GOLDING, ARTHUR, was born in London, of a good family, at some time in the early part of the 16th century. In 1564 he was living in the house of secretary Cecil, in the Strand ; and his dedica tions show him to have been patronised also by the earls of Leicester and Essex, Lord Cobham, Sir Christopher Hatton, and other men of station iu his time. His earliest known work was printed iu 1562. After the death of Sir Philip Sidney, in 1584, he completed Sir Philip's translation of Philippe de Mornay's French treatise on the ' Truth of Christianity;' and he must have been alive till 1587, when that translation was published, or perhaps for two or three years longer. The dates of his published writings extend over the whole of the period thus marked out. They amount to about thirty ; of which however, besides some copies of verses, one only is original, a religious 'Discourse upon the Earthquake' of 1580. Tho rest of
them are translations, chiefly from the Latin, but some from the French. Several are theological or ecclesiastical works of Calvin, Chytrmus, Bishop Grosteste, and others : two or three are historical. But those which were most useful to his contemporaries were his translations from the Latin classics. These embraced, in succession, prose versions of Justin, Caesar, Seneca, Pomponius Mela, and Soliuus, and a spirited and not very unfaithful translation of Ovid's Meta morphoses' into fourteen-syllable verse. Four books of the Ovid were published in 1565, and the complete work in 1575. Golding deserves to be commemorated, on account of the great influence which he and other translators of the classics exercised upon the dawning poetry of Eoglaud.