Part 18

{78} Whose heart-strings the Titan (Prometheus) fastened with a better clay. (Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 35). Dryden translated the line, with its context—

“Some sons, indeed, some very few, we see Who keep themselves from this infection free, Whom gracious Heaven for nobler ends designed, Their looks erected, and their clay refined.”

{79} The orator is made, the poet born.

{80} What you will; the first that comes.

{81} “Whatever I shall try to write will be verse.” Sidney quotes from memory, and adapts to his context, Tristium IV. x. 26.

“Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos, Et quod temptabam dicere, versus erat.”

{82} His for “its” here as throughout; the word “its” not being yet introduced into English writing.

{83} Defects in the Drama. It should be remembered that this was written when the English drama was but twenty years old, and Shakespeare, aged about seventeen, had not yet come to London. The strongest of Shakespeare’s precursors had not yet begun to write for the stage. Marlowe had not yet written; and the strength that was to come of the freedom of the English drama had yet to be shown.

{84} There was no scenery on the Elizabethan stage.

{85} Messenger.

{86} From the egg.

{87} Bias, slope; French “bìais.”

{88} Juvenal, Sat. iii., lines 152–3. Which Samuel Johnson finely paraphrased in his “London:”

“Of all the griefs that harass the distrest, Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest.”

{89} George Bachanan (who died in 1582, aged seventy-six) had written in earlier life four Latin tragedies, when Professor of Humanities at Bordeaux, with Montaigne in his class.

{90} Defects in Lyric Poetry.

{91} Defects in Diction. This being written only a year or two after the publication of “Euphues,” represents that style of the day which was not created but represented by the book from which it took the name of “Euphuism.”

{92} Nizolian paper-books, are commonplace books of quotable passages, so called because an Italian grammarian, Marius Nizolius, born at Bersello in the fifteenth century, and one of the scholars of the Renaissance in the sixteenth, was one of the first producers of such volumes. His contribution was an alphabetical folio dictionary of phrases from Cicero: “Thesaurus Ciceronianus, sive Apparatus Linguæ Latinæ e scriptis Tullii Ciceronis collectus.”

{93} “He lives and wins, nay, comes to the Senate, nay, comes to the Senate,” &c.

{94} Pounded. Put in the pound, when found astray.

{95} Capacities of the English Language.

{96} Metre and Rhyme.

{97} Last Summary and playful peroration.