The sonnets vary much in poetic value; some are written in Alexandrines, a metre not consonant with the traditions of the English Muse. _Sidney's_ "_Defence of Poesie._" Readers who fail to find brilliant merit in English literary poetry between Chaucer and Spenser may not be ill-pleased to note that Sir Philip Sidney was strong on their side. Acquainted as he was with the poetry of Greece, Rome, Italy, and France, he could see nothing to admire in the efforts and experiments of such writers as Occleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Googe, Churchyard, and Turbervile. His "Defence of Poesie" (or, according to the title of the first edition (1595), his "Apologie for Poesie") was elicited by the unauthorized dedication to himself of Stephen Gosson's "School of Abuse". Gosson was a young Oxford man who had tried his hand as a playwright, and been disgusted, he says, by the disorders of the playhouses, where his comedy and morality may have been hooted. He therefore tried to make himself notorious, or he expressed his penitence, by assailing poets who deal in the silly conceits of Lyly's "Euphues". "The scarab flies over many a sweet flower and lights in a cow-shard... it is the manner of swine to forsake the fair fields and wallow in the mire: and the whole practice of poets, either with fables to show their abuses, or with plain terms to unfold their mischief, discover their shame, discredit themselves, and disperse their poison through the world". Gosson chooses Virgil as one of his terrible examples, and whether he is a genuine or a hypocritical puritan, or a mere fribble in search of notoriety, he made a mistake when he thought to find a patron or a butt in Sidney, who does not advertise Gosson's name in the "Defence of Poesie".