I know not whether Mr. William Webbe had yet given to the world any fragments of his precious hints for the “Reformation of English poetry,” to the tune of his own “Tityrus, happily thou liest tumbling under a beech-tree:”  but the Cambridge Malvolio, Gabriel Harvey, had succeeded in arguing Spenser, Dyer, Sidney, and probably Sidney’s sister, and the whole clique of beaux-esprits round them, into following his model of

     “What might I call this tree?  A laurel?  O bonny laurel! 
     Needes to thy bowes will I bowe this knee, and vail my bonetto;”

after snubbing the first book of “that Elvish Queene,” which was then in manuscript, as a base declension from the classical to the romantic school.

And now Spenser (perhaps in mere melancholy wilfulness and want of purpose, for he had just been jilted by a fair maid of Kent) was wasting his mighty genius upon doggerel which he fancied antique; and some piratical publisher (bitter Tom Nash swears, and with likelihood that Harvey did it himself) had just given to the world,—­“Three proper wittie and familiar Letters, lately past between two University men, touching the Earthquake in April last, and our English reformed Versifying,” which had set all town wits a-buzzing like a swarm of flies, being none other than a correspondence between Spenser and Harvey, which was to prove to the world forever the correctness and melody of such lines as,

     “For like magnificoes, not a beck but glorious in show,
     In deede most frivolous, not a looke but Tuscanish always.”

Let them pass—­Alma Mater has seen as bad hexameters since.  But then the matter was serious.  There is a story (I know not how true) that Spenser was half bullied into re-writing the “Faerie Queene” in hexameters, had not Raleigh, a true romanticist, “whose vein for ditty or amorous ode was most lofty, insolent, and passionate,” persuaded him to follow his better genius.  The great dramatists had not yet arisen, to form completely that truly English school, of which Spenser, unconscious of his own vast powers, was laying the foundation.  And, indeed, it was not till Daniel, twenty years after, in his admirable apology for rhyme, had smashed Mr. Campian and his “eight several kinds of classical numbers,” that the matter was finally settled, and the English tongue left to go the road on which Heaven had started it.  So that we may excuse Raleigh’s answering somewhat waspish to some quotation of Spenser’s from the three letters of “Immerito and G. H.”

“Tut, tut, Colin Clout, much learning has made thee mad.  A good old fishwives’ ballad jingle is worth all your sapphics and trimeters, and ‘riff-raff thurlery bouncing.’  Hey? have I you there, old lad?  Do you mind that precious verse?”

“But, dear Wat, Homer and Virgil—­”

“But, dear Ned, Petrarch and Ovid—­”

“But, Wat, what have we that we do not owe to the ancients?”