An English Version of Horace's Odes, Satires, and Epistles by William Popple (1700–1764)

Abstract

In an earlier number of this journal I presented a transcript of two unpublished Juvenal translations or imitations by William Popple.1 In introducing these texts it was explained that Popple, a published poet in the 1720s and a playwright on the London stage in the 1730s, had gone on to become Governor of the Bermudas in 1745, publishing an English version of Horace's Ars Poetica in 1753 and a satire called The Age ofDulness in 1757, and leaving behind him on his death in 1764 a number of unpublished poems and translations, including these from Juvenal. Two manuscript volumes, I wrote, one in the British Library, London, and the other in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contained the surviving copies of this material. To these can now be added an extensive further manuscript found in the Osborn collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Osborn fc 104, 1-2), which has gone largely unremarked.2 It consists of two thick folio-size volumes apparently made up from individual sheets used by the scribes, in uniform half morocco bindings, containing 696 and 484 numbered pages respectively. The copyists' hands vary both from one volume to the other, and internally within the second. Their format and mise-en-page match the London ms and the Bodleian ms, the latter of which is in the same hand as the numbered pages 1-24 of the second of these volumes. Together they make up a complete verse translation of Horace, in rhyming couplets