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Shakespeare and Precious Stones
1601. This translator, who Englished many of the chief Latin and Greek authors, Suetonius, Livy, Ammianus Marcellinus, Plutarch's "Morals" and other works, was pronounced by Fuller, in his "Worthies," to be "translator general in his age," adding that "these books alone of his turning into English will make a country gentleman a competent library." For his Ammianus Marcellinus the Council of Coventry, his place of residence, paid him £4, and £5 for a translation of Camden's "Britannia" small sums, indeed, for so much labor, but not so unreasonable when we think that a half-century later the immortal Milton got but £5 for his "Paradise Lost." He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had studied and graduated; later he studied medicine, receiving a degree of M.D., not from Oxford or Cambridge, however, but either from a Scottish or foreign university.
Although Solinus, writing in the third century a.d., relies mainly upon Pliny for his information on precious stones, still he here and there gives evidence of a more critical spirit, as when he says of the rock-crystal that the theory according to which it was frozen and hardened water was necessarily incorrect, for it was to be found in such mild climates as
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