Sprat is anxious to claim for Cowley much of the credit for introducing "this way of leaving verbal translations and chiefly regarding the sense and genius of the author," which "was scarce heard of in England before this present age."[394] Why Chapman and later translators should have fixed upon extreme literalness as the besetting fault of their predecessors and contemporaries, it is hard to see. It is true that the recognition of the desirability of faithfulness to the original was the most distinctive contribution that sixteenth-century critics made to the theory of translation, but this principle was largely associated with prose renderings of a different type from that now under discussion. If, like Denham, one excludes "matters of fact and matters of faith," the body of translation which remains is scarcely distinguished by slavish adherence to the letter. As a matter of fact, however, sixteenth-century translation was obviously an unfamiliar field to most seventeenth-century commentators, and although their generalizations include all who have gone before them, their illustrations are usually drawn from the early part of their own century. Ben Jonson, whose translation of Horace's _Art of Poetry_ is cited by Dryden as an example of "metaphrase, or turning an author word by word and line by line from one language to another,"[395] is perhaps largely responsible for the mistaken impression regarding the earlier translators. Thomas May and George Sandys are often included in the same category. Sandys' translation of Ovid is regarded by Dryden as typical of its time. Its literalism, its resulting lack of poetry, "proceeded from the wrong judgment of the age in which he lived. They neither knew good verse nor loved it; they were scholars, 'tis true, but they were pedants; and for all their pedantic pains, all their translations want to be translated into English."[396] But neither Jonson, Sandys, nor May has much to say with regard to the proper methods of translation. The most definite utterance of the group is found in the lines which Jonson addressed to May on his translation of Lucan: But who hath them interpreted, and brought Lucan's whole frame unto us, and so wrought As not the smallest joint or gentlest word In the great mass or machine there is stirr'd? The self same genius! so the world will say The sun translated, or the son of May.[397]