.

In a moment a dozen long bows were bent at the daring foeman: but Amyas
behind shouted--

"Shame, lads! Stop and let the gallant gentleman have due courtesy!"

So they stopped, while Amyas, springing on the rampart of the battery,
took off his hat, and bowed to the flag-holder, who, as soon as relieved
of his charge, returned the bow courteously, and descended.

It was by this time all but dark, and the firing began to slacken on
all sides; Salvation and his brother gunners, having covered up their
slaughtering tackle with tarpaulings, retired for the night, leaving
Amyas, who had volunteered to take the watch till midnight; and the rest
of the force having got their scanty supper of biscuit (for provisions
were running very short) lay down under arms among the sand-hills, and
grumbled themselves to sleep.

He had paced up and down in the gusty darkness for some hour or more,
exchanging a passing word now and then with the sentinel, when two
men entered the battery, chatting busily together. One was in complete
armor; the other wrapped in the plain short cloak of a man of pens
and peace: but the talk of both was neither of sieges nor of sallies,
catapult, bombard, nor culverin, but simply of English hexameters.

And fancy not, gentle reader, that the two were therein fiddling while
Rome was burning; for the commonweal of poetry and letters, in that same
critical year 1580, was in far greater danger from those same hexameters
than the common woe of Ireland (as Raleigh called it) was from the
Spaniards.

Imitating the classic metres, "versifying," as it was called in
contradistinction to rhyming, was becoming fast the fashion among the
more learned. Stonyhurst and others had tried their hands at hexameter
translations from the Latin and Greek epics, which seem to have been
doggerel enough; and ever and anon some youthful wit broke out in
iambics, sapphics, elegiacs, and what not, to the great detriment of the
queen's English and her subjects' ears.

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