Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 60.djvu/41

 know his son-in-law, Sir Philip Sidney, and other members of the statesman's family; but his patrons rapidly grew in number, and ultimately included most of the men of culture at Elizabeth's court.

Watson's earliest effort in English verse—that was published separately—was licensed for the press to Gabriel Cawood on 31 March 1582, under the title of ‘Watson's Passions, manifestinge the true frenzy of love.’ It was soon afterwards published as ‘ἙΚΑΤΟΜΠΑΘΙΑ, or Passionate Centurie of Loue, Divided into two parts: whereof, the first expresseth the Authours sufferance in Loue; the latter, his long farewell to Loue and all his tyrannie. Composed by Thomas Watson, Gentleman: and published at the request of certaine Gentlemen his very frendes’ (black letter), London, 4to [1582]. A perfect copy of the rare volume is in the British Museum; five other perfect copies are known (cf. Huth Library Cat.) At Britwell are two copies, one perfect and another imperfect. George Steevens, the former owner of the latter copy, possessed a second imperfect copy with interesting manuscript notes of early date, some by a member of the Cornwallis family. This copy John Mitford [q. v.] acquired; he described it in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ (1846, i. 491). In the Harleian MS. 3277 seventy-eight of the hundred poems are transcribed in a sixteenth-century hand under the title, ‘A Looking glasse for Lovers.’ Watson's ‘Ἑκατομπαθία’ was dedicated to the Earl of Oxford. John Lyly contributed a prose epistle of commendation ‘to the authour his friend,’ and among writers of laudatory verse are T. Acheley, Matthew Roydon, and George Peele. There is a preliminary quatorzain by Watson, but the poems that follow, although the author calls them sonnets, are each in eighteen lines (instead of fourteen). Each poem is termed a ‘passion,’ and is introduced by a prose note explaining its intention, and setting forth the literary source of its inspiration. Throughout the prose notes the author is referred to in the third person, but they all doubtless came from his own pen. The elaborate apparatus criticus confirms the impression given internally by the poems themselves, that they reflect no personal feeling, and are merely dexterous imitations of classical or modern French and Italian poems. The width of Watson's reading may be gathered from the fact that eight of his ‘sonnets’ are, according to his own account, renderings from Petrarch; twelve are from Serafino dell' Aquila (1466–1500); four each from Strozza, another Italian poet, and from Ronsard; three from the Italian poet Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1548); two each from the French poet Etienne Forcadel, known as Forcatulus (1514?–1573), the Italian Girolamo Parabosco (fl. 1548), and Æneas Sylvius; while many paraphrase passages from such authors as (among the Greeks) Sophocles, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes (author of the epic ‘Argonautica’); or (among the Latins) Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Horace, Propertius, Seneca, Pliny, Lucan, Martial, and Valerius Flaccus; or (among other modern Italians) Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) and Baptista Mantuanus (1448–1516); or (among other modern Frenchmen) Gervasius Sepinus of Saumur, writer of Latin eclogues after the manner of Virgil and Mantuanus (, Life of Shakespeare, p. 103 n. 1).

In 1585 Watson gave new proof of his appreciation of Italian literature and his aptitude for Latin verse by publishing a distant paraphrase of Tasso's pastoral ‘Aminta’ in Latin hexameters. The title ran: ‘Amyntas Thomæ Watsoni Londinensis I. V. Studiosi. Excudebat Henricus Marsh, ex assignatione Thomæ Marsh,’ 1585, 16mo. This was dedicated to the Elizabethan courtier Henry Noel, who was equally well known as a spendthrift and a musician [see under ]. To the same patron Watson dedicated a philosophic treatise in Latin prose on the art of memory entitled ‘Compendium Memoriæ Localis;’ of this work an imperfect copy—without colophon and ending with the first page of the fifteenth chapter—belonged to Heber, and is now in Mr. Christie-Miller's library at Britwell; no other copy has been met with. Next year Watson published a second Latin translation from the Greek, ‘Coluthus: Raptus Helenæ, Tho. Watsonæ Londinensis,’ London, 1586, 4to. This was dedicated to the Duke of Northumberland. Three years later Watson contributed a ‘Hexastichon’ to Robert Greene's romance ‘Ciceronis Amor’ (1589).

Meanwhile, in 1587, Watson had the mortification of witnessing the publication of an unauthorised English translation of his Latin version of Tasso's ‘Aminta.’ The English translator, Abraham Fraunce [q. v.], made no mention of Watson. Fraunce's work proved more popular than Watson's, and he printed it for a fourth time in 1591, together with a second original English translation by himself of the Italian poem; Fraunce's volume of 1591 bore the general title of ‘The Countess of Pembroke's Ivychurch.’ There for the first time Fraunce made, in a prefatory sentence, a tardy and incomplete acknowledgment of his debt to Watson: ‘I have somewhat altered S.