[258]. Reprinted by Haslewood. Whetstone’s Preface to Promos and Cassandra (1578) and A. Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetoric (1588) are earlier still. The former anticipates Sidney in objecting to the irregularity of English plays: the latter is a strong partisan of classical metres, his practice in which is sufficiently roughly treated by Ben Jonson in his Conversations, v. infra, p. 199.
[259]. Reprinted (in its critical section) by Mr Arber, English Garner, ii. 94 sq.
[260]. Bolton’s criticism of his contemporaries is extracted in Warton (iv. 204 sq., ed. Hazlitt). The writer, who is dealing with History, and speaking directly of language, disallows most of Spenser (excepting the Hymns) and all Chaucer, Lydgate, Langland, and Skelton, can “endure” Gascoigne, praises Elizabeth and James (of course), Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, Constable, Southwell, Sackville, Surrey, Wyatt, Raleigh, Donne, and Greville, but gives the palm for “vital, judicious, and practicable” language to Jonson.
[261]. Ed. Bullen, Works of Dr Thomas Campion, London, 1889.
[262]. Chalmers’s Poets, iii. 551-560; Grosart’s Works of Samuel Daniel, iv. 29-67.
[263]. It ought to be, but from certain signs perhaps is not, unnecessary to say that the De Augmentis is itself no mere Latin version of the Advancement, but a large expansion of it. There seems, however, no necessity here to deal with both.
[264]. Advancement of Learning, Bk. II. iv.
[265]. I have more than once said that controversy or polemic in detail with other writers is forbidden here. But those who wish to see what has been said for Bacon will find most of the references in Messrs Gayley and Scott’s invaluable book. The panegyrists—from my honoured friend and predecessor, Professor Masson, to Mr Worsfold—all rely on the description of poetry above referred to, as “Feigned History,” with what follows on its advantages and on poetical justice, &c. All this seems to me, however admirably expressed, to be obvious and rudimentary to the xth and the nth.
[266]. To be most readily found in Rogers’s Memorials of the Earl of Stirling (vol. ii. pp. 205-210; Edinburgh, 1877), where, however, it appears merely as one of the Appendices to a book of more or less pure genealogy, without the slightest editorial information as to date or provenance. It seems to be taken from the 1711 folio of Drummond’s Works: and to have been written in 1634, between Bacon’s death and Ben’s.
[267]. From Park, and from Messrs Gayley and Scott. I did not always agree with my late friend Dr Grosart: but I think he was better advised when he called it “disappointing.”