e
art and good taste. Certainly in what remains of Gabriel Harvey's
writing, there is much that seems to us vain and ridiculous enough; and
it has been naturally surmised that he must have been a dangerous friend
and counsellor to Spenser. But probably we are hard upon him. His
writings, after all, are not much more affected and absurd in their
outward fashion than most of the literary composition of the time; his
verses are no worse than those of most of his neighbours; he was not
above, but he was not below, the false taste and clumsiness of his age;
and the rage for "artificial versifying" was for the moment in the air.
And it must be said, that though his enthusiasm for English hexameters
is of a piece with the puritan use of scripture texts in divinity and
morals, yet there is no want of hard-headed shrewdness in his remarks;
indeed, in his rules for the adaptation of English words and accents to
classical metres, he shows clearness and good sense in apprehending the
conditions of the problem, while Sidney and Spenser still appear
confused and uncertain. But in spite of his pedantry, and though he had
not, as we shall see, the eye to discern at first the genius of the
_Faery Queen_, he has to us the interest of having been Spenser's first,
and as far as we can see, to the last, dearest friend. By both of his
younger fellow-students at Cambridge, he was looked up to with the
deepest reverence, and the most confiding affection. Their language is
extravagant, but there is no reason to think that it was not genuine. E.
Kirke, the editor of Spenser's first venture, the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
commends the "new poet" to his patronage, and to the protection of his
"mighty rhetoric," and exhorts Harvey himself to seize the poetical
"garland which to him alone is due." Spenser speaks in the same terms;
"_veruntamen te sequor solum; nunquam vero assequar_." Portions of the
early correspondence between Harvey and Spenser have been preserved to
us, possibly by Gabriel Harvey's self-satisfaction in regard to his own
compositions. But with the pedagogue's jocoseness, and a playfulness
which is like that of an elephant, it shows on both sides easy
frankness, sincerity, and warmth, and not a little of the early
character of the younger man. In Spenser's earliest poetry, his
pastorals, Harvey appears among the imaginary rustics, as the poet's
"special and most familiar friend," under the name of Hobbinol,--

"Good Hobbinol, tha