“Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state,”
where certainly the state must have been bad if it was as infelicitous as the verse.
Not such was Gabriel Harvey that he might take even a polite correction; and his reply is a proper donnish setting-down of a clever but presumptuous youth. He respects the Areopagus—indeed they were persons of worship, and Harvey was a roturier—more than Spenser can or will suppose, and he likes the trimeters (indeed, though poor things, they were Spenser’s own after all, and such as no man but Spenser could have written in their foolish kind) more than Spenser “can or will easily believe.” But—and then follows much reviewing in the now stale hole-picking kind, which has long been abandoned, save by the descendants of Milbourne and Kenrick, and a lofty protestation that “myself never saw your gorbellied master’s rules, nor heard of them before.”
The Three Letters which follow[[235]] are distributed in subject between an Earthquake (which has long since ceased to quake for us) and the hexameters. They open with a letter from Spenser, in which he broaches the main question, “Whether our English accent will endure the Hexameter?” and doubts. Yet he has a hankering after it, encloses his own—
“See ye the blindfoldèd pretty god, that feathered archer,” &c.,
and prays that Harvey would either follow the rules of the great Drant, indorsed by Sidney, or else send his own. Harvey replies in double. The first part is some very tragical mirth about the earthquake; the second, “A Gallant Familiar Letter,” tackles the question of versification.
This gallant familiarity might possibly receive from harsh critics the name of uneasy coxcombry; but it is at any rate clear that the author has set about the matter very seriously. He expresses delight that Sidney and Dyer, “the two very diamonds of her Majesty’s Court,” have begun to help forward “the exchange of barbarous and balductum[[236]] rhymes with artificial verses”; thinks their “lively example” will be much better than Ascham’s “dead advertisement” in the Schoolmaster. He would like (as should we) to have Drant’s prosody. His own Rules and Precepts will probably not be very different; but he will take time before drafting them finally. He thinks (reasonably enough) that before framing a standard English Grammar or Rhetoric (therein including Prosody), a standard orthography must first be agreed upon. And he suggests that “we beginners” (this from the author of these truly “barbarous and balductum” antics to the author of the Faerie Queene is distinctly precious) have the advantage, like Homer and Ennius, of setting examples. “A New Year’s Gift to M. George Bilchaunger,” in very doleful hexameters, follows, and after a little gird at Spenser’s “See ye the Blindfoldèd,” another sprout of Harvey’s brain in the same kind, which has been, perhaps, more, and more deservedly, laughed at than any of these absurdities, except the scarcely sane jargon-doggerel of Stanyhurst—
“What might I call this tree? a Laurell? o bonny Laurell!
Needs to thy boughs will I bow this knee, and veil my bonetto;”
with yet another—