Note 39 — TRANSLATIONS FROM JUVENAL. (continued 2)

The learned Barten Holyday was born at Oxford, in the end of the 16th century. Wood says, he was second to none for his poetry and sublime fancy, and brings in witness his "smooth translation of rough Persius," made before he was twenty years of age. He wrote a play called "Technogamia, or the Marriage of the Arts," which was acted at Christ Church College, before James I., and, though extremely dull and pedantic, was ill received by his Majesty. Holyday's version of Juvenal was not published till after his death, when, in 1673, it was inscribed to the dean and canons of Christ Church. As he had adopted the desperate resolution of comprising every Latin line within an English one, the modern reader has often reason to complain, with the embarrassed gentleman in the "Critic," that the interpreter is the harder to be understood of the two.