SIR

See also:

• THOMAS
• THOMAS (c. 1654-1720)
• THOMAS (d. 110o)
• THOMAS, ARTHUR GORING (1850-1892)
• THOMAS, CHARLES LOUIS AMBROISE (1811-1896)
• THOMAS, GEORGE (c. 1756-1802)
• THOMAS, GEORGE HENRY (1816-187o)
• THOMAS, ISAIAH (1749-1831)
• THOMAS, PIERRE (1634-1698)
• THOMAS, SIDNEY GILCHRIST (1850-1885)
• THOMAS, ST
• THOMAS, THEODORE (1835-1905)
• THOMAS, WILLIAM (d. 1554)

THOMAS

See also:

• NORTH
• NORTH, BARONS
• NORTH, MARIANNE (1830—1890)
• NORTH, ROGER (1653-1734)
• SIR THOMAS NORTH (1535?-16o1?)

NORTH (1535?-16o1?)  , English translator of Plutarch, second son of the 1st Baron North, was born about 1535 . He is supposed to have been a student of Peterhouse, .Cambridge, and was entered at Lincoln's Inn in 1557 . In 1574 he accompanied his brother, Lord North, on a visit to the French court . He served as captain in the year of the Armada, and was knighted about three years later . His name is on the roll of justices of the peace for Cambridge in 1592 and again in 1597, and he received a small pension (l4o a year) from the queen in 16o, . A third edition of his Plutarch was published, in 1603, with a supplement of other translated biographies . He translated, in 1557, Guevara's Reloj de Principes (commonly known as Libro Aureo), a compendium of moral counsels chiefly compiled from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, under the title of Diall of Princes . The English of this work is one of the earliest specimens of the ornate, copious and pointed style for which educated young Englishmen had acquired a taste in their Continental travels and studies . North translated from a French copy of Guevara, but seems to have been well acquainted with the Spanish version . The book had already been translated by Lord Berners, but without reproducing the rhetorical artifices of the original . North's version, with its mannerisms and its constant use of antithesis, set the fashion which was to culminate in Lyly's Euphues . His next work was The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570), a translation of an Italian collection of eastern fables .

The first edition of his translation of Plutarch, from the French of Jacques

Amyot, appeared in 1579 . The first edition was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, and was followed by other editions in 1595 and 1603, containing in each case fresh Lives . It is almost impossible to over-estimate the influence of North's vigorous English on contemporary writers, and some critics have called him the first master of English prose . The book formed the source from which Shakespeare drew the materials for his Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra . It is in the last-named play that he follows the Lives most closely, whole speeches being taken direct from North . North's Plutarch was reprinted for the " Tudor Translations " (1895), with an introduction by George Wyndham .