incestuous and unnatural marriages, making the father to marry the
son's wife, and the son his own mother."

He treats Camden with the respect due to his genius, while he
judiciously distinguishes where the greatest ought to know when to
yield.

"The most abstruse arts I profess not, but yield the palm and victory
to mine adversary, that great learned Mr. Camden, with whom, yet, a
long experimented navigator may contend about his chart and compass,
about havens, creeks, and sounds; so I, an ancient herald, a little
dispute, without imputation of audacity, concerning the honour of
arms, and the truth of honourable descents."

Brooke had seen, as he observes, in four editions of the "Britannia,"
a continued race of errors, in false descents, &c., and he continues,
with a witty allusion:--

"Perceiving that even the brains of many learned men beyond the seas
had misconceived and miscarried in the travail and birth of their
relations, being gotten, as it were, with child (as Diomedes's mares)
by the blasts of his erroneous puffs; I could not but a little
question the original father of their absurdities, being so far blown,
with the trumpet of his learning and fame, into foreign lands."

He proceeds with instances of several great authors on the Continent
having been misled by the statements of Camden.

Thus largely have I quoted from Brooke, to show, that at first he
never appears to have been influenced by the mean envy, or the
personal rancour, of which he is constantly accused. As he proceeded
in his work, which occupied him several years, his reproaches are
whetted with a keener edge, and his accusations are less generous. But
to what are we to attribute this? To the contempt and persecution
Brooke so long endured from Camden: these acted on his vexed and
degraded spirit, till it burst into the excesses of a man heated with
injured feelings.

When Camden took his station in the Herald's College with Brooke,
whose offers of his notes he had refused to accept, they soon found
what it was for two authors to live under the same roof, who were
impatient to write against each other. The cynical York, at first,
would twit the new king-of-arms, perpetually affirming that "his
predecessor was a more able herald than any who lived in this age:" a
truth, indeed, acknowledged by Dugdale. On this occasion, once the
king-of-arms gave malicious York "the lie!" reminding the crabbed
herald of "his own learning; who, as a sc