furniture than it went from them, but in handsomeness and fashion more
answerable to these times, wherein fashions are so often altered. Let
one word suffice for your encouragement herein; namely, that your
commendable pains in disrobing him of his antique curiosity, and
adorning him with the approved guise of our stateliest English terms
(not diminishing, but more augmenting his artificial colours of absolute
poesy, derived from his first parents) cannot but be grateful to most
men's appetites, who upon our experience we know highly to esteem such
lofty measures of sententiously composed tragedies.

How much you shall make me and the rest of your private friends beholden
to you, I list not to discourse: and therefore grounding upon these
alleged reasons; that the suppressing of this tragedy, so worthy for the
press, were no other thing than wilfully to defraud yourself of an
universal thank, your friends of their expectations, and sweet Gismund
of a famous eternity, I will cease to doubt of any other pretence to
cloak your bashfulness, hoping to read it in print (which lately lay
neglected amongst your papers) at our next appointed meeting.

I bid you heartily farewell. From Pyrgo in Essex, August the eighth,
1591.

_Tuus fide & facultate_

GUIL. WEBBE.[3]



To the Worshipful and Learned Society, the GENTLEMEN STUDENTS of
the Inner Temple, with the rest of his singular good Friends, the