sweet English verse "," and is largely cited in England's Parnassus, 1600. Lock applied the sonnet to a spiritual purpose, and substituting Christian love in the place of amorous passion, made it the vehicle of humiliation, holy comfort, and thanksgiving. This book he dedicated, under the title of The Passionate Present, to queen Elizabeth, who, perhaps, from the title, expected to be entertained with a subject of a very different nature". In the second Satire, our author poetically laments that the nine Muses are no longer vestal virgins.

Whilom the Muses nine were vestal maides,

And held their temple in the secret shades

Of faire Parnassvs, that two-headed hill

Whose avncient 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 Heaven and Earth..........

He complains, that the rabble of rymesters new have engrafted the myrtle on the bay; and that poetry, departing from its ancient moral tendency, has been unnaturally perverted to the purposes of corruption and impurity. The Muses have changed, in defiance of chastity,

Their modest stole to garish looser weed,

Deckt with loue-fauours, their late whoredom's meed

while the pellucid spring of Pyrene is converted into a poisonous and muddy puddle,

.Whose infectious staine

Corrupteth all the lowly fruitfull plaine ".

Marlow's Ovid's Elegies, and some of the dissolute sallies of Green and Nash, seem to be here pointed out. I know not of any edition of Marston's Pygmalion's Image before the year 1598; and the Caltha Poetarum, or Bumble-Bee, one of the most exceptionable books of this kind, written by T. Cutwode, appeared in 1599 6. Shakspeare's Venus and Adonis, published in 1593, had given great offence to the graver readers of English verse ".

"Transl. Orl. Fur. Notes, B. xxxv. p. 296. 1633. Hence, or from an old play, the name of Holofernes got into Shakspeare.

14 I have before cited this collection, which appeared in 1597, vol. iii. 445. That was a second edition. To his Ecclesiastes there is a recommendatory poem by Lilly. Some of David's Psalms in verse appear with his name the same year.

13 B. i. 2. f. 4.

"To R. Olave, April 17, 1599. Registr. Station. C. f. 50. b.

"This we learn from a poem entitled, A Scourge for Paper Persecutors, by J. D. with an Inquisition against Paper Persecutors by A. H. Lond. for H. H. 1625, 4to. Signat. A. 3.

Making lewd Venus with eternall lines

To tye Adonis to her loues designes:
Fine wit is shown therein, but finer 't were

If not attired in such bawdy geere :

But be it as it will, the coyest dames
In priuate reade it for their closet-games.

In the subsequent Satire, our author more particularly censures the intemperance of his brethren; and illustrates their absolute inability to write, till their imaginations were animated by wine, in the following apt and witty comparison, which is worthy of Young.

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 forth filthy smoak, and stinking steams;
So doth the base and the fore-barren brain,
Soon as the raging wine begins to raign.

In the succeeding lines, he confines his attack to Marlow, eminent for his drunken frolics, who was both a player and a poet, and whose tragedy of Tamerlane the Great, represented before the year 1588, published in 1590, and confessedly one of the worst of his plays, abounds in bombast. Its false splendour was also burlesqued by Beaumont and Fletcher in The Coxcomb; and it has these two lines, which are ridiculed by Pistol, in Shakspeare's King Henry the Fourth", addressed to the captive princes who drew Tamerlane's chariot:

Holla, you 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 now thought almost essentially and solely to consist, in the pomp of declamation, in sounding expressions, and unnatural amplifications of style. But to proceed:

One, higher pitch'd, doth set his soaring thought
On crowned kings that fortune low hath brought;
Or some vpreared high-aspiring swaine,
As it might be the Turkish Tamberlaine":
Then weeneth he his base drink-drowned spright
Rapt to the threefold loft of Heauen's hight:
When he conceiues upon his faigned stage
The stalking steps of his great personage

Graced with huff-cap termes, and thundering threats,
That his poor hearers hair quite vpright sets,
So soon as some braue-minded hungrie youth
Sees fitly frame to his wide-strained mouth,

See also Freeman's Epigrams, the second part, entitled, Run and a great Cast. Lond. 1614, 4to. Epigr. 92. Signat. K. 3.

18 A. ii. S. iv.

TO MASTER WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

Shakespeare, that nimble Mercury thy braine, &c.

Who list reade lust, there's Venus and Adonis,

True model of a most lasciuious letcher,

19 There is a piece entered to R. Jones, Aug. 14, 1590, entitled, Comicall Discourses of Tamberlain the Cithian [Scythian] Shepherd. Registr. Station, B. f. 262. b. Probably the story of Tamerlane was introduced into our early drama from the following publication: The Historie of the great Emperour Tamerlane, drawn from the antient Monuments of the Arabians. By messire Jean du Bec, abbot of Mortimer. Translated into English by H. M. London, for W. Ponsonbie, 1597, 4to. I cite from a second edition.