Of ivy mix'd with bays, circlen around,
Their living temples likewise laurel-bound.
Rather had I, albe in careless rhymes,

Check the mis-order'd world, and lawless times.
Nor need I crave the Muse's midwifery,
To bring to light so worthless poetry:
Or if we list, what baser Muse can bide,
To sit and sing by Granta's naked side?
They haunt the tided Thames and salt Medway,
E'er since the fame of their late bridal day.
Nought have we here but willow-shaded shore,
To tell our Grant his banks are left forlore 5.

toral vein of affected or mercenary poetasters, leaves heroic poetry, pastoral, comedy, and tragedy to the celebrated established masters in those different kinds of composition, such as Spenser, Surrey, Sidney, &c. unless he means the classic poets, which is not improbable. The imitation from the prologue of Persius to his satires is obvious. W.

4 The compliment in the close to Spenser is introduced and turned with singular address and elegance. The allusion is to Spenser's beautiful episode of the marriage of Thames and Medway, then recently published, in the fourth book of the second part of the Fairy Queen. But had I, says the poet, been inclined to invoke the assistance of the muse, what muse, even of a lower order, is there now to be found who would condescend to sit and sing of the desolated margin of the Cam? The muses frequent other rivers ever since Spenser celebrated the nuptials of Thames and Medway. Cam has now nothing on his banks but willows, the types of desertion. W.

5 Forlore is the same as forlorn, abandoned, forsaken. All editions print erroneously forlore.

SATIRE II.

WHILOM the sisters nine were vestal maids,
And held their temple in the secret shades
Of fair Parnassus, that two-headed hill,
Whose ancient fame the southern world did fill;
And in the stead of their eternal fame,

Was the cool stream that took his endless name,
From out the fertile hoof of winged steed:
There did they sit and do their holy deed,
That pleas'd both heav'n and earth-till that of

late

(Whom should I fault? or the most righteous fate,
Or heaven, or men, or fiends, or aught beside,
That ever made that foul mischance betide?)
Some of the sisters in securer shades
Defloured were-

And ever since, disdaining sacred shame,
Doon aught that might their heavenly stock de-
fame.

Now is Parnassus turned to a stews7,

And on bay-stocks the wanton myrtle grews; Cytheron hill's become a brothel bed,

And Pyrene sweet turn'd to a poison'd head

6 Fault, i. e. blame.

7 A brothel, a place of infamy.

Of coal-black puddle, whose infectious stain
Corrupteth all the lowly fruitful plainR.

Their modest stole, to garish looser weed, Deck'd with love-favours their late whoredoms' meed:

And where they wont sip of the simple flood,
Now toss they bowls of Bacchus' boiling blood,
I marvell'd much, with doubtful jealousy,
Whence came such litters of new poetry:
Methought I fear'd lest the horse-hoofed well
His native banks did proudly overswell
In some late discontent, thence to ensue
Such wondrous rabblements of rhymesters new:
But since, I saw it painted on fame's wings,
The Muses to be woxen wantonings.

8 This satire is directed with honest indignation against the prostitution of the muse to lewd or obscene subjects. Ovid's Art of Love had recently been rendered in a coarse manner, and Marlowe had translated Ovid's Epistles, and written his erotic romance of Hero and Leander. Shakspeare had also published his Venus and Adonis, which had given great offence to the graver readers of English verse. But it is in the Epigrams of Davies and Harrington, and in the ephemeral publications of Greene and Nashe, that decency was most outraged. The poet had these most flagrant transgressions in his eye. Though the first edition of Marston's Pigmalion's Image bears the date of 1598, I cannot but think that Hall particularly points at that poem, which is one of Ovid's transformations heightened with much paraphrastic obscenity. Marston was the poetical rival of Hall, whom he often censures or ridicules, particularly in his fourth satire, entitled, Reactio, in which he paraphrases several of Hall's lines. It appears from the 10th satire of Marston's Scourge of Villanie, that Hall had caused a severe epigram to be pasted on the last page of every copy of Pigmalion that came to the booksellers of Cambridge.

Each bush, each bank, and each base apple

squire 9

Can serve to sate their beastly lewd desire.
Ye bastard poets, see your pedigree

From common trulls and loathsome brothelry!

9 This cant phrase has been erroneously explained as meaning a pander or pimp. The fact is, that it meant what is in modern slang, called a flash-man; a squire of the body had the same meaning. It was sometimes, however, used for a base wittol, a cuckoldy knave, who would hold the door while his wife played the strumpet. All this may be learned from that curious little manual, Junius's Nomenclator, by Abraliam Fleming, 1585, in voce Aquariolus. In the Letting of Humours Blood, by S. R. 1611. A pippin-squire is used in the latter sense.

SATIRE III.

WITH Some pot-fury, ravish'd from their wit1o,
They sit and muse on some no-vulgar writ:
As frozen dunghills in a winter's morn,
That void of vapours seemed all beforn,
Soon as the sun sends out his piercing beams,
Exhale out filthy smoke and stinking steams.
So doth the base, and the fore-barren brain,
Soon as the raging wine begins to reign.

One higher pitch'd doth set his soaring thought
On crowned kings, that fortune hath low brought:
Or some upreared, high-aspiring swain,
As it might be the Turkish Tamberlain 11 :

10 This satire is levelled at the intemperance and bombastic fury of his contemporary dramatists. W.

11 Evidently an attack upon Marlowe, who was unfortunately distinguished for his dissipated life. He is said to have been a player as well as a poet. The tragedy of "Tamburlaine the Great; or, the Scythian Sheperd," was represented before 1588, and published in 1590, and has been generally attributed to him. It abounds in bombast: "The lunes of Tamburlane are perfect midsummer madness." Its false splendour was burlesqued by Beaumont and Fletcher in the Coxcomb; and Pistol borrows two "huff-cap" lines from it in K. Henry the Fourth :

Holla, ye pamper'd jades of Asia

What can ye draw but twenty miles a day?"

"We should in the mean time remember, that by many of the most skilful of our dramatic writers, tragedy was then thought almost essentially and solely to consist in the pomp of declamation, in sounding expressions, and unnatural amplifications of style."