long and
almost unintelligible words. This he laid great store by, and he speaks
wrathfully of one who translated his "Piers Penniless," into what he
calls "maccaronical language." In his "Lenten Stuffe or Praise of the
Red Herring," _i.e._, of Great Yarmouth, he calls those who despised
Homer in his life-time "dull-pated pennifathers," and says that "those
grey-beard huddle-duddles and crusty cum-twangs were strooke with
stinging remorse of their miserable euchonisme and sundgery."

Peele was one of the gay play-writers to whom Greene addressed his
warning. They seem at this time to have united the professions of
dramatist and actor, and to have been infected with that dissipation
which has since been attributed with more or less justice to the stage.
Peele is as fond as Greene of surprises and miraculous interventions. In
the "Arraignment of Paris" a golden tree grows up, and in the "Old Wives
Tale," the most humorous of his works, the head of Huanebango rises from
a well. He is fond of dealing in phonetic words Latinisms and
barbarisms; in one place he makes Corebus say:

"O _falsum Latinum_
The fair maid is _minum_
_Cum apurtinantibus gibletis_ and all."

Peele was very popular in his day, and was often called upon to write
pieces for the Lord Mayor and for royal receptions. He sometimes used
Hexameter lines such as:

"Dub, dub-a-dub bounce, quoth the guns with
a sulphurous huff shuff."

Gabriel Harvey first introduced this metre into English, and he tried to
induce Spenser to adopt it. Nash calls it "that drunken staggering kind
of verse which is all vp hill and downe hill, like the way betwixt
Stamford and Beechfeild, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire
in the deep of winter, now soust vp to the saddle and straight aloft on
his tip-toes."

CHAPTER V.

Donne--Hall--Fuller.

Already we have seen that some of our earliest humorists were
ecclesiastics, and it would be unfitting that we should here overlook
three eminent men, Donne, Hall, and Fuller. Pleasantry was with them
little more than a vehicle of instruction; the object was not to
entertain, but to enforce and illustrate their moral sentiments. Hence
their sober quaintness never raises a laugh, much less does it border
upon the profane or indelicate.

Donne was born in 1573, in London, and was educated, as was not then
uncommon, first at Oxford, and then at Cambridge. His ability in church
controvers