6–7 hunt the Letter: Cf. SC Ded Ep 103. Harvey seems to be mocking the slightly mannered schematic word play of Spenser’s letter (e.g., that at 239-45) and especially the alliterative schemes of 111-12: ‘you shall bee verye deepe in my debte: notwythstandyng, thys other sweete, but shorte letter, and fine, but fewe Verses’. But above all, he is responding to Spenser’s request that Harvey respond with one of his ‘mellitissimis, longissimisque Litteris’ (‘sweetest, longest letters’; 34).

16 πορφύρα περὶ πορφύραν διακριτέα: porphyra peri porphyran diakritea, ‘Purple distinguished from purple’. Harvey is probably misremembering the proverb as cited from Phoebammon in Erasmus’s Adages, ‘πορφύρα παρὰ τὴν πορφύραν διακριτέα’ porphyra para tōn porphyran diakritea (2.1.74), which Erasmus renders purpura ad purpuram dijudicanda est, ‘purple should be compared to purple’. Harvey explains the proverb clearly enough, that one porphyra (purple or scarlet) may appear impressive in isolation, but may seem far less so when compared to another.

27 these Presentes: The contents of this document. As Harvey makes clear, the phrase is a legal formula: scriveners specialized in the production of legal documents.

30 Counsaylour: The term can specify one who gives legal counsel, but Harvey’s mocking attempt to live up to Spenser’s description of him, as Nostri Cato maxime sæcli (‘the greatest Cato of our age’, quoting 4.184 above) entails moral and not legal counsel. Spenser has already remarked on the force of Harvey’s counsel at 4.6-10.

32 Uerses . . . enclosed: See 189-221 below.

35–36 Uertue . . . Substaunces: Harvey’s academic joke draws on the Aristotelian distinction, most fully worked out in his treatise on Categories, between accidents, the qualities or attributes of things, and substances, those entities in which accidents inhere. Harvey is probing a kind of irony in Aristotelean thought: while ‘redness’ is an accident of roses and ‘virtue’ an accident of individual humans, and therefore, in a sense, dependent on them, the substances in which redness and virtue inhere, roses and humans, are mortal; on the other hand, even though redness and virtue are only manifest in substances like roses and humans, they are not themselves subject to mortality. So the substance is mortal and the accident is immortal.

37–40 so clearkly . . . Paraphrase: Harvey appends these poems of Norton, Gouldingham, and the elder Withipoll to the end of his letter; see 188-211.

38 olde Maister Wythipole: Edmund Withipoll was an Ipswich landowner who had been the student of Thomas Lupset and the dedicatee of Lupset’s Exhortation to Young Men (1529). His son, Peter, two of whose poems are also appended at the end of Harvey’s letter, was a university acquaintance of Harvey’s.

42–44 Of my credit . . . large.: By ‘youre doubtes’ Harvey may be referring to those doubts which Spenser expressed at 4.10-21 concerning the publication of the Calender (in which case Harvey somewhat mysteriously reasserts his earlier ‘credite’ or beliefs, promising to explain more later). Yet it seems more likely that he is here taking up the topic of his own reputation (‘my credite’), to the cultivation of which Spenser has advised him to be more attentive (4.26-9); indeed, Spenser twice mentions that he has himself taken pains to enhance Harvey’s reputation (4.2-6, 38-40) and also indicates that E.K. is also hard at work promoting Harvey (4.57-9). Harvey seems to feel that Spenser doubts his commitment to his own self-promotion and he reassures him that these ‘doubtes’ are unfounded. At 47-8, Harvey insists that he is biding his time and that he is content to have others exert themselves on his behalf.

44 Your hotte yron: See 4.29.

47–48 bee . . . Caruers: Cf. Hamlet 1.3.19-20.

50 ἄρειονπαγον: Areion pagon (Gk acc. for ‘Areopagos’); see 4.41 and n.

51 the . . . Gentlemenne: Dyer and Sidney; see 4.36-7.

52 Dionisij Areopagitæ: ‘Dionysius-the-Areopagites’. Dionysius, the second Bishop of Athens, had been a judge in the court of the Areopagus before he converted to Christianity under the influence of the preaching of the Apostle Paul. A body of important late-antique Christian Neoplatonic writings was later attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, but Valla, Grocyn, and Erasmus all advanced arguments discrediting the attribution.

56–59 Marry . . . auouche: Harvey’s response to Spenser’s assessment of his own trimeters—‘I dare warrant, they be precisely perfect for the feete (as you can easily judge)’ (4.76-7)—plays on the legal sense of ‘warrant’.

59 the thirde: 4.87/3. On the metrics of these lines, see 4.82n.

61 Senarie: Because the senarius is the chief Latin descendant of the Greek iambic trimeter the terms trimeter and senarius are often used interchangeably. The senarius can be understood as having six feet, like a louse.

61 the sixte: 4.90/6.

Syncopes: Syncope is the metrical suppression of a short vowel between two consonants within a word, as in the treatment of Virginals as Virg’nals in the alternate scansion of 4.90.6 that Harvey here facetiously proposes:

Playing alone carelesse on hir heauenlie Virg’nals.

Etymologically derived from κόπτειν koptein (Gk ‘to cut off, to strike’), syncope is here imagined as surgically correcting the deformity of the hypermetric sixth line of Spenser’s senarius.

66 Curtoll: A curtal is a horse with its tail cut short and, sometimes, with its ears cropped. Since cropping of ears is also one of the punishments for criminal activity, the term is sometimes used for criminals, so there is a rough humor in the suggestion that Spenser ‘should have made a Curtoll of Immĕrĭtō’ in order to regulate his metrics. See 4.82 and n.

67 licentious: An appropriate description of the senarius, which admits of a variety of metrical substitutions and shortenings, many of which were regarded as impermissible in other metrical forms. So free was the form that Plautus, among others, took pains strictly to guard the iambic character of the final foot against substitution; as Harvey scans the lines, Spenser’s handling of Virginals (4.87) and Immerito (4.102) push the limits of the licentious iambic, since his procedures violate even the special privilege of the final foot.

68–69 and of . . . Spondee: Harvey here changes tack and concedes the ‘licentious’ hypermetricality of ‘Virginals’ and ‘Immerito’ is preferable to imposing a spondaic conclusion—Vīrg’nāls and Immēr’tō—on the words.

70 too many Spondees: Most lines contain three, but the 5th, 11th, 14th, and 15th contain four. In the Arcadian Rhetoricke (1588), Fraunce cites the poem, without detraction, as an example of the mixed form of iambic verse, ‘which admitteth also Spondaeus’ (Fraunce, 1950, 32).

72–73 thy . . . shorte: Harvey here infers Spenser’s position on particular quantities from the manifest evidence of Iambicum Trimetrum. (The sustained discussion of the rules governing syllable quantity unfolds in Letters 1-3, composed after Letters 4 and 5). While the relaxed rules of iambic trimeter make it difficult to ascertain what quantity Spenser assigns to almost any syllable in the poem, there is some reason to believe that he regards ‘thy’—along with the first syllables of ‘lying’ and ‘flying’ as short: although substitutions are allowed, the expected second foot of most iambic metres, especially the second foot of the final metre in any given line, would be an iamb, and we find ‘flying’, ‘fly forth’, and ‘lying’ in such positions in 4.83, 4.84, and 4.85, which suggests that Spenser regards ‘fly’, ‘ly-’ and, by analogy, ‘thy’, as short. (The second foot of the poem’s final line ‘I dye’ might therefore seem to be an unallowable trochee, but the spelling of ‘dye’ may be meant to distinguish it from ‘fly’ and ‘thy’, so that we may regard this as a spondee.)

74 Arte Memoratiue: While Harvey’s sentence figures the faculty of memory as a kind of vocation, this particular phrase is technical. The Art of Memory was a body of techniques to facilitate verbal memory; training in these techniques had a place in formal rhetorical education.

75 Abstemio: Lorenzo Astemio (or Bevilaqua), otherwise known as Laurentius Abstemius. Harvey’s tale is adapted from the 68th fable of Astemio’s second Hecatomythia, ‘De claudo primum accubitum occupante’ (‘Of the lame man occupying the first place at table’), widely available in various EM editions of the Fables of Aesop and others.

82–83 Sedes . . . Trochæo: ‘To the trochee is given none but the sixth place’. The formulation derives from the Doctrinale puerorum (3.10), the widely used thirteenth-century versified grammar of Alexander of Villedieu; Villedieu is here discussing the prosodic rules governing the Latin hexameter.

86–87 quite thrust . . . Senarie: For all the prosodic license allowable in the senarius, the trochee is impermissible in all positions—perhaps especially impermissble in the first place in which Spenser has placed ‘Make thy’ (4.83), where, according to Harvey, it sits as improperly as the lame man at the nuptial feast.

92 In eo . . . peccat: ‘Whose only sin is that he does not sin’. Harvey here adapts, with negligible change in meaning, a line from Pliny the Younger, ‘Nihil peccat, nisi quod nihil pecat’ (Epistles 9.26.1).

95 89-92 Ascham offers this report on Thomas Watson’s prosodic fastidiousness in the course of his discussion of imitation in The Scholemaster (Works, 284), in which Ascham singles out Watson’s Absolon and Buchanan’s Jepthe as the only worthy modern imitations of Euripides’ tragedies. Harvey may have more of this portion of The Schoolmaster in mind, since a few lines earlier Ascham discusses the sole instance in which trochaic meters are allowable in tragedy.

96–97 in Locis paribus: ‘In the same places’, i.e., as if anapaests were prosodically allowable substitutes for iambs.

98 in . . . opinion: Expressed in the same passage in The Scholemaster (Works, 284).

101–102 Lo . . . worlde: Building an argument in favor of such minor forms of license as the irregular anapaest, Harvey twits Spenser for having failed to achieve the same fastidiously precise adherence to rule as inhibited Watson.

102 A good . . stumbleth: The Bishop of Winchester’s Vindication (1683) makes the meaning of the proverb clear: ‘aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus, Sometimes honest Homer is caught napping; or as we say, It is a good horse that never stumbles’ (T3).

108–109 M. Drantes Rule: See 4.69.

110–111 Pauca . . . Virtutibus: ‘A few vices should be forgiven for the sake of many virtues’.

112–115 Verum . . . ratiocinandi: ‘Indeed, entrust those [vices] to me, by the way, not, as in the spirit of opposition or even of contradiction; but rather in our earlier, Academic manner of deliberation’.

115–119 And . . . presence: The sentence is difficult and may have suffered transmissional distortion. As printed, it might be construed in one of two ways: 1) ‘And to speak truly—and also, partly, to requite your gentle courtesy in pledging yourself to me and [in] noting my inadvertent breach of Drant’s rules—I discern which rules can pass as good ones and comport themselves in an orderly fashion [‘keepe a Rule’] even when they are not in the presence of better rules’ or 2) ‘And to speak truly—and also, partly, to requite your gentle courtesy in pledging yourself to me and [in] noting my inadvertent breach of Drant’s rules, which rules you accept as good ones—I perceive and keep a [different] Rule, whenever there’s no better rule already in place.’ According to the second construction, Harvey’s rule would be implied in the next sentence: never to pass judgement on something about which one is inadequately informed, like Drant’s rules.

123–124 some . . . man.: Drant’s relatively recent death in 1578 motivates Harvey’s slightly elegiac tone.

132–134 Reliqua . . . magis: ‘All the other things that remain concerning this plan for English versifying, we will set aside for another, more leisured occasion’.

136 your bountifull Titles: Harvey’s slightly mocking thanks may have a dual focus, on both the extravagant terms of the title of Spenser’s verse epistle—‘ornatissimum’, ‘clarissimum’—and on the grandiose titles he lavishes on Harvey in the course of the poem—‘Magne pharetrati . . . contemptor Amoris’, ‘magnus Apollo’, ‘nostri Cato Maxime sæcli’, ‘Nomen honorati sacrum . . . Poëtæ’, ‘Angelus’.

137 Italy: Here understood to be a vast schoolroom in the art of insincere flattery.

139–140 Tittles . . . pointe: Since a tittle is a small stroke or a dot in writing or printing, often serving as some sort of diacritical mark, Harvey’s contrast between ‘Tittles’ and ‘the very pointe in deede’ amounts to a witty, strongly evaluative comparison of kinds of point. The conceit is sustained in Harvey’s suggestion that the latter point, like that of the surgeon’s knife, will touch Spenser ‘to the quicke’ (134).

141 one . . . humors: While Harvey’s phrasing alludes to the formal humoral system of Galenic psychology and medicine, his meaning is casual: that disorderly erotic interests ‘raigne’ over youthful male behavior.

142–144 Heus . . . finem: ‘Ay me, good suitor, you great womanizer, distinguished philanderer, Consider the consequences that remain at long last for you and for all skirt-chasers, for the entire woman-crazed throng’.

146–159 quod . . . Credite me: ‘As I have so often said, and as you, too, have occasionally said, and as the experienced daily say: Love is a bitter thing. Love is not a god, as some maintain, but bitterness and error and whatever else the Experienced can accumulate in the same vein. And Agrippa seems to me to have cleverly corrected that Ovidean work, entitled [‘epigraphēn’] The Art of Love, rightly retitling it the Art of Whoring. Nor did someone inaptly compare lovers to alchemists, pleasantly dreaming of golden mountains and silver fountains, all the while nearly blinded and even wretchedly suffocated by vast coal smoke. He declared that, in addition to that famous Paradise of Adam, there was another Paradise, of Fools, the wonderful Paradise of Lovers—Adam’s the one of the truly blessed, theirs of the fantastically and fanatically so. But of these things, more, perhaps, elsewhere. Believe me’.

149–151 Agrippa . . . Meretricandi: Cornelius Agrippa makes this ‘correction’ in chapter 63 of his treatise De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (1530, trans. by James Sanford in 1569 as On the Vanity and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences).

165 you shall not: Harvey seems to have been correct; no evidence survives of Spenser ever having made the trip to France anticipated at 4.236-9. What follows may therefore be construed as a kind of boast: whereas Harvey wagers that Spenser will make no journey, he flaunts his own authority as an advisor to Leicester on the art and craft of travel.

167 your request: 4.112-4.

170 Il Pellegrino: Harvey seems to be referring to the title of Girolamo Parabosco’s comedy from 1552.

170–173 162-70: Whereas Spenser anticipated traveling as his Lord’s representative (‘as sent by him’, 4.238), Harvey here describes Leicester’s own preparations for travel. The transformative ‘Lecture’ that Harvey is preparing will be in the art of apodemica, which included the construction of itineraries, methods of observation while traveling, systems for questioning native informants, and for taking notes. Harvey refers here to two of the earliest contributions to what would become a large body of literature on the science of travel. The first is Hieronymo Turler’s De peregrinatione (1574), which was translated into English as The Traveiler in 1575: Spenser himself gave Harvey a copy of the translation in 1578. The second is Theodor Zwinger’s Methodus apodemica (1577), a much more systematic treatise heavily influenced by Peter Ramus, one of Harvey’s intellectual heroes. For a useful introduction to the form, see Howard 1914: ch. 2.

179–185 Wherof I . . . other: Harvey’s praise of Leicester, that chief among the many goddesses and graces who guide him are the wise Minerva and the ingratiating Venus, contains an implicit apodemical theory, that the ideal traveler must combine the judiciousness, discipline, and prudence of the Minervan head and the amiable grace and courtesy of the Venereal body. It is worth noting that Harvey returns, quite self-consciously, to the technical philosophical vocabulary adopted earlier in the letter, at 32-3, signalling the return by means of the parenthesis, ‘(I speake to a Logician)’. Harvey’s reference to Leicester as an ‘apt subjecte’ [my emphasis] introduces one of the key terms in Aristotle’s Categories: Aristotle devotes a section, Z.3, to the discussion of what a ‘subject’ (hypokeimenon) is and he defines it as ‘that of which everything else is predicated’ (1028b36), which makes it rather like what Aristotle refers to as a ‘primary substance’. At the end of the sentence, when Harvey speaks of ‘the inseparable and indivisible accidents’—Harvey seems to regard the two adjectives as synonyms—‘of the foresaide Subiect’ he alludes to a ‘subtile’ logical distinction, introduced by Porphyry, in the understanding of accidents. In chapt. 3 of his Isagoge, Porphyry distinguishes between separable and inseparable accidents, the latter being those accidents or features of individual subjects—like ‘the prudence of Leicester’s mind’ or ‘the grace of Leicester’s body’—that seem to inhere in it at all times—in Leicester’s case, abroad or at home—yet seem not to be essential to those subjects. The ‘inseparable accident’ is something of a boundary case, for one might challenge whether it is indeed accidental, asking, ‘If Leicester’s mind is always prudent and his body always graceful are grace and prudence not more than accidental? Are they not substantial, constitutive of his mind and body?’ Harvey’s philosophic usage is not very fastidious, although it allows him an alternative to a sociable mythographic register in which Leicester is accompanied by goddesses; in Harvey’s flattering philosophical register Leicester’s remarkable characteristics are evoked mysteriously, as both intellectually separable and also intrinsic.

188–196 De quibus . . . valebis: ‘Concerning these things and all the other equipment of the skilled traveller, of which the foremost is that divine Homeric herb, “Moly, the gods call it”, by means of which Mercury fortified his Ulysses against the potions, spells, and drugs of Circe and against all diseases, I hope soon [to discourse] personally, both copiously at length, as is my wont, and also, perhaps, somewhat more plainly than is my wont, and, especially, more practically and politically. Meanwhile, you will content yourself with three syllables: “and fare-well”’.

191 μῶλυ . . . θεοί: ‘mōly de min kaleousi theoi’; Homer, Od 10.305.

197 stil in my Gallerie: Since gallery denotes an unusually narrow apartment, Harvey may be emphasizing the continued modesty of his circumstances, despite his having been awarded a fellowship in the preceding year.

201 M. Doctor Norton: This Doctor Norton has not been securely identified. It is tempting to identify him as Thomas Norton, co-author of Gorboduc, for he has a few other Latin poems to his credit and had considerable experience as a translator. But if Harvey were using the title ‘Doctor’ in a strict sense, he would be referring to someone other than Thomas Norton, for this Norton did not hold the doctorate, having been admitted to the M.A. in 1570 by a grace passed by the Cambridge university senate.

202–203 M. Thomas . . . Requestes: Thomas Sackford or Seckford may have been an alumnus of Cambridge; he was certainly a lawyer, like Thomas Norton, and was sworn Master in ordinary in the Court of Requests in 1558.

205-1–213 Tempora . . . manent: ‘Our pleasant times are ravaged by a secret bite; / what slowly flourishes shortly will lie dead; / what buds in the spring of the year is soon consumed by age. / Effort and care enrich; do not the same things oppress? / Falsehood, or wisdom begotten by wakeful study, / oh, and the pride of the great are often cast down. / We stream away among wavering things and tumble down by degrees; / Only the sweet rewards of virtue still remain.’

213–214 M. . . . Gouldingam: Probably the William Goldingham who wrote Herodes, a Senecan play in Latin composed sometime in the early 1570s. William Goldingham became a Fellow of Trinity Hall in 1571 and proceeded Doctor of Laws in 1579.

214–215 olde . . . Ipswiche: See above, 35 and n.

216-1–223-8 Tempora . . . manent: ‘The sweet times slip away in an unseen rush, / And those things that long had flourished collapse in an instant. / Whatever the new year brings forth is snatched away by autumn. / The Fates cut off the stinted joys of youth. / Ambition is false and the care of ownership distressing; / Glory is dim, and the renown of the wise man hollow. / Fortune churns all human affairs with its unsteady wheel: / Only the sweet rewards of virtue still remain.’

235 Master . . . Wythipolles: Peter Withipoll was a Cambridge acquaintance, also a Fellow at Trinity Hall, whom Harvey held in considerable esteem.

247 222-3: The envoy may be admired for its frank assessment of the preceding poems, which share a formulaic and, arguably, shallow facility in their handling of the theme, and capture the difficulty of giving force to the theme, while at the same moment managing to muster the necessary force.

251 Virtuti . . . vsum: Harvey concludes with an emblem much like those that follow the eclogues of the Calender. ‘I made this poem for virtue, not for you', he writes, gallantly affirming that Withipoll hardly needs instruction in the eternal value of virtue. (Harvey leaves unclear whether he is addressing the elder or the younger Withipoll.) In an answering emblem, Peter Withipoll claims the modestly appreciative last word: ‘For virtue, and for me: in praise of virtue and for my benefit.’