Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/226

212 In contrast to such writings as called forth this praise, Tate has been guilty of some offences. The fact that he rendered into English the second Satire of Juvenal, in what is called "Dryden's Translation," should perhaps screen Dryden from some of the censure which has been cast on him for coarseness. Tate contributed also to "Miscellaneous Poems," published by Tonson, and edited by Dryden, an English version of one of Ovid's loosest elegies. This publication chiefly consisted of poems, original and translated, by "the most eminent hands." The nature of some of its contents, is quite sufficient to show that the taste of the reading public was not a whit purer than that of the habitués of the theatre. At the end of the fourth volume, there is a long translation by Tate of a composition of a very singular kind. It is the celebrated Latin poem on a medical subject by "that famous Poet and Physician, Fracastorius, Englished by Mr. Tate." There are some prefatory lines to Dr. Thomas Hobbs, and a life of the renowned medico-poet-philanthropist. In this memoir, the world is informed that Fracastorius was born at Verona, that he was specially and providentially preserved in childhood to write his great poem, for that while in his mother's arms, she was struck dead by lightning, while he remained unscathed; that he lived to rival Pliny and Catullus, and outstrip all his contemporaries in learning and poetry; that he studied under Peter Pomponatius, and became so devoted a student that Polybius and Plutarch were scarce ever out of his hands; that when not employed in literary avocations he was occupied in curing disorders, and that in the intervals of his professional exertion, while the pestilence he so vividly describes, was raging in the city he found leisure to compose these undying verses, which no less a man than Sanazarius is driven in despair to admit excelled his own poem "De Partu Virginis," which was a labour of twenty years. It is also recorded