[329]. See [vol. ii. p. 416].
[330]. See the Ode to the Queen, 1706. Prior inserts a tenth line, and makes the seamless coat an awkwardly cobbled thing of quatrain, quatrain, couplet.
[331]. See [vol. ii. p. 481].
[332]. To this context perhaps best belongs Thomas Hayward’s British Muse,[[333]] an anthology on the lines of Poole and Bysshe, published in 1738 and dedicated to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. T. Hayward. The book has a preface of some length (which is said to be, like the dedication, the work not of the compiler but of Oldys[[334]] himself), criticising its predecessors (including Gildon) rather severely, and showing knowledge of English criticism generally; but the point of chief interest about the book is its own interest in, and extensive draughts from, Elizabethan Drama. Not merely “the divine and incomparable” Shakespeare, not merely the still popular sock and buskin of Ben Jonson and of Beaumont and Fletcher, but almost all the others, from Massinger and Middleton down to Goffe and Gomersall, receive attention, although, as he tells us, they were so hard to get that you had to give between three or four pounds for a volume containing some ten plays of Massinger. This is noteworthy; but that his zeal was not according to full knowledge is curiously shown by the contempt with which he speaks, not merely of Bodenham’s Belvedere, but of Allot’s England’s Parnassus, alleging “the little merit of the obsolete poets from which they were extracted.” Now it should be unnecessary to say that Allot drew, almost as largely as his early date permitted him, on “the divine and incomparable” himself, on Spenser, and on others only inferior to these. But this carping at forerunners is too common. If Oldys could write thus, what must have been the ignorance of others?
[333]. 3 vols., London.
[334]. It thus connects the book with The Muses’ Library.
[335]. Even before, at, or about the date of the Reliques themselves, a good deal was being done—e.g., Capell’s well-known Prolusions, which gave as early as 1760 the real Nut-Browne Maid, Sackville’s Induction, Edward III., and Davies’ Nosce Teipsum, and the Miscellaneous Pieces of 1764, supplying Marston’s Poems and The Troublesome Reign of King John.
[336]. The most remarkable recent authority on this matter is of course M. Texte, who has appeared already and will appear again in his own place.
[337]. I hold (though as probable rather than certain) that Richardson and Fielding knew Marianne and Le Paysan Parvenu: but Marivaux frankly wrote Le Spectateur Français.
[338]. [Vol. ii. p. 545]. Once more Tiraboschi must be reserved as a great early example of the historical treatment of a national literature.