“Ancients, quotha?  Why, the legend of King Arthur, and Chevy Chase too, of which even your fellow-sinner Sidney cannot deny that every time he hears it even from a blind fiddler it stirs his heart like a trumpet-blast.  Speak well of the bridge that carries you over, man!  Did you find your Redcross Knight in Virgil, or such a dame as Una in old Ovid?  No more than you did your Pater and Credo, you renegado baptized heathen, you!”

“Yet, surely, our younger and more barbarous taste must bow before divine antiquity, and imitate afar—­”

“As dottrels do fowlers.  If Homer was blind, lad, why dost not poke out thine eye?  Ay, this hexameter is of an ancient house, truly, Ned Spenser, and so is many a rogue:  but he cannot make way on our rough English roads.  He goes hopping and twitching in our language like a three-legged terrier over a pebble-bank, tumble and up again, rattle and crash.”

“Nay, hear, now—­

     ’See ye the blindfolded pretty god that feathered archer,
        Of lovers’ miseries which maketh his bloody game?’*

True, the accent gapes in places, as I have often confessed to Harvey, but—­”

     * Strange as it may seem, this distich is Spenser’s own; and
     the other hexameters are all authentic.

Harvey be hanged for a pedant, and the whole crew of versifiers, from Lord Dorset (but he, poor man, has been past hanging some time since) to yourself!  Why delude you into playing Procrustes as he does with the queen’s English, racking one word till its joints be pulled asunder, and squeezing the next all a-heap as the Inquisitors do heretics in their banca cava?  Out upon him and you, and Sidney, and the whole kin.  You have not made a verse among you, and never will, which is not as lame a gosling as Harvey’s own—­

     ’Oh thou weathercocke, that stands on the top of Allhallows,
     Come thy ways down, if thou dar’st for thy crown, and take the wall
     on us.’

“Hark, now!  There is our young giant comforting his soul with a ballad.  You will hear rhyme and reason together here, now.  He will not miscall ‘blind-folded,’ ’blind-fold-ed, I warrant; or make an ‘of’ and a ‘which’ and a ‘his’ carry a whole verse on their wretched little backs.”

And as he spoke, Amyas, who had been grumbling to himself some Christmas carol, broke out full-mouthed:—­

     “As Joseph was a-walking
     He heard an angel sing—­
     ’This night shall be the birth night
     Of Christ, our heavenly King.

     His birthbed shall be neither
     In housen nor in hall,
     Nor in the place of paradise,
     But in the oxen’s stall.

     He neither shall be rocked
     In silver nor in gold,
     But in the wooden manger
     That lieth on the mould.

     He neither shall be washen
     With white wine nor with red,
     But with the fair spring water
     That on you shall be shed.