SOURCE: Bush, Douglas. Foreword to Ovid's Metamorphosis, Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, by George Sandys, edited by Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vanersall, pp. vii-xiii. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1970.

In the following essay, Bush compares Sandys's translations of and commentaries on Ovid's Metamorphoses to those of John Dryden, Arthur Golding, and others.

We may look first at the translator, who, like so many writers of his robust and stirring age, was not merely a man of books. George Sandys (1578-1644) came of a prominent family. He was the son of Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, and a younger brother of Sir Edwin, one of the chief promoters of the Virginia Company. He attended Oxford (1589 f.) and in 1596 was admitted to the Middle Temple, where probably for a year or two he read law. A youthful marriage, previously arranged by the parents, led within a...