This study has a two-fold purpose: first, to illustrate

"Sowerby's accounts of the writing he selects are always acute, fresh, and rarer still in a primer, do not hesitate to pass judgement...it is easily the best guide of its kind now available." Review of English Studies

Part 1: Epic: Homer's Illiad and Chapman's translation; Homer and Aristotle - the form of the Homeric poems; the "Odyssey"; the "Aeneid"; Virgilian influence in the early Renaissance; the Humanist Virgil - Jonson; Virgil and Dryden. Part 2: Drama: Tragedy; Seneca and Aeschylus - "Agamemnon"; Seneca and Sophocles - "Oedipus"; Seneca and Euripides - "Medea"; the Senecan Hercules - Stoicism; the Senecan history play; Senecan style and transmission; Greek old comedy; Aristophanes' "Knights"; Plato and Aristotle on comedy; Greek new comedy; Roman new comedy; Plautus and Terence compared; commentators on Terence - classical dramatic thory; the Humanist Terence; Jonson's classical practice. Part 3: Lyric: The Greek and the Roman lyric; Jonson and the classical lyric; Herrick - Anacreon; Milton Cowley and Horace; Marvell's "Horatian Ode"; Horace and Pindar; the Cowleyan Pindaric; two Pindaric odes of Dryden. Part 4: Pastoral and Georgic: Greek beginnings; Virgilian pastoral; neo-Latin pastoral - Petrarch and Mantuan; English pastoral - Spenser; Milton's pastoral elergy - Marvell; the Georgic - Hesiod; Virgil's Georgics in Dryden;s translation; the happy man of Cowley's Georgic; Augustan Georgic. Part 5: Ovidian genres: The Epyllion, the love elergy and the heroic epistle; the "Metamorphoses"; the love elergy in Marlowe's translation; the heroic epistle; the Elizabethan erotic epyllion - Marlowe Chapmen Shakespeare; the heroic epistle in English - Drayton and Donne; English love elegies - Donne Carew Rochester. Part 6: Satire: The classical satirists; definitions and classifications of ancient and Renaissance commentators; English beginnings - Wyatt; Elizabethan innovation - Hall; Jonson and Horace; Cowley's country mouse; imitations by Rochester and Oldham; Dryden's translation of Juvenal.