The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IV. Prose and Poetry: Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton.
§ 4. Barnabe Googe
Barnabe Googe takes his real place in literature in another department, but his translation of the Foure bookes of Husbandry, collected by M. Conradus Heresbachius (1577) must be noted here. As Googe remarks in his preface, you have here set down before you “the rules and practices of the olde auncient husbands, as well Greekes as Latines whose very orders, for the most, at this day wee observe”; and, though he professes to have increased the work both by his own reading and the experience of his friends, yet it represents precepts of the older writers rather than contemporary knowledge and practice, and the subject is treated from the standpoint of a man of letters rather than from that of a professed agriculturist. The authorities quoted in the preface include the names of several Englishmen, and he mentions in terms of respect “Master Fitzherbert and Master Tusser: whose workes may, in my fancie, without any presumption, compare with any, either Varro, Columella, or Palladius of Rome.” Some fifty years later, the book was re-edited and enlarged by Markham.