[353] _To the Gentlemen Readers_, in _Herodotus_, translated by B. R., London, 1584. [354] _Op. cit._ [355] _Dedication_, in edition of 1576, reprinted, ed. Spingarn, Boston, 1914. [356] _Preface_, in _Godfrey of Bulloigne_, London, 1594, reprinted in Grosart, _Occasional Issues_, 1881. [357] _To the Reader_, in edition of 1549. [358] _The Printer to the Reader_, reprinted in _Shakespeare's Library_, 1875. [359] _To the Reader._ [360] See _Works_, ed. Grosart, II, 50. [361] _Dedication_, London, 1590. [362] _To the Reader_, in _The Iliads of Homer_, Charles Scribner's Sons, p. xvi. [363] P. xxv. [364] P. xv. IV. FROM COWLEY TO POPE IV FROM COWLEY TO POPE Although the ardor of the Elizabethan translator as he approached the vast, almost unbroken field of foreign literature may well awaken the envy of his modern successor, in many respects the period of Dryden and Pope has more claim to be regarded as the Golden Age of the English translator. Patriotic enthusiasm had, it is true, lost something of its earlier fire, but national conditions were in general not unfavorable to translation. Though the seventeenth century, torn by civil discords, was very unlike the period which Holland had lovingly described as "this long time of peace and tranquillity, wherein ... all good literature hath had free course and flourished,"[365] yet, despite the rise and fall of governments, the stream of translation flowed on almost uninterruptedly. Sandys' _Ovid_ is presented by its author, after his visit to America, as "bred in the New World, of the rudeness whereof it cannot but participate; especially having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the Muses,"[366] but the more ordinary translation, bred at home in England during the seventeenth century, apparently suffered little from the political strife which surrounded it, while the eighteenth century afforded a "peace and tranquillity" even greater than that which had prevailed under Elizabeth.