kingdom of Bohemia at all, or of that modern barbaric name, with anything so entirely belonging to the old classic world as the Oracle of Delphi. The story (though no earlier record of it has yet been discovered) is not improbably much older than either Shakespeare or Greene: the latter no doubt expanded and adorned it, and mainly gave it its present shape; but it is most likely that he had for his groundwork some rude popular legend or tradition, the characteristic middle age geography and chronology of which he most properly did not disturb.

But the most brilliant pamphleteer of this age was Thomas Nash. Nash is the author of one slight dramatic piece, mostly in blank verse, but partly in prose, and having also some lyrical poetry interspersed, called Summer's Last Will and Testament, which was exhibited before Queen Elizabeth at Nonsuch in 1592; and he also assisted Marlow in his Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, which, although not printed till 1594, is supposed to have been written before 1590. But his satiric was of a much higher order than his dramatic talent. There never perhaps was poured forth such a rushing and roaring torrent of wit, ridicule, and invective, as in the rapid succession of pamphlets which he published in the course of the year 1589 against the Puritans and their famous champion (or rather knot of champions) taking the name of Martin Mar-Prelate; unless in those in which he began two years after to assail poor Gabriel Harvey, his persecution of and controversy with whom lasted a much longer time-till indeed the Archbishop of Canterbury (Whitgift) interfered in 1597 to restore the peace of the realm by an order that all Harvey's and Nash's books should be taken wherever they might be found, "and that none of the said books be ever printed hereafter." Mr. D'Israeli has made both these controversies familiar to modern readers by his lively accounts of the one in his Quarrels, of the other in his Calamities, of Authors; and ample specimens of the criminations and recriminations hurled at one another by Nash and Harvey have also been given by Mr. Dyce in the Life of Greene prefixed to his edition of that writer's dramatic and poetical works. Harvey too was a man of eminent talent; but it was of a kind very different from that of Nash. Nash's style is remarkable for its airiness and facility; clear it of its old spelling, and, unless it be for a few words and idioms which have now dropt out of the popular speech, it has quite a modern air. This may show, by-the-by, that the lan

guage has not altered so much since the latter part of the sixteenth century as the ordinary prose of that day would lead us to suppose; the difference is rather that the generality of writers were more pedantic then than now, and sought, in a way that is no longer the fashion, to brocade their composition with what were called ink-horn terms, and outlandish phrases never used except in books. If they had been satisfied to write as they spoke, the style of that day (as we may perceive from the example of Nash) would have in its general character considerably more resembled that of the present. Gabriel Harvey's mode of writing exhibits all the peculiarities of his age in their most exaggerated form. He was a great scholar-and his composition is inspired by the very genius of pedantry; full of matter, full often of good sense, not unfrequently rising to a tone of dignity, and even eloquence, but always stiff, artificial, and elaborately unnatural to a degree which was even then unusual. We may conceive what sort of chance such a heavy-armed combatant, encumbered and oppressed by the very weapons he carried, would have in a war of wit with the quick, elastic, inexhaustible Nash, and the showering jokes and sarcasms that flashed from his easy, natural pen. Harvey, too, with all his merits, was both vain and envious; and he had some absurdities which afforded tempting game for satire. In particular he plumed himself on having reformed the barbarism of English verse by setting the example of modelling it after the Latin hexameter: "If I never deserve any better remembrance," he exclaims in one of his pamphlets, "let me be epitaphed the inventor of the English hexameter!" Nash, again, profanely characterises the said hexameter as "that drunken staggering kind of verse, which is all up hill and down hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and Beechfield, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the deep of winter-now soused up to the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes" (in these last words, we suppose, exemplifying the thing he describes and derides).

ENGLISH HEXAMETER VERSE.

Harvey, however, did not want imitators in his crotchet; and among them were some of high name. He boasts, in the same place where he claims the credit of the invention, of being able

to reckon among his disciples, not only "learned Mr. Stanyhurst,"--that is Richard Stanyhurst, who in 1583 produced a most extraordinary performance, which he called a translation of the First Four Books of the Æneid, in this reformed verse,* but "excellent Sir Philip Sidney," who, he observes, had not disdained to follow him in his Arcadia and elsewhere. This is stated in his Four Letters and certain Sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene, 1582. But from a preceding publication, entitled Three Proper and Witty Familiar Letters lately passed between two University Men, touching the Earthquake in April last, and our English Reformed Versifying, which were given to the world in 1580,‡ we learn that Edmund Spenser too seemed, or professed himself, for a short time half inclined to enlist himself among the practitioners of the new method. The two University men between whom the Letters had passed are Spenser (who is designated Immerito) and Harvey, with whom he had become intimate at Cambridge (they were both of Pembroke Hall), and by whom he is supposed to have been introduced to Sidney a short time before this correspondence began. The Letters are in fact five in number; the original three, before the pamphlet was published, having had two others added to them, "of the same men's writing, both touching the foresaid artificial versifying and certain other particulars, more lately delivered unto the printer." The publication is introduced by a Preface from "a Well-willer" to both writers, who professes to have come by the letters at fourth or fifth hand, through a friend, "who with much entreaty had procured the copying of them out at Immerito's hands." He had not, he declares, made the writers privy to the publication. The merits of Harvey's letters in particular-which form indeed the principal part of the pamphlet, and to which the only one by Spenser originally designed to be given is merely introductory-are trumpeted forth in this Preface in a very confident style :-"But show me or Immerito," exclaims the Well-willer, "two English letters in print in all points equal to the other two, both for the matter itself and also for the manner of handling, and say we never saw

*This very scarce volume was reprinted, under the care of Mr. Maidment, in 4to., at Edinburgh in 1836.

+ Reprinted by Sir E. Brydges in the second volume of the Archaica, 1813. Reprinted in the second volume of Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy, edited by Joseph Haslewood, 2 vols. 4to. Lond. 1811-15.

good English letters in our lives." "And yet," he adds, "I am credibly informed by the foresaid faithful and honest friend, that himself [the writer of the said two letters] hath written many of the same stamp both to courtiers and others, and some of them discoursing upon matters of great weight and importance, wherein he is said to be fully as sufficient and habile as in those scholarly points of learning." Nevertheless, this well-wisher, or his faithful and honest friend, was strongly suspected at the time to be no other than Harvey himself. Nash declares in one of his pamphlets that the compositor by whom the Well-willer's epistle, or Preface, was set up, swore to him that it came under Harvey's own hand to be printed. And in another place, addressing Harvey, he says, "You were young in years when you privately wrote the letters that afterward were publicly divulged by no other but yourself. Signior Immerito was counterfeitly brought in to play a part in that his interlude of epistles. I durst on my credit undertake Spenser was in no way privy to the committing of them to print. Committing I will call it, for in my opinion G. H. should not have reaped so much discredit by being committed to Newgate, as by committing that misbelieving prose to the press." Nash's authority, however, is none of the best; and it is fair to add that Harvey himself, in one of his Four Letters published in 1592, speaks of the present letters as having been sent to the press either by some malicious enemy or some indiscreet friend. It can hardly be supposed that he designed to conceal himself under the latter description.

But to return to what Spenser tells us of his studies and experiments in English hexameters and pentameters. In one letter, written from Leicester House, Westminster, in October, 1579, he says: "As for the two worthy gentlemen, Mr. Sidney and Mr. Dyer [afterwards Sir Edward Dyer, and greatly esteemed as a writer of verse in his day], they have me, I thank them, in some use and familiarity, of whom and to whom what speech passeth to your credit and estimation I leave yourself to conceive; having always so well conceived of my unfeigned affection and zeal towards you. And now they have proclaimed in their aрεway a general surceasing and silence of bald rhymers, and also of the very best too; instead whereof they have, by authority of their whole senate, prescribed certain rules and laws of quantities of English syllables for English verse; having had thereof already great practice, and almost drawn me into their

faction." Afterwards he goes farther: "I am more in love," he says, "with English versifying [that was the name by which Harvey and his friends distinguished the new invention] than with rhyming; which I should have done [with?] long since if I would then have followed your counsel." And he concludes, "I received your letter sent me the last week, whereby I perceive you continue your old exercise of versifying in English; which glory I had now thought should have been ours at London and the court." "Trust me," he adds, "your verses I like passingly well, and envy your hidden pains in this kind, or rather malign and grudge at yourself that would not once impart so much to me." He remarks, however, that Harvey has once or twice made a breach in the rules laid down for this new mode of versifying by Master Drant, that is, Thomas Drant, chiefly known as the author of two collections of Latin poetry, entitled Sylva and Poemata Varia, but also the author of some verse translations from the Latin and Greek. "You shall see," says Spenser in conclusion, "when we meet in London (and when it shall be, certify us), how fast I have followed after you in that course beware lest in time I overtake you." And, as a sample of what he had been doing, he subjoins a few English Iambics.

Six months later we find him still occupied with the new method. Writing to Harvey again in the beginning of April 1580, he says: "I like your late English hexameters so exceedingly well that I also enure my pen sometimes in that kind; which I find, indeed, as I have often heard you defend in word, neither so hard nor so harsh [but] that it will easily and fairly yield itself to our mother-tongue." Yet from what follows it almost looks as if he were all the while making sport of his solemn friend and his preposterous invention. The only or

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chiefest hardness which seemeth," he goes on, "is in the accent; which sometime gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth, ill-favouredly, coming short of that it should, and sometime exceeding the measure of the number; as in Carpenter, the middle syllable being used short in speech, when it shall be read long in verse seemeth like a lame gosling, that draweth one leg after her; and Heaven, being used short as one syllable, when it is in verse stretched out with a diastole is like a lame dog that holds up leg." Nash's ridicule is hardly so unmerciful as this. Spenser, however, adds, by way of consolation, "But it is to be won with custom, and rough words must be subdued with use." After

one