French fiction -- Translations into English; Italian fiction -- Translations into English
[Footnote 40: If Painter had laid in this School the foundation of
that fortune, which he afterwards appears to have realised in land,
he did no more than was done by a celebrated successor, Thomas
Farnaby, a well-known annotator on Horace, who settled his male
posterity at Keppington, in the parish of Sevenoaks, where they
remained in rank and opulence, till the late Sir Charles Farnaby,
Bart., who at one time in the present reign represented the County
of Kent, sold that seat and estate to Francis Motley Austen, Esq.,
the present owner.]
In 1562 there was a license obtained by William Jones to print “The
Cytie of Cyvelite, translated into Englesshe by william paynter.”
Probably this was intended for the present work, and entered in the
Stationers Register as soon as the translation was commenced, to secure
an undoubted copy-right to the Publisher. Neither of the stories bear
such a title, nor contain incidents in character with it. The
interlocutory mode of delivery, after the manner of some of the
originals, might have been at first intended, and of the conversation
introducing or ending some of those taken from the collection of the
Queen of Navarre, a part is even now, though incongruously,
retained.[41] By rejecting the gallant speeches of the courtiers and
sprightly replies of the ladies, and making them unconnected stories,
the idea of civility was no longer appropriate, and therefore gave place
to a title equally alliterative in the adoption of the Palace of
Pleasure.
[Footnote 41: George Whetstone has _An Heptameron of Civill
Discourses_, &c. 1582.]
Under this conjecture Painter was three years perfecting the Translation
of the first volume of the Palace of Pleasure. He subscribes the
dedicatory Epistle “nere the Tower of London the first of Januarie
1566,” using the new style, a fashion recently imported from France.[42]
It must be read as 1565-6 to explain a passage in another Epistle before
the second volume, where he speaks of his histories “parte whereof, two
yeares past (almost) wer made commune in a former boke,” concluding
“from my poore house besides the Toure of London, the fourthe of
November, 1567.” The two volumes were afterwards enlarged with
additional novels, as will be described under a future head, and with
the completion of this task ends all knowledge of his literary
productions.
[Footnote 42: In France the style was altered in 1564. _Clavis
Calendaria_. Vol I. p. 64.]
It no where appears in the Palace of Pleasure that Painter either
travelled for information, or experienced, like many a genius of that
age, the inclination to roam expressed by his contemporary, Churchyard,
“Of running leather were his shues,
his feete no where could reste.”[43]
[Footnote 43: _Bibliographical Miscellanies_, 1813. p. 2.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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