23 Orig. note: [Sir Edwin Sandys' survey of Religion in the West] More properly entitled Europae Speculum (1559).
53 seq. In the original there are side-notes: 'Job', 'Ecclesiastes', 'The Act of Parliament for Public Thanksgiving on the fifth of November, set to a tune by H. Dod a tradesman of London, at the end of his Psalms, which stole from the Press Anno Domini 1620'; 'Hymns', 'Lamentations', 'Psalms', referring to other Paraphrases of Sandys on the various books named, and (in the third place) on certain Songs selected from other parts of the Bible. The unfortunate 'H. Dod a tradesman' may have had his Manes refreshed by a notice in the D.N.B.
70 It was too early for King to recognize, as has been done since, the reason of the 'perfect harmony' he relished as a fact in Sandys. That poet was one of the earliest after Fairfax, and probably before Beaumont or Waller, to master (though not always to practise) the stopped antithetic couplet which was conquering, and to conquer, public favour.
71 It were much to be desired (though Hannah did not think so) that King had allowed his wishes to be satisfied by Sandys' performance, without attempting competition.
79 The reference is, of course, to the universally heard of, but perhaps by extremely few read, 'Sternhold and Hopkins'. The actual terms of King's criticism are not very happy, but nobody then knew, or easily could know, much about literary history. It was a fifteenth- rather than a sixteenth-century fault 'hardly to distinguish verse and rhyme'. Where Sternhold and Hopkins—in common with much greater men, from Wyatt to Gascoigne—sometimes went wrong, was in their inability to attain anything but a 'butterwoman's rank to market'—a sing-song and soulless uniformity of cadence, and (a sin more specially their own) in the hopeless dullness and drabness of their diction.
The Woes of Esay.
Woe to the worldly men, whose covetous
Ambition labours to join house to house,