The tract is, as has been said, interesting, because it is an honest, and by no means unintelligent, attempt to make an English prosody, with special reference to a dialect which had done great things in its short day, but which had been specially affected—not to say specially disorganised—by the revived and bastard alliteration of the fifteenth century. Probably it was the study of French (where the iamb had long been the only foot) which, quite as much as mere following of Gascoigne, induced James to extend that crippling limitation to English; and the same influence may be seen in his insistence on the hard-and-fast section. These things (the latter of which at least rather endeared him to Dr Guest)[250] are, of course, quite wrong; but they express the genuine and creditable desire of the time to impose some order on the shambling doggerel of the generation or two immediately preceding. We find the same tendency even in Spenser, as far as rigid dissyllabic feet and sections are concerned; and it is certainly no shame for the Royal prentice to follow, though unknowing, the master and king of English poetry at the time when he wrote. ----- Footnote 250: Who also caught at James’s “tumbling verse” as a convenient stigmatisation for the true English equivalenced liberty. ----- One would not, however, in any case have expected from James evidence of the root of the matter in poetry. [Sidenote: _Webbe’s_ Discourse.] There is more of this root, though less scholarship and also more “craze,” in the obscure William Webbe, of whom we know practically nothing except that he was a Cambridge man, a friend of Robert Wilmot (the author of _Tancred and Gismund_) and private tutor to the sons of Edward Sulyard of Flemyngs, an Essex squire. The young Sulyards must have received some rather dubious instruction in the classics, for Webbe, in his inevitable classical exordium, thinks that Pindar was older than Homer, and that Horace came after—apparently a good while after—Ovid, and about the same time as Juvenal and Persius. He was, however, really and deeply interested in English verse; and his enthusiasm for Spenser—“the new poet,” “our late famous poet,” “the mightiest English poet that ever lived,” is, if not in every case quite according to knowledge, absolutely right on the whole, and very pleasant and refreshing to read. It is, indeed, the first thing of the kind that we meet with in English; for the frequent earlier praises of Chaucer are almost always long after date, always uncritical, and for the most part[251] much rather expressions of a conventional tradition than of the writer’s deliberate preference.