SATIRE III.

WITH Some pot-fury', ravish'd from their wit,
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 brains,
Soon as the raging wine begins to reign.
One, higher pitch'd, doth set his soaring thought

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On crowned kings, that fortune hath low brought:

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Or some upreared, high-aspiring swain,

As it might be the Turkish Tamberlain :

Then weeneth he his base drink-drowned spright,

Rapt to the threefold loft of heaven's height,
When he conceives upon his feigned stage
The stalking steps of his great personage,

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Graced with huff-cap" terms and thund'ring threats,
That his poor hearers' hair quite upright sets.
Such, soon as some brave-minded hungry youth
Sees fitly frame to his wide-strained mouth,
He vaunts his voice upon an hired stage,
With high-set steps and princely carriage:

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This Satire is levelled at the intemperance and bombastic fury of his contemporary dramatists.-WARton.

Pot-fury. Vid. Bishop Earle's character of a Pot-poet, in his Microcosmography, Ed. 1811, p. 80.-MAITLAND.

Fore-barren brain; the brain that was previously barren.-MAITLAND. 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.”—Singer. See Malone's Shakespeare.

Ed. 1790. pp. 115, 116.-ELLIS.

Huff-cup; cant, for saucy, bold, arrogant. given to strong ale, "from inducing people to huffing style." Nares.-MAITLAND.

Huff-cap was also a name set their caps in a bold or

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Now, swooping in side-robes of royalty,
That erst did scrub" in lousy brokery,
There, if he can with terms Italianate ",
Big-sounding sentences and words of state,
Fair patch me up his pure Iambic verse,
He ravishes the gazing scaffolders":
Then certes was the famous Corduban
Never but half so high tragedian. ←
Now, lest such frightful shows of Fortune's fall,
And bloody tyrant's rage, should chance appall
The dead-struck audience, midst the silent rout,
Comes leaping in a self-misformed lout",

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And laughs, and grins, and frames his mimic face,

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And justles straight into the prince's place :
Then doth the theatre echo all aloud,

With gladsome noise of that applauding crowd.

A goodly hotch-potch! when vile russetings

Are match'd with monarchs, and with mighty kings.

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A goodly grace to sober Tragic Muse,

When each base clown his clumsy fist doth bruise,
And show his teeth in double rotten row,

For laughter at his self-resembled show.

Swooping, which Hall generally spells, soouping, is the same as sweeping along majestically. Drayton uses it in the same sense, speaking of a river :"Proud Tamer swoops along with such a lusty train As fits so brave a flood." Polyolbion, Song 1.

Again, in Song 6 :—

"Thus as she swoops along with all that goodly train.”

See Tooke's EПEA IITEPOENTA, vol. ii. p. 263.-SINGER. Alluding, perhaps, to the swooping or descent of a bird of prey on his quarry.-PRAtt.

Side-robes are long loose robes; the term being of Saxon or Danish etymology.-H. This word was particularly applied to dress. Side-sleeves were long loose hanging sleeves. Thus in Ben Jonson's "New Inn,"—

His branch'd cassock, a side sweeping gown."

"Their cotes be so syde that they be fayne to tucke them up when they ride.” Fitzherbert's Book of Husbandrie.-SINGER.

Scrub; to look mean and filthy: taken, probably, from scrub, a short and dirty fellow. See Reed's Shakespeare, vol. vii. p. 383.-PRATT.

a Alluding to the prevailing custom of innovating on our native tongue from the Italian. See also, in book v. Sat. 2:

"When Mævio's first page of his poesy,

Nail'd to a hundred posts for novelty,

With his big title, an Italian mot,

Lays siege unto the backward buyer's groat."

So Marston, in his Satires, 1598 :-

I cannot quote a motte Italianate,

Or brand my Satires with a Spanish terme."-ELLIS.

Meanwhile our poets, in high parliament,
Sit watching every word and gesturement,
Like curious censors of some doughty gear",
Whispering their verdict in their fellows' ear.
Woe to the word, whose margent, in their scroll,
Is noted with a black condemning coal!
But if each period might the synod please,
Ho! bring the ivy boughs, and bands of bays.

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Now, when they part, and leave the naked stage,
Gins the bare hearer, in a guilty rage,

To curse, and ban, and blame his likerous eye,
That thus hath lavish'd his late halfpenny..

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Shame that the Muses should be bought and sold,
For every peasant's brass, on each scaffold!

SATIRE IV.

Too popular is Tragic Poesy,

Straining his tip-toes for a farthing fee,

And doth beside on rhymeless numbers tread,
Unbid Iambics flow from careless head'.

Scaffolders; those who sat on the Scaffold; a part of the Play-House, which answered to the Upper Gallery. So, again, Book iv. Sat. 2 :—

"When a craz'd scaffold, and a rotten stage,

Was all rich Ninius his heritage."

See the conformation of an old English Theatre accurately investigated in the Supplement to Shakspeare: i. 9, seq.-WArton.

The famous Corduban; Seneca.-PRATT.

d But, adds the critical Satirist, that the minds of the astonished audience may not be too powerfully impressed with the terrors of tragic solemnity, a vice, or buffoon, is suddenly, and most seasonably introduced.-WARTON. See Malone's Shakespeare. Ed. 1790. pp. 115, 116.-PRATT.

e

Hotch-potch; an incongruous mixture. In Scotland this term is applied to a soup made of a variety of vegetables; in England it is a law-term, which Lyttleton defines to be "a commixtion, or putting together of lands for the equal division of them, being so put together." Hall's use of the phrase is metaphorical.-MAITLAND.

Russetings; coarse rustic dress. The name was derived from the usual colour of such garments, namely, a reddish brown; in Fr. rousset.—MAITLAND. Russetings are clowns, low people, whose clothes were of a russetcolour. Hence the name of russet, or russeting, given to an apple formerly called a leather-coat in Devonshire.

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"He borrowed on the working-days his holy russets oft.”
Warner's Albion's England, p. 95.

Florio, in voce Romagnuolo, describes it as a kind of coarse, homespun,
sheepes-russet cloth, called frier's cloth, or shepheard's clothing."-SINGER.
In striking the benches to express applause.-WARTON.
Doughty gear; important matter.-MAITLAND. Gear is a general word for
things or matters. See Reed's Shakespeare: vol. vii. 240. xiii. 261.—PRATT.
Hall seems to have conceived a contempt for blank verse; observing

b

VOL. XII.

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Some braver brain in high heroic rhymes
Compileth worm-eat stories of old times:
And he, like some imperious Maronist,
Conjures the Muses that they him assist.
Then strives he to bombast his feeble lines
With far-fetch'd phrase;

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And maketh up his hard-betaken tale

With strange enchantments, fetch'd from darksome vale,

Of some Melissa', that by magic doom

To Tuscan's soil transporteth Merlin's tomb.

Painters and Poets, hold your ancient right:

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Write what you will, and write not what you might:
Their limits be their list; their reason, will.

But if some painter, in presuming skill,

Should paint the stars in centre of the earth,

Could ye forbear some smiles, and taunting mirth?
But let no rebel Satirem dare traduce

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Th' eternal legends of thy Fairy Muse,

Renowmed" Spenser: whom no earthly wight
Dares once to emulate, much less dares despight.

that the English Iambic is written with little trouble, and seems rather a spontaneous effusion, than an artificial construction.-WARTON. He soon after condemns such licentious fictions as occur in Orlando Furioso.-ELLIS. Yet, in his Postscript, he speaks pretty decisively against rhyme, at least as applicable to satire :-"the fettering together the series of the verses, with the bonds of like cadence or desinence of rhyme, which if it be unusually abrupt, and not dependent in sense upon so near affinity of words, I know not what a loathsome kind of harshness and discordance it breedeth to any judicial ear, &c."-PRATT.

* Maronist; an imitator of Virgil.—MAITLAND.

1 Melissa; a sorceress of early romance, whose agency is used by Ariosto, in the Orlando Furioso (c. iii. v. 10. and c. xxvi. v. 39.), for the purpose of removing Merlin's tomb from Wales to Tuscany.-MAITLAND. The Orlando had just then been translated by Harrington in a most licentious manner.—SINGER. Compare Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen, i. 37.— ELLIS.

The poet here suddenly checks his career, and retracts his thoughtless temerity in presuming to blame such themes as had been immortalized by the Fairy Muse of Spenser.-WARTON.

n Renowmed; a variety in the orthography of renowned, which frequently occurs in the early editions of Spenser's works.-MAITLAND.

• Guillaume Salluste, Seigneur du Bartas, the translation of whose “Semaines" was once popular, and to which Hall prefixed Commendatory Verses. -ELLIS.

P The Book, to which this Satire alludes, is the “Mirrour of Magistrates :" in which poem many of the most eminent characters in English History are introduced, relating their own misfortunes. It was originally written by Thomas Sackville, first Lord Buckhurst, about 1557; and was afterwards digested anew, and continued by several of the greatest wits of the Eliza

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Sallust of France, and Tuscan Ariost,
Yield up the laurel garland ye have lost:
And let all others willow wear with me,
Or let their undeserving temples bared be.

SATIRE V.P

ANOTHER, whose more heavy-hearted saint
Delights in naught but notes of rueful plaint,
Urgeth his melting Muse, with solemn tears,
Rhyme of some dreary fates of luckless peers.
Then brings he up some branded whining ghost",
To tell how old misfortunes had him toss'd.
Then must he ban the guiltless fates above,
Or fortune frail, or unrewarded love.
And when he hath parbrak'd' his grieved mind,
He sends him down where erst he did him find,
Without one penny to pay Charon's hire,
That waiteth for the wand'ring ghost's retire.

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bethan age.-ELLIS. For a detailed account of its contents, see Warton's History of English Poetry, vol. iii. p. 209-282.-MAITLAND.

It is undoubtedly our author Hall, whom Marston abuses in his Book iii. Satire 10, for affecting to censure the Mirror for Magistrates :

"Fond censurer! why should those MIRRORS seeme
So vile to thee? which better judgments deeme

Exquisite then, and in our polished times

May run for sencefull tollerable lines?

What, not mediocria firma from thy spight?

But must thy enuious hungry fangs need light

On MAGISTRATES' MIRROR? must thou needs detract,

And striue to worke his antient honor's wrack?

What, shall not Rosamond, or Gaueston,

Ope their sweet lips without detraction?

But must our modern crittick's enuious eye," &c.—WARTON.

A variety of ghosts are introduced in the Mirror for Magistrates, whom the poet sends back to hell without a penny to pay Charon for their passage over the river Styx.-MAITLAND.

› Parbrak'd,—i. e. sickened to vomiting. Spenser, Book I. Canto i. v. 20, has

"Her filthy parbreake all the place defiled has."

See Mr. Todd's note. In the old translation of the Bible, edit. 1569, at Prov. xxv. 16. we read, “If thou findest honey, eate so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be over full, and perbrake it out agayne."-PRATT. Thus, in Horman's Vulgaria,' 1519, "The Egyptians healed all diseases with fastynge and castynge, parbrakyng or vomytte." The 'versus ructari' of Horace, is rendered to belch verses,' by the old translators.-SINGER.

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