r maturer efforts were imitations of the
sweet and stately measures and style of Italian poesie. The polish
which men like Wyatt and Surrey were praised for giving to our 'rude
and homely manner of vulgar poesie' might have led to some
degeneration.

Might it, indeed? As another Dominie would have said, 'Pro-digious.'

(Thought for to take
Is not my mind;
But to forsake

This Principal of the Glasgow College of the United Free Church of
Scotland--

Farewell unkiss'd!)

But I have lingered too long with this favourite poet of mine and left
myself room only to hand you the thread by following which you will come
to the melodious philosophising of Shakespeare's Sonnets--

Let me not to the marriage of true Minds
Admit impediment. Love is not love
Which alters where it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.

Note the Latin words 'impediment,' 'alteration,' 'remove.' We are using
the language of philosophy here or, rather, the 'universal language,'
which had taken over the legacy of Greek. You may trace the use of it
growing as, for example, you trace it through the Elizabethan song-books:
and then (as I said) comes Shakespeare, and with Shakespeare the miracle.

The education of Prose was more difficult, and went through more violent
convulsions. I suppose that the most of us--if, after reading a quantity
of Elizabethan prose, we had the courage to tell plain truth, undaunted
by the name of a great epoch--would confess to finding the mass of it
clotted in sense as well as unmusical in sound, a disappointment almost
intolerable after the simple melodious clarity of Malory and Berners. I,
at any rate, must own that the most of Elizabethan prose pleases me
little; and I speak not of Elizabethan prose at its worst, of such stuff
as disgraced the already disgraceful Martin Marprelate Controversy, but
of such as a really ingenious and ingenuous man like Thomas Nashe could
write at his average. For a sample:--

English Seneca read by candle-light yields many good sentences such as
'Blood is a beggar' and so forth; and if you entreat him fair on a
frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls
of tragical speeches.... Sufficeth them [that is, modern followers of
Seneca] to bodge up a blank verse with if's and and's, and others,
while for recreation after their candle-stuff, having starched their
beards most cur