3 sweete Harte: See Corculum above, l. 1.80.

4 dispense with: The phrase can have technical legal force involving the relaxation of a law or exemption from a penalty; here, by slight figurative extension, Harvey seeks relaxation of the rule of rhetorical decorum that dictates serious treatment of serious matters. But he may also be playing on Spenser’s name—Spenser the Dispenser—which would make this the first recorded instance of a pun that would be rehearsed with some frequency.

7 shrewde: The word is sometimes used as a slightly disparaging intensifier, as it seems to be here: shrewde wittie is poised between meaning ‘especially clever’ and ‘too clever’ with perhaps a shading towards ‘shrewishly clever’.

47–48 in the House toppe: Cf. Gervase Babington’s advice in A Briefe Conference Betwixt Mans Frailtie and Faith (1584), that we should cultivate ‘a patient and meeke nature in our selues able to beare and tolerate something, without mounting into the house top immediatly, and flashing out all on fire by and by vppon the sight or hearing of it’ (H5).

52 All-in: The last tolling of church bells prior to the commencement of service.

52 our Ladyes Mattins: The early morning prayer service. The version of the service designated, since the Middle Ages, as ‘our Ladyes’ is simpler than that of the traditional divine office because it was invariant across most of the liturgical calendar; it was therefore included in the Primer, which was the anchor of lay piety. The broad, blunt force of the Gentleman’s remark is to protest what he characterizes as the women’s noisy gynocentric stir.

58 mystresse: Used as a verb here, by comic analogy with master.

61 Philosophers: The term can denote ‘natural philosophers’, i.e., scientific thinkers.

62 sensible Naturall cause: The first adjective is somewhat swaggeringly chosen, since sensible usually denotes the obvious or perceptible, and is frequently contrasted with intelligible, whereas Harvey’s interlocutor imagines a cause beyond the reach of the senses; the force of the phrase here is ‘a hypothetical cause so plausible as to seem obviously correct’. Harvey’s response that the cause may be intelligible is simply corrective, although his use of Supernaturall, also corrective, seems at first to be a comic provocation. He takes up the question of Supernatural causation below (2.250 ff.).

63 Eruption of wynde: This is the standard theory within a meteorological tradition dominated by Aristotle; the most influential version of the theory available in English may be found in William Fuller’s A Goodly Gallery (1563) in both the chapters ‘Of earthquakes’ (C3v) and ‘How so great wyndes come to be vnder the earth’ (C6). By here insinuating that earthquakes are a kind of terrestrial flatulence, Harvey’s interlocutor may intend smugly to outrage the gentlewomen, but the analogy is also traceable to Aristotle, who elaborates it in Meteorologica 2.8.366b.

65–75 the great aboundaunce . . . Originall place: Harvey here summarizes the theory propounded in Meteorologica, 2.8.366b (and cf. Fuller, 1563, C6). The idea that water has a ‘Naturall’ place above the earth permeates Aristotle’s De Caelo, deriving from the more fundamental principle that earth seeks to occupy the cosmic center and, hence, a place beneath the other elements (see, in particular, De Caelo, 4.4.311b). Harvey’s description of the ‘Naturall Originall place’ of water may be more informal, a reference to the fact that the ‘windie Exhalations and Vapors’ seek ascent to the place from which the rainwater that generates them originally came, yet he seems to return to this notion below, when he speaks of ‘winde, or vapors, seeking . . . to get them home to their Naturall lodgings’ (2.239-41).

73 windie Exhalations: Although Aristotle and Seneca gave currency to the idea that most meteorological and geological phenomena are traceable to the exhalations produced when water or earth are heated, the concept of exhalations is almost certainly pre-socratic, deriving both from Heraclitus and Anaximander. Aristotle’s treatment of earthquakes in the Meteorologica follows directly from a longer treatment of wind (2.4-6.359b-365a, and see also 1.13.349a)

90–91 substantiall matter . . . spirites: Harvey’s vocabulary has strong philosophical associations, although he appears to be using his terms loosely. In many popularizing discussions of natural philosophy, as here, the terms humours, fumes, and spirites are used interchangeably to represent exhalations of matter; when used in series, as here, they are never carefully distinguished. (Technically speaking, humours is a term usually, but not exclusively, associated with the medical tradition, fumes with the alchemical and meteorological traditions, and spirites with a range of scientific and philosophical traditions, but carrying distinct meanings in each.) Similarly, the strict distinction in Aristotelean metaphysics between substance and accident seems not to operate here; rather, Harvey seems to be using the contrastive terms substantiall and accidentall to distinguish the primary material state of the elements contained within the earth and the various, largely gaseous derivatives of those elements.

91–101 either good . . . or other.: Harvey rejects the idea that the accidental vapors are good, on the grounds that they generate bad effects; he rejects the idea that the vapors are uniformly bad, on the grounds that if they were so, they would simply be inert. He therefore concludes that they must manifest themselves in mixed compounds and that the mixtures are sometimes imbalanced, with bad vapors working against good ones and, overpowering them, bursting forth.

93 poysonfull: On the poisonous vapors of earthquakes, see Seneca the Younger, Natural Questions, 27.1-28.3

99 Temperature: As in humoural medicine, in which health depends on the temperate balance of different humours, so geological stability would depend on the ‘proportionable’ balance of those ‘humours, and fumes, and spirites’ that are contained in the earth’s channels and cavities.

109–110 violent . . . Ague: Lucretius compares the earth racked by earthquake to a human body racked by fever (6.591-95); Harvey’s language, from his description of the Earth as a ‘huge body’ to the evocation of the earth’s disproportionate ‘Temperature’ to this description of earthquakes as an ‘Ague’, that is, as a shivering fever, is resolutely non-figurative.

100 interchaungeably: Although in many places and times the earth’s mixture of the earth’s vapors is balanced, sometimes it is not.

105 putrified Humors: The process of humoral putrefaction is given its fullest description in Galenic medicine—for Galen, humoural putrefaction, which predisposes the body to disease, takes place when a stagnant humour is heated without the possibility of evaporation. Aristotle devotes the opening of the fourth book of the Meteorologica to an account of putrefaction, which he treats as the fundamental process of destruction.

113 Terræ metus: Harvey is not adopting language from the Vulgate—indeed, the phrase probably owes more to Virgil, Aen 1.280, where Juno roils air, sea, and land with fear—but the idea of the earth cowering in terror owes a good deal to recurrent images in Psalms; see, for example, Ps 18.7 and 68.8.

115 terrified . . . scarcely mooued: The gnomic formulation seems to suggest that the gentlewomen are too shallow truly to be moved, that their terror is superficial, especially when compared to the graver intellectual motion of scholars. Yet, the speaker implicitly compares this male motion to the very motion of the earthquake, thus suggesting that male intellection is a kind of grave flatulence.

122 not wooman: Because Eve was fashioned from Adam’s rib.

121–127 I am flatly . . . for feare.: Harvey’s larger argument against supernatural causation here begins to emerge more sharply: this is not the earth of the psalter, trembling before the Lord; it is Aristotle’s earth, suffering from natural distemper. Harvey’s argument is pitched against that of the likes of Arthur Golding, whose Discourse Upon the Late Earthquake urged that ‘this miracle proceeded not of the course of any naturall causes, but of Gods only determinate purpose, who maketh even the verye foundations and pillers of the earthe to shake, the mountaines to melte lyke wax, and the seas to dry vp and to becom as a drie field, when he listeth to shewe the greatenesse of his glorious power’ (B2v). Harvey’s naturalist argument echoes that of Seneca: Suas ista causas habent nec ex imperio saeviunt sed quibusdam vitiis, ut corpora nastra turbantur, et tunc, cum facere videntur, iniuriam accipiunt (‘These phenomena have causes of their own; they do not range on command but are disturbed by certain defects, just as our bodies are’; Natural Questions, 6.3.1). See 218-9n below.

126–127 only . . . force: It moves only by virtue of the specific power.

133 little helpe:'Much ado and little help' was proverbial; cf. 2.595-6 below.

135 Tale of Robinhood: (prov.) A fantastic tale, ‘moonshine’.

135–136 I knowe not what: I don’t know what, i.e., ‘some such nonsense’.

136 I dowte . . . beleefe: I fear I hold heterodox beliefs.

138–139 would . . . presume of: Must you trust in, i.e., what compels you to trust in.

156–158 wherin . . . here.: Harvey refers the question of the breadth of consensus to the other men in attendance.

160 too much drinke: According to Aristotle, Democritus also held that earthquakes resulted from super-saturation of the earth (Meteorologica, 2.7.365b). For the idea of earthquakes as a kind of terrestrial drunkenness, see Isa 24.18-20.

172 diet: Harvey sustains the idea of the Earth as a body and of its absorption of precipitation as a kind of ingestion.

163–165 Alebench Rhetorick . . . Pottypôsis: Alebench Rhetorick would be Harvey’s joking name for the ‘art’ of drunken speech; Pottypôsis is a fabricated name for a figure of Alebench speech, a term built from both pot, an English word for ‘tankard’ and potare, ‘to drink’ in Latin, and poesis, Greek for ‘poetic composition’.

176 Secretaries of Nature: Usually denotes those charged with managing secret information without disclosing the secrets; in this case, those who disclose secrets. Harvey may be translating Suidas’ description of Aristotle as γραμματεὺς τῆς ϕύσεως grammateus tēs physeōs (‘scribe of nature’).

178 maruellous reasonable: The oxymoron sustains Harvey’s facetious tone.

192 go me: go

192 go me: In this construction, me is an ethical dative.

205 aspect: The influential ‘gaze’ of a star or planet, particularized by its position, as it looks upon earth (astrol.).

206 our . . . Venus: Associating the god of eloquence with the male graduates of Cambridge and the goddess of Love with the ladies in the room. Perhaps cued by this, the ‘Gentleman of the House’ (2.216-7) will request a differently gendered account of the cause of earthquakes: ‘let us men learne some thing of you too’.

218–219

Naturall, or Supernaturall: Harvey’s interlocutor invites him to resume the central concern that animates Book 6 of Seneca the Younger’s Natural Questions: Illud quoque proderit praesumere animo, nihil horum deos facere, nec ira numinum aut caelum concuti aut terram: suas ista causas habent (‘It will help to keep in mind that gods cause none of these things and that neither heaven nor earth is overturned by the wrath of divinities. These phenomena have causes of their own’; 3.1).

225 Causes: These are the four causes that Aristotle enumerates in Metaphysics 1013a. For Aristotle, the material cause is that from which a thing is made: wood is the material cause of a table. Its formal cause is that which makes it what it is and not something else: in Aristotle’s formulation, the formal cause of the octave is a ratio of 2:1. The efficient cause is that which brings a thing into being, as parents do children, while the final cause is that towards which a thing moves as, or as if to, its fruition, so that a mature plant is the final cause of a seed. Harvey seems to use the term Materiall Cause slightly differently; see the next note.

229–232 Materiall Cause . . . wynde: Actually, Aristotle designates wind as the efficient cause of earthquakes and earth and water as their material causes (Meteor 368a). This is a momentary lapse: as Harvey refines his treatment of earthquakes here, his etiological account draws closer to Aristotle’s; cf. Meteor 366b.

232–233 grosse and drye vapors, and spirites: The formulation may represent Harvey’s attempt to render Aristotle’s difficult theory of the two exhalations, moist and dry: see Meteor 341b and 365b. It may be worth noting that in the Nat Quaest, Seneca persistently uses the term spiritus when he speaks of air as the efficient cause of earthquakes. See also the semantic analysis in the Aetna, a pseudo-Virgilian poem on seismic activity, probably indebted to Seneca: spiritus inflatis nomen, languentibus aer (‘it is called “spirit” when in a state of tension, and “air” when it is at ease’; 212, ed. trans.).

235–236 seeking . . . lodgings: Cf. 2.65-75.

237 prison: The figure of subterranean air as imprisoned is ubiquitous in ancient writing on earthquakes; see Seneca, Nat Quaest, 6.18.4-5, Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 3.7.154 and 4.10.105, and the passage from Ovid, Met cited below.

246–245 Vis . . . solet: ‘The wild forces of the winds, shut up in dark regions underground, seeking an outlet for their flowing and striving vainly to obtain a freer space since there was no chink in all their prison through which their breath could go, puffed out and stretched the ground, just as when one inflates a bladder with his breath’; Met XV.299-304.

256–257 Locutus . . . Terra: ‘The Lord spake and the earth trembled’. But the text is improvised: Harvey splices together two phrases that appear in various places in the Vulgate, but never together.

258–262 for . . . motions: Harvey’s syntax here is extremely artful: one might at first suppose that he is proposing that we take seriously—because ‘it is not to be gainesayd’ and because it is the opinion of ancient scientists—the assertion that stellar and solar heat and influence are the ‘principall and sole Efficient’ cause of earthquakes, and not ‘God himselfe’. But as the sentence proceeds, we are obliged to reconsider the force of ‘for’ in the phrase ‘for the principall, or rather sole Efficient’, understanding it to mean ‘on account of’ (OED 21b): the force of the sentence is thus ‘although God is the principal efficient cause, it is not to be gainsaid that solar, stellar, and planetary influence and heat are secondary, instrumental, efficient causes.’ Harvey tempts us to suspect him guilty of doubting that God is the efficient cause of earthquakes, and then dispels the suspicion.

260–261 superior Planets: In the Ptolemaic system, the inferior planets, Mercury and Venus, were distinguished from the three superior planets by two main features: unlike the superior planets, the centers of their epicycles were collinear with the earth and sun, and their paths never took them in opposition to the position of the sun.

264 naturall reasonable: Both ‘simply reasonable’ and ‘satisfied with reasons involving natural processes’. The problem of the final causes of meteorological phenomena was hotly contested in the sixteenth century. In his Peripateticarum Quæstionum (1571) Andrea Cesalpino went so far as to imply that meteora did not have final causes, by excluding them from his causal account (H8v-I3).

278–279 very Nature selfe: The Stoic idea that God and Nature were one and the same had been given renewed currency in the work of Francesco Patrizi and Giordano Bruno.

280 Natura Naturans: L ‘Nature naturing’, i.e. Nature in its creative or active aspect.

287–288 in . . . dayes: Harvey here invokes the Protestant idea that miracles had ceased at some determinate historical moment. The moment of Cessation was variously assigned. Some thinkers associated the cessation with the moment at which the canonical books of the New Testament were completed; others held that miracles ceased with the death of John, the last of the Apostles; still others dated the cessation from the fourth-century establishment of Christendom.

311–313 Roma . . . Euentus: ‘Rome never trembled, that it did not portend some notable future event’. Harvey seems to be quoting the Nat Hist from memory; his version does not match Pliny’s ‘numquam urbs roma tremuit, ut non futuri eventus alicuius id praenuntium esset’ (‘The city of Rome never experienced a shock which was not the forerunner of some great calamity’; 2.86). In the passage in question, from his chapter on earthquakes, Pliny refers to fifty-seven earthquakes in one year at the outset of the Second Punic War; at 2.85, Pliny refers to an earthquake of 90 B.C., the year before the Bellum Sociale or Social War that disrupted centuries-old peninsular alliances.

321–322 Cause . . . End: Harvey is here referring to the two ‘external’ causes, the efficient and final causes.

322 preternaturall, or supernaturall: The two terms were occasionally used interchangeably, and the distinctions implied when they were used contrastively were various. Supernatural causation is almost always understood to be divine, whereas preternatural causation could refer to the agency of angels (or demons), or simply to causation thought neither to be natural, on the one hand, nor immediately divine, on the other. See Daston 1999, 78-85.

328 his priuie Counsell: With light derision, Harvey mocks such natural philosophers as imagine that God is like an English king who might disclose His ‘secret and inscrutable purposes’ to an ingratiating mortal confidante or to such intimate and august advisors, members of His divine Privy Council, as might betray the details of His purposes.

332–337 Eclipse . . . Nouilunio: Because solar eclipses can take place only during a new moon (L novilunium), whereas Passover begins with a full moon (L plenilunium), the three hours of darkness that covered the land on the occasion of the crucifixion (Matt 27:45, Mark 15:33, and Luke 23:44) were best explained as miraculous, although many chronographers, seeking to settle the date of the crucifixion, sought various means to resolve the apparent natural impossibility.

340 Aut . . . destruetur: ‘Either the nature of things is suffering or the structure of the world is being destroyed’. The exclamation attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite (now better known as Pseudo-Dionysius) is variously reported, though it appears nowhere in the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius; perhaps its most familiar form was that given in the Roman Breviary as part of the first lesson for the second nocturn for 9 October: Aut Deus naturae patitur, aut mundi machina dissoluitur (‘Either the God of nature is suffering, or the frame of the universe is being dissolved’; Leiden, 1544, gg4v). In his ‘Letter to Polycarp’ (Epist. 7), Pseudo-Dionysius reports on his struggle to convince one Apollophanes of the existence of supernatural signs, reminding him that they together witnessed the crucifixion eclipse, which eclipse Apollophanes knows was a natural impossibility, given the lunar cycle (AA6v, Opera, 1555; PG, 1081A-B).

343 the Errour . . . tollerable: I grant that the error is the more tolerable.

346–348 if so be . . . reformation: ‘If it happen that it’—i.e., the error of unwarranted confidence that natural calamaties are divine admonitions would be more tolerable—‘secure our inward reformation (and not the merely hypocritical and pharisaical show of reformation)’.

349 Pænitentiam agite: ‘Do penance!’ Harvey here quotes Matt 4:17, but the phrase may have special significance here as having been the focus of attention in the first of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses: Dominus et magister noster Iesus Christus dicendo ‘Penitentiam agite &c.’ omnem vitam fidelium penitentiam esse voluit (‘By saying “Do penance, etc.” our Lord and Master Jesus Christ willed that the entire life of the faithful should be repentance’; WA 1.233, ed. trans.).

352–354 especially . . . places.: In this slightly obscure passage, Harvey casts doubt on the idea that earthquakes that vary so widely in duration and spatial extent could all have the same general cautionary import.

391 auncient . . . Lawyer: An ‘ancient’ was one of the senior members of the governing body of the Inns of Court.

433 Eldertons: The ballad writer William Elderton was a frequent object of Harvey’s scorn; in his Foure Letters and Certaine Sonnets (1592), Harvey calls him a ‘drunken rimester’ (A4) and links him with Robert Greene, referring to the two of them as ‘the very ringleaders of the riming, and scribbling crew’ (A4v).

437 diuision: I.e., into categories or into noteworthy particular instances.

438 Induction: The systematic consideration of a number of particular instances.

450 vt supra: See 2.299 ff.

451–452 as wel . . . the other: i.e., concerning both material and formal causes.

460 dispositions: Several senses are relevant: temperaments (OED 6), attitudes (OED 7a), and situations (OED 1b).

462 Non causam pro causa: The error of incorrectly inferring a cause is the sixth of the seven ‘extra-linguistic fallacies’ analyzed in Aristotle’s De Sophisticis Elenchis (‘On Sophistical Refutations’).

463 Elencho Finium: L. ‘By a refutation of ends’. Harvey’s meaning here is obscure: he seems to be speaking of the fallacy of assigning ends or purposes without sufficient warrant, but he may be proposing something more radical, either that there is no intelligible purpose for earthquakes or that the final cause of earthquakes is beyond the limits of our knowledge. If the latter, Harvey’s treatise would take its place in that body of Early Modern scientific literature that resists reference to final causation in accounts of natural phenomena (Martin 2010).

466 Still . . . Byng: John Still, fellow of Christ’s Church Cambridge (1562), proceeded MA in 1565, the year before Harvey matriculated there. Awarded a Bachelor’s of Divinity degree in 1570 and made Doctor of Divinity in 1575, Still was highly reputed as a controversialist. By 1577, Still was Master of Trinity Hall and Harvey, having some hope of Still’s patronage, had therefore recommended his appointment to a bishopric in a letter written to Leicester in April of 1579. Thomas Byng was a bit senior to Still, having begun his Cambridge career in 1552; he became a fellow of Peterhouse in 1558 and earned the LLD in 1570. In 1565 he was made University Orator and in 1574 became Regius Professor of Civil Law.

472–473 Lord . . . Picus: Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, the distinguished philosophical skeptic, was the nephew and biographer of the famous Neoplatonist Giovanni Pico. The work to which Harvey now turns is much indebted to the uncle’s posthumously published attack on astrology, the Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem (‘Arguments Against Divinatory Astrology’), which Gianfrancesco edited for publication in 1496. There is, indeed, some reason to believe that Harvey confused uncle and nephew; see below (2.519-23n).

476–477 De . . . vanitates: ‘On Foreknowledge, on Behalf of True Religion, and Against Vain Superstitions’.

481–490 Naturæ . . . Aristoteles: ‘It cannot be that a natural phenomenon portends future events, whether by signs or portents nor can these events depend on some proximate cause that could also reveal future things. It seems possible that this happens by the deceit of demons. But a great many things not marvellous or strange in themselves can still be regarded as omens and portents by those who have not adequately grasped the nature of things—and usually are so regarded. For ignorance of the causes of an unusual event excites wonder on account of which, as Aristotle observes in the opening of his Metaphysics, people began to engage in philosophy’.

490–491 Impostura . . . causarum: ‘Deceptions of demons and the ignorance of causes’. Pico’s reflection on the latter paraphrases Cicero’s observation that ignorance of the causes of extraordinary events produces wonder (Causarum enim ignoratio in re nova mirationem facit; ‘On Divination’ 2.49).

498–507 Idem . . . deductum est: ‘Antiquity understood earthquakes just as it did lightning and thunder. An eloquent book on the subject of earthquakes in Greek recently fell into my hands, its author supposedly Orpheus. And while it often happens that people look to the diverse exhalations of the ground, to the violence of winds, to the turbulence of vapors—mark you that?—for signs indicating future events, it is absolutely absurd to do so, for those turbulences can be neither effects nor causes of future events—except perhaps by bringing death to those struck by lightning or undone by the gaping of the earth. But they cannot be derived from the same proximate cause on which future events also depend, as was discussed above’.

503 conductione: In his own copy Harvey hand-corrected the printed text to bring it into accord with the 1507 edition of Pico’s text (P1v), despite the fact that the reading in Pico’s text is probably a misprint.

511–517 Nec . . . Autoris: ‘Certainly the renowned Orpheus—if there really was an Orpheus—does not propose any cause at all why anyone would be able to predict from earthquakes the futures of cities, people, or regions. He merely says, on the basis of an insubstantial judgment, what is portended if an earthquake happens at night or in the summer or winter or during the day. These predictions can certainly be refuted by a more rational judgment and indeed, on the testimony of experience, I judge them worthy to be laughed at just as we have laughed at the Portents of Tages, the founder of Divination’. Pico here continues to draw on Cicero whose mocking account of the legend of the Etruscan prophet Tages (‘On Divination’ 2.50-51) immediately follows his discussion of the effects of ignorance of causes.

519–523 Picus . . . Phœnix: Harvey has plainly confused Gianfrancesco Pico with his more eminent uncle, Giovanni Pico, who died in 1494 at age 31 and was widely known as the Phoenix of his age; see the brief life composed by the biographer, Paolo Giovio, for his Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita, Venice, 1546, G1v.

525 tempering with: Addressing himself to, dealing with. Harvey’s use of ‘tempering’ is idiosyncratic, but he seems to have chosen the term to bring in the connotation of dealing temperately with the philosophical challenge of the earthquake, an ideal consistent with his professed resolution, in the next clause, to maintain himself ‘in the meane’. The philosophical disposition of temperate intellectual patience in the face of rational uncertainty approximates the Ἀταραξία Ataraxia (‘tranquility’) that was the psychological goal of skepticism.

526–527 this probable . . . his: The ‘Interim’ of suspended judgement in the face of uncertainty to which Harvey refers, is as much a philosophical state as a period.

531 beetleheaded: A beetle was a heavy implement for driving wedges or setting paving stones (OED 1a); cf. Foxe’s rendering of Luther’s description of his Roman adversaries as ‘beetell headed asses’ (1570: +++5).

533–534 sawe . . . Milstone: ‘To see far in a millstone’ is a proverb meaning ‘to have great insight’; the proverb was customarily used ironically, to impugn someone’s discernment.

536 Bayarde: Generally, a bay-colored horse, but bayard is frequently used to denote, or name, an old horse, often blind.

536–537 Scribimus . . . passim: ‘Unskilled or skilled, we all write poetry anyway’; Horace, Ep. 2.1.117. With odd abruptness, Harvey here returns to the subject of poetry and specifically addresses the details taken up in the last lines of the letter (1.73-74, 88 ff.) to which he is responding, where Spenser first reports having completed work on Dreames and The Dying Pellicane, proposes bringing out the Dreames, with illustrations and commentary, as an independent volume, and remarks on his uncertainty about whether the Stemmata Dudleiana is ready for publication.

538 the firste . . . the laste: i.e., the unskilled . . . the skilled.

538–539 O interim . . . miserabiles: ‘Meanwhile, O wretched and miserable Muses . . .’. In this pairing of miseras and miserabiles, Harvey may be recalling the curse from Ovid’s Ibis: sisque miser semper nec sis miserabilis ulli (‘may you always be pitiful, but pitied of none’; 117).

539–545 viderint . . . maximè: ‘Let the eyes and head of the state see. To my mind, this thing of yours is neither fully sown nor fully harvested. At any rate, my library certainly does not need any new books; it’s quite content with the old ones. What else? Farewell, my Immerito, and assure yourself that it’s something quite different from the things our booksellers hold to be most marketable.’ Harvey’s phrasing is a bit mysterious, perhaps intentionally so: it is unclear whether the incomplete enterprise (isthic) to which Harvey refers here, so out-of-step with what he regards as the debased output of the contemporary press, are the books to which he refers in the next lines—The Dying Pellicane, Dreames, the Commoedies, and the Stemmata Dudleiana—or the quantitative poems under discussion in these letters, or, perhaps, the entire joint output of these two university men: the quantitative poems, the letters (and the scientific treatise interpolated there), The Dying Pellicane, etc. One might suppose that Harvey is commenting on the state of the Stemmata alone, since Spenser himself had expressed reservations about whether it was ready for publication, but Harvey’s protestations in the next sentence, that the Stemmata and the English comedies need, at most, only a week’s polishing, seem to suggest that he is thinking of something else as neither fully sown nor reaped.

546 thy dying . . . Dreames: See above, 1.73.

550 shal go: Harvey’s phrasing draws on the expression ‘he shall go [or ‘he goes’] for my money’, meaning ‘he has my enthusiastic support.’

552 trimming: The use of ‘trim’ to mean ‘abridge’ is a later development.

553–554 Schollers . . . contraries: Harvey’s draft of this bumptious poem appears in BL Sloane MS 93, fols 58-67 (reproduced in Letter-Book 1884, 101-38). Harvey used this MS for drafts of a number of letters and poems composed between 1573 and 1580.

554 shrunke in the wetting: Depreciated, often with the implication that the depreciated thing was shoddily made. The expression was frequently used of depreciated intellectual products, and, occasionally, the phrase affords the suggestion that the shrinkage is effected by a ‘wetting’ from too much drink. At fol. 58 of BL Sloane MS 93, Harvey considers foisting the authorship of this ‘amorous odious sonnet’ on Thomas More (Sloane MS93: fol 58).

560 Pluribus . . . sensus: ‘The understanding of particular things is diminished by attention to many’.

561–564 Anticosmopolita . . . Lorde there: Anticosmopolita is the title of Harvey’s unfinished epic poem; see SC Sept gl 80. The poem had been entered in the Stationers’ Register in June of 1579, but Harvey here reports that the poem remains in its earlier unfinished state (‘in statu, quo’) and insinuates that his poetic labor has been especially frustrated by the failure of his suits for the patronage of the Earl of Leicester. In the same letter of April 1579 in which Harvey recommended Still for a bishopric, Harvey had written to ask Leicester’s support in an appeal to Elizabeth for a prebend at Litchfield (Stern 1979, 49-50); the fiction of the poem’s attendance on ‘my Lorde’ at court may be evidence that Harvey had gotten so far as to follow Leicester to court in order to advance the appeal, albeit to no avail.

566 Sat citò . . . bene: ‘Soon enough, if good enough’.

570–574 Det mihi . . . esset: ‘May my Mother [i.e., Cambridge] grant that one of her most obedient sons be allowed to reveal some of her secrets and that the revelation be kept, thus, to just a few words. More, perhaps, later, but to do so now would be unpleasant, I don't have time, it would be a nuisance.’

574 Tully: I.e., Marcus Tullius Cicero. Because Cicero and Demosthenes were the most renowned orators of ancient Rome and ancient Greece, the pair often stand for ‘Rhetoric’, as here.

575 Liuie, and Salust: Livy and Sallust may stand in, generally, for ‘Roman History’, although their pairing might also be taken as comprehending a triumphalist account of the rise of Rome in Livy and an account of Roman decline in Sallust’s Catiline Conspiracy and Jugurthine War.

576 Lucian: The second-century CE Greek author of satirical prose essays, dialogues, and short stories had a reputation for irreverence.

577 Xenophon: This Greek historian and political philosopher was a contemporary of Plato. His Hiero, a dialogue between the poet Simonides and the tyrant Hieron, provided Early Modern thinkers with an idealized classical model for the proper relation between the prince and his more philosophical advisors; his fictional account of the education of Cyrus, the Cyropedia, was held in especially high regard in the Early Modern period. Comparing the author of the Cyropedia to the author of the Republic in the FQ, Letter Spenser alleges that ‘Xenophon [is] preferred before Plato’ (36) both because of Xenophon’s greater practical orientation and because he seeks to teach by example rather than by rule.

577 Discoursers: The term was sometimes used with pejorative connotations, suggesting obscurantism and misrepresentation; see, for example, ‘these discoursers that vse the word of God with as little conscience as they doe Machiauel’ (Stubbes, Gaping Gulf, 1579, A6v).

578 verball: merely concerned with words (rather than things)

579–581 noble . . . Angelles: The passage might be paraphrased thus: ‘the high style, the style associated with noblemen and rulers, is regarded as the best and the most persuasive form of eloquence’—and, Harvey seems thereby to imply, other stylistic practices are held in inappropriately low esteem—‘[but] Orators capable of such eloquence are as rare as red-headed angels’.

581–585 an exceeding . . . none at all: Harvey contrasts the influence of apparel on comportment with the influence of learning thereon: these days, he says, people carry themselves proudly if they are conspicuously well-dressed, but the well-educated do not carry themselves any better than the unlearned.

583 braue and gallaunt: Although both terms can refer (approvingly) to character, when they are used as here to describe apparel, they can be either approving—‘eye-catching and handsome’—or dismissive—‘flashy, showy’.

585 Tom Tooly: Cf. Stanyhurst, ‘What Tom Towly is so simple, that wyl not attempt, too bee a rithmoure?’ (Virgil his Aeneis, 1582, A4).

586–589 Matchiauell . . . Vnico Aretino: Harvey here surveys the Italian authors who had the most obvious and, perhaps, unsettling effect on Harvey and Spenser’s generation of young intellectuals. Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince (c. 1513, first printed in 1532) and Discourses on Livy (c. 1517, first printed in 1531) made him notorious for the bold amorality of his political thought. Baldassare’s Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528) spawned a substantial output of books that described the proprieties of modern comportment and meditated on the relation of those proprieties to the exercise of social and political influence. (Among the most popular conduct-books indebted to Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier were Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo [1558], and Stefano Guazzo’s Civil Conversazione [1574], a book very different in temper from Castiglione’s.) The fourteenth-century poet Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch—and ‘Petrach’ seems also to have been an acceptable English spelling of the name—was most famous for the Italian amatory poems in his collection the Rime Sparse, although his Latin epic, the Africa, was fairly well-known and his published correspondence, the Familiares, distantly influenced Spenser’s and Harvey’s Letters. Petrarch’s friend Giovanni Boccaccio is now best known for his collection of novelle, the Decameron, and although Boccaccio’s notoriety at Cambridge may well have rested primarily on that work, several of Boccaccio’s other writings had considerable influence: Chaucer was indebted to both his Filocolo and Filostrato, and several encyclopedic works—a synthetic treatise on Greco-Roman mythology, the Genealogia Deorum; a compendium of tragic narratives, the De Casibus Virorum Illustrium; and a collection of lives of famous women, De Mulieribus Claris—were still widely consulted. Last in Harvey’s list here is the satirist Pietro Aretino, whom Harvey, like E.K., the commentator of the Calender, confused with the Aretine poet Bernardo Accolti, known as Unico Aretino to such contemporaries as Castiglione (see SC Jan gl 35). Pietro Aretino wrote in a variety of genres, but his reputation for scurrilousness rested on the Ragionamenti, a collection of whores’ dialogues he wrote in the mid 1530s, and on a series of obscene sonnets written to accompany a set of pornographic prints by Marcantonio Raimondi, the poems and prints published together in 1524 as I Modi (‘The Postures’).

589 The French and Italian: Although Harvey has named no French authors in the foregoing list of modern writers especially esteemed at Cambridge, the phrasing here makes it clear that Harvey is not simply thinking of a few influential modern figures. He is also reflecting on the sudden prestige of continental scholarship and literature, much of it written in the vernacular, texts that advance intellectual developments sharply distinguishable from the traditions of the Greek and Latin academic curriculum.

590 The Queene mother: Catherine de Medici, who had wielded very great influence over her two eldest sons during their reigns as Francis II and Charles IX. She was more of a partner to her third son, Henry III, assisting and advising him in a range of diplomatic maneuvers. When Sir Philip Sidney presumed to write to Elizabeth in 1579 to discourage her from entertaining a match with Catherine’s youngest son, the Duc d’Alençon, he referred to him as ‘the son of a Jezebel of our Age’ (Works 3:52).

591 Mounsieur: Perhaps the most common of the English sobriquets for Alençon during the period in which Elizabeth entertained him as a suitor. When he was finally sent away in February 1582, Elizabeth wrote a poem ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’.

591 Shymeirs: Jean de Simier, an advisor to Alençon who was instrumental in advancing the prospective match between Alençon and the queen. He is satirized in the character of the Ape in Mother Hubberd.

592 Newes: Whereas the term can denote what has come to be its primary modern sense, ‘information concerning recent public events’, that is not its primary sense here, for the collection and distribution of such information was not yet sufficiently developed to be recognizable as such. As is clear from the list that explicates the general term, Harvey refers to something vaguer and more encompassing: to information concerning affairs of moment; to gossip; to fashions in literature, speech, and apparel; to discoveries and imaginings—that is, to anything that might have the power to excite or unsettle.

593–594 newe Elementes . . . Helles to: Harvey here returns to the letter’s presiding concern with natural philosophy. The clause seems to refer to disruptions of Ptolemaic astronomy, with its limiting sphere of fixed stars, and its composition limited to sublunary bodies composed of four elements and celestial bodies composed primarily of a fifth, the ether. Harvey’s reference to ‘newe Heavens’, a phrase that echoes Isa 65:17, seems to refer to the idea of multiple celestial worlds, first proposed in the fifth century, B.C.E. by Leucippus and Democritus, and later taken up by Epicurus, whose ideas were transmitted to the Renaissance by means of both Diogenes Laertius’ biography and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. (For Lucretius’ chief evocation of multiple heavens and multiple earths, see DRN 2.1094-1105.) The great sixteenth-century exponent of the idea of multiple worlds is Giordano Bruno, but Bruno did not arrive in England until 1583 and did not publish his treatise On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (De l'Infinito Universo et Mondi) until 1584. Although, as part of a consideration of the possibility of heliocentrism, Nicholas of Cusa had proposed that all stars might be considered like suns, Copernicus would not take this step: despite the revolutionary assertion of heliocentrism, he retained a single rigid firmament in his cosmological system. But Copernicus’ first important English exponent, Thomas Digges, imagined an infinite space, with the stars scattered throughout it, thus providing, before Bruno, a conceptual framework in which Cusanus’ idea of plural solar-systems could flourish.

594 Turkishe affaires: Since the Ottoman invasion of Cyprus and the Battle of Lepanto, there had been no major military engagements with Turkish forces either in Eastern Europe or in the Mediterranean. While the previous decade had been fairly quiet in this respect, Harvey here attributes to the young men of Cambridge a gossipy preoccupation with an exotic, and perhaps glamorous Ottoman ‘threat’ to Christendom.

599 Numbers . . . Ciphars: This means much the same thing as ‘Something made of Nothing’, but Harvey is insisting on the symbolic or ‘artful’ character of numbers and ciphers (‘0’, ‘.’ and other symbols of nullity that could also serve as multipliers).

599–601 Geometricall . . . abused: The first half of Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics, the book in which Aristotle takes up the virtue of Justice, is devoted to the application of proportion to social relations. Aristotle carefully distinguishes arithmetic from geometric proportion, associating the former with rectification and simple market exchange and the latter with distributive justice and complex forms of economic valuation. The effect was to associate arithmetic proportion with crude political and moral thinking and geometrical proportion with more highly developed political and moral thought.

601–603 Oxen . . . Yoke: At 2 Cor 6:14, Paul compares this mismatch with attempts to bring believers and non-believers into cooperative relations. In the Aulularia, Plautus’ poor Euclio uses the same metaphoric yoking together to evoke the folly of allying himself with the wealthy Megadorus (by means of the marriage of Megadorus to Euclio’s daughter Phædra; Aulularia, 228-35).

603 Conclusio ferè sequitur deteriorem partem: ‘The conclusion usually follows the weaker premise’: that is, if one of the premises of a syllogism is negative or particular, then the conclusion must be negative or particular. This rule was Theophrastus’ famous contribution to Aristotelean logic. Harvey cites the logical rule metaphorically: the firmly limiting ‘deteriorem partem’ (weaker part) of the syllogism is like the asses that, when yoked to oxen, limit the ability of the oxen to draw.

604 key colde: proverbial

604–605 nothing . . . Imputation: Harvey seems to be observing the weakening of the idea of intrinsic, unconditional goodness, but his phrasing takes some colour from the theological use of imputation to denote moral transfer between Christ and mankind: righteousness comes to mankind by ‘imputation’ from Christ and Christ takes on human sinfulness by a similar ‘imputation.’

605–607 Ceremoniall . . . abandoned: The ‘Ceremonial Lawe’ is that collection of ordinances thought to have been abrogated by Christ’s sacrifice. Harvey’s ‘in worde’ seems to imply ‘only’, and so to suggest that, whereas his fellow university men flouted judicial and moral law, they had an unregenerate fondness for Romanist ceremony and works.

607–609 the Lighte . . . Egles: Those who make verbal boast of spiritual illumination here seem to do so in the idiom of St. John the Evangelist, who refers to John the Baptist as sent ‘to beare witness of the light. That was the true light’ (John 1:7-8) even in the face of a mental ‘darkness [that] comprehended it not’ (1:5). St. John’s symbol was the eagle.

611 Humanitie: The study of ancient Greek and Latin literature, history, and other non-philosophical or non-scientific texts.

612 Doctors: The term can refer not only to candidates for the most advanced degrees and the holders of such degrees, but also to the early Church fathers.

616 Patient: A person acted upon; specifically, the recipient of pastoral care.

616–617 Agent . . . Herring: Agent and patient can have their general sense as ‘actor’ and ‘object of action’, but the specific sense of the phrase seems to be that ‘Ministers are not much better than the recipients of their pastoral care or correction.’ The proverb ‘never a barrel the better herring’ means ‘there’s no difference between them’, ‘six of one, half a dozen of the other’; Harvey has adjusted the phrasing to suggest, perhaps, that the ministering agent may retain some slight superiority to his patient.

617 Cappes and Surplesses: One of the central goals of the English reformers was the reduction of superfluous Church ceremony and they had especially objected to the over-elaboration of ‘massing vestments’. There was general agreement that the so-called liturgical vestments, those ecclesiastical garments specifically associated with the Roman Catholic service of the mass, were to be rejected, but the question of exactly which non-liturgical vestments to proscribe was vigorously argued, with Puritans objecting strenuously to the non-liturgical cap and surplice. In 1565, the year before Harvey matriculated at Christ’s College, William Fulke had led a protest at St. John’s College against the wearing of the surplice and square ‘cater-cap’; during the year following, Archbishop Parker’s efforts to enforce vestiarian conformity precipitated a major confrontation with non-conforming clergy and may be regarded as a crucial moment in the propagation of Puritan separatism. If Harvey here attests to a diminution in the reforming clamor on this subject, at least in the environs of Cambridge, it was only a temporary lull.

618 Cartwright: Thomas Cartwright, who had been ousted by Whitgift in 1570 from his position as the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge (in which he was succeeded by John Still). Cartwright was balked in his candidacy for a chair in Hebrew because of his support of the Puritan Admonitions to Parliament of 1572, which strongly opposed vestments and the episcopal efforts to impose conformity in vestiarian matters. Cartwright spent most of the 1570s as a minister to the English Protestant community in Antwerp.

618–619 The man . . . at pleasure: Because Harvey is being cautious, ‘the man you wot of’ is difficult to identify: probably a member of the Cambridge faculty; conforming to the terms of the 1559 Act of Uniformity and the Thirty-Nine Articles; acquiescent to Elizabethan efforts to maintain episcopal authority; and quite content to wear surplice and square cap—but there were many such influential clergymen at Cambridge, and quite a few of them were non-resident holders of church benefices. Harvey may be referring to Andrew Perne, who also comes under oblique attack a few sentences later in this letter. Five times vice-chancellor of Cambridge, Perne held a range of very lucrative livings in addition to the deanery of Ely. Perne was a person of such flexible religious allegiances that his name became ‘a byword for a religious turncoat’ (Collinson, Elizabethans, 179). He was later much satirized in the Marprelate Tracts and Harvey would frequently speak of him as a fox; indeed, in 1592, when Harvey came to explain another obscure satiric moment in this letter (2.646), he would designate Perne, ‘the olde Fox’ as the object of attack. Perne is almost certainly shadowed in the character of Palinode in SC Maye.

619 Non resident: Regularly absent from the place where one has official clerical duties.

622–623 sibbe . . . Women: Full of bluster, like boastful men, but cowardly; ‘all talk and no action’.

624 of Hermogenes mettall: Hermogenes is one of Socrates’ two interlocutors in Plato’s Cratylus and he cuts an unimpressive intellectual figure there. That he espouses the merely conventional nature of verbal reference may have suggested to Harvey the linguistic equivalent of religious conformity; see the reference to ‘Iani’ and ‘Camelions’ immediately below.

624–626 Olde men . . . olde men: ‘Reputed wise only when compared to children and reputed childish only when compared to the wise’.

626–630 Iani . . . Dormise: The central theme in this small exercise of Harvey’s considerable talent for slanging invective is lapsed integrity: many members of the clergy had found ways to adapt to the vicissitudes in English religious institutions across the reigns of Edward, Mary, and now Elizabeth and Harvey here insinuates that those now conforming did so not out of conviction, but out of a conspicuous lack thereof. Nashe will quote liberally from this passage in Strange Newes, in which Nashe takes Harvey to task for both misaimed attack and a lumbering satiric manner.

626 Iani: Janus was the two-faced Roman god of the new year.

628 Aspen leaues: Persons of craven flexibility (because the aspen leaf ‘shivers’ even in a light breeze).

629 painted . . . Sepulchres: Both the painted sheath and painted (or whited) sepulchre (for the latter, see Matt 23:27) were proverbial figures for those of gorgeous exterior and corrupt or unimpressive interiors.

629 Asses . . . skins: Erasmus discusses this proverb, which derives from Aesop, in the Adages, 1.3.66.

629 Dunglecockes: Unlike the belligerent game-cock, a dunglecock (or dunghill-cock) is a common barnyard fowl, with no fight in it.

633 Bishoppe . . . Wutton: Stephen Gardiner and Nicholas Wotton figure here as men of the previous generation who survived complex political and religious vicissitudes, all the while occupying positions of considerable influence and making themselves vulnerable to the charge of temporizing. Wotton, a doctor of both canon and civil law, long held the deanships of Canterbury and York, but seems to have evaded episcopal appointments, spending much of his time during the reigns of Henry, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth on a range of diplomatic missions. Like Wotton, Gardiner had doctorates in canon and civil law, but his career was more vexed. Shortly after graduation, he became Wolsey’s secretary and, six year’s later, Henry VIII’s; he became Bishop of Winchester in 1532. He soon came into conflict with Henry over matters of Episcopal authority and, thenceforth, he became a powerful conservative force within the English Church, a defender of ceremony, advocated clerical celibacy, and dealt harshly, under Edward, with the most eager reformers. His conservatism earned him two imprisonments in 1548, and he was deprived of his see in 1551, though he was restored to his position in 1553, under Mary, whose religious agenda he served with energy until his death.

634–636 hauing . . . commaundement: ‘Choosing his own horoscope at will (rather than having it determined by his location and time of birth), were born in the tenth astrological house (decimo cœli domicilio) and so endowed with all possible gifts of political discernment’. The astrological influences of planets in the tenth house determine the orientation of individuals to government, career, and public affairs. As William Lilly describes the tenth house, ‘Commonly it personateth Kings, Princes, Dukes, Earles, Judges, prime Officers . . . ; all sorts of Magistracy and Officers in Authority’ (Christian Astrology, 1647, G4).

636–638 Sed . . . Canopi: ‘But hark in your ear. Do you remember what Varro says? To ourselves we seem lovely and jolly, when we’re really a bunch of Egyptian sardines.’ Different versions of the fragment from Varro’s Menippean Satires appeared in a range of Renaissance compendia; although the meaning of saperdae was disputed, the general sense of the sentence as Harvey reports it is clear.

638–639 Dauid . . . madmen: For the feigned madness of David, see 1 Sam 21:13. That Ulysses feigned madness to avoid the Trojan expedition is reported in a number of sources; see especially Cicero, De officiis 3.26. Plutarch refers to Solon’s pretended madness briefly in his Solon 8.1-2; Diogenes Laertius is more expansive in his Solon, 2-3.

641 Metoposcopus: One who practices the art of determining character by the interpretation of facial lines.

645 Controllers: Harvey quickly suffered for the incautiousness of this unspecific swipe. In Have With You to Saffron Walden (1596), Thomas Nashe reports that Sir James Croft, Controller of the Household, complained of this in the Privy Council as a personal insult, that Harvey was constrained to withdraw to the haven of Leicester’s house, and that Croft nonetheless had Harvey thrown into prison at the Fleet. In Foure Letters and Certaine Sonnets (1592), Harvey reports having insisted that the ‘Controller’ to whom he referred here was Andrew Perne, who had blocked Harvey’s appointment as University Orator. (Nashe accepts this as a reference to Perne in Strange Newes [1592].) For Perne, see above (2.618-9).

645–646 brazen forehead: Denoting stubbornness; see Isa 48.4.

646 copper face: Probably denoting impudence (cf. ‘brazen’), but this may also be a disparaging physical description, since acne rosacea was sometimes referred to as copper-nose (cf. Theatre Decl 579-580 and n).

651 toyes . . . withal: Fantastic deceptive contrivances that could only deceive the credulous. The phrase was proverbial; cf. Reginald Scot’s use of the phrase to dismiss divination by sieve and shears (The Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, T3v).

655–656 Many . . . Tutors: Resuming his survey of the state of things at Cambridge, Harvey notes both that students are on terms too familiar with their tutors and that the wealthier students are going unsupervised (‘their very own Tutors’).

656 Tutors: Harvey elaborates the conclusion of the sentence in the marginalia of his own copy: ‘. . . Tutors, Dimitutors, and as A Man woold saye, Quartremasters.’ ‘Quartremaster’, the term for a petty naval officer charged with keeping things ship-shape on board, is only loosely relevant; Harvey is straining after a comic serial diminution from tutors to half-tutors and quarter-masters.

659–678

Ah mala . . . Vesperi: ‘Ah, wicked License; it was not this way in the beginning. Youthful Learning without manly Discipline is foolish. As if sternness were fitting only for the poorer boys and not so much more fitting for fine and noble youths in that pristine Instruction and Education that is liberal, wise, learned, and eminently suited as much to the person of the Tutor as to the student. Wisdom in all things, that will be the keenest weapon. Other things are much as before: continuous War between the Head and limbs of the university. Doxosophia sustained in our public halls, ratified within private walls, and flaunted everywhere. (You know that you know nothing if you know not this.) Everywhere Wealth is the only thing of worth, Modesty dismissed as measly, Letters discounted as Nothing. Believe me, no one believes anyone, and friendship, my friend, means nothing. Where does that leave you, meanwhile? You ask how you should act? How, indeed? It is best to profit from others’ folly. I watch, I keep silent, I smile: I have spoken. And I’ll add what the famous Satirist says: There are many reasons why one should live properly now, and above all so that one may scorn the tongues of slaves.

‘From my lodgings, the day after the above conversation on the Earthquake, that is (if I’m not mistaken) on the evening of April seventh’

The ‘famous Satirist’ (Satyricus ille), is Juvenal: the lines are adapted from his ninth Satire, 118-20.

667 δοξοσοφία: In Plato’s Sophist, the Stranger identifies δοξοσοφία as one of the many manifestations of ignorance and makes the removal of this presumption one of the nobler aspects of sophistical education (231b).

682 the two odde Gentlemen: Probably Sidney and Dyer; see above (1.49-50).

684–687 Non multis . . . vnguem: ‘I am not asleep for many; I do not write for many; I do not desire to please everyone. Some praise, prefer, and admire some poems; others, other ones: of ours and of yours, I most prefer the “Trinity”. A word to the wise is sufficient; you know the rest—and you possess the three Graces to perfection.’ The first clause, adapted from Cicero, Familiares 7.24, means ‘I do not let all transgressions pass unremarked’; the second clause is attributed to Epicurus in Seneca, Epist. Morales 7.11. By nos . . . Trinitatem (‘our Trinity’), Harvey is referring to his own poem, New Yeeres Gift, printed below (3.74-106), on the ‘three most precious Accidentes, Vertue, Fame, and Wealth’; by vos . . . Trinitatem (‘your Trinity’) he refers to Spenser’s Iambicum Trimetrum (4.84-105), a poem organized around a set of triplicities.