Given that he wrote and published some of the most stunningly handsome books of the 17th century, John Ogilby has not been served well by literary history. The Fables of Aesop (1651), the first complete English translation of Virgil (1654), a two-volume edition of the Authorised Version of the Bible (1660) plus vernacular versions of the Iliad (1660) and Odyssey (1665) were all magisterial folios, produced with the clearest of type, the widest of margins and on the heaviest of paper. Ogilby wrote specifically for those with deep pockets and fine libraries, an elite book-buying public who could afford translations illustrated with copious and expensive engravings. He would have been particularly nettled, then, by John Dryden’s influential assessment of his legacy in the verse satire ‘Mac Flecknoe’ (1676), written in the year of Ogilby’s death. Listing him among a handful of ‘neglected authors’, Dryden described Ogilby’s works as ‘Martyrs of pies, and relics of the bum’.
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