ly set open, choose rather to have thy wind-pipe
cut in pieces than to salute any man. Bid not good-morrow so much
as to thy father, though he be an emperor. An idle ceremony it is
and can do him little good; to thyself it may bring much harm:
for if he be a wise man that knows how to hold his peace, of
necessity must he be counted a fool that cannot keep his tongue."

The voluminous work in pamphlet kind of Nicholas Breton, still more the
verse efforts closely akin to it of Samuel Rowlands, John Davies of
Hereford and some others, must be passed over with very brief notice. Dr.
Grosart's elaborate edition of the first-named has given a vast mass of
matter very interesting to the student of literature, but which cannot be
honestly recommended to the general reader. Breton, whose long life and
perpetual literary activity fill up great part of our whole period, was an
Essex gentleman of a good family (a fact which he never forgot), and
apparently for some time a dependent of the well-known Countess of
Pembroke, Sidney's sister. A much older man than most of the great wits of
Elizabeth's reign, he also survived most of them, and his publications, if
not his composition, cover a full half century, though he was _nel mezzo
del cammin_ at the date of the earliest. He was probably born some years
before the middle of the sixteenth century, and certainly did not die
before the first year of Charles I. If we could take as his the charming
lullaby of _The Arbour of Amorous Devices_ he would stand (if only as a
kind of "single-speech") high as a poet. But I fear that Dr. Grosart's
attribution of it to him is based on little external and refuted by all
internal evidence. His best certain thing is the pretty "Phillida and
Corydon" idyll, which may be found in _England's Helicon_ or in Mr. Ward's
_Poets_. But I own that I can never read this latter without thinking of
two lines of Fulke Greville's in the same metre and on no very different
theme--

"O'er enamelled meads they went,
Quiet she, he passion-rent,"

which are simply worth all the works of Breton, prose and verse, unless we
count the _Lullaby_, put together. In the _mots rayonnants_, the _mots de
lumiere_, he is sadly deficient. But his work (which is nearly as plentiful
in verse as in prose) is, as has been said, very interesting to the
literary student, because it shows better perhaps than anything else the
style of literature which a ma