Harington, a person of humour, and a typical Englishman, perstringes this as well as other things in his fling at the _Art_. ----- The second book deals with Proportion, in which word Puttenham includes almost everything belonging to Prosody in its widest sense—staff, stanza, measure, metres, and feet, “cæsure,” rhyme, accent, cadence, situation (by which he means the arrangement of the rhymes), and proportion in figure. [Sidenote: _Systematic arrangement_] On most of these heads he speaks more or less in accordance with his fellows (though he very noticeably abstains from extreme commendation or condemnation of rhyme), save that, for the moment, he seems to neglect the “new versifying.” It is, however, but for a moment. After his chapters on “proportion” in figure (the fanciful egg, wheel, lozenge, &c., which he himself argues for, and which were to make critics of the Addisonian type half-angry and half-sad), he deals with the subject. About this “new versifying” he is evidently in two minds. He had glanced at it before (and refers to the glance now)[256] as “a nice and scholastic curiosity.” However, “for the information of our young makers, and pleasure to those who be delighted in novelty, _and to the intent that we may not seem by ignorance or oversight to omit_,”[257] he “will now deal with it.” Which he does at great length; and, at any rate sometimes, with a clearer perception of the prosodic values than any other, even Spenser, had yet shown. But he does not seem quite at home in the matter, and glides off to a discussion of feet—classical feet—in the usual rhymed English verse. ----- Footnote 256: Here as elsewhere we may note evidences of possible revision in the book. That there was some such revision is certain; for instance, Ben Jonson’s copy (the existence of which is not uninteresting) contains a large cancel of four leaves, not found in other copies known. For this and other points of the same kind, see Mr Arber’s edition. Footnote 257: “Reviewing” was as yet in its infancy—a curiously lively one though, with Nash and others coming on. Puttenham seems to have understood its little ways rather well. -----