minora 20), of Martial 10.47, and of several of the lyric portions of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, Surrey’s version of Martial 10.47 is included in Tottel under the title ‘The meanes to attain happy life’ (no. 31):

In a near-contemporary manuscript now in the British Library, a copy of this same poem, Surrey’s translation of Martial, is titled ‘The Noble Table of A Quiet Lieff written & made by Martiall the Poet worthy to bee set fourthe in golden verses in eny Mans howse’, alongside improving quotations from Euripides (in Latin), Seneca and Cassiodorus.Footnote ²² Contemporary or later seventeenth-century translations of Martial 10.47 include those by Ben Jonson, Thomas Randolph, Charles Cotton, Abraham Cowley and John Evelyn, as well as a host of amateur and anonymous poets.Footnote ²³

Another of Wyatt’s poems in Tottel, titled (possibly with particular reference to Henry VIII) ‘He ruleth not though he raigne over realms that is subject to his own lustes’ (no. 122), deals overall with the same subject as Seneca’s ‘kingship’ chorus, though it is in fact derived not from Seneca but from the verse portions of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy: the first stanza corresponds to Boethius 3.5, the second 3.6 and the third 3.3. The poem demonstrates that Power, Glory and Riches are all false goods, with no real value.Footnote ²⁴

Both content and the structure of this poem can be frequently paralleled in later lyrics. Compare for instance Poem 91 in Fulke Greville’s Caelica, on the illusory rewards of nobility and fame:

Just as Seneca is indebted to the moralizing portions of Horace, so is Boethius dependent upon Horace and Seneca. The lyrics of these three are united by form as well as content: all wrote primarily in lyric metres, and the majority (though not all) of the lyric metres of Seneca and Boethius are borrowed from Horace. Boethius (c.477–524 ad) is a good example of a poet rarely read by classicists today who had a much more central place in the early modern canon: his poetry was frequently excerpted and translated in manuscript miscellanies.Footnote ²⁶ The thematic collection of classical Latin verse extracts prepared by the future Charles I as a gift for his father, for instance, includes two extracts of Boethius 3 met. 12 alongside Claudian’s ‘Old Man of Verona’ (Carmina Minora 20) under the heading ‘De Felicitate’ (‘On Happiness’).Footnote ²⁷ Richard Fanshawe’s verse translations, dating from the 1630s, include 21 verse translations from Horace’s Odes and Epodes, but also translations of almost the complete sequence of the metrical portions of Boethius, thirteen of Martial’s epigrams, and Psalm 45.Footnote ²⁸ Similarly, Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island (1633) includes two translations from the metrical portions of Boethius as well as six English psalm paraphrases.Footnote ²⁹

In Tottel, similar generalizing titles are given for translations and expansions of Horace, Seneca, Boethius and Martial, as well as pieces such as Grimald’s ‘Prayse of measurekepying’ (no. 108), in fact a translation of Beza’s Elegia 2 (that is, a contemporary Latin poem in the same tradition), or ‘The pore estate to be holden for best’ (no. 169), which incorporates an acrostic on the name of Edward Somerset, who had fallen from power in 1549 and was executed in 1552:

The last line of this poem alludes to Odes 2.10, but the sustained and explicit moralizing is closer in tone to Seneca or Boethius.

Hudson, noting how the translation of contemporary (neo-)Latin verse shaped Grimald’s ‘epigrammatic’ English style, remarks that ‘these qualities belong to the Latin sources from which he translates; and we are pointed to sixteenth-century Latin poetry as a factor in some of the most important tendencies in English poetry in the early Renaissance’.Footnote ³¹ This perceptive comment has not been taken up by subsequent scholarship, but the moralizing verse which is such a marked element of Tottel’s miscellany was certainly a popular Latin form. For a near-contemporary Anglo-Latin example we could turn, for instance, to Walter Haddon’s poem ‘Perpetua est mutatio tum animi tum corporis’, printed in his Lucubrationes (1567):

Haddon’s poem begins with that tell-tale Senecan word ‘lubricus’ (‘slippery’), linking it to the kingship chorus of the Thyestes (‘Stet quicumque uolet potens / aulae culmine lubrico’, 391–2; ‘Stond who so list upon the slipper wheele, / Of hye astate’).

Poems of this sort were an enduringly popular kind of early modern lyric, representing some of the most widely circulated poems in manuscript miscellanies; they are closely related to the classical tradition, as the overlap between translation and looser imitation in Tottel’s volume demonstrates, but they have barely been considered in terms of classical reception because they do not fit well into the models of classical imitation which have been most influential in recent years. By paying attention to how poems of this sort were composed in (or translated into) Latin as well as English, we can see how they were understood at the time in relation to the classical Latin lyric tradition derived from Horace.

Classical Allusion and Translation

Analyses of allusion and intertextuality usually work by breaking a poem down into constituent and contributing elements, often emphasizing, at least in the more interesting readings, a sophisticated ‘conversation’ or even competition created between distinct allusions. Such an approach has been influential in the study of both classical Latin poetry and the reception of classical poetry in early modern literature.Footnote ³³ It works well for a great deal of classicizing literature, but it is not a satisfactory model for poetry of the sort discussed in this chapter. What is effective and memorable about these generalizing lyrics is not usually their allusive structure: in most cases, there is no real sense of an allusive ‘dialogue’ between elements derived from Horace, Seneca, Martial, Claudian, Boethius and scriptural or contemporary sources. The power of these poems derives rather from the force of their authority, an impression created by the very familiarity of the theme: a sense of multiple overlapping precedents, each in themselves morally as well as aesthetically authoritative. This ‘conventional’ mode of literary authority is augmented, in some instances, by the counterpoint between general sentiments and the specific contexts in which such poems were placed not only (or even mostly) by their authors, but also by those who read, transcribed and circulated them.

The congruence of the translation and imitation of Horace, Seneca, Boethius, Martial, Claudian and contemporary or near-contemporary Latin poetry such as that of Beza and Haddon has attracted little critical attention partly because it is found most obviously in the kind of widely circulated lyrics which, though appearing in multiple print and manuscript miscellanies, have not often been included in modern anthologies; but also because our modern patterns of education and scholarship, both in classics and English literature, make the existence of a substantial zone of ‘Horatio-Senecan-Boethian’ lyric, and the links between this kind of poem and the psalms – a point which must have been obvious to the point of banality to educated early modern readers – hard to discern. There are several reasons for this. First, the elements of Horatian lyric least popular today, both in teaching and scholarship – hymns, moralizing, and panegyric lyric – map almost exactly onto the most widely appropriated poems in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Second, Seneca’s drama is no longer a centrepiece of early classical education, as it was in early modernity; and work on Seneca’s influence upon the development of Renaissance drama has paid relatively little attention to the lyric qualities of the Senecan chorus, or the frequency with which such passages were excerpted and translated.Footnote ³⁴ Late antique Latin poetry is rarely taught by Anglophone classics departments, so both Boethius and Claudian are unfamiliar to many classically educated readers of English poetry.

Moreover, studies of English poetic culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have largely ignored neo-Latin verse, despite the great quantity of Latin material found in both print and manuscript sources of the period. This refusal to engage with what we actually find in early modern literary sources helps to obscure the classical roots of the ‘moralizing’ lyric: time and again, a resonant English lyric which does not look or sound markedly ‘Horatian’ or ‘Senecan’, especially to the reader who associates Seneca with drama (not lyric) and Horace with erotic or sympotic (not moralizing or political) verse, is found in contemporary manuscripts accompanied by a Latin version, or Latin companion poem, which, whether by metre or diction or both, makes the associations of the piece with the classical tradition of moralizing lyric quite plain.

The cultural centrality of paraphrase – discussed in the introduction – is key to this phenomenon. Tottel makes no distinction between translations, freer imitations, and ‘original’ poems. None of the titles in the volume indicates that the poem is or is not a translation, imitation, or response. Both print and manuscript sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reflect this: translations, imitations, responses or sequences of such poems frequently appear in volumes alongside moralizing lyrics which belong to the same tradition, and are presented as such, but which are in modern terms ‘original’ rather than versions of existing poems.

Sequences and Clusters of Moralizing Lyric in Manuscript Sources: BL MS Harley 3910

British Library Harley MS 3910 is a typical example from the middle of the period covered by this book; a small paper book of 147 leaves, it contains a large variety of English and Latin poetry in various hands, with many examples of bilingual presentation of both classical and contemporary Latin verse.Footnote ³⁵ None of the entries is dated, although the poems included, and events referred to, suggest that it dates from the 1620s.Footnote ³⁶ The sequence most relevant to this chapter begins on fol. 76^v, with an eight-line extract from the opening of Horace, Odes 3.3, accompanied on the facing page (fol. 77^r) by an English translation:

This portion of Horace is very commonly excerpted and translated in miscellanies of the period.Footnote ³⁷ The following double-page spread (fols. 77^v–8^r) contains the Latin text, with facing translation, of the section from the ‘kingship’ chorus of Seneca’s Thyestes already discussed above: indeed, the opening eight lines of Odes 3.3 is one of the identifiable sources for Seneca’s chorus, as the sequence of entries here suggests.Footnote ³⁸ This notebook, however, records not one but two distinct versions of the Senecan chorus, the first considerably longer than the second (thirty-two compared to twelve lines), though both apparently indebted to Wyatt’s version.Footnote ³⁹

These three classical translations – one of Odes 3.3 and two of the ‘kingship’ chorus – are in fact only the beginning of a sequence, all with facing Latin text, of passages from Seneca, Horace, Martial and Boethius, namely: the second chorus of Seneca’s Medea; the first chorus of the Agamemnon; Phaedra 483–558; Horace, Odes 2.3, 2.14, 2.15, 3.23, 4.7, 4.9; Martial 9.17, 10.47 and 11.40; Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae 1.4 and 3.6.Footnote ⁴⁰ There is an obvious thematic coherence to this selection; compare for instance the translation of the first chorus of the Agamemnon (fol. 84^r, translating lines 57–74), which begins:

with the version of Boethius, Cons. 1.4 (fol. 93^r):

and that of Horace, Odes 2.3 (fol. 94^r), beginning:

In this series, the original Latin texts have significant overlaps in theme and tone, but these are emphasized and augmented by the translations, which reuse certain words and phrases (‘And so precipitate with all’, translating Seneca, Thyestes 341–2; ‘Doubtfully, precipitate’, translating Seneca, Agamemnon 58; ‘He that is still, in setled state’, Boethius, Cons. 1.4.1; ‘Still keepe an even mind’, Horace, Odes 2.3.1; ‘Meane estat’s doe longer last’, translating Agamemnon 102; ‘In their greatest and best estate’, translating Agamemnon 57). The Latin that stands behind these overlapping translations is often quite different: towards the end of the version of the Agamemnon chorus, for instance, the English line ‘Meane estat’s doe longer last’ (fol. 86^r) translates the Latin line modicis rebus longius aevum est (fol. 85^v, Agamemnon 102). Here ‘estat’s’ translates Latin rebus (‘things,’ ‘matters,’ ‘situation’). At the beginning of the same poem, the line ‘In their greatest, and best estate’ (fol. 84^r) uses the same English word (‘estate’) to translate the Latin phrase magnis … bonis (Agaememnon 57) , which means literally ‘great goods’. The sense of ethical coherence is intensified by the close relationship between the English words ‘estate’ and ‘state’, both of which had a different and wider range of meanings in early modern English than they do today.Footnote ⁴¹ The word ‘state’ recurs particularly frequently in the sequence: the phrase ‘setled state’, for instance, appears both in the translation of Boethius, Cons. 1.4.1 – ‘He that is still, in setled state’ translating Quisquis composito serenus aevo (fols. 92^v–3^r) – and in the translation of Horace, Odes 4.9 (‘From her right and setled state’, fol. 98^r), linking by vocabulary two ostensibly rather different poems.Footnote ⁴²

These repeated words and phrases have a cumulative force, partly by virtue of their recurrence in the sequence, and partly by their ethical and literary resonance, reaching back, via Jonson, to Elizabethan and Tudor lyric, and indeed (as in ‘Meane estat’s doe longer last’) to Tottel’s miscellany itself. The translations are also quite substantial expansions, as the mise-en-page of the manuscript makes clear. Some pages have as few as 8 lines on the left (Latin) side against 23 on the right, and the translation is most expansive in the moralizing passages most closely related to the ‘theme’ of the collection: in the translation of the Agamemnon chorus, for instance, the memorable phrase ‘as the state & port of kings’ (15) expands the much less striking regnum casus (Agamemnon 71). The line from the translation of Horace, Odes 4.9, ‘From her right and setled state’ (fol. 98^r), already discussed above, is also a significant expansion: the only Latin word to which the phrase corresponds directly is the single adjective rectus (‘upright’, Odes 4.9.36). In this way, a set of ancient poems which already share elements of theme and tone are brought further together by details of translation. Whereas modern readers and scholars might tend to stress the individuality of authors – emphasizing for instance the differences in style, tone and political context of Horace and Seneca, and the role of Seneca’s lyrics as dramatic choruses – the typical early modern reader values the sense of a common purpose and a moral consensus, and translates or excerpts accordingly.

Several of these translations are successful English poems in their own right, though the parallel text format (which is maintained throughout) and the inclusion of some lines, such as ‘Doubtfully, precipitate’, which are hard to follow without reference to the Latin, imply a close relationship with the original. Such sequences, found commonly in seventeenth-century miscellanies, demonstrate the shared literary associations which linked lyrics by Horace, Seneca, Boethius and a selection of other individual pieces, such as Martial 10.47, Claudian’s ‘Old Man of Verona’ and versions of the Psalms. (In sixteenth-century sources, such thematic sequences are equally common, but less frequently include parallel translation.) Verse translation, however, is not a very fashionable area of literary study, and where such material has been discussed, it is usually in reference to individual authors (whether classical or early modern). Stuart Gillespie’s recent Newly Discovered Classical Translations, for instance, restores to visibility a great wealth of forgotten translations, many of very high quality, but is (understandably) organized by classical author; similarly, the scattered classical translations of well-known English poets, such as Jonson or Wyatt, are edited for inclusion in collected works, leaving little sense of the original manuscript context in which they are often found surrounded not by other poems by the same author, but by thematically related items from a wide chronological range: such excerpting and editing of translations makes it harder to see how individual poems, authors or, as here, ‘types’ of poems were commonly associated by readers, translators and imitators in early modernity.

Where such sequences are found in sources dating from the Civil War period, the selection of translated material often reflects the political upheaval: John Polwhele’s (c.1606–72) notebook, for instance, begins with a typical 1630s blend of tributes to Ben Jonson and George Herbert alongside Horatian translations (Odes 1.1, 2.14, and a fragment of the Ars poetica) before, apparently in direct response to the events of 1649, breaking suddenly into an extraordinary sequence of heavily revised and explicitly politicized versions of Horace (Odes 1.14 [twice], 1.33, 4.9; Epodes 5, 7 and 16; Epistles 1.18) and Boethius (Cons. 1, met. 2–7; 2, met. 1–8; 3, met. 1–6, twenty translations).Footnote ⁴³ In a typical example, Polwhele expands and elaborates four rather generalizing lines in Cons. 1. met. 5 on the injustice of fortune:

In an otherwise fairly straightforward and little-corrected translation, Polwhele has revised these lines intensely, with a confusing series of further possibilities added at the end; a semi-diplomatic transcription gives a sense of the intensity of revision, and of how the patterns of expansion and reworking are politically inflected:

Such a version bears only a remote resemblance to the original. Nothing in the Latin corresponds to ‘behead the Lords anointed one’, which obviously refers to the execution of Charles I.

In the early eighteenth century, the poetry composed by Reverend Daniel Baker (d. 1722) and collected after his death by his nephew, reflects changed literary fashions – he looks to Cowley as well as Herbert as a model, and many of his English poems are in Cowleian Pindarics – but also substantial continuity. The second item in the collection, ‘The Retreat’, is a standard moralizing poem on the benefits of obscurity, indebted to both Claudian and Horace, with a marginal reference to Martial 2.90:

Baker’s large collection of classical translations includes 5 pieces of Horace, 16 of Martial’s epigrams and (yet again) a translation of the kingship chorus from Seneca’s Thyestes.

The thematically coherent sequences of moralizing translations in the notebooks of Fanshawe, Polwhele, Baker and the anonymous compiler of British Library Harley MS 3910 all consist mainly of translations made apparently by the compiler themselves; many similar sequences, however, either incorporate or depend largely upon the poems and translations of others: Bod. MS Rawl. poet. 173, for instance, dating from about 1705, contains several of Dryden’s translations of Horace alongside John Glanville’s version of the Thyestes chorus.

Beyond Translation

The popularity of the ‘moralizing lyric’ can also be traced beyond the (porous) boundaries of translation, whether of individual pieces or in sequences, and into the larger realm of English lyric, both in printed collections and in manuscript sources. In a few cases, the classical roots are obvious: Michael Drayton’s Odes are an ambitious early attempt to import the Horatian (or rather neo-Horatian and humanist) lyric ‘book’ into English.Footnote ⁴⁶ Drayton’s work is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, but his fourth ode, though not a translation or imitation of any specific model, is a good example of the moralizing lyric:

Drayton’s interesting preface acknowledges the role of moralizing verse within the overall economy of what he describes as Horatian ‘mixed’ lyric: that is, a lyric collection which, like those of Horace, incorporates both the grandest panegyric lyric of the Pindaric kind, as well as the lighter mode of erotic or love lyric associated in Greek with Anacreon.Footnote ⁴⁸

Where passages of conventional moralizing verse appear within larger works, they have often been marked by early readers, probably for the purposes of excerpting into commonplace books. The twelfth and final Canto of Phineas Fletcher’s Purple Island, for instance, opens with a moralizing poem on the blessedness of a simple rural existence. In the British Library copy of this work (which has been digitized by EEBO), the whole of this song (stanzas 2–6) has been pointed as gnomic in the margin.Footnote ⁴⁹

Lyrics of this sort are not usually well represented in modern anthologies of Renaissance poetry, but they are ubiquitous in early modern manuscript miscellanies. Bod. MS Rawl. poet. 31, dating from c.1620–33, is a typical example: identified authors include Sir John Harington, Henry Wotton, Ben Jonson, John Donne and Edward Herbert, and the material by Donne and Jonson in particular has attracted scholarly attention.Footnote ⁵⁰ This manuscript collection includes, on adjacent pages, two examples of the tradition we are tracing here: Henry Wotton’s popular poem, ‘How happy is he born and taught’ (fol. 5^r, quoted above) and Thomas Campion’s ‘The man of life upright’ (fol. 5^v), the latter of which I give below:

Campion’s poem takes its cue (and, in manuscript versions, often its title, ‘Integer Vitae’) from Horace, Odes 1.22, which begins ‘Integer vitae scelerisque purus’ (‘The man whose life is wholesome and free of wickedness’). The opening four stanzas of Campion’s poem loosely paraphrase the first eight lines of the Horatian ode (similar to the relationship between Seneca, Thyestes 348–64 and Horace, Odes 3.3.1–8, noted above). But the focus and unity of Campion’s lyric are quite different from the Horatian ode which (typically for Horace) moves after line 8 from the idea that the good man is safe from harm, to a related but distinct suggestion that the lover in the grip of his obsession is equally protected even in the harshest of environments. The irony is augmented by Horace imagining himself (not Fuscus, the addressee of the poem) as the preoccupied lover:

The tone of these two poems is quite different: there is nothing arch about Campion’s account of what the good man might hope to escape, whereas Horace’s list (2–8) is markedly over-the-top – both this passage and a subsequent description of exotic wanderings (17–24), are probably indebted to Catullus 11.1–12; and Horace’s poem is also linked metrically to Catullus 11 and 51 (the latter itself a version of an earlier poem by Sappho). Two of Catullus’ most famous poems about Lesbia, these have often been read as the beginning and end of the ‘Lesbia cycle’.Footnote ⁵³ The alert reader discerns literary self-consciousness, a suggestion of erotic adventure and a degree of irony in Horace’s poem well before its explicit ‘turn’ to the erotic from line 10 onwards. Campion’s popular poem, by contrast, raises no such uncertainties of tone, and in both form and content has links to later hymnody. Indeed, Odes 1.22 was often associated with the first psalm: as we have seen, psalm paraphrases are frequently found included in sequences of ‘moralizing lyric’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The tonal stability and moral seriousness of Campion’s poem, despite its obvious debt to Horace, are not ultimately particularly Horatian: but both those characteristics are typical of Senecan choruses, the metrical portions of Boethius and the broadly (but not precisely) ‘Horatian’ tradition of moralizing lyric indebted to all three. This type of verse draws heavily upon Horace metrically, lexically and thematically, but has a quite different tone and ‘feel’ from anything that Horace actually wrote.

John Ashmore’s Certain Selected Odes of Horace, Englished (1621), often cited as the first collection of English translations of Horatian lyric, demonstrates both the moral associations of the Odes at this period, and the sense of a moralizing subgenre of poems on how to live well, of which Horace himself is only a part. The subtitle of the book continues: With Poems (Antient and Modern) of divers Subjects, Translated. Whereunto are added, both in Latin and English, sundry new Epigrammes, Annagramms, Epitaphes, and the work is in fact divided into four parts: the translations and imitations of Horace (1–28); a section of mostly contemporary epigrams, presented in Latin and English (29–79, by far the longest); a section entitled ‘The Praise of a Country Life’ (81–7) including poems and extracts by Martial and Virgil as well as neo-Latin examples; and a final section ‘Of a Blessed Life’ (91–6), once again a mixture of ancient and modern pieces.

The selection of Horace’s lyric that Ashmore chooses to translate is typical of the period in its emphasis upon moral themes, and the relative prominence of odes from Books 2 and 4.Footnote ⁵⁵ (In contrast to modern critics and teachers, who tend to prefer Odes 1 and 3.) He also includes Epodes 2. In this way his selection of Horatian translations sets up the moralizing themes of the final two sections, on the ‘Country Life’ and the ‘Blessed Life’. The latter of these, ‘Of a Blessed Life’, includes an English lyric with a Latin title, ‘Lipsii laus, & vota Vitae beatae’ (‘Lipsius’ praise and prayer for a blessed Life’):

This is, as the title suggests, a translation of a Latin poem by Justus Lipsius:

Lipsius’ lyric was very popular: in Ben Jonson’s copy of Lipsius, the entire poem is underlined, and other translations are found in manuscript.Footnote ⁵⁷ Despite a witty Catullan allusion in the opening line, it is derived in particular from Seneca. Indeed, a contemporary work, Philip Camerarius’ Operae horarum subcisivarum, quotes Lipsius’ poem (which is reproduced in full) in a chapter, titled ‘Commendatio privatae vitae’ (‘Praise of a private life’) which begins by quoting Seneca, Phaedra 483–95 (p. 341) and then comments explicitly on the links between Lipsius’ lyric and the metrical portions of Boethius (p. 342).Footnote ⁵⁸ Lipsius’ phrase ambitio impotens (‘powerless ambition’, 5) is borrowed from the same chorus of the Thyestes so often translated and imitated at this period (‘quem non ambitio impotens’, 350). Lipsius’ poem transforms the ‘never stable’ popular favour of Seneca’s chorus into the true stability of the wise man (‘uno sed stabilis loco’, 10; ‘firmely seated in one Place’); while the fickleness of the mob in Seneca (‘vulgi praecipitis’) is transferred to the unpredictability and violence of royal power (‘regum praecipites minae’, 8; ‘Threats of Kings’). There are several further parallels between Lipsius’ poem and the final two choruses of Seneca’s Oedipus, which themselves draw on Horace: Oedipus 882–910 is written in the same unusual stichic glyconic metre used here by Lipsius (which is also the single most frequent metre in Boethius), and the subject of the Oedipus chorus is fate and the virtues of the ‘middle path’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Ashmore’s collection points to a bilingualism in moralizing lyrics typical of the seventeenth century: original Latin and English poems stand alongside English translations from both classical and neo-Latin.

Indeed, the Latin ‘feel’ and associations of English lyrics in this tradition, far from obvious to the modern reader, are reflected in the contemporary habit of translating English poems of this type into (almost, as it were, ‘back’ into) Latin verse. Henry Wotton (1568–1639), for instance, whose ubiquitous ‘The Character of a Happy Life’ has already been mentioned, was one of the masters of the suggestive moralizing lyric in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. His works have largely slipped out of the lyric ‘canon’, but copies appear in manuscript collections throughout the seventeenth century – the CELM lists 63 copies of ‘The Character of a Happy Life’ – and many Latin translations of his poems are also found in manuscript sources.Footnote ⁶⁰

Perhaps the most striking example of the translation of English into Latin lyric concerns Wotton’s fine poem, found in many manuscripts with varying titles, and published posthumously in Izaak Walton’s Reliquiae Wottonianae of 1651 in the following form:

This poem was probably written, as the title in this edition indicates, about the spectacular fall in 1616 of Robert Carr, the Earl of Somerset; a royal favourite for around a decade, he was charged and convicted of the murder by poison of Sir Thomas Overbury, who had opposed his marriage to his wife Frances. Extant examples of the poem in both print and manuscript, however, often give it either a generic title (‘On the sudden restraint of a favourite’) or link the poem to the fall of another prominent individual, such as Walter Raleigh (imprisoned for marrying without the Queen’s permission in 1591; later executed for treason in 1618); Francis Bacon (found guilty of taking bribes in 1621); George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (impeached in 1626, eventually assassinated in 1628); and even William Davison (secretary to Queen Elizabeth I, who was made the scapegoat for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587).Footnote ⁶² In some instances, the poem is in fact attributed to the unfortunate favourite, as in one Bodleian manuscript where it is titled ‘By y^e moste Illustrious Prince George Duke of Buckingham &c.’, or a copy in the Leeds Archives which ascribes the poem to Sir Walter Raleigh.Footnote ⁶³

This is a lovely and memorable poem, which is at once timelessly imprecise and politically highly suggestive. It belongs recognizably to the kind of politico-moral ‘generalizing lyric’ under discussion. Nevertheless, there is nothing very obviously Horatian about the English poem, especially from the perspective of a modern classicist: it is not a translation, or even a close imitation, and it has no marked classicizing touches. In the only existing article dedicated to the poem, Ted-Larry Pebworth does not relate it in any way to the classical tradition.Footnote ⁶⁴ But contemporary readers did read the poem as part of that broadly Horatian tradition of moralizing lyric which is the subject of this chapter. ‘Dazel’d thus, with height of place’ is found in at least five manuscripts (to my knowledge) accompanied by multiple Latin translations, and in each case the choice of metre and vocabulary, as well as specific allusions, make the association with Horace and Seneca explicit. I give below an edited transcription of one stanza, alongside the Latin translations which accompany it in four of the five sources. The Latin on the right is in sapphic stanzas, on the left in alcaics.Footnote ⁶⁵

The striking mise-en-page of these double translations, with the sapphic and alcaic versions of the poem set alongside one another in the same way in all four manuscripts, immediately suggests a markedly Horatian interpretation of the poem. Indeed, the Latin versions are full of echoes of Horace: in this section, the phrase turba clientium (‘crowd of clients’, 2 on the left) is borrowed from Odes 3.1.13, which is also in alcaics. But these lines are forcefully Senecan as well: the phrase tunc lapsus alto culmine gloriae (‘then fallen from the high gable of glory’, 1 on the left) borrows from the same much-imitated passage, the second chorus of Seneca’s Thyestes, with which this chapter began: stet quicumque volet potens | aulae culmine lubrico (391–2, ‘Stond who so list upon the slipper wheele, / Of hye astate’). The translator at this point has in fact conflated two separate passages of the Thyestes, blending the second chorus – which implies but does not explicitly state the possibility of falling from high office (culmine lubrico, ‘on the slippery gable’) – with Thyestes’ speech near the end of the play, where he describes himself as ex alto culmine lapsum (‘fallen from a high gable’, 927). The translation in this way combines Horace’s non-specific disdain for popular favour with a much sharper reference to the memorably horrific evocation of personal disaster in the Thyestes. (Thyestes ends up unwittingly eating his own children.) The Latin translation of Wotton’s poem reflects the origin of the ‘moralizing lyric’ in the translation of these classical texts, while also suggesting the personalized force of a poem widely interpreted at the time as being about (or even by) a particular victim of spectacular political misfortune.

This oscillation between specific and generalizing effect is a feature of many of the poems belonging to this tradition that were written and published, especially by royalist authors, under pressure of the English Civil War (1642–51) and its immediate aftermath. Verse collections by Robert Herrick (Hesperides, 1648), Mildmay Fane (Otia Sacra, 1648), Richard Lovelace (Lucasta, 1649 and Posthume Poems, 1659) and Henry Vaughan (Silex Scintillans, 1650 and Olor Iscanus, 1651) all reflect an engagement with this tradition, sharpened by circumstance. Robert Herrick’s ‘His Age: Dedicated to his Peculiar Friend, Mr John Wickes, under the name of Postumus’, first published in Hesperides, is one example of this kind of poem which is found in contemporary manuscript miscellanies as well as in print: CELM records ten copies. In common with many of the longer lyric poems of the period – such as Lovelace’s ‘The Grasse-hopper’, ‘Advice to my best Brother’ and even (though to very different political effect) Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ – Herrick’s poem has a well-recognized Horatian base: the opening lines follow Horace, Odes 4.7 (the ode to Postumus), though Herrick continues by imitating a series of Horace’s moralizing passages, both lyric (Odes 2.16 and 2.18) and hexameter (Satires 2.6 and Epistles 1.10).Footnote ⁶⁷

Observations of this sort, however, are of limited help in understanding the strength and success of the English poem: for all the scholarly satisfaction in ‘spotting’ the Horatian allusions, the overall effect of Lovelace’s poem is not very much like reading Horace at all. None of Horace’s Odes are devoted so uniformly to moralizing, and the moralizing sentiments which in Herrick’s poem are piled up, one after another, are found individually in Horace, often at the beginning or the end of a given poem, and almost always distanced or complicated by what follows or precedes. Moreover, the handful of Horace’s Odes which are of anything close to the length of Herrick’s poem are his grandest panegyric celebrations of public office and achievement. Formally, the closest analogues for this almost obsessive appropriation of Horatian motifs are found outside Horace himself: Herrick’s poem is indebted stylistically to the more insistently moralizing Horatianism of Seneca and Boethius and their sixteenth-century imitators (such as the Lipsius lyric discussed above) but also, most proximately, to the mid-seventeenth-century vogue for extended philosophical and moralizing ‘Horatian’ poems exemplified by the Latin odes of the enormously popular Jesuit poet Casimir Sarbiewski (1595–1640).Footnote ⁶⁸

Similar observations can be made about Richard Lovelace’s ‘The Grasse-hopper. To my Noble Friend, Mr. Charles Cotton. Ode’, first published in Lucasta (1649). This well-known and still frequently anthologized poem has often been described as Horatian, and does indeed have an Horatian core: the two stanzas addressed directly to Cotton (21–8) are based on Horace, Odes 1.9 and perhaps also Epodes 13.1–8, and the whole poem, as Joanna Martindale puts it, ‘suggests’ the Soracte ode.Footnote ⁶⁹ Scholars have been quick to note that the opening twelve lines on the grasshopper are based not upon Horace but rather a poem from the Greek Anacreontea 43.Footnote ⁷⁰ Except that, as Martindale pointed out in passing, Lovelace’s model is almost certainly not directly Anacreon, but rather Sarbiewski’s own Anacreontic grasshopper poem, Odes 4.23, given here with a translation by John Chatwin dating from the early 1680s:

Lovelace’s image of the grasshopper drinking the tears of dew, which has been described as an original elaboration on his part, in fact comes directly from Sarbiewski (Caeli roriferis ebria lacrymis, ‘drunk with the dew-bearing tears of heaven’, 2). Most relevant to this chapter, however, is the blend of elements in the final stanza of the poem:

The first couplet here, as Scodel has noted, is close to three lines from that most ubiquitous of models, the kingship chorus of Seneca’s Thyestes: Rex est qui metuet nihil, / rex est qui cupiet nihil: / hoc regnum sibi quisque dat (‘He is king who shall fear nothing, / He is king who shall desire nothing: / Each man grants this kingdom to himself’, 388–90), itself a popular trope (compare for instance Sarbiewski Odes 4.3, ‘Regnum sapientis’, ‘The Kingdom of the wise man’).Footnote ⁷² But Lovelace’s conclusion combines Seneca not, as we might have expected, with Horace directly, but rather with lines drawn once again from the ‘Polish Horace’, Sarbiewski (here given with Hils’ translation):

The importance of Sarbiewski’s lyrics to English poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been noted several times, usually in reference to the strikingly large number of English translations from this period. Poets of the mid-seventeenth century who engaged directly with Sarbiewski, in translation or imitation, include Mildmay Fane, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, Sir Edward Sherburne, Edward Benlowes and Andrew Marvell as well as Lovelace and Herrick.Footnote ⁷⁴ But the stylistic influence of Sarbiewski extends well beyond specific translations or imitations: Sarbiewski’s odes are markedly Horatian in their metre and diction – they are inconceivable without Horace; but Sarbiewski himself cited Martial and Seneca as his most important influences after Horace, and his critical writings make considerable use of Seneca.Footnote ⁷⁵ Sarbiewski’s odes are on average significantly longer than those of Horace, and in their meditative circling around a given ethical point resembles Seneca’s moralizing choruses more than any of Horace’s own lyrics. They are much more consistently moralizing than Horace, both in the proportion of poems devoted to moral themes, and in the lack of any tendency to turn aside from or aslant to the moral which is so distinctive of Horace’s own lyric output.Footnote ⁷⁶ His explicitly Christian and often devotional lyrics repeatedly start from Horace, but also seek to augment and sometimes directly confront the pagan poet, as in his third epode, ‘Palinodia. Ad secundam libri Epodon Odam Q. Horatii Flacci. Laus otii Religiosi’ (‘Palinode. On the second ode in Horace’s book of Epodes. Praise of religious leisure’) which rewrites Epodes 2, beginning: At ille, Flacce, nunc erit beatior, / Qui mole curarum procul / Paterna liquit rura, litigantium / Solutus omni iurgio (‘But that man, Flaccus, will now be even more blessed / Who far removed from weight of cares / Leaves his ancestral lands, released / From all the quarrels of litigants’). In other words, both the Horatian and un-Horatian elements of his style closely resemble the similar points made above about Herrick and Lovelace.

Sarbiewski’s Ode 3.4, for instance, bears the kind of generalizing title typical of Tottel’s miscellany: ‘Ad Egnatium Nollium. Aequo semper rectoque animo adversus Fortunae inconstantiam standum esse’, translated by Hils as ‘To Egnatius Nollius. That we ought to be of an even and upright mind, against the inconstancy of fortune.’ It is a very beautiful but typically ‘one-note’ poem that draws extensively and recognizably upon Horace and the wider ‘Horatian’ lyric tradition but which, in its unironized moralizing, rhetorical structure and marked use of alliteration in the final stanza, is closer to Kipling than to Horace himself:

Again with Hils’ translation:

An enormous commonplace book, now in Cambridge University Library, demonstrates exhaustively which Latin poets seemed to readers in the mid-seventeenth century to ‘belong’ together. The anonymous compiler repeatedly draws upon various combinations of Horace, Boethius, Seneca and ‘Casimir’ (i.e. Sarbiewski) under moralizing headings.Footnote ⁷⁷ The page for ‘Aequabilitas, aequanimitas’ (‘Equanimity’), for instance, contains four main entries, two of which are accompanied by further cross-references.Footnote ⁷⁸ The first is an extract from Horace, Odes 2.3: Aequam memento rebus in arduis / Seruare mentem, non secus ac bonis / Ab insolenti temperatam / Laetitia (‘Remember to keep a level head, / In difficult times, and in good ones restrain / Yourself from intemperate joy’), with a cross-reference to Odes 2.10, on the golden mean. A further cross-reference, without quotations, refers us to Sarbiewski’s Odes 3.4 (given above) and 4.13. The next extract is also from Horace (though not attributed to him) – this time from the Epistles, the most systematically philosophizing of all Horace’s works. The third is from Boethius Cons. 1 met. 4: Quisquis composito serenus aeuo / fatum sub pedibus &c. (‘He who has ground proud fate beneath his heel / Calm in his own well-ordered life’, translated in BL MS Harley 3910 and discussed above). This is accompanied by further references, without quotations, to Boethius Cons. 2. pros. 2, and Sarbiewski Odes 2.6, 4.3 and 4.13: Sarbiewski 4.13 is the same poem to which Horace Odes 2.3 was also linked. The final extract under this heading is a five-line quotation from Seneca’s Herc. Oet.

The order of entries suggests that the compiler of this manuscript, having already begun a commonplace book, at some point read Sarbiewski with great enthusiasm, and set about adding cross-references from Sarbiewski, as on this page, to many of the existing entries.Footnote ⁷⁹ Here we have a vivid glimpse of what it was like to encounter Sarbiewski for the first time in England in the seventeenth century, and with which earlier poets and texts he was naturally associated by his readers. Indeed, Sarbiewski’s lyrics – and especially the subset of them most often translated or imitated in England – fit precisely within the blended tradition of Latin moralizing lyric which is the subject of this chapter, a point which no doubt partly explains their great popularity. Sarbiewski offered English readers a ‘Christian Horace’ who accorded more closely than Horace himself with the most influential aspects of the ‘Horatian’ tradition at the time.

Just as Lovelace’s ‘Grasse-hopper’ ends with a highly conventional quatrain which sounds (and indeed in a sense is) broadly ‘Horatian’ but which in its details is drawn most directly from Seneca and Sarbiewski (that is, a Christianized Horatianism), so in several collections of this period we find Sarbiewski standing in for Horace in sequences of translation: Henry Vaughan’s Olor Iscanus (1651), for instance, juxtaposes translations of Ovid’s exile poetry, Boethius and Sarbiewski.Footnote ⁸⁰ Such sequences demonstrate how the stock of popular poems of this general type is updated over time.

We find the same phenomenon in relation to original poems as well as translations. First published as the closing song of his 1650s play The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, James Shirley’s (1596–1666) ‘The glories of our blood and state’ quickly circulated widely as a lyric in this tradition:

Though composed a century later, Shirley’s poem plays upon the suggestive ambiguity of ‘state’ in the same way as the moralizing lyrics in Tottel’s miscellany.

Like Wotton’s lyric before it, Shirley’s poem was also translated into Latin. Leeds Brotherton Collection MS Lt 55, a miscellany of mainly satiric verse from the 1670s, includes a double translation of Shirley’s poem first into hexameters, and then into rather effective sapphic stanzas, two per English verse. The final English stanza is translated as follows:

As in the Latin translations of Wotton’s ‘Dazel’d thus with height of place’, the choice of sapphic stanzas points towards the Latin lyric history of the form, and inserts Shirley’s poem as it were ‘back’ into the nexus of classical and classicizing models from which it emerges. If the form is similar to the Wotton translations of the 1620s, however, the style of the Latin is quite different: the Latin poem shares with its English model a metaphorical boldness typical of its period. In this way we see how the striking continuities of the moralizing lyric form, in terms of tone and content, run alongside changes in style.

Such ‘fashionable’ iterations of the moralizing lyric extend also to matters of form. A collection of verse assembled by one John Watson between 1667 and 1673 preserves a Latin translation of Shirley’s poem into rhyming, stress-based stanzas rather than classical quantitative metre:

The use of end rhyme obviously recalls the English poem, though it does not precisely reproduce the rhyme scheme of Shirley’s original (ababccdd): instead, the Latin poem consistently groups the rhyming words together (aabbccdd; in the first stanza only, aa and bb also rhyme, though more weakly). Though generally associated with medieval Latin verse, rhyming Latin poetry and songs were produced throughout early modernity, a point discussed further in Chapter 8, and indeed appear to have been particularly popular in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the period to which this manuscript belongs. This is also the period in which we find the greatest quantity of Latin poems which are translated from English. In both these respects, then, Watson’s manuscript reflects the fashions of its day.

Half a century later, Isaac Watts, a dissenting poet and the first of the great English hymn-writers, turns to Sarbiewski, a Polish Jesuit, alongside and in some respects more readily than to Horace himself. Watts made many translations of Sarbiewski, and his early English poetry includes dozens of pieces which belong clearly to the tradition traced in this essay, such as this extract from his poem ‘To Mr. John Lock Retired from The World of Business’:

Indeed, by the mid-eighteenth century Watts himself had been assimilated into sequences of moralizing verse in manuscript miscellanies: a Latin and English collection by the Quaker John Kelsall (1683–1743) includes a paraphrase of Horace, Odes 2.10 (on the golden mean), four English psalm paraphrases translated from Buchanan’s Latin, several original moralizing poems (‘On Obedience’ and ‘On Contentment’) in both English and Latin versions, and an English paraphrase of one of Watt’s own hymns (‘On Parting with carnal Joys. Paraphras’d from Watt’s Hymn 10 Book 2’).Footnote ⁸⁵

Wotton’s ‘Dazel’d thus’ is a beautiful example of a type of poem which is immediately recognizable to any sensitive and experienced reader of English poetry, a mode of verse which has persisted relatively unchanged through successive waves of poetic fashion: this is not the poetry of Elizabethan sonneteers or love elegists; nor is it ‘metaphysical’ verse or Augustan satire. Poetry of this kind has an enduring, if enduringly unfashionable, role in English literature: Kipling’s poem ‘If –’, quoted at the start of this chapter, is an expansion of the theme – of consistent virtue and restraint in the face of both good and ill fortune – which is the subject of Seneca’s most widely translated chorus (Thyestes 336–403) as well as the opening lines of Horace, Odes 4.9, and indeed Sarbiewski’s Odes 2.1. ‘If –’ was voted Britain’s favourite poem in a 1995 BBC opinion poll; Wotton’s ‘How happy is he born and taught’ was apparently George Washington’s favourite hymn; and the hymns of Watts and Wesley are still sung regularly in Christian churches of many denominations around the world.Footnote ⁸⁶

Kipling is almost as out of fashion as Wotton and Watts, but he was a fine reader of Horace, and his memorable immortalization of a peculiarly English brand of stoicism descends directly, via Jonson, Wotton and the English hymn book, from Horace.Footnote ⁸⁷ Recent classical criticism has shown little interest in Horace’s moral and philosophical lyrics (less so than in the philosophical content of his hexameter verse), and has done almost nothing with Horace as a religious poet, although many of his odes are formally hymns, a point of great importance for his early modern readers. This hymnic element of Horatian lyric forms the foundation for its use in psalm paraphrase, to which the next two chapters turn. But to gain a sense of the moralizing tradition of ‘Horatian’ lyric, we do best to read not the criticism of our own day, but poetry: the poetry of Seneca and Boethius, but also of Wyatt, Wotton, Sarbiewski, Lovelace, Vaughan and Watts.