Dryden finds little to praise in the French and Italian renderings of Virgil. "Segrais ... is wholly destitute of elevation, though his version is much better than that of the two brothers, or any of the rest who have attempted Virgil. Hannibal Caro is a great name among the Italians; yet his translation is most scandalously mean."[384] "What I have said," he declares somewhat farther on, "though it has the face of arrogance, yet is intended for the honor of my country; and therefore I will boldly own that this English translation has more of Virgil's spirit in it than either the French or Italian."[385] On translators outside their own period seventeenth-century critics bestowed even less consideration than on their French or Italian contemporaries. Earlier writers were forgotten, or remembered only to be condemned. W. L., Gent., who in 1628 published a translation of Virgil's _Eclogues_, expresses his surprise that a poet like Virgil "should yet stand still as a _noli me tangere_, whom no man either durst or would undertake; only Master Spenser long since translated the _Gnat_ (a little fragment of Virgil's excellence), giving the world peradventure to conceive that he would at one time or other have gone through with the rest of this poet's work."[386] Vicars' translation of the _Aeneid_ is accompanied by a letter in which the author's cousin, Thomas Vicars, congratulates him on his "great pains in transplanting this worthiest of Latin poets into a mellow and neat English soil (a thing not done before)."[387] Denham announces, "There are so few translations which deserve praise, that I scarce ever saw any which deserved pardon; those who travail in that kind being for the most part so unhappy as to rob others without enriching themselves, pulling down the fame of good authors without raising their own." Brome,[388] writing in 1666, rejoices in the good fortune of Horace's "good friend Virgil ... who being plundered of all his ornaments by the old translators, was restored to others with double lustre by those standard-bearers of wit and judgment, Denham and Waller,"[389] and in proof of his statements puts side by side translations of the same passage by Phaer and Denham. Later, in 1688, an anonymous writer recalls the work of Phaer and Stanyhurst only to disparage it. Introducing his translation of Virgil, "who has so long unhappily continued a stranger to tolerable English," he says that he has "observed how _Player_ and _Stainhurst_ of old ... had murdered the most absolute of poets."[390] One dissenting note is found in Robert Gould's lines prefixed to a 1687 edition of Fairfax's _Godfrey of Bulloigne_.