John Evelyn’s Translation of the Dies irae

In a letter to Evelyn of 1656, Jeremy Taylor asked him if he would attempt a translation of the medieval hymn the Dies irae. Along with many of Evelyn's other unprinted poems and translations the outcome was lost to view until a very recent date, and is here printed, as far as is known, for the first time. The work is placed in the context of the hymn's wider translation history, and texts of two further seventeenth-century manuscript translations are provided for comparison.