Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/267

 one of the rules making it obligatory for the boys to speak French under pain of wearing a fool's cap at meals. He seems to have stayed there about three years, and to have then entered a trading firm. His early removal ‘from arts to marts,’ that is from school to business, was a constant source of lament with him in after life. Joining the merchant adventurers of the Stade, he sought to become secretary of that ancient corporation in 1597, and the Earl of Essex wrote two letters on his behalf, but his application was unsuccessful. Meanwhile for six years at least Sylvester had devoted his leisure to poetic composition. His work was well received, but his numberless dedications and dedicatory sonnets yielded him, he complained, an extremely poor return (cf., Restituta, ii. 412 sq.). Plot relates in his ‘Staffordshire’ that the poet was for some time residing at Lambourne in the capacity of steward to the ancient family of Essex; and this receives confirmation from the dedication to ‘Mistresse Essex of Lamborne’ of his 1606 volume (cf. Gent. Mag. 1743, p. 586). Sylvester hailed the accession of James I with hope, and wrote an appeal for the new king's favour with his own hand (letter facsimiled in, ii. front.); but in 1604 he met with a rebuff in an attempt to secure a clerkship in the House of Commons, and it was probably not until about 1606 that Prince Henry made him a groom of his chamber and gave him a small pension of twenty pounds a year (, Revels at Court, 1842, Intr. p. xvii). ‘Queen Elizabeth,’ wrote Anthony à Wood, ‘had a great respect for him, King James I had a greater, and Prince Henry greatest of all, who valued him so much that he made him his first poet pensioner.’ His metrical lament upon the prince's death in 1612 has the merit of sincerity. The poet's affairs at the time seem to have been far from flourishing. In 1613, however, another patron—perhaps George Abbot—enabled him to obtain a secretaryship in the service of the merchant adventurers.

His functions, which were probably not distinguishable from those of a factor, compelled him, reluctantly enough, to leave England and settle at Middelburg, and there he spent the last five years of his life. Wood suggests that his freedom in correcting in his poems ‘the vices of the times’ caused ‘his step-dame country to ungratefully cast him off and become most unkind to him.’ Sylvester expressed the hope that he might his ‘rest of days in the calm country end’ (week 1, day 3); above all that he might repose in England (week 1, day 2). But he died at Middelburg on 28 Sept. 1618 (epitaph by John Vicars, prefixed to folio of 1641). By his wife Mary, who survived him (with her, if the autobiographical indications in ‘The Wood-man's Bear’ and elsewhere are to be trusted, his relations were frequently strained), he seems to have had five or six children, among them Ursula (b. 1612), Bonaventura (d. 1625), Henry, and Peter (d. 1657?).

Sylvester's literary work mainly consisted of translations of the scriptural epics of the Gascon Huguenot, Guillaume de Saluste, seigneur du Bartas (1544–1590). Du Bartas's poetry was translated into Latin, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Danish; but it was to the Teutonic races, especially to the Germans and the English, that he appealed most powerfully. James VI, (fl. 1610) [q. v.], Sir [q. v.], Sylvester's old schoolfellow Ashley, [q. v.], and others essayed translations of portions of Du Bartas's works; but Sylvester's version was soon established as the most complete and the most popular.

The metre adopted by Sylvester was the rhymed decasyllabic couplet. Though no exact scholar (his rendering is indeed far more of a paraphrase than a translation), he had some pre-eminent qualifications for the task he had undertaken. His religious sympathy with his original was profound, and he had a native quaintness that well reflected the curious phraseology of Du Bartas. His enthusiasm overflowed in embellishments of his own, in which he is often at his best.

Ben Jonson, in his conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, complained that ‘Sylvester wrote his verses before he understood to confer,’ referring apparently to the verbal inaccuracy of the rendering. Drummond, however, spoke of the translation as happily matching the felicity of the original, and this was the general opinion among contemporaries. Michael Drayton in his ‘Moyses in a Map of his Miracles’ (1604) eulogised Sylvester along with his original. Bishop Hall mentions him with praise in his letters, and Richard Niccolls in his ‘Vertues Encomium’ (1614) speaks of the song of ‘a sweet Sylvester nightingale.’ He was frequently quoted in Swan's ‘Speculum Mundi’ of 1643. On the strength of such and many similar references Southey styled Sylvester the most popular poet of the reign of James I. Together with Spenser, Sylvester formed the chief poetical nutriment of Milton when a boy, and his influence was transmitted through William Browne to other pastoral writers. It is not too much, perhaps, to surmise that from Du Bartas and Sylvester Milton first conceived the possibilities of the