"Whoever saw a colt, wanton and wild,
Yok'd with a slow foot ox on fallow field,
Can right areed how handsomely besets
Dull spondees with the English dactylets.
If Jove speak English in a thund'ring cloud,
Thwick thwack, and riff raff, roars he out aloud.

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

On crowned kings, that fortune hath low brought:
Or some uprearéd high aspiring swaine,

As it might be the Turkish Tamburlaine:
Then weeneth he his base drink-drownéd spright
Rapt to the threefold loft of heaven height
When he conceives upon his feignéd stage
The stalking steps of his great personage,
Graced with huff-cap terms and thund'ring threats
That his poor hearer's hair quite upright sets."

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
Or manly garlicke.

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.
An Englishman in none, a foole in all :

Many in one, and one in severall.

Then men were men; but now the greater part
Beasts are in life, and women are in heart."

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,
And sometimes visited the dancing school."

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
Bastard.

"Here I converse with those diviner spirits

Whose knowledge and admire the world inherits:
Iere doth the famous profound Stagirite

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,
And learning of that moral lecturer

To temper mine affections, gallantly

Get of myself a glorious victory:

And then, for change, as we delight in change,

(For this my study is indeed my exchange)

Here may I sit, yet walk to Westminster

And hear Fitzherbert, Plowden, Brooke, and Dyer
Canvas a law-case: or if my dispose
Persuade me to a play, I'll to the Rose
Or Curtain, one of Plautus' comedies,
Or the pathetic Spaniard's tragedies;

If my desire doth rather wish the fields,

Some speaking painter, some poet, straightway yields

A flower-bespangled walk, where I may hear

Some amorous swain his passions declare

To his sun-burnt love. Thus my books' little case,
My Study, is mine all, mine every place.”

One book of epigrams, published in 1598, was by an Oxford man. This was the "Chrestoleros. Seven Bookes of Epigrames, written by T. B.," that is Thomas Bastard, who was born in 1566 at Blandford, in Dorsetshire. He was educated at Winchester School

and New College, Oxford, whither he went with a scholarship, and where he was registered in August, 1586, as "Pleb. fil., æt. 20." In the next year (1587) Thomas Bastard contributed Latin verses to an Oxford collection made in honour of the memory of Philip Sidney. In 1588 he obtained a fellowship. In May, 1590, he was admitted B.A., and took his M.A. in 1606, being then in orders. Bastard's readiness at satire brought him into difficulty at Oxford, and in 1591, he was, says Anthony Wood, "in a manner forced to leave his fellowship." Bastard took orders, and, through the friendship of the Earl and Countess of Suffolk, became vicar of Bere Regis and rector of Aylmer, in Dorsetshire. Wood's record of Oxford worthies further tells us that "this poet and preacher, being towards his latter end crazed, and thereupon brought into debt, was at length committed to the prison in Allhallows parish in Dorchester, where, dying very obscurely, and in a mean condition, he was buried in the churchyard belonging to that parish on nineteenth April, 1618, leaving behind him many memorials of his wit and drollery."

Thomas Bastard's "Chrestoleros" (serviceable trifling, is the meaning of that word), dedicated to Sir Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, contains two hundred and ninety epigrams, varying in length from two to sixteen lines, and distributed in seven books. Some of these epigrams are playful, some are loyal, some religious; some are addressed to the praise of Elizabeth, Essex, Sir Thomas Egerton, Mountjoy, Samuel Daniel, Dr. Reynolds. This is his epigram

"Ad librum suum.

"Lye not, my booke, for that were wickednes:

Be not too idle, idle though thou be:

Eschewe scurrilitie and wantonnesse,
Temper with little mirth more gravity.

"Rayle not at any, least thy friends forsake thee:
In earnest cause of writing shew thy witt.
Touch none at all, that no man may mistake thee,
But speak the best, that all may like of it.

66

Whitgift's
Edict against

Satire.

If any aske thee what I doe professe,

Say, that of which thou art the idlenesse."

But Archbishop Whitgift found much offence in sudden outbreak of the idleness of wisdom. It was his way always to put his foot down upon what he thought to be an evil, and on the first of June, 1599, it was Epigram and ordered by John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London, as licensers, "That no satyres or epigrams be printed hereafter." Remaining copies of Marston's "Pigmalion," and "Scourge of Villanie," were presently burnt in obedience to the order that "Such bookes as can be found or are already taken, of the argumentes aforesaid, or any of the bookes above expressed, lett them bee presentlye brought to the Bishop of London to be burnte. J. CANTUAR. RIC. LONDIN."

The Parnassus Plays of Cam

bridge.

But at St. John's College, Cambridge, satire made for itself in these years a stage, and more than one young member of the university was engaged, Christmas after Christmas, in the production of three successive comedies or moralities that touched, in the spirit of young Hall or Marston, the ills of life, as they affected the career of Cambridge scholars. When they went out into the world, they found their learning useless. When they sought advancement in the Church, they found their careers blocked by simony. These themes, with incidental satire of unpopular Cambridge officials, and much young talk about the writers of the day, not overlooking Shakespeare, give an interest. beyond their merits to the three parts of one parable. The First Part, called "The Pilgrimage to Parnassus," was first