Reynolds (Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging), and Karl Mantzius (in his voluminous History of Theatrical Art), down to the elaborately circumstantial theories of the very latest German specialists, such as Dr. Brandl, Robert Prölss (Altenglishes Theater), and Cecil Brodmeier (Die ShakespeareBühne). As in the case with some Teutonic theories concerning Shakespeare's chronology and "Metrik," zeal occasionally outruns discretion, but both zeal and discretion alike seem distanced by prodigious learning.

CHAPTER VI

SPENSER AND HIS SCHOOL

"See in your library whether you have Spenser's Faerie Queene. No English is easier to understand, richer or more flowing; nowhere is there such an assemblage of abundant fiction, blissful imaginations, and marvellous adventures. It is like soaring on the wings of a beautiful swan; this aerial and fantastic world seems Man's natural home. It is like Ariosto, but serious, tender, touching, exalted, Platonican. It resembles in nowise Shakespeare's rapid, tormented, and dazzling Fairyland; it is perfectly calm, bright, and sweet. I shall endeavour to show this delight of Imagination, this beautiful madness of sixteenth-century poetry to our modern public fed on physiological novels."-TAINE, Letters.

Rhyme or classical metres-Gabriel Harvey-Edward Dyer— Two great metrical innovations-Edmund Spenser-The Shepheard's Calender The Faerie Queene-Giles and Phineas Fletcher-Daniel-Drayton.

EVER since the "new learning" had begun to make way in England, English poetry had been mainly experimental and imitative. In the absence of any native literary tradition and of good and available English models, our writers had turned with a commendable humility to the reservoirs of the classics and to the more recent Italian masters. Wyatt and Surrey had followed the Italians; the more original Sackville had been influenced chiefly by Virgil. The writers of 1579 found themselves in the presence of developed literatures, with the formal perfection and maturity of which English literature could not bear comparison. They were oppressed by the superiority of Greek and Latin poetry; and in order to reproduce the merits of the clas sical poetry they thought that its prosody would first have

to be resurrected. It would not have been so very surprising had the development of poetry in England been injured and retarded as it was deplorably retarded in France by a too timid devotion to these models of antiquity.

Between 1570 and 1580 it was actually being debated whether rhyme should not be altogether discarded, and English poetry written for the future in metres consecrated by Greek or Latin usage. The question of the adaptation of English to classical metres was first raised by Roger Ascham in his Scholemaster of 1570.

Thomas Drant, a Cambridge man of a later generation, translated Horace's Satires and his Ars Poetica into classical metre, and when he died in 1578 left some elaborate posthumous rules whereby English might be twisted into quantitative measures such as sapphics and pentameters, but more especially hexameters. Ascham had found it absurd that such novices in poetry as the English should presume to follow the Goths in rhyming when they had before them the example of Homer and Virgil, the world's greatest poets, who knew not rhyme. William Webbe, the critic, likewise protested against "the tinkerly verse which we call rhyme," and the very lyrists themselves such as Thomas Campion denounced the practice as a concession to childish titillation. These various rules and admonitions were taken up very seriously by the group of poetical theorists who surrounded Sidney. Prominent among these were Gabriel Harvey and Sir Edward Dyer. Gabriel Harvey, a lecturer in rhetoric at Cambridge and author of various works in Latin, a man of genuine learning and not devoid of shrewdness and humour, is now mainly remembered for his devotion to this lost cause of classicism in English poetry. His counsels encouraged Sidney in the metrical experiments which diversified the Arcadia. The material service which he rendered to Spenser by intro