The great dramatists had not yet arisen, to form completely that truly English school, of which Spenser, unconscious of his own vast powers, was laying the foundation.

And, indeed, it was not till Daniel, twenty years after, in his admirable apology for rhyme, had smashed Mr.Campian and his "eight several kinds of classical numbers," that the matter was finally settled, and the English tongue left to go the road on which Heaven had started it.

So that we may excuse Raleigh's answering somewhat waspish to some quotation of Spenser's from the three letters of "Immerito and G.H." "Tut, tut, Colin Clout, much learning has made thee mad.

A good old fishwives' ballad jingle is worth all your sapphics and trimeters, and 'riff-raff thurlery bouncing.' Hey?
have I you there, old lad?
Do you mind that precious verse ?" "But, dear Wat, Homer and Virgil--" "But, dear Ned, Petrarch and Ovid--" "But, Wat, what have we that we do not owe to the ancients ?" "Ancients, quotha?
Why, the legend of King Arthur, and Chevy Chase too, of which even your fellow-sinner Sidney cannot deny that every time he hears it even from a blind fiddler it stirs his heart like a trumpet-blast.

Speak well of the bridge that carries you over, man! Did you find your Redcross Knight in Virgil, or such a dame as Una in old Ovid?
No more than you did your Pater and Credo, you renegado baptized heathen, you!" "Yet, surely, our younger and more barbarous taste must bow before divine antiquity, and imitate afar--" "As dottrels do fowlers.