tin), the historians (though the little known Holinshed has broken off
into a much more vernacular but also much more disorderly style), the rare
geographers (of whom the chief is Richard Eden, the first English writer on
America), and the rest. Of this rest the most interesting, perhaps, are the
small but curious knot of critics who lead up in various ways to Sidney and
Harvey, who seem to have excited considerable interest at the time, and who
were not succeeded, after the early years of James, by any considerable
body of critics of English till John Dryden began to write in the last
third of the following century. Of these (putting out of sight Stephen
Gosson, the immediate begetter of Sidney's _Apology for Poetry_, Campion,
the chief champion of classical metres in English, and by a quaint contrast
the author of some of the most charming of English songs in purely romantic
style, with his adversary the poet Daniel, Meres, etc.), the chief is the
author of the anonymous _Art of English Poesie_, published the year after
the Armada, and just before the appearance of _The Faerie Queene_. This
_Art_ has chiefly to be compared with the _Discourse of English Poetrie_,
published three years earlier by William Webbe. Webbe, of whom nothing is
known save that he was a private tutor at one or two gentlemen's houses in
Essex, exhibits that dislike and disdain of rhyme which was an offshoot of
the passion for humanist studies, which was importantly represented all
through the sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England, and which
had Milton for its last and greatest exponent. _The Art of English Poesie_,
which is attributed on no grounds of contemporary evidence to George
Puttenham, though the book was generally reputed his in the next
generation, is a much more considerable treatise, some four times the
length of Webbe's, dealing with a large number of questions subsidiary to
_Ars Poetica_, and containing no few selections of illustrative verse, many
of the author's own. As far as style goes both Webbe and Puttenham fall
into the rather colourless but not incorrect class already described, and
are of the tribe of Ascham. Here is a sample of each:--

(Webbe's _Preface to the Noble Poets of England_.)

"Among the innumerable sorts of English books, and infinite
fardels of printed pamphlets, wherewith this country is pestered,
all shops stuffed, and every study furnished; the greater part, I
think, i