nd force. To sum up, there is no Elizabethan poet,
except the two named, who is more unmistakably imbued with poetical quality
than Sidney. And Hazlitt's judgment on him, that he is "jejune" and
"frigid" will, as Lamb himself hinted, long remain the chiefest and most
astonishing example of a great critic's aberrations when his prejudices are
concerned.

Had Hazlitt been criticising Thomas Watson, his judgment, though harsh,
would have been not wholly easy to quarrel with. It is probably the
excusable but serious error of judgment which induced his rediscoverer,
Professor Arber, to rank Watson above Sidney in gifts and genius, that has
led other critics to put him unduly low. Watson himself, moreover, has
invited depreciation by his extreme frankness in confessing that his
_Passionate Century_ is not a record of passion at all, but an elaborate
literary _pastiche_ after this author and that. I fear it must be admitted
that the average critic is not safely to be trusted with such an avowal of
what he is too much disposed to advance as a charge without confession.
Watson, of whom as usual scarcely anything is known personally, was a
Londoner by birth, an Oxford man by education, a friend of most of the
earlier literary school of the reign, such as Lyly, Peele, and Spenser,
and a tolerably industrious writer both in Latin and English during his
short life, which can hardly have begun before 1557, and was certainly
closed by 1593. He stands in English poetry as the author of the
_Hecatompathia_ or _Passionate Century_ of sonnets (1582), and the _Tears
of Fancy_, consisting of sixty similar poems, printed after his death. The
_Tears of Fancy_ are regular quatorzains, the pieces composing the
_Hecatompathia_, though called sonnets, are in a curious form of eighteen
lines practically composed of three six-line stanzas rhymed A B, A B, C C,
and not connected by any continuance of rhyme from stanza to stanza. The
special and peculiar oddity of the book is, that each sonnet has a prose
preface as thus: "In this passion the author doth very busily imitate and
augment a certain ode of Ronsard, which he writeth unto his mistress. He
beginneth as followeth, _Plusieurs_, etc." Here is a complete example of
one of Watson's pages:--

"There needeth no annotation at all before this passion, it is of
itself so plain and easily conveyed. Yet the unlearned may have
this help given them by the way to know what Galaxia is or