Poetry so completely dominated the literature of Elizabeth’s reign that we can leave not only the prose, which was entirely subordinate, but the drama, poetic as it was, aside for the time. There was no great drama till the poets had suppled and moulded the language. The example set by Surrey and Wyatt had no such immediate influence as had been exercised by Boscan and Garcilaso in Spain. Part even of their own work hardly rose above the level of the doggerel to which English verse had fallen. Those who look for an explanation of the flowering or the barrenness of literature elsewhere than in the presence or absence of genius in a people, may account for this by the troubled times which followed the death of Henry VIII. But the return of peace and security with the accession of Elizabeth brought no change. The first twenty years of her reign were as barren as the disturbed years of Edward or Mary. Indeed they were even poorer, for Sackville’s Induction to _The Mirror of Magistrates_ and his _Complaint of Buckingham_, which have been recognised as the best verse written in England between Chaucer and Spenser, though not published till Elizabeth was on the throne, had been written before 1559--in the reign of Mary. Between this year and the publication of _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ (1579) the voice of poetry was not mute in England--at least not the voice of those who were endeavouring to write poetry. When Webbe spoke, with more emphasis than respect, of the “infinite fardles of printed pamphlets,” mostly “either meere poeticall or which tend in some respects (as either in matter or forme) to poetry,” by which “this country is pestered, all shoppes stuffed, and every study furnished,” he was not wholly exaggerating. Translators were very busy, and not a few published original work. There were certainly many others who wrote but did not publish. But these forerunners could in no case have deserved more than the praise which Sir John Harington gave to one of them, George Turberville:-- “When times were yet but rude thy pen endeavoured To polish barbarism with purer style.” Their inferiority to Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville diminishes their claim even to so much as this. They were enslaved to the old fourteen-syllabled metre, which might or might not be printed in lines of eight and six, but which, in whatever way it was arranged, had a fatal tendency to fall into a rocking-horse movement. We constantly meet with rhymes like these:-- “The hawtye verse that Maro wrote made Rome to wonder muche, And mervayle none for why the style and weightynes was such, That all men judged Parnassus Mownt had clefte herselfe in twayne, And brought forth one that seemed to drop from out Minervaes brayne.”