After an interval, however, Harvey returns to actual criticism, and shows himself in rather better figure by protesting, in spite of “five hundred Drants,” against the alteration of the quantity of English words by accenting “Majesty” and “Manfully,” and “Carpenter” on the second syllable. And he falls in with Gascoigne on the subject of such words as “Heaven.” Nor could he, even if he had been far less of a pedant and coxcomb, have given better or sounder doctrine than that with which he winds up. “It is the vulgar and natural mother Prosody, that alone worketh the feat, as the only supreme foundress and reformer of Position, Diphthong, Orthography, or whatsoever else; whose affirmatives are nothing worth if she once conclude the negative.” And for this sound doctrine, not unsoundly enlarged upon, and tipped with a pleasant Latin farewell to _“mea domina Immerita, mea bellissima Collina Clouta”_, let us leave Gabriel in charity.[238] ----- Footnote 238: The further letters to Spenser, which Dr Grosart has borrowed from the Camden Society’s _Letter-book of Gabriel Harvey_, touch literary matters not seldom, but with no new important deliverances. In the later (1592) _Four Letters_, the embroidery of railing at the dead Greene and the living Nash has almost entirely hidden the literary canvas. ----- [Sidenote: _The Puritan attack on Poetry._] Meanwhile the strong critical set of the time—so interesting, if not so satisfying, after the absolute silence of criticism in English earlier—was being shown in another direction by a different controversy, to which, as we have seen, Spenser makes allusion. The points which chiefly interested him at the moment were formal; those to which we now come were partly of the same class though of another species, partly transcending form. Stephen Gosson is one of the persons of whom, as is by no means always the case, it would really be useful to know more than we do know about their private history and character. [Sidenote: _Gosson._] What disgust, what disappointment, what tardy development of certain strains of temper and disposition he underwent, we do not know; but something of the kind there must have been to make a young man of four-and-twenty, a fair scholar, already of some note for both dramatic and poetical writing, and obviously of no mean intellectual powers, swing violently round, and denounce plays, and poems, and almost literature generally, as the works of the Devil. It is quite insufficient to ejaculate “Puritanism!” or “Platonism!” for neither of these was a new thing, and the question is why Gosson was not affected by them earlier or later.