e conclusion before. How much we owe to
such adventurers of the impossible few men know except those who have tried
to study literature as a whole.

A few words have to be said in passing as to the miscellanies which played
such an important part in the poetical literature of the day. Tottel and
_The Mirror for Magistrates_ (which was, considering its constant
accretions, a sort of miscellany) have been already noticed. They were
followed by not a few others. The first in date was _The Paradise of Dainty
Devices_ (1576), edited by R. Edwards, a dramatist of industry if not of
genius, and containing a certain amount of interesting work. It was very
popular, going through nine or ten editions in thirty years, but with a few
scattered exceptions it does not yield much to the historian of English
poetry. Its popularity shows what was expected; its contents show what, at
any rate at the date of its first appearance, was given. It is possible
that the doleful contents of _The Mirror for Magistrates_ (which was
reprinted six times during our present period, and which busied itself
wholly with what magistrates should avoid, and with the sorrowful departing
out of this life of the subjects) may have had a strong effect on Edwards,
though one at least of his contributors, W. Hunnis, was a man of mould. It
was followed in 1578 by _A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions_,
supposed to have been edited by Roydon and Proctor, which is a still drier
stick. The next miscellany, six years later, _A Handful of Pleasant
Delights_, edited by Clement Robinson, is somewhat better though not much.
It is followed by the _Phoenix Nest_, an interesting collection, by no less
than three miscellanies in 1600, edited by "A. B." and R. Allot, and named
_England's Helicon_, _England's Parnassus_, and _Belvedere_ (the two latter
being rather anthologies of extracts than miscellanies proper), and by
Francis Davison's famous _Poetical Rhapsody_, 1602, all which last belong
to a much later date than our present subjects.

To call the general poetical merit of these earlier miscellanies high would
be absurd. But what at once strikes the reader, not merely of them but of
the collections of individual work which accompany them, as so astonishing,
is the level which is occasionally reached. The work is often the work of
persons quite unknown or unimportant in literature as persons. But we
constantly see in it a flash, a symptom of the presence of the true
p