Note 458:A — Chapter II
Reading edition
One of his specimens of "our Englishe reformed Versifying," as he terms it, is entitled Encomium Lauri, and commences thus:—
"What might I call this Tree? A Laurell? O bonny Laurell: Needes to thy bowes will I bow this knee, and vayle my bonetto;"
lines which Nash, in his Foure Letters confuted, 1593, has most happily ridiculed, representing Harvey walking under the "ewe-tree at Trinitie Hall," and addressing it in similar terms, and making "verses of weather cocks on the top of steeples, as he did once of the weather cocke of Allhallows in Cambridge:—
"O thou weathercocke, that stands on the top of All-hallows, Come thy waies down, if thou dar'st for thy crowne, and take the wall of us!"
Vide Todd's Spenser, vol. i. p. xliii.