ses in such wise as thee
_Greekes_ and _Latins_, thee fathurs of knowledge, haue doone;
and too leaue too theese doltish coystrels theyre rude rythming
and balducktoom ballads."

Given a person capable of this lingo, given the prevalent mania for English
hexameters, and even what follows may not seem too impossible.

"This sayd, with darcksoom night shade quite clowdye she vannisht.
Grislye faces frouncing, eke against Troy leaged in hatred
Of Saincts soure deities dyd I see.
Then dyd I marck playnely thee castle of Ilion vplayd,
And Troian buyldings quit topsy turvye remooued.
Much lyk on a mountayn thee tree dry wythered oaken
Sliest by the clowne Coridon rusticks with twibbil or hatchet.
Then the tre deepe minced, far chopt dooth terrifye swinckers
With menacing becking thee branches palsye before tyme,
Vntil with sowghing yt grunts, as wounded in hacking.
At length with rounsefal, from stock vntruncked yt harssheth.

* * * * *

Hee rested wylful lyk a wayward obstinat oldgrey.

* * * * *

Theese woords owt showting with her howling the house she replennisht."

There is perhaps no greater evidence of the reverence in which the
ancients were held than that such frantic balderdash as this did not
extinguish it. Yet this was what a man of undoubted talent, of considerable
learning, and of no small acuteness (for Stanyhurst's Preface to this very
translation shows something more than glimmerings on the subject of
classical and English prosody), could produce. It must never be forgotten
that the men of this time were at a hopelessly wrong point of view. It
never occurred to them that English left to itself could equal Greek or
Latin. They simply endeavoured, with the utmost pains and skill, to drag
English up to the same level as these unapproachable languages by forcing
it into the same moulds which Greek and Latin had endured. Properly
speaking we ought not to laugh at them. They were carrying out in
literature what the older books of arithmetic call "The Rule of
False,"--that is to say, they were trying what the English tongue could
_not_ bear. No one was so successful as Stanyhurst in applying this test of
the rack: yet it is fair to say that Harvey and Webbe, nay, Spenser and
Sidney, had practically, though, except in Spenser's case, it would appear
unconsciously, arrived at the sam