Heywood's proverbs, with his, and Sir Thomas More's Epigrams, may serve for sufficient supplies of many of these devices. And now translated Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, and Bartas himself deserve curious comparison with Chaucer, Lidgate, and our best English, ancient and modern. Among which, the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, and the Fairy Queen are now freshest in request: and Astrophil, and Amyntas are none of the idlest pastimes of some fine humanists. The Earl of Essex much commends Albion's England: and not unworthily for diverse notable pageants, before, and in the Chronicle. Some English, and other Histories nowhere more sensibly described, or more inwardly discovered. The Lord Mountjoy makes the like account of Daniel's piece of the Chronicle, touching the Usurpation of Henry of Bolingbroke. Which indeed is a fine, sententious, and politique piece of Poetry: as profitable, as pleasurable. The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeare's Venus, and Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them, to please the wiser sort. Or such Poets: or better: or none. Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo Pocula Castaliae plena ministret aquae: quoth Sir Edward Dier, between jest, and earnest. Whose written devices far excel most of the sonnets, and cantos in print. His Amaryllis, & Sir Walter Raleigh's Cynthia, how fine and sweet inventions? Excellent matter of emulation for Spencer, Constable, France, Watson, Daniel, Warner, Chapman, Silvester, Shakespeare, and the rest of our flourishing metricians. I look for much, as well in verse, as in prose, from my two Oxford friends, Doctor Gager, and M. Hackluit: both rarely furnished for the purpose: and I have a fancy to Owen's new Epigrams, as pithy as elegant, as pleasant as sharp, and sometime as weighty as brief: and amongst so many gentle, noble, and royal spirits methinks I see some heroical thing in the clouds: my sovereign hope. Axiophilus shall forget himself, or will remember to leave some memorials behind him: and to make a use of so many rhapsodies, cantos, hymns, odes, epigrams, sonnets, and discourses, as at idle hours, or at flowing fits he hath compiled. God knows what is good for the world, and fitting for this age.

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The Legend and defense of the Noble Knight and Martyr Sir John Oldcastle, set forth by Richard James, Bachelor of Divinity, and Fellow of Christ Church College in Oxford.

Aristotle [Greek writing]

To my Noble friend Sir Henry Bourchier

Sir Harry Bourchier, you are descended of Noble Ancestry, and in the duty of a good man love to hear and see fair reputation preserved from slander and oblivion. Wherefore to you I dedicate this edition of Occleve, where Sir John Oldcastle appears to have been a man of valor and vertue, and only lost in his own times because he would not bow under the foul superstition of Papistry, from whence in so great light of Gospel and learning that there is not yet a more universal departure, is to me the greatest scorn of men. But of this more in another place; and in preface will you please to hear me that which follows. A young Gentle Lady of your acquaintance having read the works of Shakespeare made me this question. How Sir John Falstaffe or Fastalf, as he is written in the statute book of Magdalen College in Oxford, where every day that society were bound to make memory of his soul, could be dead in the time of Harrie the fifth, and again live in the time of Harrie the sixth, to be banished for cowardice: Whereto I made answer that it was one of those humors and mistakes for which Plato banished all poets out of his commonwealth. That Sir John Falstaff was in those times a noble valiant soldier as appears by a book in the Herald's Office dedicated unto him by a Herald, who had been with him, if I will remember, for the space of 25 years in the French wars; that he seems also to have been a man of learning, because in a library of Oxford I find a book of dedicating Churches sent from him for a present unto Bishop Wainfleet and inscribed with his own hand. That in Shakespeare's first show of Harrie the fifth [Henry IV, part 1], the person with which he undertook to play a buffoon was not Falstaff but Sir John Oldcastle, and that offence being worthily taken by Personages descended from his title (as peradventure by many others also who put to make an ignorant shift

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of abusing Sir John Fastalf a man not inferior of vertue, though not so famous in piety as the other, who gave witness unto the truth of our reformation with a constant and resolute Martyrdom, unto which he was pursued by the Priests, Bishops, Monks, and Friars of those days. Noble Sir, this is all my preface. God keep you, and me and all Christian people, from the bloody designs of that cruel Religion.

Yours in all observance,

Richard James