University of Virginia Library

Dryden and the Fourth Earl of Lauderdale
by
Arthur Sherbo

As Dryden drew near the end of the Dedication to his translation of the Aeneid he listed the "Helps" he had had in "this Undertaking." His first acknowledgment was to the

This is the by far the most extended statement of debt in the Virgil on Dryden's part, and it has given rise to no little controversy as to the full measure of that debt. Lauderdale's translation was published posthumously in late 1708 or early 1709 with a second edition appearing some time between 1715 and 1718.[2] The editor of this second edition zealously marked lines and passages with double marks of quotation to point to Dryden's borrowings in toto for his Aeneid and with single marks of quotation to signal lesser depredations. What this anonymous editor did not know was that the Earl had made quite free with some early translations of parts of the Aeneid which Dryden had published in Sylvae (1685), i.e. the episodes of Nisus and Euryalus from Books V and IX, of Mezentius and Lausus from Book X, and of Venus and Vulcan in Book VIII. Students of Dryden's work have both defended and condemned him for his borrowings from Lauderdale; more recently attempts have been made to show that Lauderdale was the borrower, not Dryden. The question is more than an Alphonse-Gaston matter of precedence, for the borrowings are so very extensive that even the complacence in these matters of late-seventeenth-century and early-eighteenth-century men of letters would be disturbed.

Professor Helene Maxwell Hooker stated, a number of years ago, that comparison of Dryden's and Lauderdale's translations of the Georgics "clearly establishes the fact that Lauderdale sent over not only his Aeneis [she had just quoted Dryden's Dedication on this]; he also sent over his Georgics. Among all the English versions represented in Dryden's Georgics, Lauderdale is first, leading [Thomas] May by a very slight margin."[3] Mrs. Hooker calculated Dryden's debt to be "a total of 241 rhyme words—Book I, 110; Book II, 25; Book III, 50; and Book IV, 56. Dryden uses 5 identical lines, all in Book I. In addition there are 42 questionable lines—2 in Book I; 7 in Book II; 10 in Book III; and 23 in Book IV. In company with Thomas May, Lauderdale served very much as a skeleton for the rhyme scheme of his friend's translation" (p. 296). L. Proudfoot, in his Dryden's "Aeneid" and Its Seventeenth Century Predecessors (1960), bluntly remarks that "there is simply no defence [for Dryden] against a charge of plagiarism from Lauderdale. It must have been in the consciousness of this that Dryden penned his Acknowledgment; but it remains inadequate. . . . Not all that can be written about the difference between literary morality in Dryden's day and our own can conceal the fact that Dryden tried to bluff."[4] Of the forty lines that Dryden took over "either verbatim or nearly so" in his translation of the fourth Book of the Aeneid Proudfoot assigns twenty-one to Lauderdale (pp. 265 and 266).

Most recently, Professor Margaret P. Boddy has attempted to defend Dryden by suggesting that he had completed his translation of the Georgics

and of the first eight Books of the Aeneid by May 26, 1695, one year earlier than the usually accepted date. By extension of a highly conjectural argument, Dryden is made out to have finished Georgics I-III and Aeneid I-IV in the first five months of 1694. Lauderdale, concludes Professor Boddy, "could have been [my italics] one of the friends to whom Dryden transmitted various parts of his translation as he finished them," and since it is known that Lauderdale saw the "arguments in prose" prefixed to each Georgic, Professor Boddy also concludes that he "certainly must have seen the text of the Georgics." Even though it is known that Addison provided the arguments in prose, arguments which would not necessarily have been yet added to the text of Dryden's Georgics, Professor Boddy finds it "unlikely that the copying is the other way round," i.e. that Dryden copied from Lauderdale.[5] In a later article Professor Boddy shows that Lauderdale probably had a manuscript version of Dryden's translations of those parts of the Aeneid he published in Sylvae (1685) and goes on to state that "the revisions in both late manuscripts [of Lauderdale's Aeneid] indicate that Lauderdale revised with a manuscript of Dryden's translation before him, being probably one of the gentlemen of taste to whom Dryden sent copies of his translation book by book as he finished them." At this point Professor Boddy footnotes a reference to her earlier article in support of her statement that "Lauderdale had seen a manuscript of Dryden's Georgics." And then she makes what is surely another unwarranted assumption when she writes, "Moreover, while the possession of a manuscript of translations of Virgil by Dryden printed in the 1685 Sylvae need not mean that Lauderdale saw the later manuscripts, it certainly helps to establish a pattern."[6] In anticipation of later discussion it will be well to point out that Lauderdale was in France when he may be presumed to have "sent over" (the words are Dryden's) the translation Dryden saw. While there are seven known extant manuscripts and evidence of the existence of two others containing various parts of his translation,[7] there are none of Dryden's translation. Lauderdale, in France, with little hope of publishing his translation, could afford to send a manuscript over to England; after all he had more. Dryden, in England, permitted some of his friends to see his manuscript and transcriptions[8] made from it; whether he would take the chance of sending a manuscript to Lauderdale in France is another matter.

What is obviously needed in the vexed question of who borrowed (plagiarized?) from whom is a chronology of events, in so far as one can be reconstructed now. The relevant dates are these:

• c. 1682 "The Lord Maitland . . . who began his excellent Translation of Virgil" is associated with Dryden in a literary academy begun by the Earl of Roscommon.[9] One should note that the translation is "of Virgil," not of the Aeneid alone. And that it is said to have begun as early as 1682.
• 1684 Dryden translates Virgil's fourth and ninth Eclogues for Miscellany Poems; the other eight Eclogues were translated by a number of his friends and acquaintances, but Lauderdale is not among them, possibly because of political difficulties (see DNB).
• 1685 Sylvae contains part of the fourth Georgic, translated by "an unknown Hand," which had been attributed to Thomas Creech until Professor Hooker pointed out that the passage, the Orpheus and Eurydice episode, appears as lines 491-637 of Lauderdale's translation (first edition). Professor Boddy believes the translation is Creech's and that Lauderdale simply took it over as he had passages from earlier translations of passages from the Aeneid by Dryden and John Stafford.[10] This collection also includes Dryden's translations of those parts of the Aeneid, listed above, from which Lauderdale borrowed extensively.
• 1689 Lauderdale translates Book VI of the Aeneid.[11]
• 1689 or 90 Lauderdale follows James II to France.[12]
• 1690 Lauderdale translates Books VIII and IV.
• 1691 Lauderdale translates Books XII, XI, and IX.
• 1692 Lauderdale translates Books X, II, III, and V and sells his collection of MSS.[13] This date is of importance in that Professor Boddy (PQ, [1963], 269-270) asserts that Dryden's request for Lauderdale's "decorations," mentioned in a letter dated April 1695 by both Edmond Malone and Charles Ward, is for the 102 brass cuts (plates) used by John Ogilby in his Virgil and which she conjectures came into Lauderdale's hands. Tonson paid somebody £200 for these plates. What is more, Lauderdale sold his collection of drawings and engravings in 1690 (Boddy, PQ, [1963], 270). Since the Earl needed money all this time, what more natural than that he would have sold the 102 plates in this 1690 sale, if not in the 1692 sale of MSS? By April 1695, a date which Professor Boddy would put back a year, the Earl may

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  have already died; he died in Paris in 1695, but no month or day date is known.[14]
• 1693 Lauderdale translates Books I and VII.
• Dec. 12, 1693 Dryden writes, "I have undertaken to translate all Virgil: & as an Essay, have already paraphrased, the third Georgique, as an Example; it will be published in Tonsons next Miscellanyes, in Hilary terme."[15]
• July, 1694 The Annual Miscellany for the Year 1694, Being the Fourth Part of Miscellany Poems contains Dryden's version of the third Georgic and Lauderdale's translation of the first Georgic.
• April, 1695 Dryden translates the fourth Book of the Aeneid. As he is translating the works in order, this means that the Eclogues and Georgics and the first three Books of the Aeneid are complete.
• 1695 Lauderdale dies in Paris; only the year date is known.

In 1684 Dryden had translated the fourth and ninth Eclogues; Lauderdale, whose translation of "Virgil" is said to have been begun by 1682, would have translated the Eclogues first, then the Georgics, and finally the Aeneid, as others had before (notably John Ogilby) and as others were to do later (notably John Dryden). Examination of the fourth Eclogue in the two versions shows that they coincide in the rhyme words for ten couplets, "coincide" including what I consider to be such parallels as "shows/foregoes" in the one as against "grow/forego" in the other. However, each or both could have got the rhyme words for seven of these ten couplets from any one of four predecessors. One remains with the rhyme words for three couplets and two possible slight verbal parallels—both have "cluster'd Grapes," and where Dryden has "nauseous Qualms" Lauderdale has "tedious Qualms."[16] Similarities in the ninth Eclogue are confined to rhyme words for four couplets and one verbal similarity—where Lauderdale has "dodder'd Beech" Dryden has "dodder'd Oak," a sufficiently unusual word, the first use of which the OED tentatively attributes to Dryden. There the word is defined as a "word conventionally used (?after Dryden) as an attribute of old oaks (rarely other trees); app. originally meaning: Having lost the top or branches, esp. through age and decay; hence, remaining as a decayed stump." Dryden uses the word in the Aeneid (II. 701-702) to describe an old laurel tree. One cannot believe that both Dryden and Lauderdale came independently upon the word—or coined it—for the same passage in Virgil.

The amount and kind of Dryden's borrowings from his fellow translators in the 1684 translation of the Eclogues compared to Lauderdale's borrowings

from the volume reveal quite clearly how much more Dryden depends on his predecessors than does Lauderdale. (I have tabulated these in a yet unpublished article.) For one thing, Dryden borrows more words, phrases, and lines than Lauderdale, who contents himself, with very rare exceptions, with rhyme words. Take, for example, the well-known Fortunatus senex passage in the first Eclogue, translated by John Caryll in the 1684 volume and running to fifteen lines in that translation. Lauderdale borrows rhyme words for two couplets—nothing more. Compare, however, Dryden's possible borrowings, indicated by my italics in his version: This is typical of Dryden's practice throughout the Eclogues. What is more, his reliance on remoter predecessors in the translation of the Eclogues is consistently greater than Lauderdale's. (My unpublished tabulation). All of which is to suggest that given a body of translation—of the Eclogues—available to Dryden and to Lauderdale, the former helped himself much more plentifully than the latter, despite (or was it because of?) his association in one of these translations, the joint effort of the 1684 volume. Thus, when one is confronted with the many parallels in Dryden's and Lauderdale's versions of the Eclogues, the natural supposition is that the borrower was Dryden, since he at least saw Lauderdale's manuscript translation of the Aeneid, while there is absolutely no evidence that Lauderdale ever saw any part of Dryden's final manuscript. The extent of the debt, discounting rhymes, lines, and words and phrases available to Dryden from the other predecessors, is the rhyme words for forty-five couplets, six nearly identical lines, and nineteen words or phrases. Possibly this may seem too little to matter, but when it is added to Dryden's considerable debt to his other predecessors, and he borrowed from every one of them, the total may give rise to questions of literary morality and, more importantly, of Dryden's artistry.

It may be recalled that the editor of the second edition of Lauderdale's Virgil used double and single marks of quotation to point out Dryden's indebtedness to this version. And it should also be remembered that L. Proudfoot (1960) analyzed Book IV of the Aeneid to show to what extent Dryden

used his predecessors' versions. Despite, or possibly because of, these two attempts to gauge the exact degree of indebtedness, I have myself analyzed the translations of Book IV of the Aeneid by Dryden and by Lauderdale in the attempt to show that the debt is greater than has hitherto been realized. The editor of the second edition of Lauderdale's Virgil was not interested in rhyme words particularly, and Proudfoot was not sufficiently rigorous in the matter of half-rhymes or verbal similarities. First of all, it must be said that Dryden obviously had had access to the manuscript which provided the text for the second edition of Lauderdale's translation, for in twenty-two of twenty-five lines where Lauderdale revised the first edition Dryden is indebted to or follows (or coincides with, although the number is too great for coincidence) the second edition. For example, line 783 in Dryden's version of Book IV reads, "Then shall I seek alone the Churlish Crew"; Lauderdale's first edition reads, "Shall I alone go with some jocund Crew" (l. 597); whereas his second edition reads, "Shall I alone go with the churlish Crew" (l. 628).[17] Proudfoot, it should be observed, does not comment on this similarity. The three places where Dryden seems to favor the first edition are at his lines 399, 864, and 968 where he has "Ascanius," "the," and "calling," closer to the first edition's "Ascanius," "the," and "call'd" as opposed to the second edition's "Son Iulus'," "his" and "invok'd." But these may be coincidences, the first being of very little consequence indeed and all being cancelled by the significant similarities between Dryden and Lauderdale's second edition. As one more example, compare the last lines of the fourth book in each version. Lauderdale 1 has, Lauderdale 2 reads, And Dryden has, Unless one wishes to believe that the unknown editor of Lauderdale 2 plagiarized from Dryden's version in order to make Dryden's debt to Lauderdale seem greater, the only tenable conclusion is that Dryden helped himself from Lauderdale 2.[18] In the following table I list only the similarities not noted by Proudfoot. Dryden is not quoted when his version is identical to lauderdale 2. Lauderdale 2 is first in the table:

Proudfoot concludes that of forty lines of Aeneid IV in Dryden's version, which agree to the extent of at least four-fifths in any given line, twenty-one agree with Lauderdale (pp. 265-266). Earlier, Proudfoot had written that Lauderdale's version of Virgil "is not only readable itself, but . . . it was read by the greatest poet of his day and used by him as a standard and store of material for his own attempt" (p. 179). The editor of L2 marks twelve lines with double quotes and 46 with single quotes.[35] Dryden could, then, have got the rhyme-words for one hundred and twenty-two of his couplets from L2,

as well as forty-eight phrases (i.e. two or more words together) and forty-five words. This is an impressive total, and when one counts the actual number of lines in which these various borrowings or coincidences or parallels occur, they total 315 of the 1009 lines of Dryden's version of the fourth Book. If one adds to this the number of couplets (69) for which Dryden could have gone to one of his seventeenth-century predecessors other than Lauderdale, according to Proudfoot's analysis, the total number of couplets becomes 191 and the total number of lines becomes 454.

Proudfoot is not concerned, it is well to repeat, to explore Dryden's possible indebtedness to his predecessors for single words, except in very rare instances. Nor have I done so either, except for L2, but I have checked the predecessors independently and have discovered that Proudfoot sometimes overlooks additional possibilities of indebtedness on Dryden's part. That Dryden, already up to his neck in debt for rhyme-words, might have derived those for one more couplet from the 1654 Ogilby translation, i.e., suspect/erect (ll. 137-138) from Ogilby's reflect/erect (p. 265) is of almost no interest whatsoever. That Proudfoot should have overlooked the following is another matter entirely. Dryden's version is first, then Sidney Godolphin's part of The Passion of Dido for Aeneas (1658):

(At ll. 235-236 Dryden has to Coverts ride/side and at 171-172 Godolphin has divide/to coverts Ride).

Proudfoot fails to note Dryden's almost verbatim borrowing of a couplet from Edmund Waller's part of The Passion of Dido for Aeneas (1658). Dryden has "Witness, ye Gods, and those my better part,/How loth I am to try this impious Art" (710-711); Waller has, "Witness, ye Gods! and thou my dearest part!/How loath I am to tempt this guilty art" (51-52). Compare also the rhyme words; Dryden's version is first: Dome/Tomb (667-668), tomb/come (27-28); above/Love (694-695), prove/love (41-42); Vest/Guest (714-715), guest/dressed (55-56). Proudfoot quotes a couplet from John Vicars's translation (1632) as a possible source for Dryden's lines 188-189 and remarks, "I am not fully satisfied, from the evidence of Book VI, and from such further comparisons as I have been able to make, that Dryden consulted Vicars at all, but I think it likely" (p. 33). He remarks similarities in rhyme words in four more couplets, and that is all. There are, however, thirteen more of Dryden's couplets which may owe their rhyme words to Vicars's version.[37] What is more, although I have not thought it necessary to carry my analysis to verbal similarities, there are some between the two versions. According to Proudfoot, Dryden's "debts" to Robert Stapylton's translation of Book IV (1632) "are small" (p. 125). However small the debts may be, they should be increased to the slight possible extent of the rhyme words for five couplets.[38] Proudfoot has very little to say about Sir Robert Howard's version of the fourth book, published in his Poems (1660). He suggests that Howard "appears to have been consulted by Dryden" (p. 156) and finds that Dryden is indebted to him for one line (p. 266), hardly a significant number. But he says nothing about the rhyme-words for twenty couplets (actually sixteen couplets and four triplets) in which Dryden coincides with Howard.[39]

To recapitulate, then. Dryden could have got the rhyme-words for 122 of his couplets from Lauderdale's second edition, as well as 48 phrases and 45 words, so that the total number of lines affected would be 315. Proudfoot's analysis adds another 69 couplets, which brings the total number of couplets to 191 and the number of lines to 454. Add to this the rhyme-words for 48 more couplets (actually 43 couplets and 5 triplets) and the number of lines swells to 555, well over half the 1009 lines in Dryden's version. And this is without any attempt to trace indebtedness as to word or phrase in any predecessor other than Lauderdale.

Proudfoot should have a penultimate word. "But for Heaven's sake," he exclaims, "do not let us conclude that he [Dryden] was saving time or work. The perpetual consultation and weighing of texts described by Bottkol and documented by Miss Hooker and myself is unimaginably toilsome and slow." He thereupon undertakes to translate a familiar text faster and with less labor than anybody following Dryden's method. And he concludes "that Dryden's procedure is intelligible only if we presume that he was seeking a definitive version, constantly embodying in his own work what he thought had been well done, and constantly measuring himself against the best version he could find of any given version" (p. 267). Almost surely so, but with some qualification: Dryden had available to him a composite framework of line beginnings, rhyme-words by the hundreds, and a number of words and phrases upon which to build his own version. Only by analysis such as has been attempted here can the extent of that framework be known and the ensuing comparison of that framework with the completed edifice be made.

Notes