me more
profitable theme of repentance."

If Martin Marprelate is compared with the _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_
earlier, or the _Satire Menippee_ very little later, the want of polish and
directness about contemporary English satire will be strikingly apparent.
At the same time he does not compare badly with his own antagonists. The
divines like Cooper are, as has been said, too serious. The men of letters
like Lyly and Nash are not nearly serious enough, though some exception may
be made for Nash, especially if _Pasquil's Apology_ be his. They out-Martin
Martin himself in mere abusiveness, in deliberate quaintness of phrase, in
fantastic vapourings and promises of the dreadful things that are going to
be done to the enemy. They deal some shrewd hits at the glaring faults of
their subject, his outrageous abuse of authorities, his profanity, his
ribaldry, his irrelevance; but in point of the three last qualities there
is not much to choose between him and them. One line of counter attack they
did indeed hit upon, which was followed up for generations with no small
success against the Nonconformists, and that is the charge of hypocritical
abuse of the influence which the Nonconformist teachers early acquired over
women. The germs of the unmatched passages to this effect in _The Tale of a
Tub_ may be found in the rough horseplay of _Pap with a Hatchet_ and _An
Almond for a Parrot_. But the spirit of the whole controversy is in fact a
spirit of horseplay. Abuse takes the place of sarcasm, Rabelaisian
luxuriance of words the place of the plain hard hitting, with no flourishes
or capers, but with every blow given straight from the shoulder, which
Dryden and Halifax, Swift and Bentley, were to introduce into English
controversy a hundred years later. The peculiar exuberance of Elizabethan
literature, evident in all its departments, is nowhere more evident than in
this department of the prose pamphlet, and in no section of that department
is it more evident than in the Tracts of the Martin Marprelate Controversy.
Never perhaps were more wild and whirling words used about any exceedingly
serious and highly technical matter of discussion; and probably most
readers who have ventured into the midst of the tussle will sympathise with
the adjuration of _Plain Percivall the Peacemaker of England_ (supposed to
be Richard Harvey, brother of Gabriel, who was himself not entirely free
from suspicion of concernment in the matter), "M