Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/255

Rh not only in his Rabelais but when he describes his own adventures or the life and death of the Admirable Crichton. This, and his own exuberant imagination, made him a wonderfully sympathethic and felicitous translator of Rabelais, though his own extravagance was not humorous. He writes as an enthusiastic interpreter of his original, interpolating an explanatory paragraph when he thinks it is required, adding synonyms, racy colloquialisms or coinages of his own, and giving his sentences a full and harmonious flow. For his synonyms he was often indebted to Cotgrave's rich storehouse of French and English colloquialisms, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tougues (1611), and at times he sows them with a somewhat lavish hand. Still his version is, as Mr Whibley says, "a translation unique in its kind which has no rival in profane letters." Nothing can equal the "race" of his Elizabethan English. Mr Smith's scholarly and accurate version is invaluable for the student, but, read closely along with Urquhart, it seems to stand to it a little as the revised to the authorised English Bible.

Thomas Fuller (1608-1662) merits a place among the erudite humourists and wits of the century rather than among the more serious and heavy divines. His History of the Holy Warre (1639) shows, a critic has said, "much reading but more wit"; and his Holy and Profane State (1642), a series of characters illustrated by historic examples,