So well defensed
Against all weather that doth fall
When wayward winter spits his gall.

"And when we meet, to try me true,
Look on my head,
And I will crave an oath of you
Whe'r[10] Faith be fled;
So shall we both answered be,
Both I of you, and you of me."

[9] Refusal.

[10] Short for "whether."

The most considerable and the most interesting part of Googe's work is a
set of eight eclogues which may not have been without influence on _The
Shepherd's Calendar_, and a poem of some length entitled _Cupido
Conquered_, which Spenser may also have seen. Googe has more sustained
power than Turberville, but is much inferior to him in command of metre and
in lyrical swing. In him, or at least in his printer, the mania for cutting
up long verses reaches its height, and his very decasyllables are found
arranged in the strange fashion of four and six as thus:--

"Good aged Bale:
That with thy hoary hairs
Dost still persist
To turn the painful book,
O happy man,
That hast obtained such years,
And leav'st not yet
On papers pale to look.
Give over now
To beat thy wearied brain,
And rest thy pen,
That long hath laboured sore."

Thomas Tusser (1524?-1580) has often been regarded as merely a writer of
doggerel, which is assuredly not lacking in his _Hundred_ (later _Five
Hundred_) _Points of Husbandry_ (1557-1573). But he has some piquancy of
phrase, and is particularly noticeable for the variety, and to a certain
extent the accomplishment, of his prosodic experiments--a point of much
importance for the time.

To these five, of whom some substantive notice has been given, many shadowy
names might be added if the catalogue were of any use: such as those of
Kinwelmersh, Whetstone, Phaer, Neville, Blundeston, Edwards, Golding, and
many others. They seem to have been for the most part personally acquainted
with one another; the literary energies of England being almost confined to
the universities and the Inns of Court, so that most of those who devoted
themselves to literature came into contact and formed what is sometimes
called a clique. They were all studiously and rather indiscriminately given
to translation (the body of foreign work, ancient and modern, which was
turned into English during this quarter of a century being very large
indeed), and all or many of them were contributors of commendatory ver