, the
other younger; Gabriel Harvey, first a fellow of Pembroke, and then a
student or teacher of civil law at Trinity Hall, and Edward Kirke, like
Spenser, a sizar at Pembroke, recently identified with the E. K., who
was the editor and commentator of Spenser's earliest work, the anonymous
_Shepherd's Calendar_. Of the younger friend this is the most that is
known. That he was deeply in Spenser's confidence as a literary
coadjutor, and possibly in other ways, is shown in the work which he
did. But Gabriel Harvey was a man who had influence on Spenser's ideas
and purposes, and on the direction of his efforts. He was a classical
scholar of much distinction in his day, well read in the Italian authors
then so fashionable, and regarded as a high authority on questions of
criticism and taste. Except to students of Elizabethan literary history,
he has become an utterly obscure personage; and he has not usually been
spoken of with much respect. He had the misfortune, later in life, to
plunge violently into the scurrilous quarrels of the day, and as he was
matched with wittier and more popular antagonists, he has come down to
us as a foolish pretender, or at least as a dull and stupid scholar who
knew little of the real value of the books he was always ready to quote,
like the pedant of the comedies, or Shakespere's schoolmaster
Holofernes. Further, he was one who, with his classical learning, had
little belief in the resources of his mother tongue, and he was one of
the earliest and most confident supporters of a plan then fashionable,
for reforming English verse, by casting away its natural habits and
rhythms, and imposing on it the laws of the classical metres. In this he
was not singular. The professed treatises of this time on poetry, of
which there were several, assume the same theory, as the mode of
"reforming" and duly elevating English verse. It was eagerly accepted by
Philip Sidney and his Areopagus of wits at court, who busied themselves
in devising rules of their own--improvements as they thought on those of
the university men--for English hexameters and sapphics, or as they
called it, artificial versifying. They regarded the comparative value of
the native English rhythms and the classical metres, much as our
ancestors of Addison's day regarded the comparison between Gothic and
Palladian architecture. One, even if it sometimes had a certain romantic
interest, was rude and coarse; the other was the perfection of polit