{ 75} _Causes of Defect in English Poetry_.
{ 76} From the invocation at the opening of Virgil’s _Æneid_ (line 12), “Muse, bring to my mind the causes of these things: what divinity was injured . . . that one famous for piety should suffer thus.”
{ 77} The Chancellor, Michel de l’Hôpital, born in 1505, who joined to his great political services (which included the keeping of the Inquisition out of France, and long labour to repress civil war) great skill in verse. He died in 1573.
{ 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.”
{ 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.
{ 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.
{ 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.”