n, disdaining to condescend to burlesque or
bawdry, not gifted with any extraordinary talent, either at prose or verse,
but possessed of a certain literary faculty, could then produce with a fair
chance of being published and bought. It cannot be said that the result
shows great daintiness in Breton's public. The verse, with an improvement
in sweetness and fluency, is very much of the doggerel style which was
prevalent before Spenser; and the prose, though showing considerable
faculty, if not of invention, yet of adroit imitation of previously
invented styles, is devoid of distinction and point. There are, however,
exercises after Breton's own fashion in almost every popular style of the
time--euphuist romances, moral treatises, packets of letters, collections
of jests and short tales, purely religious tractates, characters (after the
style later illustrated by Overbury and Earle), dialogues, maxims, pictures
of manners, collections of notes about foreign countries,--in fact, the
whole farrago of the modern periodical. The pervading characteristics are
Breton's invariable modesty, his pious and, if I may be permitted to use
the word, gentlemanly spirit, and a fashion of writing which, if not very
pointed, picturesque, or epigrammatic, is clear, easy, and on the whole
rather superior, in observance of the laws of grammar and arrangement, to
the work of men of much greater note in his day.

The verse pamphlets of Rowlands (whom I have not studied as thoroughly as
most others), Davies, and many less voluminous men, are placed here with
all due apology for the liberty. They are seldom or never of much formal
merit, but they are interesting, first, because they testify to the hold
which the mediaeval conception of verse, as a general literary medium as
suitable as prose and more attractive, had upon men even at this late time;
and secondly, because, like the purely prose pamphlets, they are full of
information as to the manners of the time. For Rowlands I may refer to Mr.
Gosse's essay. John Davies of Hereford, the writing-master, though he has
been carefully edited for students, and is by no means unworthy of study,
has had less benefit of exposition to the general reader. He was not a
genius, but he is a good example of the rather dull man who, despite the
disfavour of circumstance, contrives by much assiduity and ingenious
following of models to attain a certain position in literature. There are
John Davieses of Hereford in