That did befall to two young men

As they to market went.

The one of them hight Richard,

The truth for to say,

The other they called him Robert,

Upon a holiday."

Ingenioso comes upon a boastful Gullio who so mixes his talk with phrases from the poets that Ingenioso says of it, "We shall have nothing but pure Shakespeare and shreds of poetry that he hath gathered at the theatres." Says Gullio, "Pardon me moy mittressa, ast am a gentleman, the moon in comparison of thy bright hue a mere slut, Anthony's Cleopatra a black browed milkmaid, Helen a dowdy." On which Ingenioso comments aside, "Mark, Romeo and Juliet ! O monstrous theft! I think he will run through a whole book of Samuel Daniel's." Upon Gullio's further exclamations Ingenioso's comment is, "Sweet Mr. Shakespeare!" Ingenioso shall write some love-verses for Gullio's mistress. Let him bring samples "in two or three divers veins, in Chaucer's, Gower's, and Spenser's, and Mr. Shakespeare's. Marry, I think I shall entertain those verses which run like these

"Even as the sun with purple-coloured face

Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn," etc.

"O sweet Mr. Shakespeare!" When the specimens are brought, Chaucer's and Spenser's vein are not for Gullio, but Shakespeare's is: "Let this duncified world esteem of Spenser and Chaucer, I'll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare, and to honour him will lay his 'Venus and Adonis' under my pillow, as we read of one (I do not well remember his name, but I am sure he was a king) slept with Homer under his bed's head." All the scholars have found base employment, and are out even of that, at the end of the First Part of "The Return from Parnassus."

The Second Part continues with a fuller series of such illustrations, with severer censure of the thriving of dull ignorance and greed, with what seems to have been bold caricature of a university official, and especially with satire of base traffic in Church livings, the Simony of which that part of "The Return from Parnassus" by its second title professed to be the Scourge.

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There is in this part a criticism of authors quoted by John Bodenham in his then new 'Belvedere, or, The Garden of the Muses," published in 1600. The criticism begins with contempt for Bodenham himself. Spenser is called

"A sweeter swan than ever sung in Po,

A shriller nightingale than ever blest

The prouder groves of self-admiring Rome.
Blithe was each valley, and each shepherd proud,
While he did chant his rural minstrelsy.
Attentive was full many a dainty ear.

Nay hearers hung upon his melting tongue
While sweetly of his Faerie Queene he sung,
While to the waters' fall he tuned her fame,
And in each book engraved Eliza's name.
And yet, for all, this unregarding soil
Unlaced the line of his desiréd life,
Denying maintenance for his dear relief,
Careless e'er to prevent his exequy,
Scarce deigning to shut up his dying eye."

Of other poets it is said—

"Sweet Constable doth take the wandering ear,
And lays it up in willing prisonment:
Sweet honey-dropping Daniel doth wage
War with the proudest big Italian
That melts his heart in sugared sonneting,
Only let him more sparingly make use
Of others' wit, and use his own the more,

That well may scorn base imitation.

For Lodge and Watson: men of some desert,
Yet subject to a critic's marginal,

Lodge for his oar in every paper boat,

He that turns over Galen every day,

To sit and simper Euphues' Legacy."

There are further comments upon Drayton, John Davies, Henry Lok, and Thomas Hudson-the works of the two last-named simply banished to "old nooks amongst old boots and shoes "-John Marston, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Churchyard and Nash.

Henry Lok,* last heard of in 1608 at the age of about fifty-five, Iwas third son of a well-connected London mercer. He studied at Oxford without taking a degree, went to court and sought employment

* Henry Lok's poems were privately published in an edition of 106 copies by Dr. Grosart in his "Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies Library," with a "Memorial Introduction." (1871.)

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there. In 1598 he was asking for the post of keeper of the Queen's bears and mastiffs, saying "it is better to be a bear-herd than to be baited daily with great exclamations for small debts." He published in 1597 a metrical paraphrase of Ecclesiasticus, and two hundred Sonnets of Christian Passions, some of which had appeared before, in 1593. Thomas Hudson was in the service of James VI. of Scotland. He published at Edinburgh, in 1584, a translation of the "Judith of Du Bartas, and contributed in 1585 a sonnet to King James's "Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Arte of Poesie."

Then say the young Cambridge critics, who did scant justice to Lok and Hudson

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Drayton's sweet muse is like a sanguine dye
Able to ravish the rash gazer's eye."

"However, he wants one true note of a Poet of our times, and that is this, he cannot swagger it well in a tavern, nor domineer in a pothouse." This corroborates the record we have had already from Francis Meres, who wrote, as a personal friend, of Drayton's pure and honourable character. Marston is satirized as Monsieur Kinsayder. Ben Jonson is called by Judicio "the wittiest fellow of a bricklayer in England;" while Ingenioso puts in the disguised praise that he is "a mere empiric, one that gets what he hath by observation, and makes only nature privy to what he indites; so slow an inventor that he had better betake himself to his old trade of bricklaying; a bold whoreson, as confident now in making a book as he was in times past in laying a brick."

"William Shakespeare.

Who loves not Adon's love or Lucrece' rape,

His sweeter verse contains heart-throbbing lines,
Could but a graver subject him content,
Without love's foolish lazy languishment."

In such fashion young Cambridge sat in judgment upon English writers of the last years of Elizabeth.

ALL who read Shakespeare are content to hear his works described as a Lay Bible, but many pause when it is added that they are not so by chance.

Shakespeare's

Every play-every tale with a plot in it, good Way of Work. or bad-is somebody's notion of an interweaving of the lives and actions of men and women, with, so far as it has any plot at all, some problem of human life, and in the end somebody's notion of the way to solve it. A dramatist or novelist, with a low view of life, may represent a hero or a heroine opposing hate to hate, or even cutting the knot of a story with a lie. His works would not be a Lay Bible. Shakespeare, I have said, and repeat, never allows evil to be overcome with evil; he invariably shows evil overcome with good, the diseases of man's life healed only by man's love to God and to his neighbour. Love God, Love your Neighbour, Do your Work: subject the active business of life to the commandments upon which hang all the law and the prophets : Shakespeare's plays contain no lessons that are not subordinate to these. From dogmatism he is free, of the true spirit of religion he is full. It is for this reason that we all agree in feeling that his works are a Lay Bible, however they became so. How could it have come but by the picturing of life with the religious spirit that was in himself? Religion does not forbid cakes and ale. The broadest sympathies are part of

it. The brightest wit may be spent by a dramatist in painting characters and manners of men who speak with their own tongues, and make evil their good, while his own sense of life and truth makes it impossible for him to mislead those whom he is teaching through delight. In Shakespeare's time there was none but Puritan dissent from the opinion set forth by Sir Philip Sidney in his "Defence of Poesy,"* that the purpose of the poet is to delight and teach, but so to delight that he shall not seem to be teaching.

"He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margin with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulness, but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner; and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue, even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste, which, if one should begin to tell them the nature of the aloes or rhubarbarum they should receive, would sooner take their physic at their ears than at their mouth; so it is in men (most of them are childish till they be cradled in their graves), glad they will be to hear the tales of Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, Æneas; and hearing them, must needs hear the right description of wisdom, valour, and justice, which, if they had been barely (that is to say, philosophically) set out, they would swear they be brought to school again."

And when the study of a play of Shakespeare's begins with "obscure definitions, which must blur the margin with interpretations and load the memory with doubtfulness," its victim may swear safely not only that he is put to school again, but that he is put to a bad school. Shakespeare's first reason for the choice of a story was that it was a good story, which would please his public, and could be told as a play. Next would inevitably come the business of thinking it over, and conceiving its arrangement into acts. But a story

*"E. W.," ix. 133-138.