“Envy, ye Muses, at your thrilling mate,
Cupid hath crowned a new laureat;
I saw his statue gaily tired in green,
As if he had some second Phœbus been;
His statue trimm’d with the Venerean tree
And shrined fair within your sanctuary.
What! he that erst to gain the rhyming goal,
The worn recital-post of capitol,
Rhymed in rules of stewish ribaldry
Teaching experimental bawdery,
Whiles th’ itching vulgar, tickled with the song,
Hanged on their unready poet’s tongue?
Take this, ye patient Muses, and foul shame
Shall wait upon your once profaned name.”
When Pygmalion was published Hall wrote a poor epigram (see vol. iii. p. 369), which he contrived to paste in those copies of the poem “that came to the stationers at Cambridge.”[8] One of the satires, entitled “Reactio,”[9]
appended to Pygmalion, is a violent attack on Hall. In his “Defiance to Envy,” prefixed to Virgidemiæ, Hall had boasted that he could, an’ that he would, hold his own with any of the poets,—even hinting that he was a match for Spenser. The “Defiance” is a well-written piece of verse, but it gave Marston an excellent opportunity, which he used to the full in “Reactio,” of making a very effective attack. In the first satire of book vi. of Virgidemiæ Hall replies to Marston’s raillery with less vigour than we should have expected. Again and again in The Scourge of Villainy Marston attacks Hall; he would not let the quarrel drop, but worried his adversary with the pertinacity of a bull-dog. In 1601 a certain “W. I.,” who has been doubtfully identified (by Dr. Nicholson) with a Cambridge man, William Ingram, published The Whipping of the Satire, which was chiefly directed against Marston (with gibes at Ben Jonson and others). There is a lengthy and spirited preface, in which Marston is taken to task after this fashion:—
“Think you that foul words can beget fair manners? If you do I will not bate you an ace of an ass, for experience gives you the lie to your face. But your affection over-rules your reason, and therefore you are as sudden of passion in all matters as an interjection and yet as defective in most cases as an heteroclite: you gathered up men’s sins as though they had been strawberries, and picked away their virtues as they had been but the stalks. They shall not make me believe but that you were the devil’s intelligencer, for there went not a lie abroad but it was presently entertained of your ear; and every sin kept
under writing for fear lest the devil waxing almost six thousand years of age should fail in his memory and so chance to forget it.”
The following stanzas have a sting in them:—
“Can you seem wise to any simple men
That seem’d so simple unto all the wise
And fitter far to hold the plough than pen,
Such incompt stuff you rudely poetise?
Yet I confess there’s much conceipt in it,
For you have shown great store of little wit.
Take me your staff and walk some half-score miles,
And I’ll be hang’d if in that quantity
You find me out but half so many stiles
As you have made within your poesy:
Nay for your style there’s none can you excel,
You may be called John-a-Stile full well.
* * * * *
But he that mounts into the air of Fame
Must have two wings, Nature and Art, to fly;
And that he may soar safely with the same
Must take his rise low from humility;
And not with you a goose’s quill to take,
Thinking with that an eagle’s flight to make.