d-be echo in the speech of the King
to his parasite--

For so much moving hath a poet's pen, etc., etc.

It is really not worth while to transcribe the poor meagre versicles at
length: but a glance at the text will show how much fitter was their
author to continue the tradition of Peele than to emulate the innovations
of Marlowe. In the speeches that follow there is much pretty verbiage
after the general manner of Elizabethan sonnetteers, touched here and
there with something of a higher tone; but the whole scene drags, flags,
halts onward at such a languid rate, that to pick out all the prettiest
lines by way of sample would give a favourable impression but too likely
to be reversed on further and fuller acquaintance.

Forget not to set down, how passionate,
How heart-sick, and how full of languishment,
Her beauty makes me. . . . . .
Write on, while I peruse her in my thoughts.
Her voice to music, or the nightingale:
To music every summer-leaping swain
Compares his sunburnt lover when she speaks;
And why should I speak of the nightingale?
The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong;
And that, compared, is too satirical:
For sin, though sin, would not be so esteemed;
But rather virtue sin, sin virtue deemed.
Her hair, far softer than the silkworm's twist,
Like as a flattering glass, doth make more fair
The yellow amber:--_Like a flattering glass_
Comes in too soon; for, writing of her eyes,
I'll say that like a glass they catch the sun,
And thence the hot reflection doth rebound
Against my breast, and burns the heart within.
Ah, what a world of descant makes my soul
Upon this voluntary ground of love!

"Pretty enough, very pretty! but" exactly as like and as near the style
of Shakespeare's early plays as is the style of Constable's sonnets to
that of Shakespeare's. Unless we are to assign to the Master every
unaccredited song, sonnet, elegy, tragedy, comedy, and farce of his
period, which bears the same marks of the same date--a date, like our
own, of too prolific and imitative production--as we find inscribed on
the greater part of his own early work; unless we are to carry even as
far as this the audacity and arrogance of our sciolism, we must somewhere
make a halt--and it must be on the near side of such an attribution as
that of _King Edward III_. to the hand of Shakespeare.

With the disappearance of the poetic pimp and the entrance of the