GEORGE

See also:

• SANDYS, FREDERICK (1832-1904)
• GEORGE SANDYS (1578-1644)
• SANDYS, SIR EDWIN (1561-1629)

SANDYS (1578-1644)  , English traveller, colonist and poet, the seventh and youngest son of Edwin Sandys, archbishop of York, was born on the 2nd of March 1578 . He studied at St Mary Hall, Oxford, but took no degree . On his travels, which began in 16ro, he first visited France; from North Italy he passed by way of Venice to Constantinople, and thence to Egypt, Mt . Sinai, Palestine, Cyprus, Sicily, Naples and Rome . His narrative, dedicated, like all his other works, to Charles (either as prince or king), was published in 1615, and formed a substantial contribution to geography and ethnology . He also took great interest in the earliest English colonization in America . In April 1621 he became colonial treasurer of the Virginia Company and sailed to Virginia with his niece's husband, Sir Francis Wyat, the new governor . When Virginia became a crown colony, Sandys was created a member of council in August 1624; he was reappointed to this post in 1626 and 1628 . In 1631 he vainly applied for the secretaryship to the new special commission for the better plantation of Virginia; soon after this he returned to England forgood . In 1621 he had already published an English translation of part of Ovid's Metamorphoses; this he completed in 1626; on this mainly his poetic reputation rested in the 17th and 18th centuries . He also began a version of Virgil's Aeneid, but never produced more than the first book . In 1636 he issued his famous Paraphrase upon the Psalms and Hymns dispersed throughout the Old and New Testaments; in 1640 he translated Christ's Passion from the Latin of Grotius; and in 1641 he brought out his last work, a Paraphrase of the Song of Songs .

He died, unmarried, at Boxley, near

Maidstone, Kent, in 1644 . His verse was deservedly praised by Dryden and Pope; Milton was some-what indebted to Sandys' Hymn to my Redeemer (inserted in his travels at the place of his visit to the Holy Sepulchre) in his Ode on the Passion . See Sandys' works as quoted above; the travels appeared as The Relation of a Journey begun an . Dom . 161o, in four books (1615) ; also the Rev . Richard Hooper's edition, with memoir, of The Poetical Works of George Sandys; and Alexander Brown's Genesis of the United States, pp . 546, 989, 992, 994-995, 1032, 1063; article, " Sandys, George," in Dictionary of National Biography .