James need
any friendly caution, it is against over-delicacy of handling.
LONGFELLOW
THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
The introduction and acclimatization of the _hexameter_ upon English
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.
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