AN ELIZABETHAN PURITAN : THE LIFE OF ARTHUR GOLDING By
L. T. Golding
This book (New York, R. R. Smith, $3.50) is a work of family piety ; and we may be grateful for the sentiment when it leads a latter-day descendant of a minor Elizabethan writer to resurrect as much as he can of the life of his fore- bear. It all helps to build up our know- ledge of the background to the life of that age. Not that there are not a great many lesser Elizabethans whose lives, when they lived, were altogether more interest- ing and now would repay research much more than this. But they do not seem to have left such devoted, such family-proud descendants as the American Mr. Golding. Over some years he has been research- ing into all the documents that might throw light upon his ancestor ; and if the haul of material which he has col- lected is somewhat exiguous, he has put it skilfully together and blown it up into a larger work than was perhaps necessary to the case. On the other hand, he makes no extravagant claims for his subject : it is Mr. Joseph Quincy Adams who in his Foreword refers to Arthur Golding as a " great Elizabethan," which he was not, and states that " the conspicuous place which that versatile translator occupied in the general cultural back- ground of the Age of the Fairie Queens has not, I believe, been fully realised by scholars." That statement would also appear to be fallacious : Arthur Golding receives quite a full notice in the Dictionary of National Biography, and is faithfully dealt with in such places as the Cambridge History of -English Literature.
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