A HONEYMOON

WHEN you married him, I know for your part, he was your first love; and I judge the like of him. What the freedom and simplicity of those humours were, every man is a witness, that hath not forgotten his own youth. And though it be rather a counsel of remorse than help, to lay before you your errors past; yet because they teach you to know, that time is it which maketh the same thing easy and impossible, leaving withal an experience for things to come; I must in a word lay occasion past before you.

Madame, in those near conjunctions of society, wherein death is the only honourable divorce, there is but one end, which is mutual joy; and to that end two assured ways: the one, by cherishing affection with affection: the other, by working affection, while she is yet in her pride, to a reverence, which hath more power than it self. To which are required advantage, or at least equality art, as well as nature. For contempt is else as near as respect; the lovingest mind being not ever the most lovely. Now though it be true that affections are relatives, and love the surest adamant of love; yet must it not be measured by the untemperate elne of it self, since prodigality yields fulness, satiety a desire of change, and change repentance: but so tempered even in trust, enjoying, and all other familiarities, that the appetites of them we would please may still be covetous, and their strengths rich. Because the decay of either is a point of ill huswifery, and they that are first bankrupt shut up their doors.

In this estate of minds, only governed by the unwritten laws of Nature, you did at the beginning live happily together. Wherein there is a lively image of that Golden Age, which the allegories of the poets figure unto us. For there Equality guided without absoluteness, Earth yielded fruit without labour, Desert perished in reward, the names of Wealth and Poverty were strange, no owing in particular, no private improving of humours, the traffic being love for love; and the exchange all for all: exorbitant abundance being never curious in those self-seeking arts, which tear up the bowels of the Earth for the private use of more than milk and honey. Notwithstanding, since in the vicissitude of things and times, there must of necessity follow a Brazen Age, there ought to be a discreet care in love; in respect the

advantage will prove theirs that first usurp, and breaking through the laws of Nature, strive to set down their own reaches of will.

Here Madame, had it been in your power, you should have framed that second way of peace, studying to keep him from evil, whose corruption could not be without misfortune to you. For there is no man, but doth first fall from his duties to himself, before he can fall away from his duty to others. This second way is, that where affection is made but the gold, to hold a jewel far more precious than it self: I mean respect and reverence; which two powers, well mixed, have exceeding strong and strange variety of working. For instance, take Coriolanus, who Plutarch saith-loved worthiness for his mother's sake. And though true love contain them both, yet because our corruption hath, by want of differences, both confounded words and beings, I must vulgarly distinguish names, as they are current.

(From a Letter sent to an honourable Lady.)

THE EXCELLENCE OF DUTY

THEREFORE noble Lady, as the straight line shews both it self and the crooked: so doth an upright course of life, yield all true ways of advantage, and by mastering our own affections, anatomizeth all inferior passions, making known the distinct branches out of which the higher powers of kindness, respect, and admiration do arise. A map, wherein we may by the same wisdom of moderation, choose for ourselves that which is least in the power of others. Besides, it plainly discovers that jealousy acknowledgeth advantage of worth, and so becomes the triumph of libertines; that grief is the punishment of wrong, or right ill-used. Curiosity ever returns ill news; anger, how great soever it seems, is but a little humour, springing from opinion of contempt; her causes less than vices, and so not worthy to be loved or hated; but viewed, as lively images to shew the strength and yet frailty of all passions-which passions being but diseases of the mind, do so disease-like thirst after false remedies and deceiving visions; as the weak become terrified with those glow-worm lights, out of which wise subjects often fashion arts to govern absolute monarchs by. For Madame, as nourishment which feeds and maintains our life, is yet the perfect pledge of our

mortality so are these light-moved passions true and assured notes of little natures, placed in what great estates soever. Besides, by this practice of obedience, there grow many more commodities. Since first, there is no loss in duty; so as you must at the least win of your self by it, and either make it easy for you to become unfortunate, or at least find an easy and honourable passage out of her intricate lines and circles. Again, if it be true, which the philosophers hold, that virtues and vices, disagreeing in all things else, yet agree in this; that where there is one in esse, in posse there are all: then cannot any excellent faculty of the mind be alone, but it must needs have wisdom, patience, piety, and all other enemies of Chance to accompany it ; as against and amongst all storms, a calmed and calming Mens adepta.

(From the Same.)

WILLIAM WEBBE

[A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586) was written by William Webbe, a Cambridge scholar, while tutor to the sons of Mr. Edward Sulyard at the manor-house of Flemyngs in Essex. Little is known of Webbe apart from his treatise. He was a friend of Robert Wilmot, one of the authors of the "sententiously composed" tragedy of Tancred and Gismunda, and wrote a letter to him, printed in Wilmot's revised version of the tragedy in 1592.]

LITERARY criticism was not to be found in England, except in an occasional and parenthetical form, till the time of Queen Elizabeth. In other countries there had been earlier essays in this field, of which Dante's treatise de Vulgari Eloquio is the chief, while there are others, the Provençal Rasos de Trobar, the Art de dictier et faire balades of Eustache Deschamps, and the letter of the Marquis of Santillana to the Constable of Portugal, in which various portions of the subject are dealt with, from the elements of grammar to the universal history of the poetic art.

In few of the earlier pieces of criticism in English is there much breadth of view; none, except Sidney's Apology, goes much beyond the rudiments of verse on the one hand, or commonplace disquisitions on the utility of poetry on the other. Prosody was one of the principal objects of attention; the literature dealing with it ranges from Gascoigne's Notes of Instruction to the various documents in favour of the classical forms of verse, and from these to Campion's advocacy of rhymeless but not classical forms, and Daniel's Defence of Rhyme. The debate on the value of poetry, which called out Sidney's Apology, is mainly connected with the Puritan assault on the theatres, but goes on independently. The fullest Elizabethan summary of all the popular hypocrisies about poetry is Harington's introduction to his Orlando Furioso, taken along with his moral and edifying applications of each canto of that poem.

Webbe's essay refers directly to Gascoigne's Notes of Instruc

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tion concerning the making of verse or rhyme in English, published in 1575; it does not improve on them. Gascoigne's advice to poets is a plain statement of elementary rules; a sensible explanation of English metre and English forms of stanza, the Rime Royal, the Sonnet, and others. Such doctrine was not superfluous at that time; and it came none too soon, to help to drill the shambling and self-satisfied doggerel of the common rhymers into something like humanity. There is nothing very complicated or subtle in Gascoigne's notes; they fall in with the Provençal grammarian, in recognising the practical advantages of a rhyming dictionary :—“To help you a little with rhyme (which is also a plain young scholar's lesson) work thus: when you have set down your first verse, take the last word thereof, and count over all the words of the selfsame sound by order of the alphabets; as for example the last word of your first line is care; to rhyme therewith you have bare, clare, dare, fare, gare, hare, and share, mare, snare, rare, stare, and ware, etc. Of all these take that which best may serve your purpose, carrying reason with rhyme; and if none of them will serve so, then alter the last word of your former verse, but yet do not willingly alter the meaning of your invention." Gascoigne's sound judgment is shown in his regret that all English verse should be reduced to the iambic, whereas “ we have used in times past other kinds of metres,” and also in his remarks on that dull fashion of poetry common in his time, which made couplets of an Alexandrine and a fourteen-syllable line alternately. Gascoigne calls this "poulter's measure, which giveth xii. for one dozen, and xiv. for another," and dismisses it to the hymnbooks, where it may still be found: "The long verse of twelve and fouretene syllables, although it be nowadayes vsed in all Theames, yet in my iudgment it would serve best for Psalmes and Himpnes."

Webbe founds his discourse on Ascham's Schoolmaster, especially in the theory that rhyme was brought first into Italy by the "Hunnes and Gothians." He does not quite share Ascham's contempt for "our rude and beggarly rhyming": he admires Phaer's "famous translation" of Virgil into the eights and sixes which Ascham slighted. But he also, though somewhat "in the rearward of the fashion,” attaches himself to Gabriel Harvey, and contributes some arguments in favour of the "reformed kind of English verse"; he offers with much satisfaction some of his own hexameters, to the extent of two Eclogues of Virgil—