soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was
first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre
remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel
Harvey,--a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,--whose chief claim to
remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was
the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure
Letters," (1592,) he says, "If I never deserve anye better
remembraunce, let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English
Hexameter, whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill, and
excellent Sir Phillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and
elsewhere." This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an
afterthought with Harvey, for, in the letters which passed between him
and Spenser in 1579, he speaks of himself more modestly as only a
collaborator with Sidney and others in the good work. The Earl of
Surrey is said to have been the first who wrote thus in English. The
most successful person, however, was William Webb, who translated two
of Virgil's Eclogues with a good deal of spirit and harmony. Ascham, in
his "Schoolmaster," (1570,) had already suggested the adoption of the
ancient hexameter by English poets; but Ascham (as afterwards Puttenham
in his "Art of Poesie") thought the number of monosyllabic words in
English an insuperable objection to verses in which there was a large
proportion of dactyles, and recommended, therefore, that a trial should
be made with iambics. Spenser, at Harvey's instance, seems to have
tried his hand at the new kind of verse. He says,--"I like your late
Englishe Hexameters so exceedingly well, that I also enure my penne
sometimes in that kinde.... For the onely or chiefest hardnesse, whych
seemeth, is in the Accente, which sometime gapeth, and, as it were,
yawneth ilfauouredly, coming shorte of that it should, and sometime
exceeding the measure of the Number, as in _Carpenter_; the middle
sillable being vsed shorte in Speache, when it shall be read long in