ier or Hall. And the rough vigour of his sketches and
single lines is admirable. Yet it is as rough as it is vigorous; and the
breakneck versification and contorted phrase of his satires, softened a
little in Hall, roughened again and to a much greater degree in Marston,
and reaching, as far as phrase goes, a rare extreme in the _Transformed
Metamorphosis_ of Cyril Tourneur, have been the subject of a great deal of
discussion. It is now agreed by all the best authorities that it would be a
mistake to consider this roughness unintentional or merely clumsy, and that
it sprung, at any rate in great degree, from an idea that the ancients
intended the _Satura_ to be written in somewhat unpolished verse, as well
as from a following of the style of Persius, the most deliberately obscure
of all Latin if not of all classical poets. In language Donne is not (as
far as his Satires are concerned) a very great sinner; but his
versification, whether by his own intention or not, leaves much to desire.
At one moment the ten syllables are only to be made out by a Chaucerian
lengthening of the mute _e_; at another the writer seems to be emulating
Wyatt in altering the accent of syllables, and coolly making the final
iambus of a line out of such a word as "answer." It is no wonder that poets
of the "correct" age thought him in need of rewriting; though even they
could not mistake the force of observation and expression which
characterises his Satires, and which very frequently reappears even in his
dreamiest metaphysics, his most recondite love fancies, and his warmest and
most passionate hymns to Aphrodite Pandemos.

These artificial characteristics are supplemented in the Elizabethan
satirists, other than Donne, by yet a third, which makes them, I confess,
to me rather tedious reading, independently of their shambling metre, and
their sometimes almost unconstruable syntax. This is the absurd affectation
of extreme moral wrath against the corruptions of their time in which they
all indulge. Marston, who is nearly the foulest, if not quite the foulest
writer of any English classic, gives himself the airs of the most
sensitive puritan; Hall, with a little less of this contrast, sins
considerably in the same way, and adds to his delinquencies a most petulant
and idle attempt to satirise from the purely literary point of view writers
who are a whole head and shoulders above himself. And these two, followed
by their imitator, Guilpin, assail ea