Note 39 — The Mirror for Magistrates.

Thomas Phaer is supposed to have been born in Pembrokeshire. He was educated, at Oxford, and afterwards became a student in the inns of court, and describes himself in 1558 “Sollicitour to the king and quenes maiesties, attending their honorable counsaile in the Marches of Wales.” From some unknown circumstance he suddenly quitted the practice of the law for that of physick, obtaining his degrees at Oxford, and was confirmed doctor March 21, 1558-9. In both professions his ready pen contributed several popular works to promote their general practice. As a poet, the first appearance of his name is prefixed to a few lines before Peter Betham’s Precepts of War, 1543. In May 1555, then residing in a house, which he possessed for a long term of years, in Kilgarran Forest, Pembrokeshire, he began to translate the Æneid of Virgil into English rhyme, which had not before been attempted. In this he proceeded at his leisure, and printed the first seven books in 1558, which were afterwards continued as far as part of the tenth, and left incomplete by his death. This work obtained him considerable reputation with contemporary scholars and critics. He was esteemed by William Webbe in the Discourse of English Poetry, 1586, as the best of those who had taken profitable pains in translating the Latin poets: and the encomiast also gives passages from the translation in proof of his own assertion of the meetness of our speech to receive the best form of poetry. Puttenham also praises “Phaer and Golding for a learned and well corrected verse, specially in translation, clear and very faithfully answering their author’s intent.” All that could be found of this work was added to the part already in print, and posthumously published by his friend William Wightman in 1562, who has given two verses at the end of the volume received from Phaer the day before his death, subscribed with his left hand, the use of the right being taken away through the hurt whereof he died. His will, dated August 12, 1560, was proved the June following, and he thereby directed his “boddie to be buried in the parish church of Kilgarran, [adding] with a stone vppon my grave in manner of a marble stone with suche scripture there vpon grauen, in brasse, as shalbe deuised by my friende master George Ferris.” An epitaph upon him is to be found with Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonnettes, newly written by Barnaby Googe, 1563, or in Reed’s Shakespeare, vol. ii. p. 103, n. and a Latin one by the author described in the last note, in the Miscellanea Chaloneri, 1579.