if through insanity, pitied; if through malice,
forgiven." She is likewise said, in language more familiar to her, to
have sworn a great oath that they who accused Perrot were all knaves,
and he an honest and faithful man. It was accordingly presumed that she
entertained the design of extending to him the royal pardon; but her
mercy, if such it merits to be called, was tardy; and in September 1592,
six months after his condemnation, this victim of malice perished in the
Tower, of disease, according to Camden; but, by other accounts, of a
broken heart. In either case the story is an affecting one, and worthy
to be had in lasting remembrance, as a striking and terrible example of
the potency of court-intrigue, and the guilty subserviency of judicial
tribunals under the jealous rule of the last of the Tudors.

English literature, under the auspices of Elizabeth and her learned
court, had been advancing with a steady and rapid progress; and it may
be interesting to contemplate the state of one of its fairest provinces
as exhibited by the pen of an able critic, who in the year 1589 gave to
the world an Art of English Poesy. This work, though addressed to the
queen, was published with a dedication by the printer to lord Burleigh;
for the author thought proper to remain concealed: on its first
appearance its merit caused it to be ascribed to Spenser by some, and by
others to Sidney; but it was traced at length to Puttenham, one of her
majesty's gentleman-pensioners, the author of some adulatory poems
addressed to her and called Partheniads, and of various other pieces now
lost.

The subject is here methodically treated in three books; the first, "Of
Poets and Poesy;" the second, "Of Proportion;" the third, "Of Ornament."
After some remarks on the origin of the art and its earliest professors,
and an account of the various kinds of poems known to the ancients,--in
which there is an absence of pedantry, of quaintness, and of every
species of puerility, very rare among the didactic writers of the
age,--the critic proceeds to an enumeration of our principal vernacular
poets, or "_vulgar makers_," as he is pleased to anglicize the words.
Beginning with a just tribute to Chaucer, as the father of genuine
English verse, he passes rapidly to the latter end of the reign of Henry
VIII., when, as he observes, there "sprung up a new company of courtly
makers, of whom sir Thomas Wyat the elder and Henry earl of Surry were
the two chiefta