But it is not established
that this sonnet was written in 1593, and even if it were, a sonnet
is not upon oath, and the poet would prefer the round number forty,
which suited the measure of his verse, to thirty-nine or forty-one,
which might have been truer to the measure of his days.
[269] This has been inferred from a passage in one of Gabriel
Harvey's letters to him. But it would seem more natural, from the
many allusions in Harvey's pamphlets against Nash, that it was his
own wrongs which he had in mind, and his self-absorption would take
it for granted that Spenser sympathized with him in all his grudges.
Harvey is a remarkable instance of the refining influence of
classical studies. Amid the pedantic farrago of his omni-sufficiency
(to borrow one of his own words) we come suddenly upon passages whose
gravity of sentiment, stateliness of movement, and purity of diction
remind us of Landor. These lucid intervals in his overweening vanity
explain and justify the friendship of Spenser. Yet the reiteration of
emphasis with which he insists on all the world's knowing that Nash
had called him an ass, probably gave Shakespeare the hint for one of
the most comic touches in the character of Dogberry.
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