for some definite information that it gives: "As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare; witnes his 'Venus and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece,' his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.

"As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witnes his 'Gentlemen of Verona,' his 'Errors,' his 'Love's Labor's Lost, his 'Love's Labour's Wonne,' his 'Midsummers Night Dreame,' and his 'Merchant of Venice;' for tragedy, his 'Richard the 2,' 'Richard the 3,' 'Henry the 4,' King John,' 'Titus Andronicus,' and his 'Romeo and Juliet.'

"As Epius Stolo said that the Muses would speake with Plautus' tongue, if they would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase, if they would speake English."

The next following parallels touch with their praise Marlowe and Chapman's "Hero and Leander; " apply Horace's Exegi monumentum ære perennius to Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, and Warner; match with six famous Italian poets Mathew Roydon, Thomas Atchelow, Thomas Watson, Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, and George Peele.

Of these we have left hitherto unmentioned Thomas Atchelow, or Achelley, who published in 1576 one of Bandello's tales, "newly translated into English meter, A Most Lamentable and Tragicall historie, Conteyning the outrageous and horrible tyrannie which a Spanish gentlewoman named Violenta executed upon her lover Didaco, because he espoused another, being first betrothed to her.' Thomas Achelley was a friend of Watson's, and one of those whose commendatory verses were prefixed to Watson's Exarоμmalia. There has been, very doubtfully, ascribed to

Thomas Achelley a poem on twenty-three leaves, published in 1632 under the initials A. T.-Achelley's initials reversed" called "The Massacre of Money." It may have been by a son of his, bearing the same Christian name, who was of Brasenose when he matriculated at Oxford in 1616, and was at Broadgates Hall when he became M.A. in 1620. He came from Shropshire.

Meres then celebrates as the chief heroic poets of his time Spenser and Warner; as the best lyric poets, Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, and Breton; as the best tragic poets, Lord Buckhurst, Dr. Legge of Cambridge, Edward Ferris, whom he calls the author of the "Mirrour of Magistrates," Marlowe, Peele, Watson, Kyd, Shakespeare, Drayton, Chapman, Dekker, and Benjamin Johnson. He cites two Latin tragedies by Dr. Legge, one of "Richard III.," the other of the "Destruction of Jerusalem."

Thomas Legge was born at Norwich in 1535, became a famous scholar at Cambridge, who graduated M.A. in 1560, and was made in 1573 Master of Caius College, in which office he was thought to be too friendly to the Romanists. In 1575 he proceeded to the degree of LL.D., having already taught in the university as Regius Professor of Civil Law. It was in 1579 that his Latin tragedy of "Richard III." was acted at Cambridge. His last tragedy of the "Destruction of Jerusalem," after careful preparation, was stolen from him just when it was about to be acted. Thomas Legge was Vice Chancellor in 1592-93, became then a Master in Chancery, and died in 1607.

As our best poets for comedy Meres cites Edward, Earl of Oxford, Dr. Gager of Oxford, "Maister Rowley once a rare Schollar of learned Pembroke Hall of Cambridge," John Lyly, Lodge, Gascoigne, Greene, Shakespeare, Thomas Nash, Thomas Heywood, "Anthony Mundye, our best plotter," Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathway, and Henry Chettle.

Y-VOL. X.

As the best for satire, Meres names "Piers Plowman," Lodge, Hall of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, of whom and of other writers in Meres's list, whose names now occur for the first time, more will be said in later pages of this chapter, "the author of 'Pygmalion's Image' [John Marston], and the author of Skialetheia [Edward Guilpin]."

As Iambic poets, Meres names Gabriel Harvey and Richard Stanyhurst; as Elegiac poets, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyat the elder, Sir Francis Bryan, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Edward Dyer, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, Whetstone, Gascoigne, Samuel Page, sometime Fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford, Churchyard, Breton. As Pastoral poets, Meres names Sidney, Chaloner, Spenser, Stephen Gosson, Abraham Fraunce, and Richard Barnfeild; as Epigrammatists, Heywood, Drant, Kendal, Bastard, Davies; as Royal poets, James VI. of Scotland, and Elizabeth of England. Richard Barnfeild said of James VI.,

"The King of Scots, now living, is a poet,
As his Lepanto and his Furies show it."

Of Elizabeth, Meres writes that she is "not only a liberal patrone vnto poets, but an excellent poete herself, whose learned, delicate and noble Muse surmounteth, be it in Ode, Elegy, Epigram, or in any other kind of poem, Heroicke, or Lyricke."

Meres passes then to favourers of poets, among whom he first celebrates "learned Mary, the honourable Countesse of Pembrook, the noble sister of immortall Sir Philip Sidney." Presently he goes on with his lists of poets, and pairs with George Buchanan's "Iephthe," as a tragedy able to abide the touch of Aristotle's precepts and Euripides' examples, Bishop Watson's "Absalon." Next follows a list of translators. Dr. Johnson for his Froggefight out of Homer, and Watson for his "Antigone" out of

Sophocles; Phaer for Virgil's "Eneid;" Golding for Ovid's "Metamorphoses;" Harington for his "Orlando Furioso;" the translators of Seneca's tragedies; Barnabe Googe for Palingenius; Turbervile for Ovid's Epistles and Mantuan, and Chapman for his inchoate Homer. As Emblematists, Meres cites Geoffrey Whitney, Andrew Willet, and Thomas Combe. Then he names, each with a classical parallel, Gervase Markham's translation of Solomon's Canticles into English verse, Charles Fitzgeoffrey's poem upon the life of Drake, and Tusser's Husbandry. He praises Tarleton and Wilson for skill in improvising verse, and refers to the "great and externall commendations" earned in this way by "our wittie Wilson" in his challenge at the Swan on the Bankside.

Next follow references to Harvey's attack on the dead Greene, to the liberties Nash took with Harvey, to the trouble brought upon Nash by his "Isle of Dogs.” “Yet God forbid that so braue a witte should so basely perish, thine are but paper dogges, neither is thy banishment like Ovid's, eternally to conuerse with the barbarous Getes. Therefore comfort thy selfe, sweete Tom, with Cicero's glorious return to Rome, and with the counsel Eneas gives to his sea-beaten soldiors-lib. i., Aeneid.

666

Pluck up thine heart, and drive from thence both feare and care

away:

To think on this may pleasure be perhaps another day.'”

Then the section ends with parallels for Peele's death by the pox, Greene's by a surfeit of pickled herrings and Rhenish wine, at which Nash was present; and Marlowe's pitiful end, stabbed, as the story here runs, by a servingman who was his rival in lewd love.

Thus we get from an Elizabethan minister and schoolmaster, who unquestionably loved the poets and the players of his time, and was a personal friend of Drayton and some

other good writers, his own summary account of what he took to be the best verse literature of his day.

The Drama,

It was not until 1597 or 1598 that a new growth began in the drama, round about Shakespeare, who for a few years had stood as a single oak among much underwood. Young dramatists who would reach maturity in the reign of James I., were then producing their first works: among them Ben Jonson, whose first dramatic utterances were just known to Meres. Thomas Kyd, whom Ben Jonson afterwards styled "sportive," with sober reference to his surname and laughing reference to his plays, represents the old drama through the little that remains of much that he may have written. In one play it is the old drama with touch of the new energy, in scenes added by Ben Jonson to his "Spanish Tragedy."

Thomas

Thomas Kyd was the son of Francis Kyd, a London Scrivener. He entered Merchant Taylors' School on the twenty-sixth of October, 1565, and was, therefore, Kyd. at school with Spenser, who left Merchant Taylors' in 1569. Kyd may have begun life in his father's business as scrivener. If so, he left that for literature, and was, perhaps, in Nash's mind when he spoke of those who left "the trade of noverint whereto they were born" to "pose as English Senecas, attempt Italian translations or twopenny pamphlets, and botch up a blank verse with ifs and ands." Kyd had his classical school training under Mulcaster, and could translate from French and Italian. His first book was a translation of Tasso's Padre di Famiglia, under the title of "The Householder's Philosophie, first written in Italian by that excellent orator and poet, Torquato Tasso, and now translated by T. K." This was published in 1598. Thomas Kyd had a brother John, who was admitted in February, 1584, to the freedom of the Stationers' Company, and for him he wrote, in 1592, the year of John's death, "The Truethe of the most wicked