Dict. Nat. Biogr., which is not responsible for this ascription. But in his Have With You to Saffron Walden (Grosart, iii. 117), 1596, Nashe tells us a great deal about Pedantius in his best form. The passage is too long to quote fully. He calls it Pedantius, that exquisite comedie in Trinitie College; where under the chiefe part from which it tooke his name, as namely the concise and firking finicaldo fine school-master, hee was full drawen from the soale of the foote to the crowne of his head. The just manner of his phrase in his Orations and Disputations they stuft his mouth with . . . those ragged remnaunts in his foure familiar Epistles twixt him and Signor Immerito, . . . scoffing his Musarum Lachrymæ. . . . I leave out halfe; not the carrying up of his goune, his nice gate on his pantoffles, or the affected accent of his speech, but they personated." All this is proof that Pedantius was a bitter satirical attack on Gabriel Harvey. Signior Immerito is of course Edmund Spenser. And since, according to Nashe, Pedantius quotes Harvey's subscription to one of his letters to Spenser (1580): Nosti manum & stylum (Grosart, i. 74 and 107), we have the date of Pedantius as somewhere soon after 1580, while Harvey was still lecturing on rhetoric and these things of his were fresh. There is another reference to Pedantius in Nashe which annoyed Harvey, a reference identifying him with the pedant. In his (Nashe's) Foure Letters Confuted he calls him a Dromidote Ergonist (Grosart, ii. 218), coining the term from Dromodotus, and showing what he was mocked for (see v. ii. 602, and above in this Introduction). Harvey, in Pierce's Supererogation (Grosart, ii. 275) gives this back to Nashe as one of his "Inkhornish phrases" and "outlandish collops." This term has escaped New Eng. Dict. ; "ergonist" is there, however, credited to Nashe only. If Pedantius were to be constituted "the source of Shakespeare's Holofernes," it would be hard to part company between Harvey and Holofernes. But there is no personal satire whatever in Holofernes. It is all good-natured raillery against the class, which inevitably brings in some echoes of that accomplished pedant of the day.

Pedantius is also mentioned in The Return from Parnassus, II. i. (1600), in terms that imply he was a good-natured school

master, not given to too much flogging. The elder Disraeli in his Calamities of Authors (1859, p. 128) mentions this attack on Harvey by the author of Pedantius, from Nashe's statements. The 1631 text is the earliest we possess.

For ridicule of affected language at an immediately subsequent date to the present play and to Harvey's and Nashe's wranglings, Jonson's earlier plays afford the proper continuation. Patient Grissel (by Haughton, Dekker and Chettle), 1600, has much of the same satire. See notes at V. i. 38 and 85.

Shakespeare found the name Holofernes in Rabelais (I. xiv.): "Presently they appointed him (Gargantua) a great Sophister-Doctor, called Tubal Holofernes, who taught him his ABC." He seems to have been tutor to Gargantua for about thirty-five years. While speaking of Rabelais, it seems the proper place to mention that Malone, writing of Holofernes, says the character was formed (exactly) out of two pedants in Rabelais, the other being Janotus de Bragmardo. For The Harangue of Master Janotus, see Rabelais, I. xix., xx. Furness dismisses Malone's suggestion with the loftiest contempt. But Malone is perfectly right, speaking generally not “exactly”—a word Furness rightly objects to. Janotus is introduced in ridicule of a Latinising pedant and logician. He is an amusing property, and Sidney staged him-for however much or little resemblance he has to Holofernes, he is certainly a counterpart of Rombus. We have another capital pedantical laughing-stock in Rabelais, II. vi., where "Pantagruel met with a Limousin, who affected to speak in learned phrase." He "pindarizes, as the French say," and must not be overlooked, since we often meet with him in English writers-Ben Jonson and others.

Dr. Landmann has been quoted above as referring to Puttenham for the "pedantic mingling of Latin and English called Soraismus." This is exactly wrong. Puttenham says: "Another of your intollerable vices is that which the Greekes call Soraismus, and we may call the mingle-mangle, as when we make our speech or writings of sundry languages using some Italian word, or French, or Spanish, or Dutch, or Scottish . . . ignorantly and affectedly." Latin is deliberately omitted. Probably in

Puttenham's mind it was so usual and needful that it never occurred to him it was pedantic.

Perhaps the earliest dramatic writer in English who makes his serious characters—all his characters-interlard their speech with Latin words, quotations and proverbs, is R. Edwards in Damon and Pithias (Hazlitt's Dodsley, vol. iv.). Edwards died in 1566. In that year his Palamon and Arcyte was exhibited before the queen at Oxford. It was said of that play, that a certain part "being repeated before certain courtiers. . . before the Queen came to Oxford, was by them so well liked, that they said it far surpassed Damon and Pithias, than which, they thought, nothing could be better. Likewise some said, that if the author did any more before his death, he would run mad he died within a few months after" (Nichols' Progresses, i. 212). This shows what a hit the play made; and presumably the Latin interpolations (they are very marked and numerous) were regarded as a work of high art. Edwards saw no fun in it, and it may have been against this bad precedent Sidney and Shakespeare set their faces, and proposed to mock it off the stage. Edwards has four or five French mingle-mangles and a couple of Greek ones. He has about twenty-five Latin ones, but he speaks only English in the tragical parts of his "tragical comedy," so he had some sense of the fitness of things. Ben Jonson jeered at parts of this play in his Bartholomew Fair (v. iii.) as late as 1614, showing its popularity. It is to a more extended structural license in language of this sort that E. Kirke devotes his criticism (addressed to Gabriel Harvey) on Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar (1579). He refers to the Anglicising of foreign words and rags, rather than to the borrowing them in their proper form. He is speaking of our loss in obsolete "naturall English words" when he says: "Which default whenas some endeavoured to salve and recure, they patched up the holes with peeces and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the French, there of the Italian, everywhere of the Latine; not weighing how il those tongues accorde with themselves, but much worse with ours: so now they have made our English tongue a gallimaufray or hodge-podge of al other speches." E. Kirke was a most intelligent and scholarly

critic, but he could hardly have hit on a more erroneous verdict, as viewed by posterity.

There is another peculiarity in Love's Labour's Lost which in our degenerate days is disapproved of, the display of punning. Probably it reaches a record for a drama here. It has been my good fortune to unearth several more undoubted gems. One critic has counted two hundred and fifty! Proverbial phrases too are well represented. These diversions were the simple literary fashion of a time when the shilling shocker and the halfpenny illustrated were as yet unknown. Lyly's plays abound with them. The chief exponents of these accomplishments are the wittier characters, Biron, Boyet and Rosaline. Boyet is depicted as one of the fops of the day. The scathing attack on the class uttered by Biron at V. ii. 321 et seq., is paralleled by Crites' tirade in Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels, III. ii., beginning after the real "swell," the "proud and spangled sir," has gone by :

He past, appears some mincing marmoset

Made all of clothes and face: his limbs so set
As if they had some voluntary act

Without man's motion, and must move just so
In spite of their creation: one that weighs
His breath between his teeth, and dares not smile
Beyond a point, for fear 't unstarch his look;
Hath travelled to make legs, and seen the cringe
Of several courts, and courtiers; knows the time
Of giving titles and of taking walls; . . .

"A blister on his sweet tongue, with my heart," echoes the King. And it is noteworthy here that just as the speaker Crites in Cynthia's Revels is Ben Jonson himself, so we may take Biron as giving expression in this play to Shakespeare's own thoughts. This leads to some remarks on the other more serious

CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY

By far the most important personage in Love's Labour's Lost is Biron, and it is usually conceded that Shakespeare to a certain extent recast this character in the later form of the play, the only one we have. See note at IV. iii. 296-301. Gollancz says: "Mr. Spedding as far back as 1839 pointed out that the inequality in the length of the Acts gives us a hint where to look for the principal additions and alterations; in Act I. Biron's remonstrance, and in Act IV. nearly the whole of the close and a few lines at the opening of the Act, may probably be classed with the passages already noted as belonging to Shakespeare's maturer work." A motive for this development in Biron's character, in the increased popularity of Biron, the French Marshal, in England, has been suggested already from Mr. Lee's analysis. But it is well to utter a note of warning against any tendency to identify the King and his courtiers with their French counterparts-counterparts only in name. Perhaps the most glaring absurdity this would lead us into is the adoption of the Duc de Mayenne (Dumain), who was Navarre's most powerful opponent, as one of his close circle of intimates. The Duc de Longueville, and the Duc D'Aumont, together with the Maréchal de Biron were the important generals and adherents of Navarre. One would gladly read D'Aumont for Dumain; Chapman brings him into Biron's Conspiracie. The Duc de Mayenne was noted for his "heaviness and dulness . . . augmented not only by the mass of his body, great and fat beyond all proportion, and which in consequence required a great deal of nourishment and much sleep" (Secret Memoirs: Henri IV. of France and Navarre [Grolier Society, pp. 118, 122, 135]). Dumain is small, beardless and youthful.

My lord Du Mayne" appears in one interesting episode in connection with Queen Elizabeth in 1592. It was in his lodging that the Duke of Guise spoke so basely of her that her ambassador Sir Henry Umpton gave him (the duke) the lie, and challenged him "with such arms as you shall choose"; or cause him "to be held the arrantest coward and most