"True judgment slight regards Opinion, "A partial praise shall never elevate My settled censure of mine own esteem. Shall ne'er provoke me worse myself to deem : I am myself, so is my poesie." A preface in verse to unworthy readers bids them rail, and ends with this ingenious little ditty "But ye diviner wits, celestial souls, Whose free-born minds no kennel thought controls, Ye sacred spirits, Maia's eldest sons; "Ye substance of the shadows of our age, 66 To you how cheerfully my Poem runs! 'True-judging eyes, quick-sighted censurers, O how my love embraces your great worth! "Ye idols of my soul, ye blessed spirits, "You sacred spirits, Maia's eldest sons, To you how cheerfully my Poem runs! O how my love embraceth your great worth, There followed a prose address "to those that seem judicial perusers," whereto Marston, whose name is not on the title-page, signed himself "W. Kinsayder." The name was taken from a homely word for the cure of mad dogs by cropping their tails. Its root is in the old French cagnon or kignon (“a little dog "), applied also in Picardy to a pitiably deformed man. In the three books of satires called "The Scourge for Villanie," there is much honest maintenance of the higher life against the man whose thoughts are low, and there is but one piece directly personal, the added tenth or Satyra Nova of the Third Book, on the theme Stultorum plena sunt omnia. Here he quotes and satirises Hall's attack on his "Pigmalion "An Epigram which the Authour Vergidemiarum caused to be pasted to the latter page of euery Pigmalion that came to the stacioners of Cambridge. "I Ask'd Phisitions what theyr counsell was For a mad dog, or for a mankind Asse? They told mee though there were confections store Whether thou be a mad dog, or a mankind Asse." * Mark the witty allusion to my name. Marston might well laugh, in a satire addressed to E. G. (Edward Guilpin), a Cambridge friend, at that very poor. specimen of academic wit. Virgidemiarum, Libri VI. Joseph's Hall's six books Virgidemiarum-i.e., of rodharvests, stripes, or blows-were the work of a clever young man who had read Juvenal and Persius and the satires of Ariosto, and who, because he was the first to write English satire in the manner of Juvenal, ignorantly believed himself to be the first English satirist. "I first adventure," he said in his prologue "I first adventure, follow me who list, Hall's satires are in The mistake is of no consequence. rhyming couplets of ten-syllabled lines; he thought English rhyme inferior to Latin quantity, but saw that the Latin metres could not be applied to English verse, and laughed at Stanihurst. "Whoever saw a colt, wanton and wild, Fie on the forgéd mint that did create New coin of words never articulate!" Hall abounds, as Marston does not, in direct criticisms of the English literature of his time, and his criticism is, after the manner of young omniscience, with little knowledge and no doubt. He laughed at the rising drama, crying "Shame that the Muses should be bought and sold For every peasant's brass on each scaffold." He laughed at what he called "pot fury of the dramatists "One higher pitched doth set his soaring thought As it might be the Turkish Tamburlaine : دو But while Hall attacked the "terms Italianate, bigsounding sentences and words of state upon the stage, he paid homage to Spenser, then near the end of his career. He was burnt out of Kilcolman in October, 1598, left Cork with despatches dated on the ninth of December, and died in London on the sixteenth of January, 1599: "Renowned Spenser whom no earthly wight dares once to emulate, much less dares despight." But Hall paired in the next line Du Bartas with Ariosto : "Salust of France and Tuscan Ariost." The satirist in the golden time of Elizabethan vigour talked as usual of the good old times that were gone, when luxury was not, and our "Grandsires' words savoured of thrifty leeks But thou canst mask in garish gauderie, To suit a fool's far-fetchéd liverie. A French head joyn'd to necke Italian : Thy thighs from Germanie, and brest from Spain. Many in one, and one in severall. Then men were men; but now the greater part If we go back to Occleve, or farther back to Gower, we find that the note has always been the same; sound and true in the steady fixing of attention upon vices and follies to be conquered (since there is small hope for a people that will only praise itself), but with innocent delusion of a bygone golden age. Hall's golden age, however, is not bygone; it is to be found in Spain, if the test of it be a relish for "manly garlic." Edward Guilpin. Another book of satires that appeared in 1598 was the "Skialetheia, or a Shadow of Truth in Certaine Epigrams and Satyres," by Edward Guilpin or Gilpin, of which one perfect copy remains, and from which there are six quotations in "England's Parnassus." Nothing is known of Guilpin himself, except that he also was one of the young Cambridge scholars who amused themselves in 1598 with the publishing of satires. He says of himself in one of the seventy epigrams that form the first part of his book— "I have sized in Cambridge, and my friends a season Some exhibition for me there disburst: Since that I have been in Good his weekly role And been acquaint with Monsieur Lyttleton, I have walked in Paul's and duly dined at noon, Six satires follow, with an introductory flourish in praise of the good use of epigram and satire. In his sixth satire Guilpin illustrates the variety of opinion by citing oppositions of critical opinions about Gower, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Sidney. In the fifth satire Guilpin prefers his cell at College to the city, and finds all he can wish for in his little study: Thomas "Here I converse with those diviner spirits Whose knowledge and admire the world inherits : With Nature's mystic harmony delight My ravished contemplation: I here see The now-old World's youth in an history: Here may I be grave Plato's auditor, To temper mine affections, gallantly Get of myself a glorious victory : And then, for change, as we delight in change, Here may I sit, yet walk to Westminster And hear Fitzherbert, Plowden, Brooke, and Dyer Some speaking painter, some poet, straightway yields may hear Some amorous swain his passions declare To his sun-burnt love. Thus my books' little case, One book of epigrams, published in 1598, was by an Oxford ford, in Dorsetshire. |