|
||||||||
Tut, tut, Colin Clout, much learning has made thee mad. A good old fishwives ballad jingle is worth all your sapphics and trimeters, and riff-raff thurlery bouncing. Hey? have I you there, old lad? Do you mind that precious verse? But, dear Wat, Homer and Virgil But, dear Ned, Petrarch and Ovid But, Wat, what have we that we do not owe to the ancients? Ancients, quotha? Why, the legend of King Arthur, and Chevy Chase too, of which even your fellow- sinner Sidney cannot deny that every time he hears it even from a blind fiddler it stirs his heart like a trumpet-blast. Speak well of the bridge that carries you over, man! Did you find your Redcross Knight in Virgil, or such a dame as Una in old Ovid? No more than you did your Pater and Credo, you renegado baptized heathen, you! Yet, surely, our younger and more barbarous taste must bow before divine antiquity, and imitate afar As dottrels do fowlers. If Homer was blind, lad, why dost not poke out thine eye? Ay, this hexameter is of an ancient house, truly, Ned Spenser, and so is many a rogue: but he cannot make way on our rough English roads. He goes hopping and twitching in our language like a three-legged terrier over a pebble- bank, tumble and up again, rattle and crash. Nay, hear, now Of lovers miseries which maketh his bloody game?1 True, the accent gapes in places, as I have often confessed to Harvey, but Harvey be hanged for a pedant, and the whole crew of versifiers, from Lord Dorset (but he, poor man, has been past hanging some time since) to yourself! Why delude you into playing Procrustes as he does with the queens English, racking one word till its joints be pulled asunder, and squeezing the next all a-heap as the Inquisitors do heretics in their banca cava? Out upon him and you, and Sidney, and the whole kin. You have not made a verse among you, and never will, which is not as lame a gosling as Harveys own Come thy ways down, if thou darst for thy crown, and take the wall on us. Hark, now! There is our young giant comforting his soul with a ballad. You will hear rhyme and reason together here, now. He will not miscall blind-folded, blind-fold-ed, I warrant; or make an of and a which and a his carry a whole verse on their wretched little backs. And as he spoke, Amyas, who had been grumbling to himself some Christmas carol, broke out full- mouthed: He heard an angel sing This night shall be the birth night Of Christ, our heavenly King. In housen nor in hall, Nor in the place of paradise, But in the oxens stall. In silver nor in gold, But in the wooden manger That lieth on the mould. With white wine nor with red, But with the fair spring water That on you shall |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
Copyright: All texts on Bibliomania are © Bibliomania.com Ltd, and may not be reproduced in any form without our written permission. See our FAQ for more details. | ||||||||