Ben Jonson already, in his _Every Man out of His Humour_ (1599), had satirized the common affectation under the similitude of a country knight, Puntarvolo, who, if not crazed, was at any rate "wholly consecrated to singularity" by reason of undue absorption of romances of chivalry, a singularity of "fashion, phrase, and gesture" of the Anthony Munday type and the type glassed in the _Mirror of Knighthood_. Sir Puntarvolo, who "sits a great horse" and "courts his own lady, as she were a stranger never encountered before,"--who feigns that his own house is a castle, who summons with trumpet-blast the waiting-woman to the window, and, saluting her "after some little flexure of the knee," asks for the lord of the edifice, and that the "beauties" of the "lady" may shine on this side of the building,--who "planet struck" by the "heavenly pulchritude" of his long-suffering and much bewildered poor old wife, conveys to her the information that he is a poor knight-errant pursuing through the forest a hart "escaped by enchantment," and that, wearied, he and his servant make "suit to enter" her fair abode,--Sir Puntarvolo, who every morning thus performs fantastic homage, what is he but a predecessor of Don Quixote and Ralph alike, fashioned out of the materials of decadent chivalric fiction common to both? In 1600, Robert Anton had burlesqued in prose and rhyme the romantic ballads of the day in his ludicrous _Heroical Adventures of the Knight of the Sea_, where "the queen of the fairies transforms a submissive and apathetic cow into a knight-errant to do her business in the world."[212] And in 1605, also before the appearance of Cervantes' burlesque, Chapman, with the collaboration of Jonson and Marston, had, in _Eastward Hoe_, satirized that other kind of knight, him of the city and by purchase, in the character of Sir Petronel Flash; and, with him, the aspirations of romance-fed merchants' daughters who would wed knights and dwell in country-castles wrested from giants. Nor had these authors failed to specify the sources of delusion, the _Mirror of Knighthood_, the _Palmerin of England_, etc. That both Beaumont and Fletcher were alive, without prompting from Cervantes, to the mania of chivalric emulation which obsessed the train-bands of London is attested by the bombastic talk of "Rosicleer" which Fletcher puts into the mouth of the city captain in _Philaster_, a play that was written about two years later than _The Knight_, in 1609 or 1610. There had been musters of the City companies at Mile End as early as 1532, and again under Elizabeth in 1559, and 1585, and 1599, when as many as 30,000 citizens were trained there. But the muster in which Ralph had been chosen "citty captaine" was evidently that of 1605, a general muster under James I.