.

"Whereunto I doubt not equally to adjoin the authority of our late famous English poet who wrote The Shepheard's Calender; . whose fine poetical wit and most exquisite learning, as he showed abundantly in that piece of work, in my judgment inferior to the works neither of Theocritus in Greek nor Virgil in Latin, whom he narrowly imitateth, so I nothing doubt but if his other works were common abroad, which are, as I think, in the close custody of certain his friends, we should have of our own poets whom we might match in all respects with the best. . . This place have I purposely reserved for one who, if not only, yet in my judgment principally, deserveth the title of the rightest English poet that ever I read, that is, the author of The Shepheard's Calender."-William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetry, 1586.

"And should the challenge of deep conceit be intruded by any foreigner, to bring our English wits to the touchstone of art, I would prefer divine Master Spenser, the miracle of wit, to bandy line for line for my life in the honor of England, 'gainst Spain, France, Italy, and all the world. Neither is he the only swallow of our summer, although Apollo, if his tripos were up again, would pronounce him his Socrates."-Thomas Nash, Preface to Greene's Menaphon, 1589.

Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn; and, passing by that way,
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Faery Queene;

At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept,
And from thenceforth those graces were not seen,
For they this Queene attended; in whose steed
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's herse:
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did perse;
Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief,
And curst th' access of that celestial thief.

-Sir Walter Raleigh, sonnet prefixed to The Faerie Queene, Books I-III, 1590.

"Master Edmund Spenser had done enough for the immortality of his name had he only given us his Shepheard's Calender, a masterpiece if any. . . . . Spenser is the prime pastoralist of England."-Michael Drayton, preface to his Pastorals, 1593.

But let no rebel satire dare traduce
Th' eternal legends of thy faerie Muse,
Renowned Spenser, whom no earthly wight
Dares once to emulate, much less dares despight.
Salust of France, and Tuscan Ariost,

Yield up the laurel garland ye have lost;

And let all others willow wear with me,

Or let their undeserving temples barèd be.

-Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum Libri Sex, I. iv, 1597.

"As Sextius Propertius said, 'Nescio quid magis nascitur Iliade,' so I say of Spenser's Fairy Queene, I know not what more excellent or exquisite poem may be written. . . As Pindarus, Anacreon, and Callimachus among the Greeks, and Horace and Catullus among the Latins, are the best lyric poets, so in this faculty the best among our poets are Spenser (who excelleth in all kinds), Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, Breton."-Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, 1598.

Grave, moral Spenser after these came on,
Than whom I am persuaded there was none,
Since the blind bard his Iliads up did make,
Fitter a task like that to undertake;

To set down boldly, bravely to invent,
In all high knowledge surely excellent.

-Michael Drayton, "To Henry Reynolds," 1627.

"Spenser's stanza pleased him not, nor his matter."-Ben Jonson, as reported in Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond (written, 1619). "Spenser, in affecting the

ancients, writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter, but as Virgil read Ennius."-Ben Jonson, Timber, 1641.

"That Virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that Vice promises to her followers and rejects it, is but a blank Virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness; which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guyon, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know and yet abstain."-John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644.

"Spenser may stand here as the last of this short file of heroic poets, men whose intellectuals were of so great a making as perhaps they will, in worthy memory, outlast even makers of laws and founders of empires. . And since we have dared to remember those exceptions which the curious have against them, it will not be expected I should forget what is objected against Spenser, whose obsolete language we are constrained to mention though it be grown the most vulgar accusation that is laid to his charge. .... But as it is false husbandry to graft old branches upon young stocks, so we may wonder that our language (not long before his time created out of a confusion of others, and then beginning to flourish like a new plant) should, as helps to its increase, receive from his hand new grafts of old withered words. But this vulgar exception shall only have the vulgar excuse, which is that the unlucky choice of his stanza hath, by repetition of rhyme, brought him to the necessity of many exploded words. If we proceed from his language to his argument, we must observe with others that his noble and most artful hands deserved to be employed upon matter of a more natural and therefore of a more useful kind, his allegorical story (by many held defective in the connection) resembling, methinks, a continuance of extraordinary dreams, such as excellent poets and painters, by being over studious, may have in the beginning of fevers; and those moral visions are just of so much use to human application as painted history, when with the cozenage of lights it is represented in scenes by which we are much less informed than by actions on the stage."William Davenant, Preface to Gondibert, 1651.

(90) HIS PILGRIMAGE. Supposed to have been written when Raleigh was in the Tower, under sentence of death for an alleged plot to seize the person of James I. ¶ 1. scallop-shell: one of the badges of a pilgrim, serving (theoretically) for spoon, cup, and dish. pledge.

(91) 25. suckets=sweetmeats.

and in the sense of a coin.

¶5. gage=

42. angels: a pun on the word in its usual sense

JOHN LYLY

(92) SONG BY APELLES. From Campaspe, III. v.

(92) WHAT BIRD SO SINGS, YET SO DOES WAIL. From Campaspe, V. i. ¶ 2. the ravished nightingale: King Tereus, of Thrace, pretending that his wife Procne was dead, married her sister, Philomela; when she discovered the truth, he cut out her tongue; she was finally changed by the gods into the nightingale, whose plaintive song is interpreted to be the expression of Philomela's woe. 5. brave fine, beautiful. prick-song: written music in distinction from extemporaneous; so called from the pricks, or dots, used in writing it down; as applied to the song of birds, the term indicated that the song was somewhat elaborate. ¶ 7. heaven's gates: cf. "Hark! Hark! the Lark," l. 1, p. 133.

GEORGE PEELE

(93) CUPID'S CURSE. From The Arraignment of Paris, I. ii. Ænone, the daughter of a river-god, was the love of Paris before he went to Sparta and eloped with Helen, so bringing on the Trojan War. Ambo Simul- both together. 11. roundelay: a poem with a refrain recurring at regular intervals.

(94) 27. can knows how to do (O. E. “cunnan," to know).

THOMAS LODGE

(94) ROSALIND S MADRIGAL. From Rosalynde.

(95) 18. whist=hush!