=7. The Translators.= The zeal for learning which was such a prominent feature of the early Elizabethan times was strongly apparent in the frequent translations. This class of literature had several curious characteristics. The translators cared little for verbal accuracy, and sometimes were content to translate from a translation, say from a French version of a Latin text. The translators, moreover, borrowed from each other, and repeated the errors of their fellows. These habits deprived their work of any great pretensions to scholarship; but they were eager adventurers into the new realms of learning, and to a great extent they reproduced the spirit, if not the letter, of their originals. One of the first and most popular of the translations was North’s _Diall of Princes_ (1557), from an Italian original. North also translated Plutarch’s _Lives_ (1579), a work that had much influence upon Shakespeare and other dramatists. Other classical translations were those of Virgil, done by =Phaer= in 1558 and =Stanyhurst= in 1583, and of Ovid, by =Turberville= in 1567 and by =Chapman= in 1595. Chapman’s Translation of Homer (1596) is perhaps the most famous of them all. It is composed in long, swinging lines, and is lively, audacious, and pleasing. =8. The Pamphleteers.= All through this period there is a flood of short tracts on religion, politics, and literature. It was the work of a host of literary hacks who earned a precarious existence in London. These men represented a new class of writer. The Reformation had closed the Church to them; the growth of the universities and of learning continually increased their numbers. In later times journalism and its kindred careers supplied them with a livelihood; but at this time they eked out their existence by writing plays and squabbling among themselves in the pages of broadsheets. In its buoyancy and vigor, its quaint mixture of truculence and petulance, Elizabethan pamphleteering is refreshingly boyish and alive. It is usually keenly satirical, and in style it is unformed and uncouth. The most notorious of the pamphleteers were =Thomas Nash (1567–1601)=, =Robert Greene (1560–92)=, and =Thomas Lodge (1558–1625)=. We quote a well-known passage from a pamphlet of Greene, in which he contrives to mingle praise of his friends with sly gibes at one who is probably Shakespeare. The style is typical of the pamphlets.