When Sidney too, and Dyer, another poet of
the time, proclaimed a 'general surceasing and silence
of bald rhymes, and also of the very best too, instead
whereof they have by authority of their whole senate,
prescribed certain laws and rules of quantity of
English syllables for English verse, having had already
thereof great practice,' Spenser was drawn 'to their
faction.'
'I am of late,' he writes to Harvey, 'more in love
wyth my Englishe versifying than with ryming; whyche I
should have done long since if I would then have
followed your councell.' In allying himself with these
Latin prosody bigots Spenser sinned grievously against
his better taste. 'I like your late Englishe
hexameters so exceedingly well,' he writes to Harvey,
'that I also enure my pen sometime in that kinde,
whyche I find in deed, as I have heard you often
defende in word, neither so harde nor so harsh [but]
that it will easily and fairly yield itself to our
mother tongue. For the onely or chiefest hardnesse
whyche seemeth is in the accente; whyche sometimes
gapeth and as it were yawneth il-favouredly, comming
shorte of that it should, and sometimes exceeding the
measure of the number; as in carpenter the middle
sillable being used short in speache, when it shall be
read long in verse, seemeth like a lame gosling that
draweth one legge after hir.
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