"sweet poesy
Will not be clad in her supremacy
With those strange garments (Rome's hexameters)
As she is English; but in right prefers
Our native robes."
See also, in Arber's edition of Stanyhurst in the English Scholar's Library, an account of another work in hexameters, published anonymously in 1599: the First Booke of the Preservation of King Henry the VII. This writer admired Stanyhurst's effort, but desired "him to refile" his verses into more polished English:
"If the Poet Stanihurst yet live and feedeth on ay-er,
I do request him (as one that wisheth a grace to the meter)
With wordes significant to refile and finely to polishe
Those fower Æneis, that he late translated in English."
In the same connection the writer tells us definitely what is to be hoped from the "trew kind of Hexametred and Pentametred verse." "First it will enrich our speach with good and significant wordes: Secondly it will bring a delight and pleasure to the skilfull Reader, when he seeth them formally compyled: And thirdly it will incourage and learne the good and godly Students, that affect Poetry, and are naturally enclyned thereunto, to make the like: Fourthly it will direct a trew Idioma, and will teach trew Orthography."[44]
Tityrus, happilie thou lyste tumbling under a beech tree,
All in a fine oate pipe these sweete songs lustilie chaunting:
We, poore soules goe to wracke, and from these coastes be remooved,
And fro our pastures sweete: thou Tityr, at ease in a shade plott
Makst thicke groves to resound with songes of brave Amarillis.
(William Webbe: Vergil's First Eclogue, in A Discourse of English Poetrie. 1586.)
Webbe prefaces his hexameters with a reference to those made by Gabriel Harvey, and says: "I for my part, so farre as those examples would leade me, and mine owne small skyll affoorde me, have blundered upon these fewe; whereinto I have translated the two first Æglogues of Virgill: because I thought no matter of my owne invention, nor any other of antiquitye more fitte for tryal of thys thyng, before there were some more speciall direction, which might leade to a lesse troublesome manner of wryting." (Arber Reprint, p. 72.)
Thou, who roll'st in the firmament, round as the shield of my fathers,
Whence is thy girdle of glory, O Sun! and thy light everlasting?
Forth thou comest in thy awful beauty; the stars at thy rising
Haste to their azure pavilions; the moon sinks pale in the waters;
But thou movest alone; who dareth to wander beside thee?
Oaks of the mountains decay, and the hard oak crumbles asunder;
Ocean shrinks and again grows; lost is the moon from the heavens;
Whilst thou ever remainest the same to rejoice in thy brightness.
(William Taylor: Paraphrase of Ossian's Hymn to the Sun. 1796.)