On the whole, to use the hackneyed old phrase once more, we could have better spared a better critic than Webbe, who gives us—in a fashion invaluable to map-makers of the early exploration of English criticism—the workings of a mind furnished with no original genius for poetry, and not much for literature, not very extensively or accurately erudite, but intensely _interested_ in matters literary, and especially in matters poetical, generously enthusiastic for such good things as were presented to it, not without some mother-wit even in its crazes, and encouraged in those crazes not, as in Harvey’s case, by vanity, pedantry, and bad taste, but by its very love of letters. Average dispositions of this kind were, as a rule, diverted either into active life—very much for the good of the nation—or—not at all for its good—into the acrid disputes of hot-gospelling and Puritanism. Webbe, to the best of his modest powers, was a devotee of literature: for which let him have due honour. Puttenham—or whosoever else it was, if it was not Puttenham[254]—has some points of advantage, and one great one of disadvantage, in comparison with Webbe. [Sidenote: _Puttenham’s (?)_ Art of English Poesie.] In poetical faculty there is very little to choose between them—the abundant specimens of his own powers, which the author or _The Art of English Poesie_ gives (and which are eked out by a late copy of one of the works referred to, _Partheniades_), deserve the gibes they receive in one of our scanty early notices of the book, that by Sir John Harington (_v. infra_). On the other hand, Puttenham has very little of that engaging enthusiasm which atones for so much in his contemporary. But this very want of enthusiasm somewhat prepares us for, though it need not necessarily accompany, merits which we do not find in Webbe, considered as a critic. _The Art of English Poesy_, which, as has been said, appeared in 1589, three years later than Webbe’s, but which, from some allusions, may have been written, or at least begun, before it, and which, from other allusions, must have been the work of a man well advanced in middle life, is methodically composed, very capable in range and plan, and supported with a by no means contemptible erudition, and no inconsiderable supply of judgment and common-sense. It was unfortunate for Puttenham that he was just a little too old: that having been—as from a fairly precise statement of his he must have been—born _cir._ 1530-35, he belonged to the early and uncertain generation of Elizabethan men of letters, the Googes and Turbervilles, and Gascoignes, not to the generation of Sidney and Spenser, much less to that of Shakespeare and Jonson. But what he had he gave: and it is far from valueless. ----- Footnote 254: