Almost every annotator of Persius has handled this passage as though the poet simply prosaically alluded to his being half of rustic birth. As a fact, he was of the bluest blood of the Augustine age. Harrison makes a happy hit in understanding the passage as alluding to a semi-connection with the territory of the Muses, as I have treated it.—W.
[67] Capite censi, or Proletarii.—H.
[68] The Ceylonese. The Greek name for the island of Ceylon was Taprobane, which Harrison used merely as a classical scholar.—W.
[69] The wise and learned Secretary of State in the dangerous days of Edward VI., who under Elizabeth had the task of furnishing Burleigh with brains (thus heaping “coals of fire” on the man who had stolen his place when Reform was triumphant and danger past), was himself born within a gunshot of Harrison’s Radwinter rectory, at Saffron Walden. Though Sir Thomas Smith’s own seat was a dozen miles to the south, at Theydon, Harrison was evidently very intimate with the Secretary. Some of the foregoing chapter (and much more which has been omitted) are literal transcripts from Smith’s De Republica Anglorum. This work was still in manuscript in 1577 (the year of the first “Holinshed”), and late in the summer of that year Sir Thomas himself committed suicide. In 1583, before the second “Holinshed,” the first edition of De Republica was issued, probably edited by our Harrison. The very title breathed the spirit of Elizabethan politics. Secretaries of State do not now talk about the “English Republic.” The Hampdens were closely connected with Sir Thomas Smith, and De Republica was a text-book of John Hampden. In 1589 the title for Smith’s work was first Englished (without doubt Harrison’s own handiwork), and that title has been made immortal in English history by Hampden’s disciples: The Commonwealth of England.—W.
[70] If Harrison means to give us the impression that a city has any direct connection with episcopal affairs, he is quite in error. Cities are distinctly royal and imperial institutions. The accident of the number of cities and sees being the same comes from the natural tendency of the two institutions to drift together, though of distinct origin.—W.
[71] Here follows a long and learned disquisition upon the Roman and other early towns, especially about St. Albans, a portion of which will be found in the Appendix.—W.
[72] The regalia which denoted sovereign right within the city limits, even to excluding kings at the head of their armies as the “scroyles of Angiers” do in King John, much to the Bastard’s disgust.—W.
[73] The cutters have not been heard from for the three centuries intervening. These would have been the most valuable set of Elizabethan maps ever known had they been executed as Harrison expected.—W.
[74] Here follows an allusion to the decay of Eastern cities.—W.
[75] See on this my Ballads from MSS., i.; Mr. Cowper’s edition of Life in Tudor England; Four Supplications; and Crowley’s Select Works for the Early English Text Society; More’s Utopia, etc.—F.