It is strange that the great Athenian dramatists, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the comic Aristophanes, were left untranslated; probably because no contemporary foreign versions were easily procurable. What our ancestors knew of ancient tragedy was mainly through the rhetorical Roman imitations by Seneca. Of Plato scarce anything was translated. By 1600 Philemon Holland (born 1552), who actually went to the ancient originals for his texts, published his translation of Livy. As early as 1547 John Wylkinson Englished the Ethics of Aristotle,--out of an Italian version. Philemon was rapid, racy, indefatigable. He translated Plutarch's "Morals" in a year, using but one quill. It was through Florio's English version that Shakespeare read Montaigne's Essays. It is hardly necessary to name Richard Stanyhurst's "Four Books of Virgil's 'Æneid'" (1582) written in hideous English hexameters; and Thomas Phaer's Virgil, in "fourteeners" like Chapman's Homer, is even more helpless as a reproduction of "the stateliest measure Ever moulded by the lips of man," than Conington's modern version in the metres of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel". It was clearly through Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" (1567, Four Books in 1565) that Shakespeare knew Ovid best. Golding also did Cæsar's "De Bello Gallico" (1565), and Sir Henry Savile, Provost of Eton, undertook Tacitus. Among books from foreign modern authors, William Painter's "Palace of Pleasure" (1566-1567) with tales from Boccaccio, Queen Margaret of Navarre, Bandello, and Straparola (as well as from classical sources) was a treasure-house of plots and situations for the playwrights. In the tragedies and comedies of the age, Italian characters are predominant. The Spanish novel of the roads and inns and adventures, "Lazarillo de Tormes," was done out of Spanish in 1576, and set the example of this kind of fiction to Nash. Ariosto and Tasso were translated, the former by Sir John Harington (1591), the latter by Edward Fairfax (in 1600), and Richard Carew, but Dante was neglected. Of Chapman's "Homer," elsewhere spoken of, seven books appeared in 1598, and Shakespeare either glanced at it for his "Troilus and Cressida," or used, in places, a French or Latin version of Homer. It is impossible to enumerate all the translators, most of them are very readable, more so, in fact, than our most exact literal renderings of Greek and Latin originals into prose. The Authorized Version of the Bible.