_Æneid_, published in 1582, which is the most bulky example of misapplied labour, it ought, one would think, to have been warning enough to those who thought to force English into an alien mould when they found a writer of the real intelligence and natural good taste of Webbe, author of _The Discourse of English Poetrie_, contentedly pronouncing such a line as this:-- “Hedgerows hott doo resound with grasshops mournfully squeeking.” Webbe did worse, for he seems really to have believed that he improved Spenser, whom he admired and recognised as the new poet, when he turned the song in _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ beginning-- “Ye dainty Nymphes that in this blessed brooke doo bathe your brest,” into this:-- “O ye Nymphes most fine who resort to this brooke For to bathe your pretty breasts at all times, Leave the watrish bowers hyther and to me come At my request now.” Yet the mistake of Webbe was one which Spenser himself, and Sidney, had so far shared that they played with the classic metres. [SN: _Excuses for this._] Nor was it altogether absurd, but, on the contrary, natural, and even inevitable. When there were no native models newer than Chaucer to follow, and when the splendour of classic literature was just being fully recognised, it was not wonderful that men who were in search of a poetic form should have been deluded into thinking that they could reproduce what they admired, or should have agreed with Ascham that “to follow rather the Goths in rhyming, than the Greeks in true versifying, were even to eat acorns with swine, when we may freely eat bread among men.” [SN: _Its little effect._]