THE STARTING-POINT--ITALIAN INFLUENCE--THE OPPOSITION TO RHYME--EXCUSES FOR THIS--ITS LITTLE EFFECT--POETRY OF FIRST HALF OF ELIZABETH’S REIGN--SPENSER--ORDER OF HIS WORK--HIS METRE--CHARACTER OF HIS POETRY--SIR P. SIDNEY--THE ‘APOLOGIE FOR POETRIE’--HIS SONNETS AND LYRICS--WATSON--THE SONNETEERS--OTHER LYRIC POETRY--THE COLLECTIONS AND SONG-BOOKS--THE HISTORICAL POEMS--FITZ-GEOFFREY AND MARKHAM--WARNER--DANIEL DRAYTON--THE SATIRIC POETS--LODGE--HALL--MARSTON--DONNE. [SN: _The starting-point._] A long silence and two generations of effort preceded the renaissance of English poetry, which may conveniently, though perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, be said to date from the publication of the _Shepherd’s Calendar_ in 1579. The choice of this year as the actual starting-point is arbitrary, because Spenser was already recognised by his friends as the “new poet,” and his work was known among them in manuscript. It had therefore begun to live, and to exercise an influence, before it was given to the world. But the convention which treats the ascertainable date of printing, and not the first moment when the poet’s mind began to create, as the starting-point, is useful, and we may (always remembering that it is a convention) put 1579 at the head of the history of the great Elizabethan poetry. [SN: _Italian influence._] With us, as with the Spaniard, the spark, which was to grow into so great a flame, was brought from Italy. Before Spenser there had been Surrey and Wyatt, who had worked in the Italian metres in the reign of Henry VIII., and their example had been set up for all to follow by the publication of _Tottel’s Miscellany_ in 1557. There had also been the leaders of the New Learning, and the classic models. But the resemblance between the history of poetry in the two countries goes no further. Italy could affect only individual Englishmen. No such similarity of language, beliefs, and character existed between the two countries as would have enabled Italy to press on us as it did on Spain, all along the line. There was not the same proximity, nor had there been an equally close previous relationship of pupil to master stretching far back into the Middle Ages. The Italian influence in England was rather an incitement to independent effort than a mere pattern to be copied, as it was to the Spaniard. [SN: _The opposition to rhyme._] Nor were the Greek and Latin models more, though in this case a deliberate effort was made to bring English verse into subjection to ancient prosody. Much ridicule was shed then, and has been poured since, on those who endeavoured to write English verse by quantity only. The quaint pragmatic figure of Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey, who was the most conspicuous, though not the first of the school, was of itself enough to confer a certain absurdity on the effort. And the verse produced in this struggle to do the impossible was altogether worthy of Harvey’s oddities. Putting aside Stanyhurst’s