[While throng’d around his comrades and his peers,
To list the ’sounding Music of the Spheres:]
But, since a momentary rashness prompts us here to dare so much, as to imagine the hiatus filled, let us suppose that the lost sixteenth-line ran someway thus (each reader being free to try experiments himself, with chance of more success):—
Divine-composing Quarles, whose lines aspire
[And glow, as doth with like etherial fire] 16th.
The April of all Poesy in May,
Who makes our English speak Pharsalia;
It is with some timidity we let this stand: but, as the text is left intact, our friends will pardon us; and foes we never quail to meet. As to Ben Jonson, see our “Sessions,” in Part iv. Of Beaumont and Fletcher, we write in [the note on final page of Choyce Drollery, p. 100]. Of “Ingenious Shakespeare” we need say no more than give the lines of Richard Barnfield in his honour, from the Poems in diuers humors, 1598:—
A Remembrance of some English Poets.
Liue Spenser euer, in thy Fairy Queene: