with meats. But some will say, this variety breeds confusion, and
makes that either we lose all or hold no more than the last. Why
do we not then persuade husbandmen that they should not till
land, help it with marle, lime, and compost? plant hop gardens,
prune trees, look to beehives, rear sheep, and all other cattle
at once? It is easier to do many things and continue, than to do
one thing long."

No other single writer until we come to the pamphleteers deserves separate
or substantive mention; but in many divisions of literature there were
practitioners who, if they have not kept much notoriety as masters of
style, were well thought of even in that respect in their day, and were
long authorities in point of matter. The regular theological treatises of
the time present nothing equal to Hooker, who in part overlapped it, though
the Jesuit Parsons has some name for vigorous writing. In history, Knolles,
the historian of the Turks, and Sandys, the Eastern traveller and sacred
poet, bear the bell for style among their fellows, such as Hayward, Camden,
Spelman, Speed, and Stow. Daniel the poet, a very good prose writer in his
way, was also a historian of England, but his chief prose work was his
_Defence of Rhyme_. He had companions in the critical task; but it is
curious and by no means uninstructive to notice, that the immense creative
production of the time seems to have to a great extent smothered the
theoretic and critical tendency which, as yet not resulting in actual
performance, betrayed itself at the beginning of the period in Webbe and
Puttenham, in Harvey and Sidney. The example of Eden in collecting and
Englishing travels and voyages was followed by several writers, of whom
two, successively working and residing, the elder at Oxford, and the
younger at Cambridge, made the two greatest collections of the kind in the
language for interest of matter, if not for perfection of style. These
were Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, a venerable pair. The perhaps
overpraised, but still excellent Characters of the unfortunate Sir Thomas
Overbury and the prose works, such as the _Counterblast_ and _Demonology_,
of James I., are books whose authors have made them more famous than their
intrinsic merits warrant, and in the various collections of "works" of the
day, older and newer, we shall find examples nearly as miscellaneous as
those of the class of writers now to be noticed. Of all this