ee best who called thee Tom,
What else may all men call thee, seeing thus bright
Even yet the laughing and the weeping light
That still thy kind old eyes are kindled from?
Small care was thine to assail and overcome
Time and his child Oblivion: yet of right
Thy name has part with names of lordlier might
For English love and homely sense of home,
Whose fragrance keeps thy small sweet bayleaf young
And gives it place aloft among thy peers
Whence many a wreath once higher strong Time has hurled:
And this thy praise is sweet on Shakespeare's tongue--
"O good old man, how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world!"

XI

GEORGE CHAPMAN

High priest of Homer, not elect in vain,
Deep trumpets blow before thee, shawms behind
Mix music with the rolling wheels that wind
Slow through the labouring triumph of thy train:
Fierce history, molten in thy forging brain,
Takes form and fire and fashion from thy mind,
Tormented and transmuted out of kind:
But howsoe'er thou shift thy strenuous strain,
Like Tailor[1] smooth, like Fisher[2] swollen, and now
Grim Yarrington[3] scarce bloodier marked than thou,
Then bluff as Mayne's[4] or broad-mouthed Barry's[5] glee;
Proud still with hoar predominance of brow
And beard like foam swept off the broad blown sea,
Where'er thou go, men's reverence goes with thee.

[1] Author of _The Hog hath lost his Pearl_.

[2] Author of _Fuimus Troes, or the True Trojans_.

[3] Author of _Two Tragedies in One_.

[4] Author of _The City Match_.

[5] Author of _Ram-Alley, or Merry Tricks_.

XII

JOHN MARSTON

The bitterness of death and bitterer scorn
Breathes from the broad-leafed aloe-plant whence thou
Wast fain to gather for thy bended brow
A chaplet by no gentler forehead worn.
Grief deep as hell, wrath hardly to be borne,
Ploughed up thy soul till round the furrowing plough
The strange black soil foamed, as a black beaked prow
Bids night-black waves foam where its track has torn.
Too faint the phrase for thee that only saith
Scorn bitterer than the bitterness of death
Pervades the sullen splendour of thy soul,
Where hate and pain make war on force and fraud
And all the strengths of tyrants; whence unflawed
It keeps this noble heart of hatred whole.

XIII

JOHN DAY

Day was a full-blown flower in heaven, alive
With murmuring joy of bees and birds aswarm,
When in