lively and humorous, besides being sometimes written in harmonious verse. But as the longest of them does not much exceed fifty lines, the shortest being confined to twelve, there is scarcely more room for treatment of the subject than Davies took in his epigrams. Each kind of fashionable or popular poem of the time-the bombastic tragedy, the tragic romance, the Complaint in the style of the Mirror for Magistrates, the metrical paraphrase of Scripture, the English hexameter, the Petrarcan sonnet falls in turn under the lash of the satirist; but no attempt is made to view the subject of poetry from any elevated critical standpoint. The following satire, on the sacred poems of the period, is a good example of the style employed :

SATIRE VIII

Hence, ye profane: mell1 not with holy things,
That Sion's Muse from Palestina brings.
Parnassus is transformed to Sion hill,

And Jewry palms her steep ascents doon fill.
Now good St. Peter weeps pure Helicon,
And both the Maries make a music moan:
Yea, and the prophet of the heavenly lyre,
Great Solomon, sings in the English quire;
And is become a new-found sonnetist,

Singing his love, the holy spouse of Christ ; 3
Like as she were some light-skirts of the rest,
In mightiest ink-hornisms he can thither wrest.
Ye Sion Muses, shall by my dear will,
For this your zeal and far-admired skill,
Be straight transported from Jerusalem,
Unto the holy house of Bethlehem.

In the second book, which dwells on the different kinds of neglect to which polite learning is subject, the following picture of the condition of a domestic tutor is characteristic:

A gentle squire would gladly entertain

Into his house some trencher-chappelain ;

1 Meddle.

2 See Southwell's poems, mentioned on pp. 121-123.

3 Alluding to Drayton's Harmonic of the Church, in which the Song of Solomon is versified.

Some willing man that might instruct his sons,
And that would stand to good conditions:
First, that he lie upon the truckle-bed,
Whiles his young master lieth o'er his head ;
Secondly, that he do, on no default,

Ever presume to sit above the salt;

Third, that he never change his trencher twice;
Fourth, that he use all common courtesies;
Sit bare at meals, and one half rise and wait;
Last, that he never his young master beat,

But he must ask his mother to define

How many jerks she would his breech should line.
All these observed, he could contented be,

To give five marks and winter livery.1

The third book satirises the extravagance of contemporary manners and fashions in a style like the following:

Great Osmond knows not how he shall be known,
When once great Osmond shall be dead and gone,
Unless he rear up some rich monument,

Ten furlongs nearer to the firmament.

Some stately tomb he builds, Egyptian wise,

Rex regum written on the pyramis :
Whereas great Arthur lies in ruder oak,
That never felt none but the feller's stroke.
Small honour can be got with gaudy grave,
Nor it thy rotten name from death can save.
The fairer tomb, the fouler is thy name;
The greater pomp procuring greater shame.
Thy monument make thou thy living deeds;
No other tomb than that true virtue needs.
What! had he nought whereby he might be known,
But costly pilements of some curious stone?
The matter nature's, and the workman's frame
His purse's cost: where then is Osmond's name?
Deserved'st thou ill? well were thy name and thee,
Wert thou inditchèd in great secrecy ;
Whereas no passenger might curse thy dust,
Nor dogs sepulchral sate their gnawing lust.
Thine ill deserts cannot be graved with thee,
So long as on thy grave they engraved be.

All these show ingenuity in their kind, but the kind is rather that of Martial than Juvenal or Persius. And This may be compared with Oldham's satire on the same subject. See p. 503.

though in his last three books Hall considerably extended the length of his satires, he did not thereby approach any nearer to the style of the masters he sought to imitate. He had read the Roman poets, and especially the satirists, with great advantage to his taste: they had refined his literary perceptions, quickened his sense of proportion, and taught him how to enliven his verse with pleasant and witty turns of expression. But the time had not yet come when it was possible to imitate the spirit of the Roman satirist. Refined vice was not widely enough spread through society, or practised on a sufficiently large scale, to afford opportunities for those moral and philosophical invectives, picturesquely illustrated by living portraits, which give an undying interest to the satire of Juvenal. Nor had the nation advanced so far in selfgovernment as to fix the public attention on the sayings and doings of ambitious statesmen, contending factions, and rival wits; this was to come in the days of Dryden and Pope, under the rule of the English Parliament. At present all the social energy of the nation was confined within the narrow circle of the Court; and the vices and follies of individual courtiers were felt to be visited with adequate chastisement when they were pilloried in the light epigrams of Harington and Davies, or scourged on the stage in the new Moralities of Ben Jonson.

The failure of the attempt to extend the province of satire beyond the range of epigram is more conspicuous in the satires of John Marston than in those of Hall, in proportion as the attempt itself is more ambitious. Of Marston (who was born about 1575, who matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford, in February 1692, and died on 25th June 1634) I shall have more to say in his capacity of dramatist. But his first appearance before the public was as the author of Pigmalion, a composition of the same class as Venus and Adonis, but falling as far below the latter in richness of imagery, as it transcended it in lewdness of description. Apparently public opinion decided that the limits of what was permissible had been passed,

and when Pigmalion found its way to Cambridge, Joseph Hall wrote a severe epigram on it, which he caused to be pasted on every copy offered for sale. Marston, seeing that judgment was given against him, immediately turned round, and, pretending that Pigmalion was a veiled satire on the amorous poetry of the day, republished it (1598) in a volume followed by "certain satyrs," with an address from "the author to his precedent poem." In this he asked sarcastically:

Is not my pen complete? Are not my lines

Right in the swaggering humour of these times?

but ended with announcing that, having cheated readers into the belief that Pigmalion was written seriously, he would now show the age up in its real colours, by writing as a satirist :

Now by the whips of epigrammatists

I'll not be lashed for my dissembling shifts:
And therefore I'll use Popeling's discipline,
Lay ope my faults to Mastigophoros' eyne;
Censure myself, 'fore others me deride,
And scoff at me as if I had denied,

Or thought my poem good, when that I see
My lines are froth, my stanzas sapless be.
Thus having railed against myself a while,
I'll snarl at those which do the world beguile
With masked shows. Ye changing Proteans, list,
And tremble at a barking satirist !

Doubtless being afraid that the world would be sceptical of his sincerity, he reverts again and again to his intention :

And

And

I that e'en now lisped like an amorist,
Am turned into a snap-haunch satirist.

A partial praise shall never elevate
My settled censure of my own esteem,

A cankered verdict of malignant hate

Shall ne'er provoke me worse myself to deem.

Spite of despite and rancour's villainy,

I am myself, so is my poesy.

Curio, knowst my sprite?

Yet deemst that in sad seriousness I write
Such nasty stuff as is Pigmalion?

His mingled fear and hate of his antagonist Hall are always appearing. He attacks him in one satire as an envious railer against the poets of the time: in another he professes contempt for the hostile epigram:

Smart jerk of wit! Did ever such a strain
Rise from an apish schoolboy's childish brain?

And, under the name of "Judicial Musus," he writes against him as an envious, railing pedant :

Musus, here's Rhodes, let's see thy boasted leap,
Or else avaunt, lewd cur, presume not speak,
Or with thy venom-sputtering chaps to bark
Gainst well-penned poems in the tongue-tied dark.

Though he claimed to be inspired by his hatred of the Titanic vices of his time, the subjects of his satire are for the most part the follies and extravagances of such persons as are lashed in the light epigrammatic verse of Davies and Hall-the hulking braggart, the whining sonneteer, the over-dressed gull, the gluttonous Puritan; he hints, however, at darker vices, and it is of course possible that under the names of Curio, Tubrio, Ruscus, Luxurio, he may have had in view particular persons of the "Inglese Italianato" school. It is significant that the groundwork of all his descriptions of vice is the sin of lechery, which he had sought in Pigmalion to decorate with as much brilliancy of colour as he could command, and, as he announces to the reader that it is his intention to chastise himself in his satires, it is likely enough that, in seeming to satirise the world without him, he is usually holding up the mirror to his own prurient mind. His view of human nature is founded on extreme Calvinism : he holds man to be born in a state of absolute and utter corruption, from which the only salvation is by divine grace. In the following lines, taken from a satire entitled Cras ("To-morrow "), his philosophy reaches its high-water mark:

If not to-day (quoth that Nasonian),

Much less to-morrow. "Yes," saith Fabian,