Hollow Praise: Raising an Empty Monument from Oxford’s Ruin



In 1605 Francis Bacon published his “Advancement of Learning”, and it is from his discussion of the three ‘distempers’ of learning that I take much of the matter of the following posting in an effort to establish that at the heart of the
authorship problem lies the ‘age old’ dichotomy of style and substance, or words and matter/things (verba and res):


THERE be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which
are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second,
contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. (Bacon)

The key word in this passage that I would like to highlight and develop in terms of the authorship dispute is the word ‘VANITY’. In particular the purported ‘vanity’ of the Earl of Oxford in both his person and his rhetorical practices, and how
disparagement of the Earl corresponds to the ‘vain’ monument of hollow praise that Jonson constructs at the front of the First Folio as an empty figuration of the ‘vain’ author ‘Shake-speare’...


(second of three postings)
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Jonson’s Textual Monument
Brian Patrick Chalk

On 15 March 1604, James Stuart passed through London’s streets for the first time as James 1 of England. Modeled after a triumphal Roman procession, the event was overtly theatrical and thus presented a unique opportunity for working playwrights
to endear themselves to the new Monarch. No one appreciated this opportunity more than Ben Jonson, who played an integral role in producing the entertainments surrounding the occasion. The procession was, in Jonathan Goldberg’s words, “a self-
conscious recreation of classical art, adapting classical style to current meaning,” and Jonson wisely identified it as an opportunity to showcase his classical knowledge, and thereby distinguish himself from his competitors. James’s route through
the city featured seven ARCHES constructed specifically for the event by the architect and joiner Stephen Harrison Several included stages where brief entertainments were performed. To emphasize the Roman theme, the streets were decorated with statues
intermixed with actors who came to life to recite verses of poetry when the king rode by. Responsible for the first and last of these entertainments, Jonson was in an ideal position to make a lasting IMPRESSION. In his second ARCH at Temple Bar, the
playwright’s agenda registers clearly through Electra’s speech in The King’s Entertainment in Passing to His Coronation:

This from the loud, blest oracle I sing.
Who here and first, pronounc’d, thee Brittaines King
Long maist thou live, and see me thus appeard,
As omenous [as] a comet, from my spheare,
Unto thy raigne: as that [did] auspicate
So lasting glory to AUGUSTUS state.

Jonson shrewdly conflates James’s providential claims with his own classicizing aspirations, representing himself as a “comet” or omen that signifies the beginning of James’s reign. By proclaiming James a new “Augustus,” Jonson’s ARCHES
reflect an image that flatters the new king while also calling attention to the role that poetry plays in confirming his power. A new Augustus, of course, implies a new Virgil or a new Horace, a parallel that makes Jonson heir to the Roman poets,
confirming their posterity even as it projects his own works toward a comparable one. Poetry grounded in civil virtue, he insists, will endure. As is often the case with Jonson, even at his most panegyric, he seeks to instruct as he praises: the arches
make clear the relationship that Jonson believes should exist between a monarch and the poets of his realm.

(snip)

Jonson’s interest in Roman modes of memorialization, particularly their connection to his poetic legacy, did not begin with the triumphal arches In the two years leading up to the procession, he completed the Roman tragedy _Sejanus, HIS FALL_.
Rather than a poetic precursor such as Virgil or Horace, Jonson’s literary role model for the play as well as his primary source was the historian Cornelius Tacitus. History’s highest function in Tacitus’s works is “to let no worthy action be
uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity to evil words and deeds.” This philosophy aligned perfectly with both Jonson’s approach to composition and the criteria by which he felt his works should be judged.

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*Idolatrous Italianate Ciceronians*

Homosociality, Imitation, and Gendered Reading in Robert Greene's Ciceronis Amor

Kevin L Gustafson. Philological Quarterly

Gabriel Harvey provides a particularly illuminating example of this argument because he was a contemporary (though hardly a friend) of Greene, and because his Ciceronianus (1577) offers a brief history of Ciceronian debates up to the middle of the
sixteenth century, even while presenting the author as a repentant idolater.47 Harvey follows Jerome's letter in confessing to a prodigality in which he "virtually preferred to be elected to the company of the Ciceronians rather than to that of the
saints."48 But now, having digested the arguments of the anti-Ciceronians Erasmus and Peter RAMUS, he claims to have a more balanced view. Cicero is still "the eldest son and indeed heir of Eloquence," and thus most worthy of imitation, but one who also
has faults and is best imitated when exceeded.49 For Harvey, as for Ramus, true imitation like true friendship is an exercise dedicated to appreciating and cultivating "all of his virtues and conduct and character [virtutisfundamentuni], rather than
merely mimicking affect or style.50 Here again rhetorical imitation bears a striking resemblance to the appreciation and cultivation of virtue in theories of friendship, and the Elizabethan scholar casts this transformation in language directly
reminiscent of Quintilian's characterization of imitation as a kind of desire: "To me Cicero was always Cicero, and eloquence, eloquence; but now more than ever my mind, fired with unprecedented ardor and love, not merely expects but promises something
greater than Cicero in Cicero himself."51 The reformed Harvey will take what is best from a variety of sources and, following Erasmus and Ramus, redefine "Ciceronian" so that it refers not exclusively to the orator but instead to any writing that is "
excellent and in conformity with the most careful usage of speech and thought."52 Harvey's journey of rhetorical reformation traverses a gap between what he elsewhere calls "CURIOUS universall scholars" and "superficial humanists,"53 or the broadly
educated orator versus the less-desirable rhetor, who is "highly trained and polished in the single faculty of eloquent speech."54 There is throughout Harvey's work a tension between SCHOLARSHIP and COURTIERSHIP, and in a quite telling move he
characterizes the singular concern with style as a KIND OF EFFEMINACY, derisively saying, "Let the little ladies hold sway in the classroom."55 Harvey's ability to police imitation through gender categories only underscores the pervasive and largely
tacit homosociality of the work. The Ciceronianus, like the Rhetor that immediately followed it, began as a university lecture in Latin addressed to students as well as fellow scholars, and both treatises were dedicated to academic friends.

Ciceronis Amor initially may seem far removed from Harvey's academic polemics. Yet Greene's fiction is equally concerned with the twin discourses of friendship and imitation-equally concerned to mark proper and improper ways of loving Ciceronian
eloquence.
(snip)

The letter that Cicero writes on behalf of Lentulus (57-58), and that Greene subsequently translates for his English readers, is the central document in this drama of rhetorical desire. Relihan adduces this episode of women reading as singular evidence
that Ciceronis Amor advocates the antimisogynist position that women are just as capable as men of participating in humanist culture. On closer inspection, the scene appears much more ambivalent in its attitude towards women readers. The letter is of
course a common feature of amatory writing, and Greene here no doubt expected his audience to have Ovid in mind. Nor is there anything particularly unusual about two Roman ladies reading Latin, which is of course their native tongue. What is striking is
that, much like the Ciceronian derided by Harvey, they respond foremost, even exclusively, to its style, the pleasing surface that may lead to but does not necessarily correspond to Ciceronian virtue. Flavia first correctly attributes the letter to
Cicero based on its style. Terentia, however, goes no further, as she becomes enflamed with desire for a man she has never met: "Ah Tullie, sweete Tullie, from whose mouth flows mélodie more enchaunting then the sirens" (66). Greene has already referred
to the Sirens to suggest the dangers of other-sex desire, sensuality that Parker associates with not only woman's body but also woman's speech. Here the reference indicates a particularly sensual way of reading, and as such highlights a disjunction-
between Cicero's motives for eloquence and Terentia's reception of it-that is even more noticeable later in the story, when he tries to persuade Terentia to accept Lentulus: "This discourse of Tully did but sette Terentias herte more on fire. For hearing
the pleasant harmony of hir Cicero, shee likt of the musicke as of the Syrens melody, and so entangled her selfe with many newe conceived fancies" (102). Rhetoric here is in a profound sense at cross-purposes for the two characters. Cicero's act of
writing the letter exemplifies the ideal that true eloquence is subordinated to virtue, in this case the devotion and self-sacrifice that, in De amicitia, characterize true friendship. Her emotional reception of it, by contrast, resembles the stylistic
infatuation of the *idolatrous Italianate Ciceronian* and looks forward to the stereotype of the mad and oversexed woman reader of Jacobean city comedy.62


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Jonson, _Discoveries_

Periodi.—Obscuritas offundit tenebras.—Superlatio.—Periods are beautiful when they are not too long; for so they have their strength too, as in a pike or javelin. As we must take the care that our words and sense be clear, so if the obscurity
happen through the hearer’s or reader’s want of understanding, I am not to answer for them, no more than for their not listening or marking; I must neither find them ears nor mind. But a man cannot put a word so in sense but something about it will
illustrate it, if the writer understand himself; for order helps much to perspicuity, as confusion hurts. (Rectitudo lucem adfert; obliquitas et circumductio offuscat. [116a]) We should therefore speak what we can the nearest way, so as we keep our gait,
not leap; for too short may as well be not let into the memory, as too long not kept in. Whatsoever loseth the grace and clearness, converts into a riddle; the obscurity is marked, but not the value. That perisheth, and is passed by, like the pearl in
the fable. Our style should be like a skein of silk, to be carried and found by the right thread, not ravelled and perplexed; then all is a knot, a heap. There are words that do as much raise a style as others can depress it. Superlation and over-
muchness amplifies; it may be above faith, but never above a mean. It was ridiculous in Cestius, when he said of Alexander:

“Fremit oceanus, quasi indignetur, quòd terras relinquas.” [117a]

But propitiously from Virgil:

“Credas innare revulsas
Cycladas.” [117b]

He doth not say it was so, but seemed to be so. Although it be somewhat incredible, that is excused before it be spoken. But there are hyperboles which will become one language, that will by no means admit another. As Eos esse P. R. exercitus, qui cælum
possint perrumpere, [118a] who would say with us, but a madman? Therefore we must consider in every tongue what is used, what received. Quintilian warns us, that in no kind of translation, or metaphor, or allegory, we make a turn from what we began; as
if we fetch the original of our metaphor from sea and billows, we end not in flames and ashes: it is a most foul inconsequence. Neither must we draw out our allegory too long, lest either we make ourselves obscure, or fall into affectation, which is
childish. But why do men depart at all from the right and natural ways of speaking? sometimes for necessity, when we are driven, or think it fitter, to speak that in obscure words, or by circumstance, which uttered plainly would offend the hearers. Or to
avoid obsceneness, or sometimes for pleasure, and variety, as travellers turn out of the highway, drawn either by the commodity of a footpath, or the delicacy or freshness of the fields. And all this is called εσχηματισμενη or figured
language.

Oratio imago animi.—Language most shows a man: Speak, that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man’s form or likeness so true as his speech. Nay,
it is likened to a man; and as we consider feature and composition in a man, so words in language; in the greatness, aptness, sound structure, and harmony of it.

Jonson
Ambition, like a torrent, ne'er looks back; And is a swelling, and the last affection a high mind can put off; being both a rebel unto the soul and reason, and enforceth all laws, all conscience, treads upon religion, *and offereth violence to **Nature's*
* self*.

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note - in his translation of Horace's 'Art of Poetry', Jonson translates 'Minerva' as 'Nature'.

He is loth to make Nature afraid in his Plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries, to mix his Head with other Mens Heels; let the concupiscence of Jigs and Dances reign as strong as it will amongst you: yet if the Puppets
will please any body, they shall be entreated to come in. (Jonson, _Bartholomew Fair_)

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All action is of the MIND and the mirror of the mind is the FACE, its index the eyes.-- Cicero


Act II Scene iii
I can refell that Paradox of those, which hold the face to be the Index of the minde, which (I assure you) is not so, in any politique creature:[1601 , Jonson Cynthia's Revels - Amorphus the Deformed]

Cf. [Cicero Orator lx.] ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi, *the face is a picture of the mind* as the eyes are its interpreter; L. vultus est index animi (also oculus animi index), the face (also, eye) is the index of the mind. [my note �
� disproportionate Droeshout]

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CURIOUS UNIVERSAL SCHOLARS:

Amorphus/Oxford


For, let your Soul be as- sur'd of this (in any rank, or profession whatever) the
more general, or major part of Opinion goes with the
Face, and (simply) respects nothing else. Therefore
if that can be made exactly, CURIOUSLY, EXQUISITELY,
thorowly, it is enough. (Jonson, Cynthia's Revels)

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Gendered Style:

Jonson - Timber
{Topic 67}} {{Subject: AFFECTED language}}

DE VERE argutis. - I do hear them say often some men are not witty, because they are not everywhere witty; than which nothing is more foolish. If an eye or a nose be an excellent part in the face, therefore be all eye or nose! I think the eyebrow, the
forehead, the cheek, chin, lip, or any part else are as necessary and natural in the place. But now nothing is good that is natural; RIGHT and NATURAL LANGUAGE seems to have least of the wit in it; that which is writhed and tortured is counted the more
EXQUISITE. Cloth of bodkin or tissue must be embroidered; as if no face were fair that were not powdered or painted! no beauty to be had but in wresting and writhing our own tongue! Nothing is fashionable till it be deformed; and this is to write like a
gentleman. All must be affected and preposterous as our gallants' clothes, sweet-bags, and night-dressings, in which you would think our men lay in, LIKE LADIES, it is so CURIOUS.

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"Style is the man":
The Virility of Conversation

What is the relationship between the classical proposition that a man's literary style must be like his life and the early modern investment in table talk, or conversation, as an arena for social advancement? The topic of stylistic manliness, disparaging
by contrast an effeminate decay in modern oratory, is pervasive in classical literature; examples that elaborate upon it are Persius' first satire, the preface to the first book of the elder Seneca's declamations, and the younger Seneca's 114th epistle
to Lucilius. The topic was revived, in relation to both Latin and vernacular prose, by Renaissance humanists. In a brilliant recent essay, Patricia Parker has analyzed the literature of this revival and the way in which it expresses "a desire for a more '
masculine' or virile style," a style "linked to the metaphorics of the male body in its prime." Parker deftly unpacks the key opposing terms in this debate over style: the first term is*nervus*, a word that, as well as meaning "sinewy" or muscular, also
connoted the male sexual member; and the second is *mollis*, "soft," a word associated in Roman culture both with women and with the male "pathic," the man who desired to be penetrated by other men. One of her objectives in discussing this "massively
influential Latin tradition" is to engage with the gender politics of what has been the central contention of prose studies of the English Renaissance - that is, the argument that a seventeenth-century reaction against the Ciceronian excesses of
sixteenth-century English prose pave the way for the rise of a scientific "plain style." If the concept of stylistic virility is above all marked by a certain conflation of body and language, however, a rather different historical development might come
to mind as its more probable outcome. I am thinking of the well-attested emergence, in the early modern period, of the phenomenon known as "CIVIL CONVERSATION," according to which the arts of polite discourse become newly central to the acquisition and
expression of Social status. And yet the problem for any examination of the relationship between "virile style" and "civil conversation" is, of course, that conversation (in our modern sense of informal exchanges of speech) simply cannot be recovered as
a practice. Even the social historians whose work provides compelling evidence of conversation's new centrality necessarily derive their evidence from the period's theoretical literature - from conversation manuals. More perplexing, it would seem that,
if there were a relationship between the prescriptive literature of early modern CIVIL CONVERSATION and a classically derived discourse of "VIRILE STYLE" in literary prose, such a relationship could only be one of OPPOSITION. How else could the discourse
Parker describes as privileging deeds over words, and disparaging linguistic excess as effeminate, coexist with a conduct literature that makes manliness (for Renaissance conversation manuals are, primarily, addressed to men) depend on the ability to
converse with ease, fluency, and confidence?

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Languet to Sidney, Nov 14, 1579

...Now I will treat you frankly, as I am accustomed to do, for I am sure our friendship has reached a mark at which neither of us can be offended at any freedom of the other. It was a delight to me last winter to see you high in favour and enjoying the
esteem of all your countrymen; but to speak plainly, the habits of your court seemed to me somewhat less manly than I could have wished, and most of your noblemen appeared to me to seek for a reputation more by a kind of affected courtesy than by those
virtues which are wholesome to the state and which are most becoming to generous spirits and to men of high birth. I was sorry therefore, and so were other friends of yours, to see you wasting the flower of your life on such things, and I feared lest
that noble nature of yours should be dulled, and lest from habit you should be brought to take pleasure in pursuits which only ENERVATE the mind.

If the arrogance and insolence of Oxford has roused you from your trance, he has done you less wrong than they who have hitherto been more indulgent to you. But I return to my subject...

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Effeminate/Distaff Hercules:

Reviewed work(s): Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxv+296.


Douglas Bruster

Cheney extends the significance of this biographical episode by reading it alongside the curious “Achilles” stanza in 1594’s The Rape of Lucrece (lines 1422–28).1 In this stanza, part of a larger sequence in which Shakespeare portrays Lucrece
looking at a painting of Troy, Achilles is represented by “his spear, / Grip’d in an armed hand, himself behind / Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind” (lines 1424–26). Exploring Shakespeare’s fairly idiosyncratic attention to the spear of
Achilles and its reputation for being able to both “kill and cure” (2 Henry VI  5.1.101), Cheney argues that this stanza in Lucrece is a particularly good example of a “signature” moment in Shakespeare’s works, a passage in which “
Shakespeare signs his name to Achilles” (53) and in which—owing to its emphasis on an uncannily present-yet-absent figure—we can sense an emblem of Shakespearean authorship itself. To Cheney’s persuasive gathering of intertextual references for
this interpretation one might add a line that his study overlooks, from John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe (1584)  : “Wil you handle the SPINDLE with Hercules, when you shuld SHAKE the SPEARE with Achilles?”2 If Shakespeare pushed the elements of
his last name to their most playful extremes, then, he found the terms already in the Elizabethan air.

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Idle Hours/Graver Labour

Sidney's Womanish Man
Mark Rose

Idleness was understood to be the first shaft that 'Cupide shootethinto the hot liver of a heedlesse lover', so in desiring to give in toidleness the prince is only proving true to type. Distaff Hercules was the conventional image for just such a
condition of effeminate idleness induced by passionate love. The distaff itself was an old symbol of idleness, and Sindey would have read in Amyot's Plutarch:

...that men given to idle luxury are like Hercules 'au palais royal de la royne de Lydie Omphale, vestu d'une cotte de demoiselle, se laissant souffletter & tresser aux filles & femmes de la Royne'.

'WIL you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you should SHAKE the SPEARE with Achilles?" asks a character in Lyly's Campaspe. Barnaby Rich states that lascivious women have made 'valiant men effeminate, as Hercules'. And Robert Burton uses 'Herculean
Love' as an uncomplimentary epithet for passionate love. Sidney's own contempt for distaff Hercules is clear from the Defence of Poesie:

So in Hercules, painted with his great beard, and furious countenance, in a womans attire, spinning, at Omphales commaundement, it breedes both delight and laughter; for the representing of so straunge a power in Love, procures delight, and the
scornefulness of the action, stirreth laughter. (iii. 40)

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Return from Parnassus

Ingenioso My pen is your bounden vassal to command;
but what vein would it please you to have them in?

Gullio Not in a VAIN vein (titters at own joke; Ingenioso
feebly joins in) Pretty, i'faith! - make me them in two or
three diverse veins,(Ingenioso scribbles notes frantically) in
Chaucer's, Gower's and Spencer's, and - (Ingenioso
shudders, knowing what's coming) Mr Shakespeare's.
Marry, I think I shall entertain those verses which run like
these:

Euen as the sun with purple-coloured face
Had ta'en his last leave on the weeping morn, etc.

Ingenioso (mocking) Sweet Mr. Shakespeare!

Gullio: Oh sweet Mr. Shakespeare, I’ll have his picture in my study at the Courte

Gullio: Let the duncified worlde esteeme Spenser and Chaucer, I’ll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare.

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Harvey, Speculum Tuscanismi

Since Galatea came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp,
Vanity above all: villainy next her, stateliness Empress
No man but minion, stout, lout, plain, swain, quoth a Lording:
No words but valorous, no works but womanish only.
For life Magnificoes, not a beck but glorious in show,

In deed most frivolous, not a look but Tuscanish always.
His cringing side neck, eyes glancing, fisnamy smirking,
With forefinger kiss, and brave embrace to the footward.


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Sidney as the picture of 'True Nobility":
From Moffett's _Nobilis_ or_ A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney_,

dedicated to WILLIAM HERBERT: Jan 1594 (?)

"A few, to be sure, were observed to murmur, and to envy him so great preferment; but they were men without worth or virtue, who considered the public welfare a matter of indifference- fitter, in truth, to hold a DISTAFF and CARD WOOL AMONG SERVANT GIRLS
than at any time to be considered as RIVALS by Sidney. For no one ever wished ill to the honor of the Sidney's except him who wished ill to the commonwealth; no one ever for forsook Philip except him whom the hope that he might at some time be honourable
had also forsaken; and no one ever injured him except him for whom virtue and piety had no love. He was never so incensed, however, by the wrongs of malignant or slanderous men but that at the slightest sign of penitence the heat of his disturbed spirit
would die down, and he would bury all past offenses under a kind of everlasting OBLIVION. (p.82 Nobilis (The Noble Man), Moffett)

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Author: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.  ]
Title: Poems: vvritten by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent
Date: 1640 
Achilles his concealement of his Sex in the Court of Lycomedes.


NOw from another World doth saile with joy,
A welcome daughter to the King of Troy,
The whilst the Gr[...]cians are already come,
(Mov'd with that generall wrong 'gainst Islium:)
Achilles in a Smocke, his Sex doth smother,
And laies the blame upon his carefull mother,
What mak'st thou great Achilles, teazing Wooll·
When Pallas in a Helme should claspe thy Scul[...]?
What doth these fingers with fine threds of gold?
Which were more fit a Warlike Shield to hold.
Why should that right hand, Rocke or Tow containe,
By which the Trojan Hector must be slaine?
Cast off thy loose vailes, and thy Armour take,
And in thy hand the *Speare of Pellas shake*.
Thus Lady-like he with a Lady lay,
Till what he was, must her belly bewray,
Yet was she forc't (so should we all beleeve)
Not to be forc't so· now her heart would grieve:
When he should rise from her, still would she crie·
(For he had arm'd him, and his Rocke laid by)
And with a [...]ft voyce spake: Achilles stay,
It is too soone to rise, lie downe I pray,
And then the man that forc't her, she would kisse,
What force (Delade[...]a) call you this? 

Pelias hasta – spear of Achilles (shaft grown on mount Pelion)

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Mocking Oxford’s “Sublime/Admirable” Ciceronian Style:

Gabriel Harvey and Oxford


http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/harvey101.htm
 In 1578 the Queen visited Cambridge, accompanied by the whole Court. Harvey met the procession at Audley End, presented verses written in their honor.

The following address, in Latin, was presented to Lord Oxford (trans. by Ward).

An heroic address to [Oxford], concerning the combined utility and dignity of military affairs and of warlike exercises.

This is my welcome; this is how I have decided to bid All Hail!
to thee and to the other Nobles.
Thy splendid fame, great Earl, demands even more than in the case of others
the services of a poet possessing LOFTY ELOQUENCE.
Thy merit doth not creep along the ground,
nor can it be confined within the limits of a song.
It is a WONDER which reaches as far as the heavenly orbs.
O great-hearted one, strong in thy mind and thy fiery will,
thou wilt conquer thyself, thou wilt conquer others;
thy glory will spread out in all directions beyond the Arctic Ocean;
and England will put thee to the test and prove thee to be native-born ACHILLES.
Do thou but go forward boldly and without hesitation.
Mars will obey thee, Hermes will be thy messenger,
Pallas striking her shield with her spear shaft will attend thee,
thine own breast and courageous heart will instruct thee.
For long time past Phoebus Apollo has cultivated thy mind in the arts.
English poetical measures have been sung by thee long enough.
Let that Courtly Epistle —
more POLISHED even than the writings of Castiglione himself —
witness how greatly thou dost excel in letters.
I have seen many Latin verses of thine, yea,
even more English verses are extant;
thou hast drunk deep draughts not only of the Muses of France and Italy,
but hast learned the manners of many men, and the arts of foreign countries.
It was not for nothing that STURMIUS himself was visited by thee;
neither in France, Italy, nor Germany are any such cultivated and POLISHED men. O thou hero worthy of renown, throw away the insignificant pen, throw away bloodless books,
and writings that serve no useful purpose; now must the sword be brought into play,
now is the time for thee to sharpen the spear and to handle great engines of war.
On all sides men are talking of camps and of deadly weapons; war and the Furies are everywhere,
and Bellona reigns supreme.

Now may all martial influences support thy eager mind, driving out the cares of Peace.
Pull Hannibal up short at the gates of Britain. Defended though he be by a mighty host,
let Don John of Austria come on only to be driven home again. Fate is unknown to man,
nor are the counsels of the Thunderer fully determined.
And what if suddenly a most powerful enemy should invade our borders?
If the Turk should be arming his savage hosts against us?
What though the terrible war trumpet is even now sounding its blast?
Thou wilt see it all; even at this very moment thou art fiercely longing for the fray.
I feel it. Our whole country knows it.
In thy breast is noble blood, Courage animates thy brow, Mars lives in thy tongue,
Minerva strengthen thy right hand, Bellona reigns in thy body, within thee burns the fire of Mars.
Thine eyes flash fire, thy countenance shakes a spear;
who would not swear that ACHILLES had come to life again?

********************************

You are wielding the plectrum, and a tender mistress holds you in her warm embrace! And does anyone ask wherefore do you refuse to fight? Because the fight brings danger: while the zither, and song, and Venus, bring delight. Safer it is to lie on the
couch, to clasp a sweetheart in your arms, to tinkle with your fingers the Thracian lyre, than to take in hand the shield, and the speare with sharpened point…Ye Gods forfend! And may the spear of Pelion go quivering from your strong arm to pierce the
side of Hectore [validoque, precor, vibrata lacerto /transeat Hectoreum Pelias hasta latus!]

(Ovid, Heroides 3.113-26)

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