Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/269



, translator of Homer, dramatist, and gnomic poet, was born in 1559, and died in 1634. At fifteen, according to Anthony Wood, 'he, being well grounded in school learning, was sent to the university' of Oxford; at thirty-five he published his first poem: 'The Shadow of Night.' Between these dates, though no fact has been unearthed concerning his career, it is not improbable that he may have travelled in Germany. At thirty-nine he was reckoned 'among the best of our tragic writers for the stage'; but his only play published at that age was a crude and formless attempt at romantic comedy, which had been acted three years before it passed from the stage to the press; and his first tragedy now extant in print, without name of author, did not solicit the suffrage of a reader till the poet was forty-eight. At thirty-nine he had also published the first instalment of his celebrated translation of the 'Iliad,' in a form afterward much remodelled; at sixty-five he crowned the lofty structure of his