Why, then, has England grown so hard a stepmother to poets? They are bad enough as a rule, no doubt; though Chaucer did excellently considering his time. The _Mirror for Magistrates_ is good; so is Surrey; and _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ “hath much poetry,” though “the old rustic language” is bad, since neither Theocritus, nor Virgil, nor Sannazar has it. And what is the reason of our inferiority? The neglect of rule. From this point onwards Sidney certainly “exposes his legs to the arrows” of those who ignore the just historic estimate. He pours ridicule on all our tragedies except _Gorboduc_, and still more on our mongrel tragi-comedies. We must follow the Unities, which, as it is, are neglected even in _Gorboduc_, “how much more in all the rest?” Whence he proceeds (unconscious how cool the _reductio ad absurdum_ will leave us) to the famous ridicule of “Asia on the one side and Africa on the other,” of “three ladies walking to gather flowers,” and how the same place which was a garden becomes a rock, and then a cave with a monster, and then a battlefield with two armies—of the course of two lives in two hours’ space, &c. And he concludes with some remarks on versification, which we should gladly have seen worked out. For he does not now seem to be in that antagonistic mood towards rhyme which Spenser’s letters to Harvey discover in him. On the contrary, he admits _two_ styles, ancient and modern, the former depending on quantity, the latter depending on “number,” accent, and rhyme. He indeed thinks English fit for both sorts, and denies “neither sweetness nor majesty” to rhyme, but is, like almost all his contemporaries and followers (except Gascoigne partially), in a fog as to “numbers” and cæsura. The actual end comes a very little abruptly by an exhortation of some length, half humorous, half serious, to all and sundry, to be “no more to jest at the reverent title of a rhymer.”