Thomas Drant participated in the most forward-looking literary and ecclesiastical movements of the early Elizabethan period. As a protégé of the future archbishop of Canterbury Edmund Grindal, he acquired several important preferments and preached at both Windsor Court (1570) and St. Mary's Spittle (1570 and 1572); judging from the publication of his sermons, he was a successful preacher. In addition to his life as a clergyman, Drant was a man of letters. He reports in Silva (1578") that as an undergraduate he published verse under a pseudonym and that he spent a good deal of time translating Homer. His translations of Horace in the 1560s were the first in English. In addition, his rules for the writing of quantitative verse in English, though never printed and now lost, were important matters of discussion in the circle of Gabriel Harvey, Sir Edward Dyer, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney during...