s as follows
Mahomet's brief command in Painter that Hiren should "adorne herselfe
with her most precious jewels, and decke her with the costliest
apparell shee had" (see stanza 100).[26] Also, in order to bring out
Mahomet's realization of the enormity of his crime of slaying Hiren,
the consummation of all his amorous dreams, Barksted invents a second
killing--Mahomet's killing of Mustapha, who had driven his lord to
perform the first execution.

FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS

Like the poems reprinted by Professor Donno, these establish their
identity as minor epics by the erotic subject matter of their
narration, however symbolized or moralized, and by their use of
certain rhetorical devices that came to be associated with the genre.
These include the set description of people and places; the =suasoria=,
or invitation to love; and the formal digression, sometimes in the
form of an inset tale, such as the tale of Poplar in =Mirrha= (pp.
148-155). Other rhetorical devices cultivated in the epyllion are the
long apostrophe, and the sentence or wise saying. Also, these poems
employ numerous compound epithets and far-fetched conceits. (Dom Diego
goes hunting with a "beast-dismembring blade" [p. 64], and Cinyras
incestuous bed in =The Scourge= "doth shake and quaver as they lie,/As
if it groan'd to beare the weight of sinne." [p. 271].)

The average length of these, like other Renaissance minor epics, is
about 900 lines. Although the length of Renaissance minor epics is not
rigidly prescribed, it is noteworthy that several of these poems have
almost the same number of lines. =Philos and Licia=, =Mirrha=, and =Hiren=,
for example, running to about 900 lines, vary in length by no more
than 16 lines. (=Amos and Laura=, however, the shortest with about 300
lines, is some 650 lines shorter than =The Scourge=, the longest, with
about 950.)

As well as echoing Marlowe's =Hero and Leander= and Shakespeare's =Venus
and Adonis= in particular words and phrases, these poems reveal a much
more general indebtedness to what Professor Bush has aptly called "the
twin peaks of the Ovidian tradition in England."[27] The majority
employ one of two prosodic patterns--the Marlovian couplet
popularized in =Hero and Leander=, or the six-line stanza used by Lodge
but soon after taken over by Shakespeare in =Venus and Adonis= and
thereafter associated with his poem.[28]

In addition to the couplet, a common mark of Marlovian influence in
the poems