master lieth o'er his head.
Second, that he do, on no default,[31]
Ever presume to sit above the salt.
Third, that he never change his trencher twice.
Fourth, that he use all common courtesies;
Sit bare at meals, and one half rise and wait.
Last, that he never his young master beat,
But he must ask his mother to define,
How many jerks she would his breech should line.
All these observ'd he could contented be
To give five marks and winter livery."

[30] "Chaplain"--trisyllable like "capellan."

[31] Missing syllable.

John Marston, who out-Halled Hall in all his literary misdeeds, was, it
would appear, a member of a good Shropshire family which had passed into
Warwickshire. He was educated at Coventry School, and at Brasenose College,
Oxford, and passed early into London literary society, where he involved
himself in the inextricable and not-much-worth-extricating quarrels which
have left their mark in Jonson's and Dekker's dramas. In the first decade
of the seventeenth century he wrote several remarkable plays, of much
greater literary merit than the work now to be criticised. Then he took
orders, was presented to the living of Christchurch, and, like others of
his time, seems to have forsworn literature as an unholy thing. He died in
1634. Here we are concerned only with two youthful works of
his--_Pigmalion's Image_ and some Satires in 1598, followed in the same
year by a sequel, entitled _The Scourge of Villainy_. In these works he
called himself "W. Kinsayder," a pen-name for which various explanations
have been given. It is characteristic and rather comical that, while both
the earlier Satires and _The Scourge_ denounce lewd verse most
fullmouthedly, _Pigmalion's Image_ is a poem in the _Venus and Adonis_
style which is certainly not inferior to its fellows in luscious
descriptions. It was, in fact, with the _Satires_ and much similar work,
formally condemned and burnt in 1599. Both in Hall and in Marston
industrious commentators have striven hard to identify the personages of
the satire with famous living writers, and there may be a chance that some
at least of their identifications (as of Marston's Tubrio with Marlowe) are
correct. But the exaggeration and insincerity, the deliberate
"society-journalism" (to adopt a detestable phrase for a corresponding
thing of our own days), which characterise all this class of writing make
the identifications of but little interest