Joshua Sylvester is the next in the list of our imperfectly-known, but
real poets. Very little is known of his history. He was a merchant-
adventurer, and died at Middleburg, aged fifty-five, in 1618. He is said
to have applied, in 1597, for the office of secretary to a trading
company in Stade, and to have been, on this occasion, patronised by
the Earl of Essex. He was at one time attached to the English Court as
a pensioner of Prince Henry. He is said to have been driven abroad by
the severity of his satires. He seems to have had a sweet flow of
conversational eloquence, and hence was called 'The Silver-tongued.' He
was an eminent linguist, and wrote his dedications in various languages.
He published a large volume of poems, very unequal in their value, and
inserted in it 'The Soul's Errand,' with interpolations, as we have seen,
which prove it not to be his own. His great work is the translation of
the 'Divine Weeks and Works' of the French poet, Du Bartas, which is a
marvellous medley of flatness and force--of childish weakness and soaring
genius--with more _seed poetry_ in it than any poem we remember, except
'Festus,' the chaos of a hundred poetic worlds. There can be little doubt
that Milton was familiar with this work in boyhood, and many remarkable
coincidences have been pointed out between it and 'Paradise Lost.'
Sylvester was a Puritan, and his publisher, Humphrey Lownes, who lived
in the same street with Milton's father, belonged to the same sect; and,
as Campbell remarks, 'it is easily to be conceived that Milton often
repaired to the shop of Lownes, and there met with the pious didactic
poem.' The work, therefore, some specimens of which we subjoin, is
interesting, both in itself, and as having been the _prima stamina_ of
the great masterpiece of English poetry.