no opportunity of puffing “Colin Clout”; and Harvey was openly charged by Thomas Nash with having forged commendatory epistles and sonnets in his own praise, under the name of Thorius etc.  “E.K.,” therefore, must be considered as pretty high authority; and what says “E.K.”?  Why, this:  “Rosalinde is also a feigned name, which, being well ordered, will bewray the verie name of his love and mistresse.”  By “well ordering” the “feigned name” E.K. undoubtedly means disposing or arranging the letters of which it is composed in some form of anagram or metagram,—­a species of wit much cultivated by the most celebrated poets of the time, Spenser included, and not deemed beneath the dignity of the learned Camden to expound.

A few examples of this “alchemy of wit,” as Camden calls it, will reconcile our modern notions of the [Greek:  to trepon] with the puerile ingenuity thought graceful, at that unripe period of our literature, by some of the most accomplished writers and readers of the day.  Let us take an extravagant instance.  Sir Philip Sidney, having abridged his own name into Phil.  Sid., anagrammatized it into Philisides.  Refining still further, he translated Sid., the abridgment of sidus, into [Greek:  astron], and, retaining the Phil., as derived from [Greek:  philos], he constructed for himself another pseudonym and adopted the poetical name of Astrophil.  Feeling, moreover, that the Lady Rich, celebrated in his sonnets, was the loadstar of his affections, he designates her, in conformity with his own assumed name, Stella.  Christopher Marlow’s name is transmuted into Wormal, and the royal Elizabetha is frequently addressed as Ah-te-basile! Doctor Thomas Lodge, author of “Rosalinde; or Euphues, his Golden Legacy,” (which Shakspeare dramatized into “As you like it,”) has anagrammatized his own name into Golde,—­and that of Dering into Ringde.  The author of “Dolarney’s Primrose” was a Doctor Raynolde.  John Hind, in his “Eliosto Libidinoso,” transmutes his own name into Dinchin Matthew Roydon becomes Donroy.  And Shakspeare, even, does not scruple to alchemize the Resolute John, or John Florio, into the pedantic Holofernes of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”  A thousand such fantastic instances of “trifling with the letter” might be quoted; and even so late as the reign of Queen Anne we find this foolish wit indulged.  The cynical Swift[2] stoops to change Miss Waring into Varina; Esther (quasi Aster, a star) Johnson is known as Stella; Essy Van-homrigh figures as Vanessa; while Cadenus, by an easy change of syllables, is resolved into Decanus, or the Dean himself in propria persona and canonicals.

In the “Shepherd’s Calendar,” the very poem in which Spenser’s unknown mistress figures as Rosalinde, the poet has alchemized Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury, into Algrind, and made Ellmor, Bishop of London, Morell, (it is to be hoped he was so before,) by merely transposing the letters.  What wonder, then, if, complying with an art so general and convenient, he should be found contriving, in the case of both his mistresses at once, to reveal his passion and conceal the name of his enslaver from the public gaze?