Page:King Alfred's Version of the Consolations of Boethius.djvu/50

xlii

The first great English king had thought the translation of Boethius' work a labour well worth the doing; it now remained for the first great English queen to follow his example. Queen Elizabeth, amid the countless preoccupations of her high estate, found time to translate the Consolations of Philosophy at Windsor, and several other Latin works, in the year 1593. The manuscript in which the royal version is preserved in the Record Office is partly in the Queen's handwriting, the rest being written by a scribe to whom she dictated. In this MS. several persons bear witness that the Queen finished the work in an extraordinarily short space of time, twenty-five to twenty-seven hours of actual work, spread over a month, taking out Sundays, holidays, and absences from Windsor; the rate of work being one and a half to two hours a day. There may be some courtier's exaggeration about this. The translation is fairly accurate and very literal, and the Queen's spelling is remarkably untrammelled, as may be seen from the first specimen, which is written in her own handwriting in the MS. Book ii,