on him or on Berners the parentage of English euphuism have not at present proved successful. North's work was, nevertheless, highly popular in his day. In 1568 appeared a second edition, ‘now newly reuised and corrected by hym, refourmed of faultes escaped in the first edition; with an amplification also of a fourth booke annexed to the same, entituled the Fauored Courtier, neuer heretofore imprinted in our vulgar tongue. Right necessarie and pleasaunt to all noble and vertuous persones (by Richard Tottill and Thomas Marshe, Anno Domino 1568).’ A third edition appeared in 1582, and a fourth in 1619.
In 1570 he brought out his second work, entitled ‘The Morall Philosophie of Doni: Drawne out of the auncient writers. A worke first compiled in the Indian tongue, and afterwards reduced into diuers other languages: and now lastly Englished out of Italian by Thomas North, brother to the Right Honourable Sir Roger North, knight, Lorde North of Kyrtheling.’ A second edition is dated 1601. A reprint, edited by Mr. J. Jacobs, appeared in 1891. The book consists of a collection of ancient oriental fables, rendered with rare wit and vigour from the Italian of Antonio Francesco Doni.
In 1579 North published the work by which he will be best remembered—his translation of Plutarch's ‘Lives,’ which he rendered from the French of Amyot. It was entitled ‘The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that graue learned Philosopher and Historiographer, Plutarke of Chæronea: Translated out of Greeke into French by James Amyot, Abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the King's Priuy Counsel, and Great Amner of Fraunce; and out of French into Englishe by Thomas North. Imprinted at London by Thomas Vautrouiller and John Wight, 1579,’ fol. A new title-page introduces ‘the Lives of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus, translated out of Latine into French by Charles de l'Escluse, and out of French into English by Thomas North.’ A second edition appeared in 1595, fol. (‘R. Field for B. Norton’). In 1603 to a new edition were ‘added the Lives of Epaminondas, of Philip of Macedon, of Dionysius the elder, tyrant of Sicilia, of Augustus Cæsar, of Pluturke, and of Seneca: with the liues of nine other excellent Chieftaines of Warre: collected out of Emylius Probus by S. G. S., and Englished by the aforesaid Translator.’ A later edition was in two parts, dated respectively 1610 and 1612. Other issues are dated 1631, 1657—in which, according to Wood, Selden had a hand—and 1676 (Cambridge, fol.). This was the last complete edition. North's translation was supplanted in popular reading by one which appeared in 1683–6, with a preface by Dryden, and subsequently by the well-known edition of John and William Langhorne, which was issued in 1770.
North dedicated the book to Queen Elizabeth, and it was one of the most popular of her day. It is written throughout in admirably vivid and robust prose. But it is as Shakespeare's storehouse of classical learning that it presents itself in its most interesting aspect. To it (it is not too much to say) we owe the existence of the plays of ‘Julius Cæsar,’ ‘Coriolanus,’ and ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ while ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream,’ ‘Pericles,’ and ‘Timon of Athens’ are all indebted to it. In ‘Coriolanus’ whole speeches have been transferred bodily from North, but it is in ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ that North's diction has been most closely followed. Collier is of opinion that Shakespeare used the third edition, and Mr. Allan Park Paton has written a learned but unconvincing pamphlet to prove that a copy of that edition, now in the Greenock Library, was the poet's property, and the very book from which he worked. In 1875, ‘Shakespeare's Plutarch, being a selection from the Lives in North's Plutarch which illustrate Shakespeare's Plays,’ was edited by the Rev. W. W. Skeat, who says that, although North fell into some mistakes which Amyot had avoided, his English is especially good, racy, and well expressed. ‘He had the advantage of writing at a period when nervous idiomatic English was well understood and commonly written; so that he constantly uses expressions which illustrate in a very interesting manner the language of our Authorised Version of the Bible.’ ‘Four Chapters of North's Plutarch,’ containing the lives of Coriolanus, Cæsar, Antonius, and Brutus, were edited by F. A. Leo, 1878, 4to; and numerous single lives have appeared in Cassell's ‘Universal Library.’
