Those who may be want to find the whole passage in Lewis may not be able to locate the original Oxford History of English Literature volume, "English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama" (1954), which is the edition cited by Avva.

It was reissued in 1990, with the (needlessly confusing) new title of "Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century."

In both editions, the section on Gavin Douglas (Lewis' preferred spelling) is in Book I: Late Medieval," Chapter I, "The Close of the Middle Ages in Scotland."

Might Lewis, as an Ulsterman, have had the advantage of knowing some Scots from his playground days?

I am surprised that copies of Gradus ad Parnassum are as rare as they appear to be. I've only found one used copy online of the Latin work with English translations, and that from 1880. My university library catalogue has some Latin-only versions, but there is no modern reproduction edition e.g., Scolar. I would have thought that a work "recently" used would be more generally available.

Jonathan Cohen: It's the OED; it was "recently" in Murray's day. The schoolboy term for what they used in the latter half of the 19th Century is "Carey's Gradus", short for Gradus ad Parnassum with the English meanings. Edited by the late Dr. Carey. Revised, Corrected, and Augmented by a member of the University of Cambridge. A quick check around shows one unsold at £2.00 recently on eBay and three for sale now on ABE (title: gradus; keyword: carey), including one in Spain for €10.

I used Carey's Gradus at school in the 1960s - not recently, but Murray was a long time dead by then.

I like the argument in this post, but you also have to bear in mind that Virgil was almost certainly aiming for a degree of "spectral solemnity" when he wrote the Aeneid. It may be one of the most artificial poems ever created.

E.g. on a purely technical level, Classical Latin poetry, by its adoption of Greek metrical conventions, locked itself into a mode of expression which wasn't particularly well suited to the Latin language (as if Dryden, in his translation, felt obliged to pastiche Ariosto for reasons entirely independent of his subject); artistically, Virgil was an offshoot of the Hellenistic. The Aeneid arguably owes more to Apollonius Rhodius than to Homer (I'm not saying it isn't a greater poem than the Argonautica), and the language of any translation should allow for that; and politically it was all about the dignity of the new regime.

You might argue that a translation of the Aeneid whose language reverts to the idioms of traditional epic is, to some extent, missing the point.

What you say is true, of course, but it seems to me a far higher priority to make a translation come alive in its modern language than to have it try to reproduce some ancient chain of influence. (Of course, Pound had a typically brilliant stab at combining the two by rendering Homer into alliterative Germanic-epic-style verse at the beginning of the Cantos.)