Googe, Barnaby

was a celebrated poet and translator, who lived in the sixteenth century, but of whom little is known, unless that he was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, whence he removed to Staples Inn. Mr. Ellis conjectures that he might have been born about 1538. We have no doubt that he was the same Barnaby Googe who was a relation and retainer to sir William Cecil, queen Elizabeth’s minister, and who was gentleman-pensioner t6 the queen. Mr. Churton thinks, with great probability, that he was the father of Barnaby Googe, master of Magdalen college, Cambridge, who was incorporated at Oxford in August 1605, when king James was there. In 1563 he published a very elegant little volume, now of the greatest rarity, entitled “Eglogs, Epitaphs, and Sonnetes.” One of the sonnets, superior, as the rest are, in point of harmony, to most of the productions of those days, is addressed to Alexander No well, afterwards the celebrated dean of St. Paul’s, and reprinted in Mr. Churton’s elaborate life of that divine. It is said there are only two copies of this volume in existence, one in the possession of Mr. Heber, who purchased it at George Steevens’s sale, and the other in the library of Trinity college, Cambridge Googe’s principal translation was the “Zodiake of Life,” from Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus, a very moral, but tiresome satire, perfectly unconnected with astronomy, the author merely distinguishing each of the twelve books of his poem by the name of a celestial sign. The first three books appeared in 1560, and the first six in 1561; the whole was printed complete in 1565, 12mo. In 1570 he translated from Naogeorgus, a poem on Antichrist; in 1577, Herebach’s ceconomical treatise on agriculture; and in 1579, Lopes de Mendoza’s Spanish proverbs, and afterwards Aristotle’s “Table of the Ten Categories.” The few | specins published from these very rare works are highly favourable to the author’s talents and principles. ¹