but whose Bachelor’s Banquet—­pleasantly discoursing the variable humours of Women, their quickness of wits and unsearchable deceits, is a sarcastic impeachment of the gentler sex, while his Gull’s Hornbook must be ranked with Nash’s work as one of the most unsparing castigations of social life in London.  The latter is a volume of fictitious maxims for the use of youths desirous of being considered “pretty fellows”.  Other contemporaries were John Donne, John Marston, Jonson, George Chapman, and Nicholas Breton—­all names of men who were conspicuous inheritors of the true Elizabethan spirit, and who united virility of thought to robustness and trenchancy of sarcasm.

Marston and Breton were amongst the best of the group, though they are not represented in these pages owing to the unsuitability of their writings for extract.  Here is a picture from one of the satires of Marston which is instinct with satiric power.  It is a portrait of a love-sick swain, and runs as follows:—­

     “For when my ears received a fearful sound
      That he was sick, I went, and there I found,
      Him laid of love and newly brought to bed
      Of monstrous folly, and a franticke head: 
      His chamber hanged about with elegies,
      With sad complaints of his love’s miseries,
      His windows strow’d with sonnets and the glasse
      Drawn full of love-knots.  I approach’d the asse,
      And straight he weepes, and sighes some Sonnet out
      To his fair love! and then he goes about,
      For to perfume her rare perfection,
      With some sweet smelling pink epitheton. 
      Then with a melting looke he writhes his head,
      And straight in passion, riseth in his bed,
      And having kist his hand, strok’d up his haire,
      Made a French conge, cryes ‘O cruall Faire!’
      To th’ antique bed-post."[10]

Marston manifests more vigour and nervous force in his satires than Hall, but exhibits less elegance and ease in versification.  In Charles Fitz-geoffrey’s Affaniae, a set of Latin epigrams, printed at Oxford in 1601, Marston is complimented as the “Second English Satirist”, or rather as dividing the palm of priority and excellence in English satire with Hall.  The individual characteristics of the various leading Elizabethan satirists,—­the vitriolic bitterness of Nash, the sententious profundity of Donne, the happy-go-lucky “slogging” of genial Dekker, the sledge-hammer blows of Jonson, the turgid malevolence of Chapman, and the stiletto-like thrusts of George Buchanan are worthy of closer and more detailed study than can be devoted to them in a sketch such as this.  I regret that Nicolas Breton’s Pasquil’s Madcappe proved too long for quotation in its entirety,[11] but the man who could pen such lines as these was, of a truth, a satirist of a high order:—­