“What might I call this tree? a Laurell? o bonny Laurell! Needs to thy boughs will I bow this knee, and veil my bonetto;” with yet another— “Since _Galateo_[237] came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp.” He thinks that the author of this last “wanted but some delicate choice elegant poesy” of Sidney’s or Dyer’s for a good pattern. After some further experiments of his own, or his brother’s, in hexametring some of Spenser’s own “emblems” in the _Calendar_, he turns to Spenser himself, whom, it seems, he ranks next the same “incomparable and miraculous genius in the catalogue of our very principal English Aristarchi.” He proceeds to speak of some of that earlier work which, as in _The Dying Pelican_, is certainly, or in the _Dreams_, possibly, lost. After which he writes himself down for all time in the famous passage about the _Faerie Queene_, which he had “once again nigh forgotten,” but which he now sends home “in neither better nor worse case than he found her.” “As for his judgment,” he is “void of all judgment if Spenser’s _Nine Comedies_ [also lost] are not nearer Ariosto’s than that Elvish Queene is to the _Orlando_, which” Spenser “seems to emulate, and hopes to overgo.” And so he ends his paragraph with the yet more famous words, “If so be the _Faery Queene_ be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses, and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo, mark what I say, and yet I will not say what I thought, but there an end for this once, and fare you well till God or some good Angel put you in a better mind!” Which words let all who practise criticism grave in their memories, and recite them daily, adding, “Here, but for the grace of God——!” if they be modest and fear Nemesis. ----- Footnote 236: This word, which is certainly a cousin of “balderdash,” is a good example of the slang and jargon so often mixed with their preciousness by the Elizabethans. Nash borrowed it from Harvey to use against him; and the eccentric Stanyhurst even employs it in his _Virgil_. Stanyhurst’s hexameters, by the way (_vide_ Mr Arber’s Reprint in the _English Scholars Library_, No. 10, London, 1880), are, thanks partly to their astounding lingo, among the maddest things in English literature; but his prose prefatory matter, equally odd in phrase, has some method in its madness. Footnote 237: La Casa’s book of etiquette and behaviour. -----