Page:Shepheards Calendar-Crane 1898.djvu/18

 yet I conne them thank that they refrain from biting.

Now, for the knitting of sentences, which they call the joints and members thereof, and for all the compass of the speech, it is round without roughness, and learned without hardness, such indeed as may be perceived of the least, understood of the most, but judged only of the learned. For what in most English writers useth to be loose, and as it were unright, in this Author is well grounded, finely framed, and strongly trussed up together. In regard whereof, I scorn and spue out the rakehelly rout of our ragged rhymers (for so themselves use to hunt the letter) which without learning boast, without judgment jangle, without reason rage and foam, as if some instinct of poetical spirit had newly ravished them above the meanness of common capacity. And being,in the midst of all their bravery, suddenly, either for want of matter, or rhyme; or having forgotten their former conceit; they seem to be so pained and travailed in their remembrance, as it were a woman in childbirth, or as that same Pythia, when the trance came upon her. “Os rabidum fera corda domans,” etc.

Nathless, let them a God’s name feed on their own folly, so they seek not to darken the beams of others’ glory. As for Colin, under whose person the Author’s self is shadowed,