28.
All Ovid's Elegies: 3 Bookes. By C(hristopher) M(arlow). Epigrams by J(ohn) D(avis). At Middlebourgh. (1598.)
This volume was condemned and burnt at Stationer's Hall by an order of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, dated June 1st, 1599.
29.
The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image. And certaine Satyres. At London. Printed for Edmond Matts, and are to be sold at the signe of the Hand and Plough in Fleet street. 1598.
This book was written by John Marston. It is dedicated "To the World's mightie Monarch Good Opinion;" and the principal purpose of the author was to ridicule and to show the immorality and evil tendency of a class of poems then fashionable, and to which Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" belongs.
The main production consists of thirty nine six-line stanzas. The "certain Satires," four in number, and all written in couplets, follow, but the versification is sometimes harsh, and the rhyme frequently careless and defective.
Preceding the Satires is a Poem headed Reactio, wholly occupied by a vindication of the writers whom Hall had previously attacked in his "Virgidemiarum;" addressing that author, Marston exclaims:
"Vaine envious detractor from the good,
"What cynicke spirit stirreth in thy blood?