later age. Now by these words, to some men it may seem Indeed, if by that name you understand A May-game, or a summer-pole defy, Or shake the head, or else turn up the eye: If you mean those, however they appear, This I say of them (would they all might hear !), Yet they are God's foes, and the Churches' slander; Between the spirit of these verses, composed nearly contemporaneously with Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, and that of Britain's Remembrancer, published in 1628, there is plainly a wide divergence. It is evident that, in the latter poem, the Puritanic element in Wither's nature had grown in intensity. Personal suffering; frequent quarrels with authority and established interest; what seemed the manifest judgments of God on the country in the plague and other public calamities; exalted in him the temper of religious mysticism, alienated him more and more from the manners of the Court (though not as yet from loyalty to the Crown), and disposed him to view with more 1 Abuses Stript and Whipt. His old arrog tolerance the principles of the sectarians. ance and self-sufficiency hardened. He began to look on himself as a prophet, and to predict the coming doom of his country. From this time forward his attraction towards the Parliamentary cause became increasingly rapid, and in the same proportion his verse ran more and more to doggerel. Judging him solely by his later works, the Royalist poets and critics, either through ignorance or party spirit, regarded the once-charming lyric poet as a wretched Puritan scribbler. Cleveland and Butler ranked him with Prynne and Vicars. Pope, preserving the tradition of the Restoration, classed him in the Dunciad with Gildon and Ward, and his name might have remained in this company, had not Bishop Percy inserted one of his poems in the Reliques, and spoken of him as "not altogether devoid of genius." Since then selections from his poems have been made by Sir Egerton Brydges in 1822, while Fair Virtue was reprinted by the late Professor Henry Morley in 1891. Thomas May, the eldest son of Sir Thomas May of Mayfield, Sussex, was born in 1595, and in 1609 entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, as a fellow commoner. He took his B.A. degree in 1612. His father, having spent all his fortune, sold his estate, and Thomas was compelled to support himself by his pen. This he endeavoured to do in the first place by writing for the stage, and in 1620 he produced his first play, The Heir. He also wrote The Old Couple, a work with which Pope was acquainted, and from which he has borrowed some images for his third Moral Essay In 1627 May began his most important work, the translation of Lucan's Pharsalia, which was published in the following year; in 1629 he translated the Georgics of Virgil and Martial's epigrams. He was so good a Latin scholar that in 1630 he continued the Pharsalia, from the point at which Lucan had left it, down to the death of Cæsar. Charles I., who greatly admired his poetical powers, commanded him to 1 Moral Essay, iii. v. 176. See note (Elwin and Courthope's edition). write in verse a history of the reigns of Henry II. and Edward III. May accomplished this task in 1635, and, while he was engaged on it, received a further mark of the King's favour; for the Earl of Pembroke having insulted him at a masque, Charles intervened in his behalf, called him "his poet," and forced the Earl to apologise and make May a present of £50. Elated by these marks of distinction, May hoped, on the death of Ben Jonson in 1637, that he would have been appointed to succeed him in his posts of Poet Laureate and Chronologer to the City of London. But he was disappointed. Davenant was made Poet Laureate in 1638, and Quarles Chronologer to the City in 1639. So bitter was May's chagrin that he lost all sense of loyalty and gratitude, and on the outbreak of the Civil War sided actively with the Parliament. Clarendon, who knew him well, says : He was cherished by many persons of honour and very acceptable in all places, yet (to show that pride and envy have their influence upon the narrowest minds, and which have the greatest semblance of humility), though he had received much countenance and a very considerable donation from the King, upon his Majesty's refusing to give him a small pension which he had promised to another very ingenious person, whose qualities he thought inferior to his own, he fell from his duty and all his former friends, and prostituted himself to the vile office of celebrating the infamous acts of those who were in rebellion against the King; which he did so meanly that he seemed to all men to have lost his wits when he left his honesty; and so shortly after died miserable and neglected, and deserves to be forgotten.1 The last words of this are incorrect. May was made Secretary to the House of Commons, with a salary of £200, and in 1647 wrote a History of the Long Parliament, which he followed up in 1650 with A Breviary of the History of the Parliament of England. On his death, 13th November 1650, he was buried in Westminster Abbey at the public expense; but, after the Restoration, his body was exhumed and buried in a pit in the yard of St. Margaret's, Westminster. Andrew Marvell, who had Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon (1635). then still some Royalist leanings, wrote a severe satire on him, describing his meeting with Ben Jonson in the Elysian Fields. Ben, we are told Whipped him o'er the pate Like Pembroke at the Masque, and thus did rate : But thee nor ignorance, nor seeming good The following prophecy proved accurate enough :— Poor poet thou, and grateful Senate they, When thou hadst drunk thy last, to lead thee home; If that can be thy home where Spenser lies, And reverend Chaucer; but their dust will rise As the eagle's plumes from other birds divide. Regarded in his poetical capacity, and apart from his political leanings and his moral character, May must be awarded a distinguished place on the list of translators in the seventeenth century. His great performance is the translation of Lucan's Pharsalia, a work which it is particularly difficult to reproduce, on account both of the subject-matter and of the style. As it is an historical epic, the poet is always on the border-line between recorded fact and poetical fiction: moreover, the manner of the narrative depends so much on artificial turns of thought and language, peculiar to Lucan and the Latin language, that hardly any poetical equivalent can be invented for it in the genius of a foreign tongue. May was one of those translators who are satisfied with reproducing the exact sense of their original; and, measured by his own standard, his translation deserves the punning compliment bestowed on it by his "friend in judgment and choice," Ben Jonson, who says of the Pharsalia: It makes me ravished with just wonder cry Taught Lucan these true moods? Replies my sense, Phoebus and Hermes? They, whose tongue or pen May, an excellent scholar, seldom fails to put a right interpretation on the Latin he is translating. In some directions also the taste of his own age brought him into close sympathy with Lucan's modes of expression. One of the means by which the Roman poet endeavoured to disguise the comparatively prosaic nature of his subject was the audacious use of hyperbole; and hyperbole was of the essence of the poetry of the seventeenth century. May therefore felt no difficulty in reproducing, without any attempt to soften them, the most grotesque features of his author. In the battle-pieces of the Pharsalia, for example, Lucan, to compensate the reader for the lack of personal interest in the deeds of his leading actors, tries to excite wonder by inventing miraculous acts of individual valour, and by imagining odd kinds of death or wounds. He makes Cæsar's centurion, Scava, hold the whole army of Pompey at bay, till his body is stuck so full of javelins that at last the javelins themselves serve as a shield. May translates his original with equal exactness and gravity thus: There fortune a strange match beholds, one man His strong shield sounded than With often strokes his broken helmet, beat |