The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 13, November, 1858

"I understand, Elizabeth."

And they sailed on the morrow. No delay for wandering among the meadows of the pleasant town, for gossip with the men and women who were in childhood playmates of her father and her mother; no strolling along lovely river-banks. Chalons had nothing for Elizabeth; only one green nook of all the world had anything for her,—an island in the sea,—a prison on that island,—and there work to do worthy of Gabriel.

But—wonder of wonders!

Paul and Silas sang songs in their prison, and the jailer heard them; then there came an earthquake.

Who was he that found his cell-doors opened suddenly, and a messenger from out the courts of heaven there to guide his steps?

History is full of marvellous records; I add this to those. The eleventh hour goes always freighted with the weightiest events.

On board the vessel that carried Elizabeth and her charge back to Foray went a messenger commissioned of the king. He took from court to prison the partial pardon of Cordier. Liberty, but banishment henceforth. Stephen Cordier should be constrained to faithfulness towards his new love. Doomed to perpetual exile, he should be tempted by no late loyalty to Madeline Desperiers. The new acts of his drama should have nought to do with her. Justice forever!

Rascal that he was, according to the word of General Saterges, it was rascality which the General could pardon. He had gained many a victory in desperate strife,—now one other, the last and most complete: the kingdom's fairest star to shine among his honors! The proclamation of Stephen Cordier's pardon would instantly make broad the way to Château Desperiers. She came of a proud race, and he reckoned on her pride.

Let us not glory in that old man's defeat,—for he died ere his enemy received, through Elizabeth Montier, life, and the joy of life. Let us not call him by an evil name to whom the nation gave so fine a funeral,—but rather pause to listen to the music that comes forth in royal glory from the harmonious world of Adolphus,—and turn to look with loving reverence, not with doubt or wonder, and surely not with pity, on the serene face of Her Grace, the Drummer's Daughter.

WORK AND REST

 
  What have I yet to do?
    Day weareth on,—
  Flowers, that, opening new,
  Smiled through the morning's dew,
    Droop in the sun.
 
 
  'Neath the noon's scorching glare
    Fainting I stand;
  Still is the sultry air,
  Silentness everywhere
    Through the hot land.
 
 
  Yet must I labor still,
    All the day through,—
  Striving with earnest will
  Patient my place to fill,
    My work to do.
 
 
  Long though my task may be,
    Cometh the end.
  God 'tis that helpeth me,
  His is the work, and He
    New strength will lend.
 
 
  He will direct my feet,
    Strengthen my hand,
  Give me my portion meet;—
  Firm in his promise sweet
    Trusting I'll stand.
 
 
  Up, then, to work again!
    God's word is given
  That none shall sow in vain,
  But find his ripened grain
    Garnered in heaven.
 
 
  Longer the shadows fall,—
    Night cometh on;
  Low voices softly call,
  "Come, here is rest for all!
    Labor is done!"
 

COLIN CLOUT AND THE FAËRY QUEEN

EDMUND SPENSER IN A DOMESTIC POINT OF VIEW. HIS MISTRESS AND HIS WIFE

PART I.—HIS MISTRESS

The "Faëry Queen" of Edmund Spenser is before us,—a vast and glittering mausoleum, in which the purpose of the constructor has long been entombed, we fear without hope of a happy resurrection. Nevertheless, into this splendid ruin, hieroglyphed with the most brilliant images the modern mind has yet conceived, we are about to dig,—not with the impious desire of dragging forth the intellectual tenant, now in the fourth century of its everlasting repose, but, haply, to discover in the outer chambers and passages of the pyramid some relics of the individual architect, his family and mode of life. In fact, we are anxious to make the acquaintance of Mistress Spenser and introduce her to the American public. A slight sketch of the poet's life, up to the period of his marriage, may afford us some clue to the quarter from which he selected his bride; we shall therefore give what is known of him in the fewest possible words.

Edmund Spenser, by family, was English, and by birth a cockney. In his "Prothalamion" he thus pleads guilty to the chime of Bow-bells in his infant ear:—

 
  "At length they all to merrie London came,
  To merrie London, my most kindly nurse,
  That to me gave this life's first native source;
  Though from another place I take my name
  And house of ancient fame."
 

At what time of his life he became connected with Ireland is very uncertain; it was probably early. At or about the time of Sir Henry Sidney's vice-royalty, or in the interval between that and the lieutenancy of Lord Grey De Wilton, there was a "Mr. Spenser" actively and confidentially employed by the Irish government; and that this may have been the poet is, from collateral circumstances, far from improbable. Spenser was the friend and protégé of Sir Philip Sidney, (son of the before-named Sir Henry,) and of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester. Lord Grey De Wilton was by marriage connected with both, and lived with them on terms of the closest intimacy, social, literary, and political. In choosing an officer, then, for so important a post as that of secretary, whom would the one select or the others more confidently recommend than a young man of genius, known to all the parties, and who already had some knowledge and experience of Irish affairs? Be this as it may, we know that in 1580, Spenser, then in his twenty-seventh year, accompanied Lord Grey De Wilton into Ireland as secretary; and that he had been there before, in some official capacity not undistinguished, is evidenced by the fact, that the Lord Justice, previously to his arrival, speaks of him as "having many ways deserved some consideration from her Majesty."

We do not care to inquire into the peculiar services for which he was so speedily favored with a large grant of lands forfeited by the Desmonds. Such official transactions, we fear, would reflect little credit on the poet; no doubt he was a good man—according to the morality of his age; and if he did suggest the poisoning of a few thousand human beings of all ages and both sexes, (some go so far as to allege that his fervid imagination contemplated the utter extermination of the race,) he merely acted up to the opinions prevalent in the time and polished court of "Good Queen Bess." The beings were "mere Irishry,"—a stumbling-block in the path of British civilization, and therefore to be removed, per fas et nefas.

Spenser took up his residence on the forfeit lands in Cork; there married, and reared a family which inherited his estate; that he subsequently died in England was as mere a casualty as that by which Swift was born in Ireland. Certain it is that the greater and the better portion of his works in prose and verse was composed during his residence in the land of his adoption. Thus, in the sonnets appended to the "Faëry Queen," the poem on which his celebrity rests, he addresses this Earl of Ormond:—

 
  "Receive, most noble lord, a single taste
  Of the wilde fruit which savage soyle hath bred;
  Which, beeing through long wars left almost waste,
  With brutish barbarisme is overspred."
 

Again, addressing himself to his patron, Lord Grey, he says,—

 
  "Rude rimes, the which a rustick nurse did weave
  In savage soyle, far from Parnasso Mount."
 

Several other of the finest productions of his brain owe their birth to the "savage soyle" of Ireland; his descriptions of the country, his dialogue on Irish affairs, his "Amoretti" and "Colin Clout's come home again," belong confessedly to this category.

Having discovered thus much about the poet, we now strike out in a new direction in search of his better half. Upon this point, unfortunately, there hangs a mist,—not impenetrable, as we conceive, but yet impenetrated,—a secret to which the given clue has been neglected, and which remains to the present day the opprobrium of a careless biography. The fact and the date of his marriage in Ireland are obtained from his own writings; but, further than that her name was Elizabeth,—a fact recorded by himself,—the lady of his choice remains unknown, her maiden name and family. Mere trifles these, to be sure,—but interesting in an antiquarian point of view,—and valuable, perhaps, should the inquiry hereafter lead some more than usually acute bookworm into the real mystery and meaning, the main drift of that inexplicable "Faëry Queen."

One difficulty in the matter is, that Edmund appears to have been a "susceptible subject." He was twice attacked with the tender malady, and records, in glowing numbers, his passion for two mistresses. One he calls Rosalinde, and celebrates in the "Shepherd's Calendar"; the other, Elizabeth, to whom he was undoubtedly married, is the theme of admiration in his "Amoretti." Rosalinde was his early love; Elizabeth, the passion of his maturer years. When six-and-twenty, hopeless of Rosalinde, he wound up his philomel complainings of her cruelty by a formal commission to his friend Gabriel Harvey (Hobbinoll) to declare his suit at an end:—

 
  "Adieu, good Hobbinoll, that was so true;
  Tell Rosalinde her Colin bids adieu."
 

It took him fourteen years—surely a sufficient time!—to recover from this disappointment; for he is in his forty-first year, when, in his Sixtieth Sonnet, he represents himself as having been then one year enamored of Elizabeth:—

 
  "So since the winged god his planet cleare
  Began in me to move, one yeare is spent;
  The which doth longer unto me appears
  Than all those fourty which my life outwent."
 

That Rosalinde was not, as has been somewhat rashly conjectured, the poetic name of Elizabeth, is conclusively established by a poem written between 1591 and 1595, in which he speaks of some insurmountable barrier between them, why "her he might not love."⁴ The wife he loved, and the mistress between whose love and him there existed such a barrier, could not have been the same person, it is evident. But who this fair and false Rosalinde was, though known to many of his contemporaries, has become a mystery. That she was a real personage is placed beyond cavil by "E.K.," the ostensible editor of the "Shepherd's Calendar"; and he has given us a clue to her name, if we have but the wit to follow it. Now "E.K." we more than shrewdly suspect to have been either Spenser himself, or his friend Gabriel Harvey, or both together. Two more egregious self-laudators are not to be found in the range of English literature: Spenser loses no opportunity of puffing "Colin Clout"; and Harvey was openly charged by Thomas Nash with having forged commendatory epistles and sonnets in his own praise, under the name of Thorius etc. "E.K.," therefore, must be considered as pretty high authority; and what says "E.K."? Why, this: "Rosalinde is also a feigned name, which, being well ordered, will bewray the verie name of his love and mistresse." By "well ordering" the "feigned name" E.K. undoubtedly means disposing or arranging the letters of which it is composed in some form of anagram or metagram,—a species of wit much cultivated by the most celebrated poets of the time, Spenser included, and not deemed beneath the dignity of the learned Camden to expound.

A few examples of this "alchemy of wit," as Camden calls it, will reconcile our modern notions of the [Greek: to trepon] with the puerile ingenuity thought graceful, at that unripe period of our literature, by some of the most accomplished writers and readers of the day. Let us take an extravagant instance. Sir Philip Sidney, having abridged his own name into Phil. Sid., anagrammatized it into Philisides. Refining still further, he translated Sid., the abridgment of sidus, into [Greek: astron], and, retaining the Phil., as derived from [Greek: philos], he constructed for himself another pseudonym and adopted the poetical name of Astrophil. Feeling, moreover, that the Lady Rich, celebrated in his sonnets, was the loadstar of his affections, he designates her, in conformity with his own assumed name, Stella. Christopher Marlow's name is transmuted into Wormal, and the royal Elizabetha is frequently addressed as Ah-te-basile! Doctor Thomas Lodge, author of "Rosalinde; or Euphues, his Golden Legacy," (which Shakspeare dramatized into "As you like it,") has anagrammatized his own name into Golde,—and that of Dering into Ringde. The author of "Dolarney's Primrose" was a Doctor Raynolde. John Hind, in his "Eliosto Libidinoso," transmutes his own name into Dinchin Matthew Roydon becomes Donroy. And Shakspeare, even, does not scruple to alchemize the Resolute John, or John Florio, into the pedantic Holofernes of "Love's Labor's Lost." A thousand such fantastic instances of "trifling with the letter" might be quoted; and even so late as the reign of Queen Anne we find this foolish wit indulged. The cynical Swift⁵ stoops to change Miss Waring into Varina; Esther (quasi Aster, a star) Johnson is known as Stella; Essy Van-homrigh figures as Vanessa; while Cadenus, by an easy change of syllables, is resolved into Decanus, or the Dean himself in propriâ personâ and canonicals.

In the "Shepherd's Calendar," the very poem in which Spenser's unknown mistress figures as Rosalinde, the poet has alchemized Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury, into Algrind, and made Ellmor, Bishop of London, Morell, (it is to be hoped he was so before,) by merely transposing the letters. What wonder, then, if, complying with an art so general and convenient, he should be found contriving, in the case of both his mistresses at once, to reveal his passion and conceal the name of his enslaver from the public gaze?

The prolific hint of "E.K." set the commentators at work,—but hitherto without success. The author of the life prefixed to Church's edition conjectures Rose Linde,—forsooth, because it appears from Fuller's "Worthies," that in the reign of Henry the Sixth—only eight reigns too early for the birth of our rural beauty—there was one John Linde, a resident in the County of Kent! Not satisfied with this conjecture, Malone suggests that she may have been an Eliza Horden—the z changed, according to Camden's rules, into s, and the aspirate sunk. Malone's foundation for this theory is, that one Thomas Horden was a contemporary of John Linde, aforesaid, and resided in the same county! Both these conjectures are absurd and unsupported by any collateral evidence. To have given them the remotest air of probability, the critics should have proved some acquaintance or connection between the parties respectively, —some courtship, or contiguity of residence, which might have brought the young people within the ordinary sphere of attraction. Wrong as they were in their conclusions, the search of these commentators was in the right direction. The anagram, "well-ordered," will undoubtedly bewray the secret. Let us try if we may not follow it with better success.

Rosalinde reads, anagrammatically, into Rose Daniel; for, according to Camden, "a letter may be doubled, or rejected, or contrariwise, if the sense fall aptly"; we thus get rid of the redundant e, and have a perfect anagram. Now Spenser had an intimate and beloved friend and brother-poet, named Samuel Daniel, author of many tragedies and comedies, an eight-canto poem called "The Civil Wars of England," "A Vision of Twelve Goddesses," a prose history of England, and "Musa," a defence of rhyme. Spenser alludes to his poetic genius with high praise in his "Colin Clout." This Daniel had a sister named Rose, who was married in due time to a friend of her brother's,—not, indeed, to Spenser, but to a scholar, whose eccentricities have left such durable tracks behind them, that we can trace his mark through many passages of Spenser's love complaints, otherwise unintelligible. The supposition that Rose Daniel was Rosalinde satisfies every requisite, and presents a solution of the mystery; the anagram is perfect; the poet's acquaintance with the brother naturally threw him into contact with the sister; while the circumstance of her marriage with another justifies the complaint of infidelity, and accounts for the "insurmountable barrier," that is, a living husband. Daniel was the early protégé of the Pembroke family, as was Spenser of the house of Leicester. The youthful poets must often have met in the company of their mutual friend, Sir Philip Sidney,—for the Countess of Pembroke was the "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," celebrated by Ben Jonson, and consequently niece, as Sir Philip was nephew, of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Rose and Edmund were thus thrown together under circumstances every way favorable to the development of love in a breast so susceptible as that of the "passionate shepherd."

Other circumstances in the life of Rose Daniel correspond so strikingly with those attributed to Rosalinde, as strongly to corroborate the foregone conclusion.

Rosalinde, after having given encouragement to her enamored shepherd, faithlessly and finally deserted him in favor of a rival. This is evident throughout the "Shepherd's Calendar." The First Eclogue reveals his passion:—

 
  "I love thilk lass, (alas! why do I love?)
  And am forlorne, (alas! why am I lorn?)
  She deigns not my good will, but doth reprove,
  And of my rural music holdeth scorn."
 

Her scorn, however, may have meant no more than the natural coyness of a maiden whom the learned Upton somewhat drolly designates as "a skittish female."⁶ Indeed, Spenser must have thought so himself, and with reason, for she continues to receive his presents, "the kids, the cracknels, and the early fruit," sent through his friend Hobbinoll (Gabriel Harvey).

We hear of no alteration of his circumstances until we reach the Sixth Eclogue, in which the progress and utter disappointment of his suit are distinctly and bitterly complained of. "This eclogue," says the editorial "E.K.," "is wholly vowed to the complaining of Colin's ill-success in love. For being (as is aforesaid) enamoured of a country lass, Rosalinde, and having (as it seemeth) found place in her heart, he lamenteth to his dear friend Hobbinoll that he is now forsaken unfaithfully, and in his stead Menalcas, another shepherd, received disloyally: and this is the whole argument of the eclogue." In fact, she broke her plighted vow to Colin Clout, transferred her heart to Menalcas, and let her hand accompany it.

Now, from this and the preceding circumstances, the inference appears inevitable that, at or about the time of the composition of this Sixth Eclogue, the Rosalinde therein celebrated was married, or engaged to be married, to the person denounced as Menalcas.

Whether the ante-nuptial course of Rose Daniel corresponded with the faithlessness ascribed to Rosalinda we confess we have no documentary evidence to show: but this much is certain, that Rose was married to an intimate friend of her brother's; and, from the characteristics recorded of him by Spenser, we shall presently prove that that friend, the husband of Rosalinde, is no other than the treacherous rival denounced as Menalcas in the "Shepherd's Calendar." Who, then, is Menalcas?

Amongst the distinguished friends of Samuel Daniel was a man of much celebrity in his day,—the redoubted, or, as he chose to call himself, the "Resolute" John Florio (Shakspeare's Holofernes). This gentleman, an Italian by descent, was born in London in the same year with Spenser, and was a class-fellow with Daniel at Oxford. He was the author of many works, well received by the public,—as his "First Fruits," "Second Fruits," "Garden of Recreation," and so forth; also, of an excellent Italian and English dictionary, styled "A World of Words,"—the basis of all Anglo-Italian dictionaries since published. He was a good French scholar, as is proved by his translation of Montaigne; and wrote some verses, highly prized by Elizabeth and her successor, James I. Indeed, his general learning and accomplishments recommended him to both courts; and, on the accession of James, he was appointed classical tutor to Prince Henry, and reader of French and Italian to the Royal Consort, Anne of Denmark; he was also a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and Clerk of the Closet to his Majesty; and, finally, it was chiefly through his influence that Samuel Daniel was appointed Gentleman Extraordinary and Groom of the Privy Chamber to Queen Anne.

Long prior to this prosperous estate, however, his skill as a linguist had recommended him to the patronage and intimacy of many of the chief nobility of Elizabeth's court; and at an early period of his life, we find him engaged, as was his friend Daniel, as tutor to some of the most illustrious families,—such as Pembroke, Dudley, Essex, Southampton, etc.;⁷ all which, together with his friendship for Daniel, must needs have brought him into the acquaintance of Edmund Spenser, the friend of Sidney and his relatives. He was also on the most friendly terms with Gabriel Harvey, and a warm admirer (as his works attest) of the genius of Daniel. We have thus gathered our dramatis personae, the parties most essentially interested in Spenser's unlucky passion, into one familiar group.

Of Rose Daniel's marriage with the "Resolute John Florio" there is no manner of question. It is recorded by Anthony á Wood in his "Athenæ Oxonienses," acknowledged by Samuel Daniel in the commendatory verses prefixed to Florio's "World of Words," and she is affectionately remembered in Florio's will as his "beloved wife, Rose."⁸ Thus, if not Spenser's Rosalinde, she was undoubtedly a Rosalinde to John Florio.

We shall now proceed to gather some further particles of evidence, to add their cumulative weight to the mass of slender probabilities with which we are endeavoring to sustain our conjectures.

Spenser's Rosalinde had at least a smattering of the Italian. Samuel Daniel was an Italian scholar; for his whole system of versification is founded on that model. Spenser, too, was well acquainted with the language; for, long before any English version of Tasso's "Gerusalemme" had appeared, he had translated many passages which occur in the "Faëry Queen" from that poem, and—without any public acknowledgment that we can find trace of—appropriated them to himself.⁹ What more natural than that Rose should have shared her brother's pleasant study, and, in company with him and Spenser, accepted the tuition of John Florio?

The identity of Florio's wife and Rosalinde may be fairly inferred from some circumstances consequent upon the lady's marriage, and otherwise connected with her fortunes, which appear to be shadowed forth with great acrimony in the "Faëry Queen," where the Rosalinde of the "Shepherd's Calendar" appears before us again under the assumed name of Mirabella. Lest the ascription of these circumstances to particular parties may be imputed to prejudice or prepossession for a favorite theory, we shall state them on the authority of commentators and biographers who never even dreamed of the view of the case we are now endeavoring to establish.

The learned Upton, in his preface to the "Faëry Queen," was led to observe the striking coincidence, the absolute similarity of character, between Spenser's Rosalinde and his Mirabella. "If the 'Faëry Queen,'" quoth he, "is a moral allegory with historical allusions to our poet's times, one might be apt to think, that, in a poem written on so extensive a plan, the cruel Rosalinde would be in some way or other typically introduced; and methinks I see her plainly characterized in Mirabella. Perhaps, too, her expressions were the same that are given to Mirabella,—'the free lady,' 'she was born free,'" etc.¹⁰

"We are now come," says Mr. G.L. Craik, by far the most acute and sagacious of all the commentators on Spenser, "to a very remarkable passage. Having thus disposed of Turpin, the poet suddenly addresses his readers, saying,—

 
  'But turn we back now to that lady free
  Whom late we left riding upon an ass
  Led by a carle and fool which by her side did pass.'
 

"This is the 'fair maiden clad in mourning weed,' who, it may be remembered, was met, as related at the beginning of the preceding canto, by Timias and Serena. There, however, she was represented as attended only by a fool. What makes this episode especially interesting is the conjecture that has been thrown out, and which seems intrinsically probable, that the 'lady' is Spenser's own Rosalinde, by whom he had been, jilted, or at least rejected, more than a quarter of a century before. His unforgetting resentment is supposed to have taken this revenge."

So far with Mr. Upton and Mr. Craik we heartily concur as to the identity of Rosalinde and Mirabella; and feel confident that a perusal and comparison of the episode of Mirabella with the whole story of Rosalinde will leave every candid and intelligent reader no choice but to come to the same conclusion: We shall now collate the attributes assigned in common to those two impersonations in their maiden state, and note the correspondence.

Both are of humble birth,—Rosalinde being described in the "Shepherd's Calendar" as "the widow's daughter of the glen"; her low origin and present exalted position are frequently alluded to,—her beauty, her haughtiness, and love of liberty. Mirabella is thus described in Book VI. "Faëry Queen," Canto vii:—

 
  "She was a lady of great dignity,
  And lifted up to honorable place;
  Famous through all the land of Faërie:
  Though of mean parentage and kindred base,
  Yet decked with wondrous gifts of Nature's grace."
 
 
  "But she thereof grew proud and insolent,
  And scorned them all that lore unto her meant."
 
 
"She was born free, not bound to any wight."
 

Of Rosalinde we hear in "Colin Clout" that her ambition is

 
"So high in thought as she herself in place."
 

And that she

 
"Loatheth each lowly thing with lofty eye."
 

Her beauty, too, is dwelt upon as a "thing celestial,"—her humble family alluded to,—the boasted freedom of her heart; and upon Rosalinde and Mirabella an affectation of the demigoddessship, which turned their heads, is equally charged. In all essential characteristics they are "twin cherries growing on one stalk."

Of Rose Daniel's life so little is known, particularly during her unmarried years, that we are unable to fasten upon her the unamiable qualities of the allegorical beauties we assume to be her representatives; but if we can identify her married fortune with theirs,—then, in addition to the congruities already mentioned, we can have no hesitation in imputing to her the disposition which brought down upon them, so bitterly and relentlessly, the poetic justice of the disappointed shepherd. We may thus dispose of them in brief.

Mirabella's lot was severe. She was married (if we rightly interpret the language of the allegory) to a "fool,"—that is to say, to a very absurd and ridiculous person, under whose conduct she was exposed to the "whips and scorns," the disdain and bitter retaliation, natural to the union of a beautiful and accomplished, though vain and haughty woman, with a very eccentric, irritable, and bombastic humorist.

Rosalinde was married—with no better fate, we fear—to the vain and treacherous Menalcas.

And Rose Daniel became the wife of the "Resolute John Florio."

We shall commence with the substantial characters, and see how their histories fall in with the fortunes attributed to the allegorical. Rose Daniel's husband, maugre his celebrity and places of dignity and profit, was beset with tempers and oddities which exposed him, more perhaps than any man of his time, to the ridicule of contemporary wits and poets. He was, at least in his literary career, jealous, envious, irritable, vain, pedantic and bombastical, petulant and quarrelsome,—ever on the watch for an affront, and always in the attitude of a fretful porcupine with a quill pointed in every direction against real or supposititious enemies. In such a state of mental alarm and physical vaporing did he live, that he seems to have proclaimed a promiscuous war against all gainsayers,– that is, the literary world; and for the better assurance to them of his indomitable valor, and to himself of indemnity from disturbance, he adopted a formidable prefix to his name; and to "any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation," to every address, prelude, preface,¹¹ introduction, or farewell, accompanying any of his numerous works, he subscribed himself the Resolute,—"Resolute John Florio."

Conduct so absurd, coupled with some personal defects, and a character so petulantly vainglorious, exposed the "Resolute" to the bitter sarcasm of contemporary writers. Accordingly we find him through life encompassed by a host of tormentors, and presenting his chevaux-de-frise of quills against them at all and every point. In the Epistle Dedicatory to the second edition of his Dictionary, we find him engaged morsu et unguibus with a swarm of literary hornets, against whom he inveighs as "sea-dogs,—land-critics, —monsters of men, if not beasts rather than men,—whose teeth are cannibals',—their tongues adders' forks,—their lips asps' poison, —their eyes basilisks',—their breath the breath of a grave,—their words like swords of Turks, which strive which shall dive deepest into the Christian lying before them." Of a verity we may say that John Florio was sadly exercised when he penned this pungent paragraph. He then falls foul of the players, who—to use the technical phrase of the day—"staged" him with no small success. "With this common cry of curs" in general, and with one poet and one piece of said poet's handiwork in particular, he enters into mortal combat with such vehement individuality as enables us at a glance to detect the offence and the offender. He says, "Let Aristophanes and his comedians make plays and scour their mouths on Socrates, these very mouths they make to vilify shall be the means to amplify his virtues," etc. "And here," says Doctor Warburton, "Shakspeare is so clearly marked out as not to be mistaken." This opinion is fortified by the concurrence of Farmer, Steevens, Reid, Malone, Knight, Collier, and Hunter; and, from the additional lights thrown upon this subject by their combined intelligence, no doubt seems to exist that Holofernes, the pedantic schoolmaster in "Love's Labor's Lost," had his prototype in John Florio, the Resolute.