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Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618). Library of Literary Criticism. 1901-05

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Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618). Library of Literary Criticism. 1901-05 Dictionary Biographies Literary Criticism Welcome Terms of Service ⧏ Previous Next ⧐ Contents Bibliographic Record Charles Wells Moulton, ed.  Library of Literary Criticism.  1901–05. Joshua Sylvester (1563–1618) Joshua Sylvester: author; born in England in 1563; became eminent as a linguist; was a member of the Company of Merchant Adventurers at Stade, Holland. Died at Middelburg, Holland, Sept. 28, 1618. He is best known as the translator into English of Du Bartas’s “Divine Weekes and Workes” (1605; 7th ed. 1641). The original was by a French Huguenot nobleman; Sylvester’s version had great popularity among the Puritans of Old and New England, and was one of the sources of inspiration to Milton when writing “Paradise Lost.” The quaint “conceited” style of Du Bartas was, if anything, exaggerated in the translation. In 1615 Sylvester published a singular anti-tobacco tract—“Tobacco Battered and the Pipes Shattered,” etc.—intended to please James I., who hated the weed.—Beers, Henry A., 1897, Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia, vol. VII, p. 861.    

1 Thus to aduenture forth, and re-conuay   The best of treasures, from a Forraine Coast,   And take that wealth wherin they gloried most, And make it Oars by such a gallant pray, And that without in-iustice; doth bewray   The glory of the Worke, that we may boast   Much to haue wonne, and others nothing lost By taking such a famous prize away. As thou industrious Sylvester hast wrought,   And heere enritch’d us with th’immortall store   Of others sacred lines: which from them brought Comes by thy taking greater then before:   So hast thou lighted from a flame deuout,   As great a flame, that neuer shall goe out. —Daniel, Samuel, 1606, To my Good Friend, M. Syluester, Daniel’s Works, ed. Grosart, vol. I, p. 281.    

2   That Silvester’s translation of Du Bartas was not well done; and that he wrote his verses before it, ere he understood to conferr.—Drummond, William, 1619, Notes on Ben Jonson’s Conversation, ed. Laing.    

3 And Silvester, who from the French more weak, Made Bartas of his six days’ labour speak In natural English, who, had he there stay’d, He had done well, and never had bewray’d His own invention to have been so poor, Who still wrote less in striving to write more. —Drayton, Michael, c. 1627, Of Poets and Poesie.    

4   The English Translator of Du Bartas his Poem of the six Daies work of Creation, by which he is more generally fam’d, (for that poem hath ever had many great admirers among us) than by his own poems commonly printed therewith.—Phillips, Edward, 1675, Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, ed. Brydges, p. 277.    

5   Queen Elizabeth had a great respect for him. King James I. a greater, and Prince Henry greatest of all, and so much valued by him that he made him his first Poet-Pensioner.—Wood, Anthony, 1691–1721, Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. I, p. 594.    

6   As a whole, in its general structure and execution, it is insufferably heavy and tedious, nor will a reader, in the present day, be easily found, who shall possess perseverance and patience adequate to its complete perusal. In this mass of deterring materials, however, and which abounds with quaintnesses, puerilities, and vulgarisms, of almost every description, are to be discovered beauties of no common kind.—Drake, Nathan, 1798, Literary Hours, vol. III, p. 82.    

7   This person, who in his day obtained the name of “Silver-tongued Sylvester,” was educated by his uncle, W. Plumb, esq. and is reported to have been a merchant-adventurer. Queen Elizabeth is said to have had a respect for him, and her successor a greater, and Prince Henry greater than his father. His moral conduct, his piety, and his courage and patience in adversity, were highly celebrated: and he was so accomplished in languages as to understand French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and Latin. But his forwardness to correct the vices of the age, exposed him to a powerful resentment; and his country is said to have treated him with ingratitude.—Brydges, Sir Samuel Egerton, 1800, ed., Phillips’ Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, p. 277.    

8   Thoughts and expressions there certainly are in Milton, which leave his acquaintance with Sylvester hardly questionable; although some of the expressions quoted by Mr. Dunster, which are common to them both, may be traced back to other poets older than Sylvester. The entire amount of his obligations, as Mr. Dunster justly admits, cannot detract from our opinion of Milton. If Sylvester ever stood high in his favour, it must have been when he was very young. The beauties which occur so strangely intermixed with bathos and flatness in Sylvester’s poem, might have caught the youthful discernment, and long dwelt in the memory, of the great poet. But he must have perused it with disgust at Sylvester’s general manner. Many of his epithets and happy phrases were really worthy of Milton; but by far the greater proportion of his thoughts and expressions have a quaintness and flatness more worthy of Quarles and Wither.—Campbell, Thomas, 1819, An Essay on English Poetry.    

9   The principal poem of Du Bartas, which is a history of the Creation, was written in a sufficiently inflated style; but this was exaggerated by Sylvester, who added many peculiarities of his own, such, among others, as compound, or rather agglutinated, words made up of half a dozen radicals. Its poetical merit is slender, but the translation is not without philological interest, because it contains a considerable number of words and forms, of which examples are hardly to be met with elsewhere, and there are passages which serve as commentaries and explanations of obscure expressions in Shakespeare, and other dramatic authors of the time. It is, however, difficult to understand how an age that produced a Shakespeare could bestow such unbounded applause on a Du Bartas and a Sylvester.—Marsh, George P., 1862, The Origin and History of the English Language, etc., p. 548.    

10   Sylvester, though starting, as we see, as a Merchant-adventurer, became in time so mere a literary adventurer and translating drudge, that we cannot feel much interest about him or his unoriginal works.—Collier, John Payne, 1865, A Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language, vol. II, p. 410.    

11   Joshua Sylvester is one of those men of letters whom accident rather than property seems to have made absurd. He has existed in English literature chiefly as an Englisher of the Frenchman Du Bartas, whom an even greater ignorance has chosen to regard as something grotesque. Du Bartas is one of the grandest, if also one of the most unequal, poets of Europe, and Joshua Sylvester, his translator, succeeded in keeping some of his grandeur if he even added to his inequality. His original work is insignificant compared with his translation; but it is penetrated with the same qualities.—Saintsbury, George, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 289.    

12   Another transitional figure is that of Joshua Sylvester, whom few historians of literature have deigned to mention. He was, however, an active producer of successful verse in his own age, and he wielded, moreover, by means of his famous translation, a prodigious influence…. Sylvester was ambitious of high distinction, but he was dragged down by poverty and by a natural turbidity of style. His original sonnets and lyrics are constantly striking, but never flawless; his translations, as poems, are full of force and colour, but crude. His talent was genuine, but it never ripened, and seems to be turning sour when it should be growing mellow. He does not fear to be tiresome and grotesque for pages at a time, and in Du Bartas he unhappily found a model who, in spite of his own remarkable qualities, sanctioned the worst errors of Sylvester. Milton was, however, attracted to Du Bartas, and approached him, almost unquestionably, through Sylvester, whose version was extremely popular until the middle of the century. Sylvester’s vocabulary was very extensive, and he revelled in the pseudo-scientific phraseology of his French prototype.—Gosse, Edmund, 1894, The Jacobean Poets, p. 14.    

13   Du Bartas has not shared Spenser’s immortality; but few books have won a wider popularity than Sylvester’s translation obtained in the Puritan homes of England. The author, a French Huguenot who had fought for Henry of Navarre, left behind him at his death, in 1590, a long descriptive poem entitled “The Divine Weeks and Works.” The first part, which alone was complete, gave an account of the days of the Creation, founded on the biblical record; and the second “week” carried on the Scripture story to the reign of David, where it abruptly terminated. This poem was translated into English by Joshua Sylvester, himself a poet of some ability, in 1605, and passed through several editions in rapid succession. Its scriptural basis secured for it a welcome in Puritan households, and as the publisher’s office was in Bread Street, an early copy would certainly find its way to the Spread Eagle. Sylvester’s uncouth imagery and quaintly-structured verse is not without a certain attractiveness even now, but they have a higher claim to remembrance as an influence of Milton’s childhood, out of which was destined to grow, in the fulness of time, “Paradise Lost.”—Masterman, J. Howard B., 1897, The Age of Milton, p. 3.    

14   Though no exact scholar (his rendering is indeed far more of a paraphrase than a translation), he had some pre-eminent qualifications for the task he had undertaken. His religious sympathy with his original was profound, and he had a native quaintness that well reflected the curious phraseology of Du Bartas. His enthusiasm overflowed in embellishments of his own, in which he is often at his best.—Seccombe, Thomas, 1898, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. IV, p. 261.    

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