An honest man is held a good poore soule,
And kindnesse counted but a weake conceite,
And love writte up but in the woodcocke's soule,
While thriving _Wat_ doth but on Wealth await:
He is a fore horse that goes ever streight:
And he but held a foole for all his Wit,
That guides his braines but with a golden bit.
A virgin is a vertuous kind of creature,
But doth not coin command Virginitie?
And beautie hath a strange bewitching feature,
But gold reads so much world's divinitie,
As with the Heavens hath no affinitie:
So that where Beauty doth with vertue dwell,
If it want money, yet it will not sell.
Of the satiric forms peculiar to the Elizabethan epoch there is no
great variety. The _Characters_ of Theophrastus supplied a model to
some of the writers. The close adherence also which the majority of
them manifest to the broadly marked types of "Horatian" and
"Juvenalian" satire, both in matter and manner, is not a little
remarkable. The genius for selecting from the classics those forms both
of composition and metre best suited to become vehicles for satire, and
adapting them thereto, did not begin to manifest itself in so
pronounced a manner until after the Restoration. The Elizabethan
mind--using the phrase of course in its broad sense as inclusive of the
Jacobean and the early Caroline epochs--was more engrossed with the
matter than the manner of satire.
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