? 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?"

"Ancients, quotha? Why, the legend of King Arth