HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE +---------------------------------------------+ | | | A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE | | | | _In Six Volumes, Crown 8vo. _ | | | | ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNING | | TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST. By Rev. STOPFORD | | A. BROOKE, M. A. 8s. 6d. | | | | ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE NORMAN | | CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. By Prof. W. H. | | SCHOFIELD, Ph. D. 8s. 6d. | | | | THE AGE OF CHAUCER. By Professor W. H. | | SCHOFIELD, Ph. D. [_In preparation. _ | | | | ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE (1560-1665). By | | GEORGE SAINTSBURY. 8s. 6d. | | | | EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE (1660-1780). | | By EDMUND GOSSE, M. A. 8s. 6d. | | | | NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE (1780-1900). | | By GEORGE SAINTSBURY. 8s. 6d. | | | | | | By GEORGE SAINTSBURY. | | | | A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. | | Crown 8vo. 10s. Also in five Parts. | | 2s. 6d. 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Net. | | | | MACMILLAN AND CO. , LTD. , LONDON. | | | +---------------------------------------------+ A HISTORY OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY MACMILLAN AND CO. , LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1920 COPYRIGHT _First Edition_ 1887. _Second Edition_ 1890. _Reprinted_ 1893, 1894, 1896, 1898, 1901, 1903, 1907, 1910, 1913, 1918, 1920. PREFACE TO NINTH EDITION As was explained in the Note to the Preface of the previous editions andimpressions of this book, after the first, hardly one of them appearedwithout careful revision, and the insertion of a more or less considerablenumber of additions and corrections. I found, indeed, few errors of a kindthat need have seemed serious except to Momus or Zoilus. But in theenormous number of statements of fact which literary history of the moreexact kind requires, minor blunders, be they more or fewer, are sure tocreep in. No writer, again, who endeavours constantly to keep up and extendhis knowledge of such a subject as Elizabethan literature, can fail to havesomething new to say from time to time. And though no one who is competentoriginally for his task ought to experience any violent changes of view, any one's views may undergo modification. In particular, he may find thatreaders have misunderstood him, and that alterations of expression aredesirable. For all these reasons and others I have not spared trouble inthe various revisions referred to; I think the book has been kept by themfairly abreast of its author's knowledge, and I hope it is not too farbehind that of others. It will, however, almost inevitably happen that a long series of piecemealcorrections and codicils somewhat disfigures the character of thecomposition as a whole. And after nearly the full score of years, and notmuch less than half a score of re-appearances, it has seemed to medesirable to make a somewhat more thorough, minute, and above all connectedrevision than I have ever made before. And so, my publishers falling inwith this view, the present edition represents the result. I do not thinkit necessary to reprint the original preface. When I wrote it I had alreadyhad some, and since I wrote it I have had much more, experience in writingliterary history. I have never seen reason to alter the opinion that, tomake such history of any value at all, the critical judgments anddescriptions must represent direct, original, and first-hand reading andthought; and that in these critical judgments and descriptions the value ofit consists. Even summaries and analyses of the matter of books, except inso far as they are necessary to criticism, come far second; whilebiographical and bibliographical details are of much less importance, andmay (as indeed in one way or another they generally must) be taken atsecond hand. The completion of the _Dictionary of National Biography_ hasat once facilitated the task of the writer, and to a great extent disarmedthe candid critic who delights, in cases of disputed date, to assume thatthe date which his author chooses is the wrong one. And I have in the mainadjusted the dates in this book (where necessary) accordingly. Thebibliographical additions which have been made to the Index will be foundnot inconsiderable. I believe that, in my present plan, there is no author of importanceomitted (there were not many even in the first edition), and that I havebeen able somewhat to improve the book from the results of twenty years'additional study, twelve of which have been mainly devoted to Englishliterature. How far it must still be from being worthy of its subject, nobody can know better than I do. But I know also, and I am very happy toknow, that, as an Elizabethan himself might have said, my unworthiness hasguided many worthy ones to something like knowledge, and to what is moreimportant than knowledge, love, of a subject so fascinating and somagnificent. And that the book may still have the chance of doing this, Ihope to spare no trouble upon it as often as the opportunity presentsitself. [1] EDINBURGH, _January_ 30, 1907. [1] In the last (eleventh) re-impression no alterations seemed necessary. In this, one or two bibliographical matters may call for notice. Everystudent of Donne should now consult Professor Grierson's edition of the_Poems_ (2 vols. , Oxford, 1912), and as inquiries have been made as to thethird volume of my own _Caroline Poets_ (see Index), containing Cleveland, King, Stanley, and some less known authors, I may be permitted to say thatit has been in the press for years, and a large part of it is completed. But various stoppages, in no case due to neglect, and latterly madeabsolute by the war, have prevented its appearance. --BATH, October 8, 1918. CONTENTS CHAPTER I FROM TOTTEL'S MISCELLANY TO SPENSER The starting-point--Tottel's _Miscellany_--Its method and authorship--The characteristics of its poetry--Wyatt--Surrey--Grimald--Their metres --The stuff of their poems--_The Mirror for Magistrates_--Sackville --His contributions and their characteristics--Remarks on the formal criticism of poetry--Gascoigne--Churchyard--Tusser--Turberville-- Googe--The translators--Classical metres--Stanyhurst--Other miscellanies Pages 1-27 CHAPTER II EARLY ELIZABETHAN PROSE Outlines of Early Elizabethan Prose--Its origins--Cheke and his contemporaries--Ascham--His style--Miscellaneous writers--Critics-- Webbe--Puttenham--Lyly--_Euphues_ and Euphuism--Sidney--His style and critical principles--Hooker--Greville--Knolles--Mulcaster 28-49 CHAPTER III THE FIRST DRAMATIC PERIOD Divisions of Elizabethan Drama--Its general character--Origins--_Ralph_ _Roister Doister_--_Gammer Gurton's Needle_--_Gorboduc_--The Senecan Drama--Other early plays--The "university wits"--Their lives and characters--Lyly (dramas)--The Marlowe group--Peele--Greene--Kyd-- Marlowe--The actor playwrights 50-81 CHAPTER IV "THE FAËRIE QUEENE" AND ITS GROUP Spenser--His life and the order of his works--_The Shepherd's Calendar_ --The minor poems--_The Faërie Queene_--Its scheme--The Spenserian stanza--Spenser's language--His general poetical qualities-- Comparison with other English poets--His peculiar charm--The Sonneteers--Fulke Greville--Sidney--Watson--Barnes--Giles Fletcher the elder--Lodge--_Avisa_--Percy--_Zepheria_--Constable--Daniel-- Drayton--_Alcilia_--Griffin--Lynch--Smith--Barnfield--Southwell--The song and madrigal writers--Campion--Raleigh--Dyer--Oxford, etc. -- Gifford--Howell, Grove, and others--The historians--Warner--The larger poetical works of Daniel and Drayton--The satirists--Lodge-- Donne--The poems of Donne generally--Hall--Marston--Guilpin--Tourneur 82-156 CHAPTER V THE SECOND DRAMATIC PERIOD--SHAKESPERE Difficulty of writing about Shakespere--His life--His reputation in England and its history--Divisions of his work--The Poems--The Sonnets--The Plays--Characteristics of Shakespere--Never unnatural-- His attitude to morality--His humour--Universality of his range-- Comments on him--His manner of working--His variety--Final remarks-- Dramatists to be grouped with Shakespere--Ben Jonson--Chapman-- Marston--Dekker 157-206 CHAPTER VI LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE Bacon--Raleigh--The Authorised Version--Jonson and Daniel as prose-writers--Hakluyt--The Pamphleteers--Greene--Lodge--Harvey--Nash --Dekker--Breton--The Martin Marprelate Controversy--Account of it, with specimens of the chief tracts 207-252 CHAPTER VII THE THIRD DRAMATIC PERIOD Characteristics--Beaumont and Fletcher--Middleton--Webster--Heywood-- Tourneur--Day 253-288 CHAPTER VIII THE SCHOOL OF SPENSER AND THE TRIBE OF BEN Sylvester--Davies of Hereford--Sir John Davies--Giles and Phineas Fletcher--William Browne--Wither--Drummond--Stirling--Minor Jacobean poets--Songs from the dramatists 289-314 CHAPTER IX MILTON, TAYLOR, CLARENDON, BROWNE, HOBBES The quintet--Milton's life--His character--His periods of literary production--First Period, the minor poems--The special excellences of _Comus_--_Lycidas_--Second Period, the pamphlets--Their merits and defects--Milton's prose style--Third Period, the larger poems-- Milton's blank verse--His origins--His comparative position--Jeremy Taylor's life--His principal works--His style--Characteristics of his thought and manner--Sir Thomas Browne--His life, works, and editions --His literary manner--Characteristics of his style and vocabulary-- His Latinising--Remarkable adjustment of his thought and expression-- Clarendon--His life--Great merits of his _History_--Faults of his style--Hobbes--His life and works--Extraordinary strength and clearness of his style 315-353 CHAPTER X CAROLINE POETRY Herrick--Carew--Crashaw--Divisions of Minor Caroline poetry--Miscellanies --George Herbert--Sandys--Vaughan--Lovelace and Suckling--Montrose-- Quarles--More--Beaumont--Habington--Chalkhill--Marmion--Kynaston-- Chamberlayne--Benlowes--Stanley--John Hall--Patrick Carey--Cleveland --Corbet--Cartwright, Sherburne, and Brome--Cotton--The general characteristics of Caroline poetry--A defence of the Caroline poets 354-393 CHAPTER XI THE FOURTH DRAMATIC PERIOD Weakening of dramatic strength--Massinger--Ford--Shirley--Randolph--Brome --Cokain--Glapthorne--Davenant--Suckling--Minor and anonymous plays of the Fourth and other Periods--The Shakesperian Apocrypha 394-427 CHAPTER XII MINOR CAROLINE PROSE Burton--Fuller--Lord Herbert of Cherbury--Izaak Walton--Howell--Earle-- Felltham--The rest 428-444 CONCLUSION 445 CHAPTER I FROM TOTTEL'S "MISCELLANY" TO SPENSER In a work like the present, forming part of a larger whole and preceded byanother part, the writer has the advantage of being almost wholly free froma difficulty which often presses on historians of a limited and definiteperiod, whether of literary or of any other history. That difficulty liesin the discussion and decision of the question of origins--in the allotmentof sufficient, and not more than sufficient, space to a preliminaryrecapitulation of the causes and circumstances of the actual events to berelated. Here there is no need for any but the very briefest references ofthe kind to connect the present volume with its forerunner, or rather toindicate the connection of the two. There has been little difference of opinion as to the long dead-season ofEnglish poetry, broken chiefly, if not wholly, by poets Scottish ratherthan English, which lasted through almost the whole of the fifteenth andthe first half of the sixteenth centuries. There has also been littledifference in regarding the remarkable work (known as Tottel's_Miscellany_, but more properly called _Songs and Sonnets, written by theRight Honourable Lord Henry Howard, late Earl of Surrey, and other_) whichwas published by Richard Tottel in 1557, and which went through twoeditions in the summer of that year, as marking the dawn of the newperiod. The book is, indeed, remarkable in many ways. The first thing, probably, which strikes the modern reader about it is the fact that greatpart of its contents is anonymous and only conjecturally to be attributed, while as to the part which is more certainly known to be the work ofseveral authors, most of those authors were either dead or had written longbefore. Mr. Arber's remarks in his introduction (which, though I haverather an objection to putting mere citations before the public, I am gladhere to quote as a testimony in the forefront of this book to the excellentdeserts of one who by himself has done as much as any living man tofacilitate the study of Elizabethan literature) are entirely to thepoint--how entirely to the point only students of foreign as well as ofEnglish literature know. "The poets of that age, " says Mr. Arber, "wrotefor their own delectation and for that of their friends, and not for thegeneral public. They generally had the greatest aversion to their worksappearing in print. " This aversion, which continued in France till the endof the seventeenth century, if not later, had been somewhat broken down inEngland by the middle of the sixteenth, though vestiges of it longsurvived, and in the form of a reluctance to be known to write for money, may be found even within the confines of the nineteenth. The humbler meansand lesser public of the English booksellers have saved English literaturefrom the bewildering multitude of pirated editions, printed from privateand not always faithful manuscript copies, which were for so long thedespair of the editors of many French classics. But the manuscript copiesthemselves survive to a certain extent, and in the more sumptuous andelaborate editions of our poets (such as, for instance, Dr. Grosart's_Donne_) what they have yielded may be studied with some interest. Moreover, they have occasionally preserved for us work nowhere else to beobtained, as, for instance, in the remarkable folio which has supplied Mr. Bullen with so much of his invaluable collection of Old Plays. At the earlyperiod of Tottel's _Miscellany_ it would appear that the very idea ofpublication in print had hardly occurred to many writers' minds. When thebook appeared, both its main contributors, Surrey and Wyatt, had been longdead, as well as others (Sir Francis Bryan and Anne Boleyn's unluckybrother, George Lord Rochford) who are supposed to be represented. Theshort Printer's Address to the Reader gives absolutely no intelligence asto the circumstances of the publication, the person responsible for theediting, or the authority which the editor and printer may have had fortheir inclusion of different authors' work. It is only a theory, though asufficiently plausible one, that the editor was Nicholas Grimald, chaplainto Bishop Thirlby of Ely, a Cambridge man who some ten years before hadbeen incorporated at Oxford and had been elected to a Fellowship at MertonCollege. In Grimald's or Grimoald's connection with the book there wascertainly something peculiar, for the first edition contains forty poemscontributed by him and signed with his name, while in the second the fullname is replaced by "N. G. , " and a considerable number of his poems giveway to others. More than one construction might, no doubt, be placed onthis curious fact; but hardly any construction can be placed on it whichdoes not in some way connect Grimald with the publication. It may be addedthat, while his, Surrey's, and Wyatt's contributions are substantive andknown--the numbers of separate poems contributed being respectively fortyfor Surrey, the same for Grimald, and ninety-six for Wyatt--no less thanone hundred and thirty-four poems, reckoning the contents of the first andsecond editions together, are attributed to "other" or "uncertain" authors. And of these, though it is pretty positively known that certain writers didcontribute to the book, only four poems have been even conjecturally tracedto particular authors. The most interesting of these by far is the poemattributed, with that which immediately precedes it, to Lord Vaux, andcontaining the verses "For age with stealing steps, " known to every onefrom the gravedigger in _Hamlet_. Nor is this the only connection ofTottel's _Miscellany_ with Shakespere, for there is no reasonable doubtthat the "Book of Songs and Sonnets, " to the absence of which Slender sopathetically refers in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, is Tottel's, which, asthe first to use the title, long retained it by right of precedence. Indeed, one of its authors, Churchyard, who, though not in his first youthat its appearance, survived into the reign of James, quotes it as such, andso does Drayton even later. No sonnets had been seen in England before, norwas the whole style of the verse which it contained less novel than thisparticular form. As is the case with many if not most of the authors of our period, a ratherunnecessary amount of ink has been spilt on questions very distantlyconnected with the question of the absolute and relative merit of Surreyand Wyatt in English poetry. In particular, the influence of the one poeton the other, and the consequent degree of originality to be assigned toeach, have been much discussed. A very few dates and facts will supply mostof the information necessary to enable the reader to decide this and otherquestions for himself. Sir Thomas Wyatt, son of Sir Henry Wyatt ofAllington, Kent, was born in 1503, entered St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1515, became a favourite of Henry VIII. , received important diplomaticappointments, and died in 1542. Lord Henry Howard was born (as is supposed)in 1517, and became Earl of Surrey by courtesy (he was not, the account ofhis judicial murder says, a lord of Parliament) at eight years old. Verylittle is really known of his life, and his love for "Geraldine" was madethe basis of a series of fictions by Nash half a century after his death. He cannot have been more than thirty when, in the Reign of Terror towardsthe close of Henry VIII. 's life, he was arrested on frivolous charges, thegravest being the assumption of the royal arms, found guilty of treason, and beheaded on Tower Hill on 19th January 1547. Thus it will be seen thatWyatt was at Cambridge before Surrey was born, and died five years beforehim; to which it need only be added that Surrey has an epitaph on Wyattwhich clearly expresses the relation of disciple to master. Yet despitethis relation and the community of influences which acted on both, theircharacteristics are markedly different, and each is of the greatestimportance in English poetical history. In order to appreciate exactly what this importance is we must remember inwhat state Wyatt and Surrey found the art which they practised and in whichthey made a new start. Speaking roughly but with sufficient accuracy forthe purpose, that state is typically exhibited in two writers, Hawes andSkelton. The former represents the last phase of the Chaucerian school, weakened not merely by the absence of men of great talent during more thana century, but by the continual imitation during that period of weaker andever weaker French models--the last faint echoes of the _Roman de la Rose_and the first extravagances of the _Rhétoriqueurs_. Skelton, on the otherhand, with all his vigour, represents the English tendency to prosaicdoggerel. Whether Wyatt and his younger companion deliberately had recourseto Italian example in order to avoid these two dangers it would beimpossible to say. But the example was evidently before them, and theresult is certainly such an avoidance. Nevertheless both, and especiallyWyatt, had a great deal to learn. It is perfectly evident that neither hadany theory of English prosody before him. Wyatt's first sonnet displays thecompletest indifference to quantity, not merely scanning "harber, ""banner, " and "suffer" as iambs (which might admit of some defence), butmaking a rhyme of "feareth" and "appeareth, " not on the penultimates, buton the mere "eth. " In the following poems even worse liberties are found, and the strange turns and twists which the poet gives to his decasyllablessuggest either a total want of ear or such a study in foreign languagesthat the student had actually forgotten the intonation and cadences of hisown tongue. So stumbling and knock-kneed is his verse that any one whoremembers the admirable versification of Chaucer may now and then beinclined to think that Wyatt had much better have left his innovationsalone. But this petulance is soon rebuked by the appearance of such asonnet as this:-- (_The lover having dreamed enjoying of his love complaineth that the_ _dream is not either longer or truer. _) "Unstable dream, according to the place Be steadfast once, or else at least be true. By tasted sweetness, make me not to rue The sudden loss of thy false feigned grace. By good respect in such a dangerous case Thou brought'st not her into these tossing seas But mad'st my sprite to live, my care to increase, [2] My body in tempest her delight to embrace. The body dead, the sprite had his desire: Painless was th' one, the other in delight. Why then, alas! did it not keep it right, But thus return to leap into the fire? And where it was at wish, could not remain? Such mocks of dreams do turn to deadly pain. " [2] In original "tencrease, " and below "timbrace. " This substitution ofelision for slur or hiatus (found in Chaucerian MSS. ) passed later into thet' and th' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wyatt's awkwardness is not limited to the decasyllable, but some of hisshort poems in short lines recover rhythmical grace very remarkably, andset a great example. Surrey is a far superior metrist. Neither in his sonnets, nor in hisvarious stanzas composed of heroics, nor in what may be called his doggerelmetres--the fatally fluent Alexandrines, fourteeners, and admixtures ofboth, which dominated English poetry from his time to Spenser's, and werenever quite rejected during the Elizabethan period--do we find evidence ofthe want of ear, or the want of command of language, which makes Wyatt'sversification frequently disgusting. Surrey has even no small mastery ofwhat may be called the architecture of verse, the valuing of cadence insuccessive lines so as to produce a concerted piece and not a merereduplication of the same notes. And in his translations of the _Æneid_(not published in Tottel's _Miscellany_) he has the great honour of beingthe originator of blank verse, and blank verse of by no means a badpattern. The following sonnet, combined Alexandrine and fourteener, andblank verse extract, may be useful:-- (_Complaint that his lady after she knew of his love kept her face_ _alway hidden from him. _) "I never saw my lady lay apart Her cornet black, in cold nor yet in heat, Sith first she knew my grief was grown so great; Which other fancies driveth from my heart, That to myself I do the thought reserve, The which unwares did wound my woeful breast. But on her face mine eyes mought never rest Yet, since she knew I did her love, and serve Her golden tresses clad alway with black, Her smiling looks that hid[es] thus evermore And that restrains which I desire so sore. So doth this cornet govern me, alack! In summer sun, in winter's breath, a frost Whereby the lights of her fair looks I lost. "[3] [3] As printed exactly in both first and second editions this sonnet isevidently corrupt, and the variations between the two are additionalevidence of this. I have ventured to change "hid" to "hides" in line 10, and to alter the punctuation in line 13. If the reader takes "that" in line5 as = "so that, " "that" in line 10 as = "which" (_i. E. _ "black"), and"that" in line 11 with "which, " he will now, I think, find it intelligible. Line 13 is usually printed: "In summer, sun: in winter's breath, a frost. " Now no one would compare a black silk hood to the sun, and a reference toline 2 will show the real meaning. The hood is a frost which lasts throughsummer and winter alike. (_Complaint of the absence of her lover being upon the sea. _) "Good ladies, ye that have your pleasures in exile, Step in your foot, come take a place, and mourn with me a while. And such as by their lords do set but little price, Let them sit still: it skills them not what chance come on the dice. But ye whom love hath bound by order of desire, To love your lords whose good deserts none other would require, Come ye yet once again and set your foot by mine, Whose woeful plight and sorrows great, no tongue can well define. "[4] [4] In reading these combinations it must be remembered that there isalways a strong cæsura in the midst of the first and Alexandrine line. Itis the Alexandrine which Mr. Browning has imitated in _Fifine_, not that ofDrayton, or of the various practitioners of the Spenserian stanza fromSpenser himself downwards. "It was the(n)[5] night; the sound and quiet sleep Had through the earth the weary bodies caught, The woods, the raging seas, were fallen to rest, When that the stars had half their course declined. The fields whist: beasts and fowls of divers hue, And what so that in the broad lakes remained, Or yet among the bushy thicks[6] of briar, Laid down to sleep by silence of the night, 'Gan swage their cares, mindless of travails past. Not so the spirit of this Phenician. Unhappy she that on no sleep could chance, Nor yet night's rest enter in eye or breast. Her cares redouble: love doth rise and rage again, [7] And overflows with swelling storms of wrath. " [5] In these extracts () signifies that something found in text seemsbetter away; [] that something wanting in text has been conjecturallysupplied. [6] Thickets. [7] This Alexandrine is not common, and is probably a mere oversight. The "other" or "uncertain" authors, though interesting enough for purposesof literary comparison, are very inferior to Wyatt and Surrey. Grimald, thesupposed editor, though his verse must not, of course, be judged withreference to a more advanced state of things than his own, is but ajourneyman verse-smith. "Sith, Blackwood, you have mind to take a wife, I pray you tell wherefore you like that life, " is a kind of foretaste of Crabbe in its bland ignoring of the formal gracesof poetry. He acquits himself tolerably in the combinations of Alexandrinesand fourteeners noticed above (the "poulter's measure, " as Gascoigne was tocall it later), nor does he ever fall into the worst kind of jog-trot. Hisepitaphs and elegies are his best work, and the best of them is that on hismother. Very much the same may be said of the strictly miscellaneous partof the _Miscellany_. The greater part of the Uncertain Authors are lessambitious, but also less irregular than Wyatt, while they fall far short ofSurrey in every respect. Sometimes, as in the famous "I loath that I didlove, " both syntax and prosody hardly show the reform at all; they recallthe ruder snatches of an earlier time. But, on the whole, thecharacteristics of these poets, both in matter and form, are sufficientlyuniform and sufficiently interesting. Metrically, they show, on the oneside, a desire to use a rejuvenated heroic, either in couplets or invarious combined forms, the simplest of which is the elegiac quatrain ofalternately rhyming lines, and the most complicated the sonnet; whilebetween them various stanzas more or less suggested by Italian are to beranked. Of this thing there has been and will be no end as long as Englishpoetry lasts. The attempt to arrange the old and apparently almostindigenous "eights and sixes" into fourteener lines and into alternatefourteeners and Alexandrines, seems to have commended itself even more tocontemporary taste, and, as we have seen and shall see, it was eagerlyfollowed for more than half a century. But it was not destined to succeed. These long lines, unless very sparingly used, or with the ground-footchanged from the iambus to the anapæst or the trochee, are not in keepingwith the genius of English poetry, as even the great examples of Chapman's_Homer_ and the _Polyolbion_ may be said to have shown once for all. In thehands, moreover, of the poets of this particular time, whether they wereprinted at length or cut up into eights and sixes, they had an almostirresistible tendency to degenerate into a kind of lolloping amble which isinexpressibly monotonous. Even when the spur of a really poeticalinspiration excites this amble into something more fiery (the best exampleexisting is probably Southwell's wonderful "Burning Babe"), the sensitiveear feels that there is constant danger of a relapse, and at the worst thething becomes mere doggerel. Yet for about a quarter of a century theseovergrown lines held the field in verse and drama alike, and theencouragement of them must be counted as a certain drawback to the benefitswhich Surrey, Wyatt, and the other contributors of the _Miscellany_conferred on English literature by their exercises, here and elsewhere, inthe blank verse decasyllable, the couplet, the stanza, and, above all, thesonnet. It remains to say something of the matter as distinguished from the form ofthis poetry, and for once the form is of hardly superior importance to thematter. It is a question of some interest, though unfortunately one whollyincapable of solution, whether the change in the character of poeticalthought and theme which Wyatt and Surrey wrought was accidental, andconsequent merely on their choice of models, and especially of Petrarch, oressential and deliberate. If it was accidental, there is no greateraccident in the history of literature. The absence of the personal note inmediæval poetry is a commonplace, and nowhere had that absence been moremarked than in England. With Wyatt and Surrey English poetry became at abound the most personal (and in a rather bad but unavoidable word) the most"introspective" in Europe. There had of course been love poetry before, butits convention had been a convention of impersonality. It now becameexactly the reverse. The lover sang less his joys than his sorrows, and hetried to express those sorrows and their effect on him in the most personalway he could. Although allegory still retained a strong hold on thenational taste, and was yet to receive its greatest poetical expression in_The Faërie Queene_, it was allegory of quite a different kind from thatwhich in the _Roman de la Rose_ had taken Europe captive, and had sincedominated European poetry in all departments, and especially in thedepartment of love-making. "Dangier" and his fellow-phantoms fled beforethe dawn of the new poetry in England, and the depressing influences of acommon form--a conventional stock of images, personages, and almostlanguage--disappeared. No doubt there was conventionality enough in thefollowing of the Petrarchian model, but it was a less stiff and uniformconventionality; it allowed and indeed invited the individual to wear hisrue with a difference, and to avail himself at least of the almost infinitediversity of circumstance and feeling which the life of the actual manaffords, instead of reducing everything to the moods and forms of analready generalised and allegorised experience. With the new theme tohandle and the new forms ready as tools for the handler, with the generalferment of European spirits, it might readily have been supposed that aremarkable out-turn of work would be the certain and immediate result. The result in fact may have been certain but it was not immediate, beingdelayed for nearly a quarter of a century; and the next remarkable piece ofwork done in English poetry after Tottel's _Miscellany_--a piece of work ofgreater actual poetical merit than anything in that _Miscellany_itself--was in the old forms, and showed little if any influence of the newpoetical learning. This was the famous _Mirror for Magistrates_, or ratherthat part of it contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. _TheMirror_ as a whole has bibliographical and prosodic rather than literaryinterest. It was certainly planned as early as 1555 by way of a supplementto Lydgate's translation of Boccaccio's _Fall of Princes_. It was at firstedited by a certain William Baldwin, and for nearly half a century itreceived additions and alterations from various respectable hacks ofletters; but the "Induction" and the "Complaint of Buckingham" whichSackville furnished to it in 1559, though they were not published till fouryears later, completely outweigh all the rest in value. To my own fancy thefact that Sackville was (in what proportion is disputed) also author of_Gorboduc_ (see Chapter III. ) adds but little to its interest. Hiscontributions to _The Mirror for Magistrates_ contain the best poetrywritten in the English language between Chaucer and Spenser, and are mostcertainly the originals or at least the models of some of Spenser's finestwork. He has had but faint praise of late years. According to the lateProfessor Minto, he "affords abundant traces of the influence of Wyatt andSurrey. " I do not know what the traces are, and I should say myself thatfew contemporary or nearly contemporary efforts are more distinct. DeanChurch says that we see in him a faint anticipation of Spenser. My estimateof Spenser, as I hope to show, is not below that of any living critic; butconsiderations of bulk being allowed, and it being fully granted thatSackville had nothing like Spenser's magnificent range, I cannot see any"faintness" in the case. If the "Induction" had not been written it is atleast possible that the "Cave of Despair" would never have enriched Englishpoetry. Thomas Sackville was born at Buckhurst in Sussex, in the year 1536, of afamily which was of the most ancient extraction and the most honourablestanding. He was educated at Oxford, at the now extinct Hart Hall, whence, according to a practice as common then as it is uncommon now (except in thecases of royal princes and a few persons of difficult and inconstanttaste), he moved to Cambridge. Then he entered the Inner Temple, marriedearly, travelled, became noted in literature, was made Lord Buckhurst atthe age of thirty-one, was for many years one of Elizabeth's chiefcouncillors and officers, was promoted to the Earldom of Dorset at theaccession of James I. , and died, it is said, at the Council table on the19th of April 1608. We shall deal with _Gorboduc_ hereafter: the two contributions to _TheMirror for Magistrates_ concern us here. And I have little hesitation insaying that no more astonishing contribution to English poetry, when thedue reservations of that historical criticism which is the life of allcriticism are made, is to be found anywhere. The bulk is not great: twelveor fifteen hundred lines must cover the whole of it. The form is not new, being merely the seven-line stanza already familiar in Chaucer. Thearrangement is in no way novel, combining as it does the allegoricalpresentment of embodied virtues, vices, and qualities with the melancholynarrative common in poets for many years before. But the poetical value ofthe whole is extraordinary. The two constituents of that value, the formaland the material, are represented with a singular equality of development. There is nothing here of Wyatt's floundering prosody, nothing of thewell-intentioned doggerel in which Surrey himself indulges and in which hispupils simply revel. The cadences of the verse are perfect, the imageryfresh and sharp, the presentation of nature singularly original, when it iscompared with the battered copies of the poets with whom Sackville musthave been most familiar, the followers of Chaucer from Occleve to Hawes. Even the general plan of the poem--the weakest part of nearly all poems ofthis time--is extraordinarily effective and makes one sincerely sorry thatSackville's taste, or his other occupations, did not permit him to carryout the whole scheme on his own account. The "Induction, " in which theauthor is brought face to face with Sorrow, and the central passages of the"Complaint of Buckingham, " have a depth and fulness of poetical sound andsense for which we must look backwards a hundred and fifty years, orforwards nearly five and twenty. Take, for instance, these stanzas:-- "Thence come we to the horror and the hell, The large great kingdoms, and the dreadful reign Of Pluto in his throne where he did dwell, The wide waste places, and the hugy plain, The wailings, shrieks, and sundry sorts of pain, The sighs, the sobs, the deep and deadly groan; Earth, air, and all, resounding plaint and moan. "Here puled the babes, and here the maids unwed With folded hands their sorry chance bewailed, Here wept the guiltless slain, and lovers dead, That slew themselves when nothing else availed; A thousand sorts of sorrows here, that wailed With sighs and tears, sobs, shrieks, and all yfere That oh, alas! it was a hell to hear. * * * * * "_Lo here_, quoth Sorrow, princes of renown, That whilom sat on top of fortune's wheel, Now laid full low; like wretches whirled down, Ev'n with one frown, that stayed but with a smile; And now behold the thing that thou, erewhile, Saw only in thought: and what thou now shalt hear, Recount the same to kesar, king, and peer. "[8] [8] The precedent descriptions of Sorrow herself, of Misery, and of OldAge, are even finer than the above, which, however, I have preferred forthree reasons. First, it has been less often quoted; secondly, its subjectis a kind of commonplace, and, therefore, shows the poet's strength ofhandling; thirdly, because of the singular and characteristic majesty ofthe opening lines. It is perhaps well, in an early passage of a book which will have much todo with the criticism of poetry, to dwell a little on what seems to thecritic to be the root of that matter. In the first place, I must entirelydiffer with those persons who have sought to create an independent prosodyfor English verse under the head of "beats" or "accents" or something ofthat sort. _Every English metre since Chaucer at least can be scanned, within the proper limits, according to the strictest rules of classicalprosody: and while all good English metre comes out scatheless from theapplication of those rules, nothing exhibits the badness of bad Englishmetre so well as that application. _ It is, alongside of their great merits, the distinguishing fault of Wyatt eminently, of Surrey to a less degree, and of all the new school up to Spenser more or less, that they neglect thequantity test too freely; it is the merit of Sackville that, holding on inthis respect to the good school of Chaucer, he observes it. You will findno "jawbreakers" in Sackville, no attempts to adjust English words on aProcrustean bed of independent quantification. He has not indeed themanifold music of Spenser--it would be unreasonable to expect that heshould have it. But his stanzas, as the foregoing examples will show, areof remarkable melody, and they have about them a command, a completeness ofaccomplishment within the writer's intentions, which is very noteworthy inso young a man. The extraordinary richness and stateliness of the measurehas escaped no critic. There is indeed a certain one-sidedness about it, and a devil's advocate might urge that a long poem couched in verse (letalone the subject) of such unbroken gloom would be intolerable. ButSackville did not write a long poem, and his complete command within hislimits of the effect at which he evidently aimed is most remarkable. The second thing to note about the poem is the extraordinary freshness andtruth of its imagery. From a young poet we always expect second-handpresentations of nature, and in Sackville's day second-hand presentation ofnature had been elevated to the rank of a science. Here the newschool--Surrey, Wyatt, and their followers--even if he had studied them, could have given him little or no help, for great as are the merits ofTottel's _Miscellany_, no one would go to it for representations of nature. Among his predecessors in his own style he had to go back to Chaucer(putting the Scotch school out of the question) before he could findanything original. Yet it may be questioned whether the sketches ofexternal scenery in these brief essays of his, or the embodiments ofinternal thought in the pictures of Sorrow and the other allegoricalwights, are most striking. It is perfectly clear that Thomas Sackville had, in the first place, a poetical eye to see, within as well as without, theobjects of poetical presentment; in the second place, a poetical vocabularyin which to clothe the results of his seeing; and in the third place, apoetical ear by aid of which to arrange his language in the musicalco-ordination necessary to poetry. Wyatt had been too much to seek in thelast; Surrey had not been very obviously furnished with the first; and allthree were not to be possessed by any one else till Edmund Spenser arose toput Sackville's lessons in practice on a wider scale, and with a lessmonotonous lyre. It is possible that Sackville's claims in drama may havebeen exaggerated--they have of late years rather been undervalued: but hisclaims in poetry proper can only be overlooked by those who decline toconsider the most important part of poetry. In the subject of even his partof _The Mirror_ there is nothing new: there is only a following of Chaucer, and Gower, and Occleve, and Lydgate, and Hawes, and many others. But in thehandling there is one novelty which makes all others of no effect orinterest. It is the novelty of a new poetry. It has already been remarked that these two important books were notimmediately followed by any others in poetry corresponding to theirimportance. The poetry of the first half of Elizabeth's reign is asmediocre as the poetry of the last half of her reign is magnificent. Although it had taken some hints from Wyatt and Surrey it had not taken thebest; and the inexplicable devotion of most of the versifiers of the timeto the doggerel metres already referred to seems to have prevented themfrom cultivating anything better. Yet the pains which were spent upontranslation during this time were considerable, and undoubtedly had much todo with strengthening and improving the language. The formal part of poetrybecame for the first time a subject of study resulting in the_Instructions_ of Gascoigne, and in the noteworthy critical works whichwill be mentioned in the next chapter; while the popularity of poeticalmiscellanies showed the audience that existed for verse. The translatorsand the miscellanists will each call for some brief notice; but first it isnecessary to mention some individual, and in their way, original writerswho, though not possessing merit at all equal to that of Wyatt, Surrey, andSackville, yet deserve to be singled from the crowd. These are Gascoigne, Churchyard, Turberville, Googe, and Tusser. The poetaster and literary hack, Whetstone, who wrote a poetical memoir ofGeorge Gascoigne after his death, entitles it a remembrance of "the wellemployed life and godly end" of his hero. It is not necessary to disputethat Gascoigne's end was godly; but except for the fact that he was forsome years a diligent and not unmeritorious writer, it is not so certainthat his life was well employed. At any rate he does not seem to havethought so himself. The date of his birth has been put as early as 1525 andas late as 1536: he certainly died in 1577. His father, a knight of goodfamily and estate in Essex, disinherited him; but he was educated atCambridge, if not at both universities, was twice elected to Parliament, travelled and fought abroad, and took part in the famous festival atKenilworth. His work is, as has been said, considerable, and is remarkablefor the number of first attempts in English which it contains. It has atleast been claimed for him (though careful students of literary historyknow that these attributions are always rather hazardous) that he wrote thefirst English prose comedy (_The Supposes_, a version of Ariosto), thefirst regular verse satire (_The Steel Glass_), the first prose tale (aversion from Bandello), the first translation from Greek tragedy(_Jocasta_), and the first critical essay (the above-mentioned _Notes ofInstruction_). Most of these things, it will be seen, were merelyadaptations of foreign originals; but they certainly make up a remarkablebudget for one man. In addition to them, and to a good number of shorterand miscellaneous poems, must be mentioned the _Glass of Government_ (akind of morality or serious comedy, moulded, it would seem, on Germanoriginals), and the rather prettily, if fantastically termed _Flowers, Herbs, and Weeds_. Gascoigne has a very fair command of metre: he is not agreat sinner in the childish alliteration which, surviving from the olderEnglish poetry, helps to convert so much of his contemporaries' work intodoggerel. The pretty "Lullaby of a Lover, " and "Gascoigne's Good Morrow"may be mentioned, and part of one of them may be quoted, as a fair specimenof his work, which is always tolerable if never first-rate. "Sing lullaby, as women do, Wherewith they bring their babes to rest, And lullaby can I sing too, As womanly as can the best. With lullaby they still the child; And if I be not much beguiled, Full many wanton babes have I Which must be stilled with lullaby. "First lullaby, my youthful years. It is now time to go to bed, For crooked age and hoary hairs Have won the hav'n within my head: With lullaby then, youth, be still, With lullaby content thy will, Since courage quails and comes behind, Go sleep and so beguile thy mind. "Next lullaby, my gazing eyes, Which wanton were to glance apace, For every glass may now suffice To show the furrows in my face. With lullaby then wink awhile, With lullaby your looks beguile; Let no fair face, nor beauty bright, Entice you oft with vain delight. "And lullaby, my wanton will, Let reason(s) rule now rein thy thought, Since all too late I find by skill How dear I have thy fancies bought: With lullaby now take thine ease, With lullaby thy doubts appease, For trust to this, if thou be still My body shall obey thy will. " Thomas Churchyard was an inferior sort of Gascoigne, who led a much longerif less eventful life. He was about the Court for the greater part of thecentury, and had a habit of calling his little books, which were numerous, and written both in verse and prose, by alliterative titles playing on hisown name, such as _Churchyard's Chips_, _Churchyard's Choice_, and soforth. He was a person of no great literary power, and chiefly noteworthybecause of his long life after contributing to Tottel's _Miscellany_, whichmakes him a link between the old literature and the new. The literary interests and tentative character of the time, together withits absence of original genius, and the constant symptoms of not having"found its way, " are also very noteworthy in George Turberville and BarnabeGooge, who were friends and verse writers of not dissimilar character. Turberville, of whom not much is known, was a Dorsetshire man of goodfamily, and was educated at Winchester and Oxford. His birth and deathdates are both extremely uncertain. Besides a book on Falconry and numeroustranslations (to which, like all the men of his school and day, he was muchaddicted), he wrote a good many occasional poems, trying even blank verse. Barnabe Googe, a Lincolnshire man, and a member of both universities, appears to have been born in 1540, was employed in Ireland, and died in1594. He was kin to the Cecils, and Mr. Arber has recovered some ratherinteresting details about his love affairs, in which he was assisted byLord Burghley. He, too, was an indefatigable translator, and wrote someoriginal poems. Both poets affected the combination of Alexandrine andfourteener (split up or not, as the printer chose, into six, six, eight, six), the popularity of which has been noted, and both succumbed too oftento its capacities of doggerel. Turberville's best work is the followingsong in a pretty metre well kept up:-- "The green that you did wish me wear Aye for your love, And on my helm a branch to bear Not to remove, Was ever you to have in mind Whom Cupid hath my feire assigned. "As I in this have done your will And mind to do, So I request you to fulfil My fancy too; A green and loving heart to have, And this is all that I do crave. "For if your flowering heart should change His colour green, Or you at length a lady strange Of me be seen, Then will my branch against his use His colour change for your refuse. [9] "As winter's force cannot deface This branch his hue, So let no change of love disgrace Your friendship true; You were mine own, and so be still, So shall we live and love our fill. "Then I may think myself to be Well recompensed, For wearing of the tree that is So well defensed Against all weather that doth fall When wayward winter spits his gall. "And when we meet, to try me true, Look on my head, And I will crave an oath of you Whe'r[10] Faith be fled; So shall we both answered be, Both I of you, and you of me. " [9] Refusal. [10] Short for "whether. " The most considerable and the most interesting part of Googe's work is aset of eight eclogues which may not have been without influence on _TheShepherd's Calendar_, and a poem of some length entitled _CupidoConquered_, which Spenser may also have seen. Googe has more sustainedpower than Turberville, but is much inferior to him in command of metre andin lyrical swing. In him, or at least in his printer, the mania for cuttingup long verses reaches its height, and his very decasyllables are foundarranged in the strange fashion of four and six as thus:-- "Good aged Bale: That with thy hoary hairs Dost still persist To turn the painful book, O happy man, That hast obtained such years, And leav'st not yet On papers pale to look. Give over now To beat thy wearied brain, And rest thy pen, That long hath laboured sore. " Thomas Tusser (1524?-1580) has often been regarded as merely a writer ofdoggerel, which is assuredly not lacking in his _Hundred_ (later _FiveHundred_) _Points of Husbandry_ (1557-1573). But he has some piquancy ofphrase, and is particularly noticeable for the variety, and to a certainextent the accomplishment, of his prosodic experiments--a point of muchimportance for the time. To these five, of whom some substantive notice has been given, many shadowynames might be added if the catalogue were of any use: such as those ofKinwelmersh, Whetstone, Phaer, Neville, Blundeston, Edwards, Golding, andmany others. They seem to have been for the most part personally acquaintedwith one another; the literary energies of England being almost confined tothe universities and the Inns of Court, so that most of those who devotedthemselves to literature came into contact and formed what is sometimescalled a clique. They were all studiously and rather indiscriminately givento translation (the body of foreign work, ancient and modern, which wasturned into English during this quarter of a century being very largeindeed), and all or many of them were contributors of commendatory versesto each other's work and of pieces of different descriptions to thepoetical miscellanies of the time. Of these miscellanies and of the chieftranslations from the classics some little notice may be taken because ofthe great part which both played in the poetical education of England. Ithas been said that almost all the original poets were also translators. Thus Googe Englished, among other things, the _Zodiacus Vitæ_ of MarcellusPalingenius, the _Regnum Papisticum_ of Kirchmayer, the _Four Books ofHusbandry_ of Conrad Heresbach, and the _Proverbs_ of the Marquis ofSantillana; but some of the translators were not distinguished by anyoriginal work. Thus Jasper Heywood, followed by Neville above mentioned, byStudley, and others, translated between 1560 and 1580 those tragedies ofSeneca which had such a vast influence on foreign literature and, fortunately, so small an influence on English. Arthur Golding gave in 1567a version, by no means destitute of merit, of the _Metamorphoses_ which hada great influence on English poetry. We have already mentioned Surrey'sblank-verse translation of Virgil. This was followed up, in 1555-60, byThomas Phaer, who, like most of the persons mentioned in this paragraph, used the fourteener, broken up or not, as accident or the necessities ofthe printer brought it about. It was beyond doubt this abundant translation, and perhaps also themanifest deficiencies of the fourteener thus used, which brought about atthe close of the present period and the beginning of the next theextraordinary attempt to reproduce classical metres in English verse, whichfor a time seduced even Spenser, which was not a little countenanced bymost of the critical writers of the period, which led Gabriel Harvey andothers into such absurdities, and which was scarcely slain even by Daniel'sfamous and capital _Defence of Rhyme_. The discussion of this absurdattempt (for which rules, not now extant, came from Drant of Cambridge) inthe correspondence of Spenser and Harvey, and the sensible fashion in whichNash laughed at it, are among the best known things in the gossipinghistory of English Letters. But the coxcombry of Harvey and the felicitousimpertinence of Nash have sometimes diverted attention from the actualstate of the case. William Webbe (a very sober-minded person with tasteenough to admire the "new poet, " as he calls Spenser) makes elaborateattempts not merely at hexameters, which, though only a curiosity, are apossible curiosity in English, but at Sapphics which could never (except asburlesque) be tolerable. Sidney, Spenser, and others gave serious heed tothe scheme of substituting classical metres without rhyme for indigenousmetres with rhyme. And unless the two causes which brought this about areconstantly kept in mind, the reason of it will not be understood. It wasundoubtedly the weakness of contemporary English verse which reinforced thegeneral Renaissance admiration for the classics; nor must it be forgottenthat Wyatt takes, in vernacular metres and with rhyme, nearly as greatliberties with the intonation and prosody of the language as any of theclassicists in their unlucky hexameters and elegiacs. The majesty and graceof the learned tongues, contrasting with the poverty of their own language, impressed, and to a great extent rightly impressed, the early Elizabethans, so that they naturally enough cast about for any means to improve the one, and hesitated at any peculiarity which was not found in the other. It wasunpardonable in Milton to sneer at rhyme after the fifty years ofmagnificent production which had put English on a level with Greek andabove Latin as a literary instrument. But for Harvey and Spenser, Sidneyand Webbe, with those fifty years still to come, the state of the case wasvery different. The translation mania and the classicising mania together led to theproduction of perhaps the most absurd book in all literature--a book whichdeserves extended notice here, partly because it has only recently becomeaccessible to the general reader in its original form, and partly becauseit is, though a caricature, yet a very instructive caricature of thetendencies and literary ideas of the time. This is Richard Stanyhurst'stranslation of the first four books of the _Æneid_, first printed at Leydenin the summer of 1582, and reprinted in London a year later. This wonderfulbook (in which the spelling is only less marvellous than the phraseologyand verse) shows more than anything else the active throes which Englishliterature was undergoing, and though the result was but a false birth itis none the less interesting. Stanyhurst was not, as might be hastily imagined, a person of insufficientculture or insufficient brains. He was an Irish Roman Catholic gentleman, brother-in-law to Lord Dunsany, and uncle to Archbishop Usher, and thoughhe was author of the Irish part of Holinshed's _History_, he has alwaysbeen regarded by the madder sort of Hibernians as a traitor to the nation. His father was Recorder of Dublin, and he himself, having been born about1547, was educated at University College, Oxford, and went thence, if notto the Inns of Court, at any rate to those of Chancery, and became astudent of Furnival's Inn. He died at Brussels in 1618. Here is an exampleof his prose, the latter part of which is profitable for matter as well asfor form:-- "How beyt[11] I haue heere haulf a guesh, that two sorts of carpers wyl seeme too spurne at this myne enterprise. Thee one vtterlie ignorant, the oother meanlye letterd. Thee ignorant wyl imagin, that thee passage was nothing craggye, in as much as M. Phaere hath broken thee ice before me: Thee meaner clarcks wyl suppose my trauail in theese heroical verses too carrye no great difficultie, in that yt lay in my choice too make what word I would short or long, hauing no English writer beefore mee in this kind of poëtrye with whose squire I should leauel my syllables. [11] This and the next extract are given _literatim_ to show Stanyhurst'smarvellous spelling. * * * * * Haue not theese men made a fayre speake? If they had put in _Mightye Joue_, and _gods_ in thee plural number, and _Venus_ with _Cupide thee blynd Boy_, al had beene in thee nick, thee rythme had been of a right stamp. For a few such stiches boch vp oure newe fashion makers. Prouyded not wythstanding alwayes that _Artaxerxes_, al be yt hee bee spurgalde, beeing so much gallop, bee placed in thee dedicatory epistle receauing a cuppe of water of a swayne, or elles al is not wurth a beane. Good God what a frye of _wooden rythmours_ dooth swarme in stacioners shops, who neauer enstructed in any grammar schoole, not atayning too thee paaringes of thee Latin or Greeke tongue, yeet like blind bayards rush on forward, fostring theyre vayne conceits wyth such ouerweening silly follyes, as they reck not too bee condemned of thee learned for ignorant, so they bee commended of thee ignorant for learned. Thee reddyest way, therefore, too flap theese droanes from the sweete senting hiues of Poëtrye, is for thee learned too applye theym selues wholye (yf they be delighted wyth that veyne) too thee true making of verses in such wise as thee _Greekes_ and _Latins_, thee fathurs of knowledge, haue doone; and too leaue too theese doltish coystrels theyre rude rythming and balducktoom ballads. " Given a person capable of this lingo, given the prevalent mania for Englishhexameters, and even what follows may not seem too impossible. "This sayd, with darcksoom night shade quite clowdye she vannisht. Grislye faces frouncing, eke against Troy leaged in hatred Of Saincts soure deities dyd I see. Then dyd I marck playnely thee castle of Ilion vplayd, And Troian buyldings quit topsy turvye remooued. Much lyk on a mountayn thee tree dry wythered oaken Sliest by the clowne Coridon rusticks with twibbil or hatchet. Then the tre deepe minced, far chopt dooth terrifye swinckers With menacing becking thee branches palsye before tyme, Vntil with sowghing yt grunts, as wounded in hacking. At length with rounsefal, from stock vntruncked yt harssheth. * * * * * Hee rested wylful lyk a wayward obstinat oldgrey. * * * * * Theese woords owt showting with her howling the house she replennisht. " There is perhaps no greater evidence of the reverence in which theancients were held than that such frantic balderdash as this did notextinguish it. Yet this was what a man of undoubted talent, of considerablelearning, and of no small acuteness (for Stanyhurst's Preface to this verytranslation shows something more than glimmerings on the subject ofclassical and English prosody), could produce. It must never be forgottenthat the men of this time were at a hopelessly wrong point of view. Itnever occurred to them that English left to itself could equal Greek orLatin. They simply endeavoured, with the utmost pains and skill, to dragEnglish up to the same level as these unapproachable languages by forcingit into the same moulds which Greek and Latin had endured. Properlyspeaking we ought not to laugh at them. They were carrying out inliterature what the older books of arithmetic call "The Rule ofFalse, "--that is to say, they were trying what the English tongue could_not_ bear. No one was so successful as Stanyhurst in applying this test ofthe rack: yet it is fair to say that Harvey and Webbe, nay, Spenser andSidney, had practically, though, except in Spenser's case, it would appearunconsciously, arrived at the same conclusion before. How much we owe tosuch adventurers of the impossible few men know except those who have triedto study literature as a whole. A few words have to be said in passing as to the miscellanies which playedsuch an important part in the poetical literature of the day. Tottel and_The Mirror for Magistrates_ (which was, considering its constantaccretions, a sort of miscellany) have been already noticed. They werefollowed by not a few others. The first in date was _The Paradise of DaintyDevices_ (1576), edited by R. Edwards, a dramatist of industry if not ofgenius, and containing a certain amount of interesting work. It was verypopular, going through nine or ten editions in thirty years, but with a fewscattered exceptions it does not yield much to the historian of Englishpoetry. Its popularity shows what was expected; its contents show what, atany rate at the date of its first appearance, was given. It is possiblethat the doleful contents of _The Mirror for Magistrates_ (which wasreprinted six times during our present period, and which busied itselfwholly with what magistrates should avoid, and with the sorrowful departingout of this life of the subjects) may have had a strong effect on Edwards, though one at least of his contributors, W. Hunnis, was a man of mould. Itwas followed in 1578 by _A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions_, supposed to have been edited by Roydon and Proctor, which is a still drierstick. The next miscellany, six years later, _A Handful of PleasantDelights_, edited by Clement Robinson, is somewhat better though not much. It is followed by the _Phoenix Nest_, an interesting collection, by no lessthan three miscellanies in 1600, edited by "A. B. " and R. Allot, and named_England's Helicon_, _England's Parnassus_, and _Belvedere_ (the two latterbeing rather anthologies of extracts than miscellanies proper), and byFrancis Davison's famous _Poetical Rhapsody_, 1602, all which last belongto a much later date than our present subjects. To call the general poetical merit of these earlier miscellanies high wouldbe absurd. But what at once strikes the reader, not merely of them but ofthe collections of individual work which accompany them, as so astonishing, is the level which is occasionally reached. The work is often the work ofpersons quite unknown or unimportant in literature as persons. But weconstantly see in it a flash, a symptom of the presence of the truepoetical spirit which it is often impossible to find for years together inother periods of poetry. For instance, if ever there was a "dull dog" inverse it was Richard Edwards. Yet in _The Paradise of Dainty Devices_Edwards's poem with the refrain "The falling out of faithful friendsrenewing is of love, " is one of the most charming things anywhere to befound. So is, after many years, the poem attributed to John Wooton in_England's Helicon_ (the best of the whole set), beginning "Her eyes likeshining lamps, " so is the exquisite "Come, little babe" from _The Arbour ofAmorous Devices_, so are dozens and scores more which may be found in theirproper places, and many of them in Mr. Arber's admirable _English Garner_. The spirit of poetry, rising slowly, was rising surely in the England ofthese years: no man knew exactly where it would appear, and the greatestpoets were--for their praises of themselves and their fellows are quiteunconscious and simple--as ignorant as others. The first thirty years ofthe reign were occupied with simple education--study of models, efforts inthis or that kind, translation, and the rest. But the right models had beenprovided by Wyatt and Surrey's study of the Italians, and by the study ofthe classics which all men then pursued; and the original inspiration, without which the best models are useless, though itself can do little whenthe best models are not used, was abundantly present. Few things are morecurious than to compare, let us say, Googe and Spenser. Yet few things aremore certain than that without the study and experiments which Googerepresents Spenser could not have existed. Those who decry the historicalmethod in criticism ignore this; and ignorance like wisdom is justified ofall her children. CHAPTER II EARLY ELIZABETHAN PROSE The history of the earlier Elizabethan prose, if we except the name ofHooker, in whom it culminates, is to a great extent the history ofcuriosities of literature--of tentative and imperfect efforts, scarcelyresulting in any real vernacular style at all. It is, however, emphaticallythe Period of Origins of modern English prose, and as such cannot but beinteresting. We shall therefore rapidly survey its chief developments, noting first what had been done before Elizabeth came to the throne, thentaking Ascham (who stands, though part of his work was written earlier, very much as the first Elizabethan prosaist), noticing the schools ofhistorians, translators, controversialists, and especially critics whoillustrated the middle period of the reign, and singling out the noteworthypersonality of Sidney. We shall also say something of Lyly (as far as_Euphues_ is concerned) and his singular attempts in prose style, and shallfinish with Hooker, the one really great name of the period. Its voluminouspamphleteering, though much of it, especially the Martin Marprelatecontroversy, might come chronologically within the limit of this chapter, will be better reserved for a notice in Chapter VI. Of the whole pamphletliterature of the reigns of Elizabeth and James--an interesting subject, the relation of which to the modern periodical has been somewhatoverlooked, and which indeed was, until a comparatively recent period, notvery easy to study. Gabriel Harvey alone, as distinctly belonging to theearlier Elizabethans, may be here included with other critics. It was an inevitable result of the discovery of printing that thecultivation of the vernacular for purposes of all work--that is to say, forprose--should be largely increased. Yet a different influence arising, orat least eked out, from the same source, rather checked this increase. Thestudy of the classical writers had at first a tendency to render inveteratethe habit of employing Latin for the journey-work of literature, and in thetwo countries which were to lead Western Europe for the future (theliterary date of Italy was already drawing to a close, and Italy had longpossessed vernacular prose masterpieces), it was not till the middle of thesixteenth century that the writing of vernacular prose was warmly advocatedand systematically undertaken. The most interesting monuments of thiscrusade, as it may almost be called, in England are connected with a schoolof Cambridge scholars who flourished a little before our period, though nota few of them, such as Ascham, Wilson, and others, lived into it. A letterof Sir John Cheke's in the very year of the accession of Elizabeth is themost noteworthy document on the subject. It was written to another fatherof English prose, Sir Thomas Hoby, the translator of Castiglione's_Courtier_. But Ascham had already and some years earlier published his_Toxophilus_, and various not unimportant attempts, detailed notice ofwhich would be an antedating of our proper period, had been made. More'schief work, _Utopia_, had been written in Latin, and was translated intoEnglish by another hand, but his _History of Edward V. _ was not a meancontribution to English prose. Tyndale's _New Testament_ had given a newand powerful impulse to the reading of English; Elyot's _Governor_ had setthe example of treating serious subjects in a style not unworthy of them, and Leland's quaint _Itinerary_ the example of describing more or lessfaithfully if somewhat uncouthly. Hall had followed Fabyan as an Englishhistorian, and, above all, Latimer's _Sermons_ had shown how to transformspoken English of the raciest kind into literature. Lord Berners'stranslations of Froissart and of divers examples of late Continentalromance had provided much prose of no mean quality for light reading, andalso by their imitation of the florid and fanciful style of theFrench-Flemish _rhétoriqueurs_ (with which Berners was familiar both as astudent of French and as governor of Calais) had probably contributed not alittle to supply and furnish forth the side of Elizabethan expression whichfound so memorable an exponent in the author of _Euphues_. For our purpose, however, Roger Ascham may serve as a starting-point. His_Toxophilus_ was written and printed as early as 1545; his _Schoolmaster_did not appear till after his death, and seems to have been chiefly writtenin the very last days of his life. There is thus nearly a quarter of acentury between them, yet they are not very different in style. Ascham wasa Yorkshire man born at Kirbywiske, near Northallerton, in 1515; he went toSt. John's College at Cambridge, then a notable seat of learning, in 1530;was elected scholar, fellow, and lecturer, became public orator the yearafter the appearance of _Toxophilus_, acted as tutor to the PrincessElizabeth, went on diplomatic business to Germany, was Latin secretary toQueen Mary, and after her death to his old pupil, and died on the 30thDecember 1568. A treatise on Cock-fighting (of which sport he was veryfond) appears to have been written by him, and was perhaps printed, but isunluckily lost. We have also Epistles from him, and his works, both Englishand Latin, have been in whole or part frequently edited. The great interestof Ascham is expressed as happily as possible by his own words in thededication of _Toxophilus_ to Henry VIII. "Although, " he says, "to havewritten this book either in Latin or Greek ... Had been more easier and fitfor my trade in study, yet ... I have written this English matter in theEnglish tongue for Englishmen"--a memorable sentence none the worse for itsjingle and repetition, which are well in place. Until scholars like Ascham, who with the rarest exceptions were the only persons likely or able towrite at all, cared to write "English matters in English tongue forEnglishmen, " the formation of English prose style was impossible; and thatit required some courage to do so, Cheke's letter, written twelve yearslater, shows. [12] "I am of this opinion that our own tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmingled with borrowing of other tongues, wherein, if we take not heed by time, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tongue naturally and praisably utter her meaning, when she borroweth no counterfeitures of other tongues to attire herself withal, but useth plainly her own with such shift as nature, craft, experience, and following of other excellent doth lead her unto, and if she want at any time (as being imperfect she must) yet let her borrow with such bashfulness that it may appear, that if either the mould of our own tongue could serve us to fashion a word of our own, or if the old denizened words could content and ease this need we would not boldly venture of unknown words. "[13] [12] The letter is given in full by Mr. Arber in his introduction toAscham's _Schoolmaster_, p. 5. [13] It will be seen that Cheke writes what he argues for, "clean and pureEnglish. " "Other excellent" is perhaps the only doubtful phrase in theextract or in the letter. The _Toxophilus_ and the _Schoolmaster_ are both in their different waysvery pleasant reading; and the English is far more correct than that ofmuch greater men than Ascham in the next century. It is, however, merely asstyle, less interesting, because it is clear that the author is doinglittle more than translate in his head, instead of on the paper, goodcurrent Latin (such as it would have been "more easier" for him to write)into current English. He does not indulge in any undue classicism; he takesfew of the liberties with English grammar which, a little later, it was thehabit to take on the strength of classical examples. But, on the otherhand, he does not attempt, and it would be rather unreasonable to expectthat he should have attempted, experiments in the literary power of Englishitself. A slight sense of its not being so "easy" to write in English as inLatin, and of the consequent advisableness of keeping to a sober beatenpath, to a kind of style which is not much more English (except for beingcomposed of good English words in straightforward order) than it is anyliterary language framed to a great extent on the classics, shows itself inhim. One might translate passage after passage of Ascham, keeping almostthe whole order of the words, into very good sound Latin prose; and, indeed, his great secret in the _Schoolmaster_ (the perpetual translationand retranslation of English into the learned languages, and especiallyLatin) is exactly what would form such a style. It is, as the followingexamples from both works will show, clear, not inelegant, invaluable as akind of go-cart to habituate the infant limbs of prose English to orderlymovement; but it is not original, or striking, or characteristic, orcalculated to show the native powers and capacities of the language. "I can teach you to shoot fair, even as Socrates taught a man once to know God. For when he asked him what was God? 'Nay, ' saith he, 'I can tell you better what God is not, as God is not ill, God is unspeakable, unsearchable, and so forth. Even likewise can I say of fair shooting, it hath not this discommodity with it nor that discommodity, and at last a man may so shift all the discommodities from shooting that there shall be left nothing behind but fair shooting. And to do this the better you must remember how that I told you when I described generally the whole nature of shooting, that fair shooting came of these things of standing, nocking, drawing, holding and loosing; the which I will go over as shortly as I can, describing the discommodities that men commonly use in all parts of their bodies, that you, if you fault in any such, may know it, and go about to amend it. Faults in archers do exceed the number of archers, which come with use of shooting without teaching. Use and custom separated from knowledge and learning, doth not only hurt shooting, but the most weighty things in the world beside. And, therefore, I marvel much at those people which be the maintainers of uses without knowledge, having no other word in their mouth but this use, use, custom, custom. Such men, more wilful than wise, beside other discommodities, take all place and occasion from all amendment. And this I speak generally of use and custom. " * * * * * "Time was when Italy and Rome have been, to the great good of us who now live, the best breeders and bringers up of the worthiest men, not only for wise speaking, but also for well-doing in all civil affairs that ever was in the world. But now that time is gone; and though the place remain, yet the old and present manners do differ as far as black and white, as virtue and vice. Virtue once made that country mistress over all the world: vice now maketh that country slave to them that before were glad to serve it. All man [_i. E. _ mankind] seeth it; they themselves confess it, namely such as be best and wisest amongst them. For sin, by lust and vanity, hath and doth breed up everywhere common contempt of God's word, private contention in many families, open factions in every city; and so making themselves bond to vanity and vice at home, they are content to bear the yoke of serving strangers abroad. Italy now is not that Italy it was wont to be; and therefore now not so fit a place as some do count it for young men to fetch either wisdom or honesty from thence. For surely they will make others but bad scholars that be so ill masters to themselves. " This same characteristic, or absence of characteristic, which reaches itsclimax--a climax endowing it with something like substantive life andmerit--in Hooker, displays itself, with more and more admixture of racinessand native peculiarity, in almost all the prose of the early Elizabethanperiod up to the singular escapade of Lyly, who certainly tried to writenot a classical style but a style of his own. The better men, with ThomasWilson and Ascham himself at their head, made indeed earnest protestsagainst Latinising the vocabulary (the great fault of the contemporaryFrench _Pléiade_), but they were not quite aware how much they were underthe influence of Latin in other matters. The translators, such as North, whose famous version of Plutarch after Amyot had the immortal honour ofsuggesting not a little of Shakespere's greatest work, had the chief excuseand temptation in doing this; but all writers did it more or less: thetheologians (to whom it would no doubt have been "more easier" to write inLatin), the historians (though the little known Holinshed has broken offinto a much more vernacular but also much more disorderly style), the raregeographers (of whom the chief is Richard Eden, the first English writer onAmerica), and the rest. Of this rest the most interesting, perhaps, are thesmall but curious knot of critics who lead up in various ways to Sidney andHarvey, who seem to have excited considerable interest at the time, and whowere not succeeded, after the early years of James, by any considerablebody of critics of English till John Dryden began to write in the lastthird of the following century. Of these (putting out of sight StephenGosson, the immediate begetter of Sidney's _Apology for Poetry_, Campion, the chief champion of classical metres in English, and by a quaint contrastthe author of some of the most charming of English songs in purely romanticstyle, with his adversary the poet Daniel, Meres, etc. ), the chief is theauthor of the anonymous _Art of English Poesie_, published the year afterthe Armada, and just before the appearance of _The Faërie Queene_. This_Art_ has chiefly to be compared with the _Discourse of English Poetrie_, published three years earlier by William Webbe. Webbe, of whom nothing isknown save that he was a private tutor at one or two gentlemen's houses inEssex, exhibits that dislike and disdain of rhyme which was an offshoot ofthe passion for humanist studies, which was importantly represented allthrough the sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England, and whichhad Milton for its last and greatest exponent. _The Art of English Poesie_, which is attributed on no grounds of contemporary evidence to GeorgePuttenham, though the book was generally reputed his in the nextgeneration, is a much more considerable treatise, some four times thelength of Webbe's, dealing with a large number of questions subsidiary to_Ars Poetica_, and containing no few selections of illustrative verse, manyof the author's own. As far as style goes both Webbe and Puttenham fallinto the rather colourless but not incorrect class already described, andare of the tribe of Ascham. Here is a sample of each:-- (Webbe's _Preface to the Noble Poets of England_. ) "Among the innumerable sorts of English books, and infinite fardels of printed pamphlets, wherewith this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study furnished; the greater part, I think, in any one kind, are such as are either mere poetical, or which tend in some respects (as either in matter or form) to poetry. Of such books, therefore, sith I have been one that have had a desire to read not the fewest, and because it is an argument which men of great learning have no leisure to handle, or at least having to do with more serious matters do least regard. If I write something, concerning what I think of our English poets, or adventure to set down my simple judgment of English poetry, I trust the learned poets will give me leave, and vouchsafe my book passage, as being for the rudeness thereof no prejudice to their noble studies, but even (as my intent is) an _instar cotis_ to stir up some other of meet ability to bestow travail in this matter; whereby, I think, we may not only get the means which we yet want, to discern between good writers and bad, but perhaps also challenge from the rude multitude of rustical rhymers, who will be called poets, the right practice and orderly course of true poetry. " * * * * * (Puttenham _on Style_. ) "Style is a constant and continual phrase or tenour of speaking and writing, extending to the whole tale or process of the poem or history, and not properly to any piece or member of a tale; but is of words, speeches, and sentences together; a certain contrived form and quality, many times natural to the writer, many times his peculiar bye-election and art, and such as either he keepeth by skill or holdeth on by ignorance, and will not or peradventure cannot easily alter into any other. So we say that Cicero's style and Sallust's were not one, nor Cæsar's and Livy's, nor Homer's and Hesiodus', [14] nor Herodotus' and Thucydides', nor Euripides' and Aristophanes', nor Erasmus' and Budeus' styles. And because this continual course and manner of writing or speech sheweth the matter and disposition of the writer's mind more than one or two instances can show, therefore there be that have called style the image of man (_mentis character_). For man is but his mind, and as his mind is tempered and qualified, so are his speeches and language at large; and his inward conceits be the metal of his mind, and his manner of utterance the very warp and woof of his conceits, more plain or busy and intricate or otherwise affected after the rate. "[15] [14] The final _s_ of such names often at the time appears unaltered. [15] _i. E. _ "in proportion. " Contemporary with these, however, there was growing up a quite differentschool of English prose which showed itself on one side in the _estiloculto_ of Lyly and the university wits of his time; on the other, in theextremely vernacular and sometimes extremely vulgar manner of thepamphleteers, who were very often the same persons. Lyly himself exhibitsboth styles in _Euphues_; and if _Pap with a Hatchet_ and _An Almond for aParrot_ are rightly attributed to him, still more in these. So also doesGabriel Harvey, Spenser's friend, a curious coxcomb who endeavoured todissuade Spenser from continuing _The Faërie Queene_, devoted much timehimself and strove to devote other people to the thankless task ofcomposing English hexameters and trimeters, engaged (very much to hisdiscomfiture) in a furious pamphlet war with Thomas Nash, and altogetherpresents one of the most characteristic though least favourable specimensof the Elizabethan man of letters. We may speak of him further when we cometo the pamphleteers generally. John Lyly is a person of much more consequence in English literature thanthe conceited and pragmatical pedant who wrote _Pierce's Supererogation_. He is familiar, almost literally to every schoolboy, as the author of thecharming piece, "Cupid with my Campaspe Played, " and his dramatic work willcome in for notice in a future chapter; but he is chiefly thought of byposterity, whether favourably or the reverse, as the author of _Euphues_. Exceedingly little is known about his life, and it is necessary to say thatthe usually accepted dates of his death, his children's birth, and soforth, depend wholly on the identification of a John Lilly, who is thesubject of such entries in the registers of a London church, with theeuphuist and dramatist--an identification which requires confirmation. Astill more wanton attempt to supplement ignorance with knowledge has beenmade in the further identification with Lyly of a certain "witty and boldatheist, " who annoyed Bishop Hall in his first cure at Hawstead, inSuffolk, and who is called "Mr. Lilly. " All supposed facts about him (orsome other John Lyly), his membership of Parliament and so forth, have beendiligently set forth by Mr. Bond in his Oxford edition of the _Works_, withthe documents which are supposed to prove them. He is supposed, onuncertain but tolerable inferences, to have been born about 1554, and hecertainly entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1569, though he was notmatriculated till two years later. He is described as _plebeii filius_, wasnot on the foundation, and took his degree in 1573. He must have had someconnection with the Cecils, for a letter of 1574 is extant from him toBurleigh. He cannot have been five and twenty when he wrote _Euphues_, which was licensed at the end of 1578, and was published (the first part)early next year, while the second part followed with a very shortinterval. In 1582 he wrote an unmistakable letter commendatory to Watson's_Hecatompathia_, and between 1580 and 1590 he must have written his plays. He appears to have continued to reside at Magdalen for a considerable time, and then to have haunted the Court. A melancholy petition is extant toQueen Elizabeth from him, the second of its kind, in which he writes:"Thirteen years your highness' servant, but yet nothing. " This was in 1598:he is supposed to have died in 1606. _Euphues_ is a very singular book, which was constantly reprinted and eagerly read for fifty years, thenforgotten for nearly two hundred, then frequently discussed, but veryseldom read, even it may be suspected in Mr. Arber's excellent reprint ofit, or in that of Mr. Bond. It gave a word to English, and even yet thereis no very distinct idea attaching to the word. It induced one of the mostgifted restorers of old times to make a blunder, amusing in itself, but notin the least what its author intended it to be, and of late yearsespecially it has prompted constant discussions as to the origin of thepeculiarities which mark it. As usual, we shall try to discuss it with lessreference to what has been said about it than to itself. _Euphues_ (properly divided into two parts, "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, "and "Euphues and his England, " the scene of the first lying in Naples) is akind of love story; the action, however, being next to nothing, andsubordinated to an infinite amount of moral and courtly discourse. Oddlyenough, the unfavourable sentence of Hallam, that it is "a very dullstory, " and the favourable sentence of Kingsley, that it is "a brave, righteous, and pious book, " are both quite true, and, indeed, any one cansee that there is nothing incompatible in them. At the present day, however, its substance, which chiefly consists of the moral discoursesaforesaid, is infinitely inferior in interest to its manner. Of thatmanner, any one who imagines it to be reproduced by Sir Piercie Shafton'sextravagances in _The Monastery_ has an entirely false idea. It is muchodder than Shaftonese, but also quite different from it. Lyly's twosecrets are in the first place an antithesis, more laboured, moremonotonous, and infinitely more pointless than Macaulay's--which antithesisseems to have met with not a little favour, and was indeed an obviousexpedient for lightening up and giving character to the correct butfeatureless prose of Ascham and other "Latiners. " The second was a fancy, which amounts to a mania, for similes, strung together in endless lists, and derived as a rule from animals, vegetables, or minerals, especiallyfrom the Fauna and Flora of fancy. It is impossible to open a page of_Euphues_ without finding an example of this eccentric and tasteless trick, and in it, as far as in any single thing, must be found the recipe foreuphuism, pure and simple. As used in modern language for conceited andprecious language in general, the term has only a very partial applicationto its original, or to that original's author. Indeed Lyly's vocabulary, except occasionally in his similes, is decidedly vernacular, and he verycommonly mingles extremely homely words with his highest flights. No betterspecimen of him can be given than from the aforesaid letter commendatory tothe _Hecatompathia_. "My good friend, I have read your new passions, and they have renewed mine old pleasures, the which brought to me no less delight than they have done to your self-commendations. And certes had not one of mine eyes about serious affairs been watchful, both by being too busy, had been wanton: such is the nature of persuading pleasure, that it melteth the marrow before it scorch the skin and burneth before it warmeth. Not unlike unto the oil of jet, which rotteth the bone and never rankleth the flesh, or the scarab flies which enter into the root and never touch the fruit. "And whereas you desire to have my opinion, you may imagine that my stomach is rather cloyed than queasy, and therefore mine appetite of less force than my affection, fearing rather a surfeit of sweetness than desiring a satisfying. The repeating of love wrought in me a semblance of liking; but searching the very veins of my heart I could find nothing but a broad scar where I left a deep wound: and loose strings where I tied hard knots: and a table of steel where I framed a plot of wax. "Whereby I noted that young swans are grey, and the old white, young trees tender and the old tough, young men amorous, and, growing in years, either wiser or warier. The coral plant in the water is a soft weed, on the land a hard stone: a sword frieth in the fire like a black eel; but laid in earth like white snow: the heart in love is altogether passionate; but free from desire altogether careless. "But it is not my intent to inveigh against love, which women account but a bare word and men reverence as the best God. Only this I would add without offence to gentlewomen, that were not men more superstitious in their praises than women are constant in their passions love would either be worn out of use, or men out of love, or women out of lightness. I can condemn none but by conjecture, nor commend any but by lying, yet suspicion is as free as thought, and as far as I can see as necessary as credulity. "Touching your mistress I must needs think well, seeing you have written so well, but as false glasses shew the fairest faces so fine gloses amend the baddest fancies. Appelles painted the phoenix by hearsay not by sight, and Lysippus engraved Vulcan with a straight leg whom nature framed with a poult foot, which proveth men to be of greater affection their [then? = than] judgment. But in that so aptly you have varied upon women I will not vary from you, so confess I must, and if I should not, yet mought I be compelled, that to love would be the sweetest thing in the earth if women were the faithfulest, and that women would be more constant if men were more wise. "And seeing you have used me so friendly as to make me acquainted with your passions, I will shortly make you privy to mine which I would be loth the printer should see, for that my fancies being never so crooked he would put them into straight lines unfit for my humour, necessary for his art, who setteth down blind in as many letters as seeing. [16]--Farewell. " [16] "Blinde" with the _e_ according to the old spelling having sixletters, the same number as seeing. This curious epistle is both in styleand matter an epitome of _Euphues_, which had appeared some three yearsbefore. Many efforts have been made to discover some model for Lyly's oddities. Spanish and Italian influences have been alleged, and there is a specialtheory that Lord Berners's translations have the credit or discredit of thepaternity. The curious similes are certainly found very early in Spanish, and may be due to an Eastern origin. The habit of overloading the sentencewith elaborate and far-fetched language, especially with similes, may alsohave come from the French _rhétoriqueurs_ already mentioned--a school ofpedantic writers (Chastellain, Robertet, Crétin, and some others being thechief) who flourished during the last half of the fifteenth century and thefirst quarter of the sixteenth, while the latest examples of them werehardly dead when Lyly was born. The desire, very laudably felt all overEurope, to adorn and exalt the vernacular tongues, so as to make themvehicles of literature worthy of taking rank with Latin and Greek, naturally led to these follies, of which euphuism in its proper sense wasonly one. Michael Drayton, in some verse complimentary to Sidney, stigmatises notmuch too strongly Lyly's prevailing faults, and attributes to the hero ofZutphen the purification of England from euphuism. This is hardly critical. That Sidney--a young man, and a man of fashion at the time when Lyly'soddities were fashionable--should have to a great extent (for hisresistance is by no means absolute) resisted the temptation to imitatethem, is very creditable. But the influence of _Euphues_ was at least asstrong for many years as the influence of the _Arcadia_ and the _Apology_;and the chief thing that can be said for Sidney is that he did not whollyfollow Lyly to do evil. Nor is his positive excellence in prose to becompared for a moment with his positive excellence in poetry. His life isso universally known that nothing need be said about it beyond remindingthe reader that he was born, as Lyly is supposed to have been, in 1554;that he was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, afterwards Viceroy of Ireland, andof Lady Mary, eldest daughter of the luckless Dudley, Duke ofNorthumberland; that he was educated at Shrewsbury and Christ Church, travelled much, acquiring the repute of one of the most accomplishedcavaliers of Europe, loved without success Penelope Devereux ("Stella"), married Frances Walsingham, and died of his wounds at the battle ofZutphen, when he was not yet thirty-two years old. His prose works are thefamous pastoral romance of the _Arcadia_, written to please his sister, theCountess of Pembroke, and the short _Apology for Poetry_, a very spiritedpiece of work, immediately provoked by a rather silly diatribe against thetheatre by one Stephen Gosson, once a playwright himself, but turnedPuritan clergyman. Both appear to have been written about the sametime--that is to say, between 1579 and 1581; Sidney being then in Londonand in the society of Spenser and other men of letters. The amiability of Sidney's character, his romantic history, the exquisitecharm of his verse at its best, and last, not least, the fact of hisenthusiastic appreciation and patronage of literature at a time whenliterary men never failed to give aristocratic patrons somewhat more than_quid pro quo_, have perhaps caused his prose work to be traditionally alittle overvalued. The _Apology for Poetry_ is full of generous ardour, contains many striking and poetical expressions, and explains more than anyother single book the secret of the wonderful literary production of thehalf-century which followed. The _Arcadia_, especially when contrasted with_Euphues_, has the great merit of abundant and stirring incident andinterest, of freedom from any single affectation so pestering andcontinuous as Lyly's similes, and of constant purple patches of poeticaldescription and expression, which are indeed not a little out of place inprose, but which are undeniably beautiful in themselves. But when this issaid all is said. Enthusiastic as Sidney's love for poetry and forliterature was, it was enthusiasm not at all according to knowledge. In the_Apology_, by his vindication of the Unities, and his denunciation of themixture of tragedy and comedy, he was (of course without knowing it) layingdown exactly the two principles, a fortunate abjuration and scoutingwhereof gave us the greatest possession in mass and variety of merit thatany literature possesses--the Elizabethan drama from Shakespere and Marloweto Ford and Shirley. Follow Sidney, and good-bye to _Faustus_, to _Hamlet_, to _Philaster_, to _The Duchess of Malfi_, to _The Changeling_, to _TheVirgin Martyr_, to _The Broken Heart_. We must content ourselves with_Gorboduc_ and _Cornelia_, with _Cleopatra_ and _Philotas_, at the verybest with _Sejanus_ and _The Silent Woman_. Again Sidney commits himself inthis same piece to the pestilent heresy of prose-poetry, saying that verseis "only an ornament of poetry;" nor is there any doubt that Milton, whether he meant it or not, fixed a deserved stigma on the _Arcadia_ bycalling it a "vain and amatorious poem. " It is a poem in prose, which is asmuch as to say, in other words, that it unites the faults of both kinds. Nor is Sidney less an enemy (though a "sweet enemy" in his own or Bruno'swords) of the minor and more formal graces of style. If his actualvocabulary is not Latinised, or Italianised, or Lylyfied, he was one of thegreatest of sinners in the special Elizabethan sin of convoluting andentangling his phrases (after the fashion best known in the mouths ofShakespere's fine gentlemen), so as to say the simplest thing in the leastsimple manner. Not Osric nor Iachimo detests the _mot propre_ more thanSidney. Yet again, he is one of the arch offenders in the matter ofspoiling the syntax of the sentence and the paragraph. As has been observedalready, the unpretending writers noticed above, if they have littleharmony or balance of phrase, are seldom confused or breathless. Sidney wasone of the first writers of great popularity and influence (for the_Arcadia_ was very widely read) to introduce what may be called thesentence-and-paragraph-heap, in which clause is linked on to clause tillnot merely the grammatical but the philosophical integer is hopelessly lostsight of in a tangle of jointings and appendices. It is not that he couldnot do better; but that he seems to have taken no trouble not to do worse. His youth, his numerous avocations, and the certainty that he neverformally prepared any of his work for the press, would of course be ampleexcuses, even if the singular and seductive beauty of many scrapsthroughout this work did not redeem it. But neither of the radicaldifference in nature and purpose between prose and verse, nor of the duediscipline and management of prose itself, does Sidney seem to have had theslightest idea. Although he seldom or never reaches the beauties of the_flamboyant_ period of prose, which began soon after his death and filledthe middle of the seventeenth century, he contains examples of almost allits defects; and considering that he is nearly the first writer to do this, and that his writings were (and were deservedly) the favourite study ofgenerous literary youth for more than a generation, it is scarcelyuncharitable to hold him directly responsible for much mischief. The faultsof _Euphues_ were faults which were certain to work their own cure; thoseof the _Arcadia_ were so engaging in themselves, and linked with so manymerits and beauties, that they were sure to set a dangerous example. Ibelieve, indeed, that if Sidney had lived he might have pruned his stylenot a little without weakening it, and then the richness of his imaginationwould probably have made him the equal of Bacon and the superior ofRaleigh. But as it is, his light in English prose (we shall speak and speakvery differently of his verse hereafter) was only too often awill-o'-the-wisp. I am aware that critics whom I respect have thought andspoken in an opposite sense, but the difference comes from a more importantand radical difference of opinion as to the nature, functions, andlimitations of English prose. Sidney's style may be perhaps bestillustrated by part of his Dedication; the narrative parts of the _Arcadia_not lending themselves well to brief excerpt, while the _Apology_ is lessremarkable for style than for matter. _To my dear Lady and Sister, the Countess of Pembroke. _ "Here have you now, most dear, and most worthy to be most dear, lady, this idle work of mine; which, I fear, like the spider's web, will be thought fitter to be swept away than wove to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth, as the cruel fathers among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster, I could well find in my heart to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child which I am loth to father. But you desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment. Now it is done only for you, only to you; if you keep it to yourself, or commend it to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of good will, I hope, for the father's sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done. In sum, a young head, not so well stayed as I would it were, and shall be when God will, having many fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster, and more sorry might I be that they came in than that they gat out. But his[17] chief safety shall be the walking abroad; and his chief protection the bearing the livery of your name, which, if much good will do not deceive me, is worthy to be a sanctuary for a greater offender. This say I because I know thy virtue so; and this say I because it may be for ever so, or, to say better, because it will be for ever so. " [17] Apparently = the book's. The difference referred to above is again well exemplified by thedifference of opinions on the style of Hooker as compared with that ofSidney. Hooker wrote considerably later than the other authors herecriticised, but his work is so distinctly the climax of the style startedby Ascham, Cheke, and their fellows (the style in which English wascarefully adapted to literary purposes for which Latin had been previouslyemployed, under the general idea that Latin syntax should, on the whole, rule the new literary medium), that this chapter would be incompletewithout a notice of him. For the distinguished writers who werecontemporary with his later years represent, with rare and only partlydistinguished exceptions, not a development of Hooker, but either adevelopment of Sidney or a fresh style, resulting from the blending indifferent proportions of the academic and classical manner with theromantic and discursive. The events of Hooker's neither long nor eventful life are well-known fromone of the earliest of standard biographies in English--that of IzaakWalton. He was born at Heavitree, a suburb of Exeter, in 1554(?). Though hewas fairly connected, his parents were poor, and he was educated as a Bibleclerk at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He entered here in 1567, and forsome fifteen years Oxford was his home, latterly as Fellow and Lecturer ofCorpus. The story of his marriage is slightly pathetic, but more thanslightly ludicrous, and he appears to have been greatly henpecked as wellas obliged to lead an uncongenial life at a country living. In 1585 he wasmade Master of the Temple, and held that post for seven years, distinguishing himself both as a preacher and a controversialist. Butneither was this his vocation; and the last nine years of his life werespent, it would seem more congenially, in two other country livings, firstin Wiltshire, then in Kent. He died in 1600. The first four books of the_Ecclesiastical Polity_ were published in 1594, the fifth in 1597. The lastthree books, published after his death, lie under grave suspicion of havingbeen tampered with. This, however, as the unquestionably genuine portionis considerable in bulk, is a matter rather of historical and theologicalthan of purely literary interest. Hooker himself appears to have beensomething like the popular ideal of a student: never so happy as when penin hand, and by no means fitted for the rougher kind of converse with hisfellow-men, still less for the life of what is commonly called a man of theworld. But in the world of literature he is a very great man indeed. Very fewtheological books have made themselves a place in the first rank of theliterature of their country, and if the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ has doneso, it has certainly not done so without cause. If there has been a certaintendency on the part of strong partisans of the Anglican Church tooverestimate the literary and philosophical merit of this book, which maybe called the first vernacular defence of the position of the EnglishChurch, that has been at least compensated by partisan criticism on theother side. Nor is there the least fear that the judgment of impartialcritics will ever deprive Hooker of the high rank generally accorded tohim. He is, of course, far from being faultless. In his longer sentences(though long sentences are by no means the rule with him) he often fallsinto that abuse of the classical style which the comparatively jejunewriters who had preceded him avoided, but which constantly manifesteditself in the richer manner of his own contemporaries--the abuse oftreating the uninflected English language as if it were an inflectedlanguage, in which variations and distinctions of case and gender andnumber help to connect adjective with substantive, and relative withantecedent. Sometimes, though less often, he distorts the natural order ofthe English in order to secure the Latin desideratum of finishing with themost emphatic and important words of the clause. His subject leads andalmost forces him to an occasional pedantry of vocabulary, and in theregion which is not quite that of form nor quite that of matter, hesometimes fails in co-ordinating his arguments, his facts, and hiscitations, and in directing the whole with crushing force at his enemy. Hisargument occasionally degenerates into mere illustration; his logic intomere rhetoric. But when all these things are admitted, the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ remainsa book in which matter and manner are wedded as in few other books of thesame kind. The one characteristic which has been admitted by Hooker'sfaintest praisers as well as by his warmest--the golden moderation andjudiciousness of his argument--is perhaps rather calculated to extortesteem than to arouse admiration. Moderation, like other kinds of probity, _laudatur et alget_: the adversary is not extremely grateful for not beingpushed to extremity, and those on the same side would at least excuse alittle more vehemence in driving advantages home. But Hooker has otherqualities which are equally estimable and more shining. What especiallydistinguishes him from the literary point of view is his almost uniquefaculty of diversifying dry and technical argument with outbursts ofrhetoric. These last are not mere purple patches; they do not come in withthe somewhat ostentatious usherment and harbingery which, for instance, laid the even more splendid bursts of Jeremy Taylor open to the sharpsarcasm of South. There is nothing theatrical about them; they rise quitenaturally out of the level of discussion and sink into it again, with nosudden stumble or drop. Nor are they ever (like some of Sidney's poeticalexcrescences) tags and hemistichs of unwritten sonnets or songs stuck inanyhow upon the prose. For instance, Sidney writes: "About the time whenthe candles had begun to inherit the sun's office. " Now this in a somewhatquaint and conceited fashion of verse would be excellent. It would also beexcellent in burlesque, and in such prose as Browne's it might conquer itsplace victoriously. But except in such a context (which Sidney cannotweave) it is a _rococo_ ornament, a tawdry beautification. Compare with itany of the celebrated passages of Hooker, which may be found in the extractbooks--the encomium on law, the admirable passage, not so admirable indeedin the context as it might be but still admirable, about angels, thevindication of music in the church service. Here the expression, even atits warmest, is in no sense poetical, and the flight, as it is called, connects itself with and continues and drops into the ordinary march ofargument in the most natural and imperceptible manner. The elevatedpassages of Hooker's style resemble more than anything else thoseconvenient exploits common, probably, in most persons' dreams, in which thedreamer, without any trouble to himself or any apparent surprise in thoseabout him, lifts himself from the ground and skims or soars as he pleases, sure that he can return to earth also when he pleases, and without anyshock. The speculators on the causes of beauty, admiration, and the likehave sometimes sought them in contrast first of all, and it has beenfrequently noticed that the poets who charm us most are those who know howto alternate pity and terror. There is something of the same sort in thesevariations of the equable procession of Hooker's syllogisms, theseflower-gardens scattered, if not in the wilderness, yet in the humdrumarable ground of his collections from fathers and philosophers, hismarshallings of facts and theories against the counter-theories ofCartwright and Travers. Neither before him nor in his time, nor forgenerations after him--scarcely, indeed, till Berkeley--did any one arisewho had this profound and unpretentious art of mixing the useful with theagreeable. Taylor--already mentioned as inferior to Hooker in one respect, however superior he may be in the splendour of his rhetoric--is again andstill more inferior to him in the parts that are not ornamental, in thepedestrian body of his controversy and exposition. As a merecontroversialist, Hooker, if not exactly a Hobbes or a Bentley, if not evena Chillingworth, is not likely to be spoken of without respect by those whounderstand what evidence means. If he sometimes seems to modern readers toassume his premisses, the conclusions follow much more rigidly than iscustomary with a good many of our later philosophers, who protest againstthe assumption of premisses; but having so protested neglect the ambiguityof terms, and leave their middles undistributed, and perpetrate illicitprocess with a gaiety of heart which is extremely edifying, or who fancythat they are building systems of philosophy when they are in realityconstructing dictionaries of terms. But his argument is of less concern tous here than the style in which he clothes it, and the merit of that isindisputable, as a brief extract will show. "As therefore man doth consist of different and distinct parts, every part endued with manifold abilities which all have their several ends and actions thereunto referred; so there is in this great variety of duties which belong to men that dependency and order by means whereof, the lower sustaining always the more excellent and the higher perfecting the more base, they are in their times and seasons continued with most exquisite correspondence. Labours of bodily and daily toil purchase freedom for actions of religious joy, which benefit these actions requite with the gift of desired rest--a thing most natural and fit to accompany the solemn festival duties of honour which are done to God. For if those principal works of God, the memory whereof we use to celebrate at such times, be but certain tastes and says, [18] as it were, of that final benefit wherein our perfect felicity and bliss lieth folded up, seeing that the presence of the one doth direct our cogitations, thoughts, and desires towards the other, it giveth surely a kind of life and addeth inwardly no small delight to those so comfortable anticipations, especially when the very outward countenance of that we presently do representeth, after a sort, that also whereunto we tend. As festival rest doth that celestial estate whereof the very heathens themselves, which had not the means whereby to apprehend much, did notwithstanding imagine that it must needs consist in rest, and have therefore taught that above the highest movable sphere there is no thing which feeleth alteration, motion, or change; but all things immutable, unsubject to passion, blest with eternal continuance in a life of the highest perfection, and of that complete abundant sufficiency within itself which no possibility of want, maim, or defect, can touch. " [18] "Assays. " Hooker's defects have been already admitted, and it has to be added to themthat he was necessarily destitute of much useful vocabulary which hissuccessors inherited or added, and that he had absolutely no model ofstyle. What he lacked was the audacity to be, not like Sidney more flowery, not like the contemporary pamphleteers more slangy, but more intelligentlyvernacular; to follow in the mould of his sentences the natural order ofEnglish speech rather than the conventional syntax of Latin, and toelaborate for himself a clause-architecture or order, so to speak, ofword-building, which should depend upon the inherent qualities of euphonyand rhythm possessed by English. It is, however, quite certain that nothingwas further from Hooker's thoughts than the composition of Englishliterature merely as English literature. He wanted to bring a certainsubject under the notice of readers of the vulgar tongue, and being beforeall things a scholar he could not help making a scholarly use of thattongue. The wonder is that, in his circumstances and with his purposes, with hardly any teachers, with not a great stock of verbal material, andwith little or no tradition of workmanship in the art, he should haveturned out such admirable work. It would be interesting to dwell on the prose of Fulke Greville, Sidney'sfriend, who long outlived him, and who anticipated not a little of thatmagnificence of the prose of his later contemporaries, beside which I haveventured to suggest that Sidney's own is sometimes but _rococo_. A placeought to be given to Richard Knolles, who deserves, if not the name of thefirst historian of England, certainly the credit of making, in his _Historyof the Turks_ (1604), a step from the loose miscellany of the chronicle tothe ordered structure of the true historic style. Some would plead forRichard Mulcaster, whose work on education and especially on the teachingof the English tongue in his _Positions_ and _First Part of the Elementary_(1582) is most intimately connected with our general subject. But there isno room for more than a mention of these, or for further dwelling on thetranslators already glanced at and others, the most important andinfluential of whom was John Florio, the Englisher (1603) of Montaigne. CHAPTER III THE FIRST DRAMATIC PERIOD It does not belong to the plan of this division of the present book totrace the earliest beginnings of the English theatre, or those intermediateperformances by which, in the reigns of the four first Tudors, the Mysteryand Morality passed into the Interlude. Even the two famous comedies of_Ralph Roister Doister_ and _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ stand as it were onlyat the threshold of our period in this chapter, and everything before themis shut out of it. On the other hand, we can take to be our province thewhole rise, flourishing, and decadence of the extraordinary product, knownsomewhat loosely as the Elizabethan drama. We shall in the present chapterdiscuss the two comedies or rather farces just mentioned, and notice on theone hand the rather amorphous production which, during the first thirtyyears of Elizabeth, represented the influence of a growing taste forpersonal and lively dramatic story on the somewhat arid soil of theMorality and Interlude, and, on the other, the abortive attempt tointroduce the regular Senecan tragedy--an attempt which almost immediatelybroke down and disappeared, whelmed in the abundance of chronicle-play andmelodrama. And finally we shall show how the two rival schools of theuniversity wits and the actor playwrights culminated, the first in Marlowe, the second in the earlier and but indistinctly and conjecturally known workof Shakespere. A second chapter will show us the triumph of theuntrammelled English play in tragedy and comedy, furnished by Marlowe withthe mighty line, but freed to a great extent from the bombast and theunreal scheme which he did not shake off. Side by side with Shakesperehimself we shall have to deal with the learned sock of Jonson, the proudfull style of Chapman, the unchastened and ill-directed vigour of Marston, the fresh and charming, if unkempt grace of Dekker, the best known and mostremarkable members of a crowd of unknown or half-known playwrights. A thirddivision will show us a slight gain on the whole in acting qualities, aconsiderable perfecting of form and scheme, but at the same time a certaindecline in the most purely poetical merits, redeemed and illustrated by theabundant genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Middleton, of Webster, ofMassinger, and of Ford. And the two latest of these will conduct us intothe fourth or period of decadence where, round the voluminous work andstill respectable fame of James Shirley, are grouped names like Brome, Glapthorne, Suckling, and others, whose writing, sometimes remarkable andeven brilliant, gradually loses not only dramatic but poetical merit, tillit drops into the formless plots, the unscannable verse, the coarsenessunredeemed by passion, the horrors unlit by any tragic force, whichdistinguish the last plays before the closing of the theatres, and reappearto some extent at a period beyond ours in the drama (soon to be radicallychanged in almost every possible characteristic) of the Restoration. Thefield of survey is vast, and despite the abundant labour which has beenbestowed upon it during the nineteenth century, it is still in a somewhatchaotic condition. The remarkable collection of old plays which we owe toMr. A. H. Bullen shows, by sample only and with no pretence of beingexhaustive, the amount of absolutely unknown matter which still exists. Thecollection and editing of texts has proceeded on the most widely differentprinciples, and with an almost complete absence of that intelligentpartition of labour which alone can reduce chaos to order in such a case. To give but one instance, there is actually no complete collection, thoughvarious attempts have been made at it, which gives, with or withoutsufficient editorial apparatus to supplement the canon, all the dramatic_adespota_ which have been at one time or another attributed to Shakespere. These at present the painful scholar can only get together in publicationsabounding in duplicates, edited on the most opposite principles, andequally troublesome either for library arrangement or for literaryreference. The editions of single authors have exhibited an equal absenceof method; one editor admitting doubtful plays or plays of part-authorshipwhich are easily accessible elsewhere, while another excludes those whichare difficult to be got at anywhere. It is impossible for any one who readsliterature as literature and not as a matter of idle crotchet, not toreflect that if either of the societies which, during the nineteenthcentury, have devoted themselves to the study of Shakespere and hiscontemporaries, had chosen to employ their funds on it, a complete Corpusof the drama between 1560 and 1660, edited with sufficient, but notsuperfluous critical apparatus on a uniform plan, and in a decent if not aluxurious form, might now be obtainable. Some forty or fifty volumes at theoutside on the scale of the "Globe" series, or of Messrs. Chatto's usefulreprints of Jonson, Chapman, and other dramatists, would probably containevery play of the slightest interest, even to a voracious student--whowould then have all his material under his hand. What time, expense, andtrouble are required to obtain, and that very imperfectly, any suchadvantage now, only those who have tried to do it know. Even Mr. Hazlitt'swelcome, if somewhat uncritical, reprint of Dodsley, long out of print, didnot boldly carry out its principle--though there are plans for improvingand supplementing it. Nevertheless, if the difficulties are great so are the rewards. It has beenthe deliberate opinion of many competent judges (neither unduly prejudicedin favour of English literature nor touched with that ignorance of otherliterature which is as fatal to judgment as actual prejudice) that in notime or country has the literary interest of a short and definite period ofproduction in one well-defined kind approached in value the interest of theElizabethan drama. Other periods and other countries may produce moreremarkable work of different kinds, or more uniformly accomplished, andmore technically excellent work in the same kind. But for originality, volume, generic resemblance of character, and individual independence oftrait, exuberance of inventive thought, and splendour of execution indetached passages--the Elizabethan drama from Sackville to Shirley standsalone in the history of the world. The absurd overestimate which hassometimes been made of its individual practitioners, the hyperbole of thelanguage which has been used to describe them, the puerile and almostinconceivable folly of some of their scholiasts and parasitic students, find a certain excuse in this truth--a truth which will only be contestedby those who have not taken the very considerable trouble necessary tomaster the facts, or who are precluded by a natural inability fromsavouring the _goût du terroir_ of this abundant and intoxicating wine. There are those who say that nobody but an enthusiast or a self-deceivercan read with real relish any Elizabethan dramatist but Shakespere, andthere are those who would have it that the incommunicable anduncommunicated charm of Shakespere is to be found in Nabbes and Davenport, in Glapthorne and Chettle. They are equally wrong, but the second class areat any rate in a more saving way of wrongness. Where Shakespere standsalone is not so much in his actual faculty of poetry as in his command ofthat faculty. Of the others, some, like Jonson, Fletcher, Massinger, hadthe art without the power; others, like Chapman, Dekker, Webster, hadflashes of the power without the art. But there is something in the wholecrew, jovial or saturnine, which is found nowhere else, and which, whetherin full splendour as in Shakespere, or in occasional glimmers as inTourneur or Rowley, is found in all, save those mere imitators andhangers-on who are peculiar to no period. This remarkable quality, however, does not show itself in the dramatic workof our present period until quite the close of it. It is true that theperiod opens (according to the traditional estimate which has not been muchaltered by recent studies) with three plays of very considerable character, and of no inconsiderable merit--the two comedies already named and thetragedy of _Gorboduc_, otherwise _Ferrex and Porrex_. _Ralph RoisterDoister_ was licensed and is thought to have been printed in 1566, but itmay have been acted at Eton by 1541, and the whole cast of the metre, language, and _scenario_, is of a colour older than Elizabeth's reign. Itmay be at least attributed to the middle of the century, and is the work ofNicholas Udall, a schoolmaster who has left at two great schools a reputefor indulgence in the older methods of instruction not inferior to Busby'sor Keate's. _Ralph Roister Doister_, though a fanciful estimate may see alittle cruelty of another kind in it, is of no austere or pedagogiccharacter. The author has borrowed not a little from the classicalcomedy--Plautine or even Aristophanic rather than Terentian--to strengthenand refine the domestic interlude or farce; and the result is certainlyamusing enough. The plot turns on the courtship of Dame Christian Custance[Constance], a widow of repute and wealth as well as beauty, by the gulland coxcomb, _Ralph Roister Doister_, whose suit is at once egged on andprivately crossed by the mischievous Matthew Merrygreek, who plays not onlyparasite but rook to the hero. Although Custance has not the slightestintention of accepting Ralph, and at last resorts to actual violence, assisted by her maids, to get rid of him and his followers, the affairnearly breeds a serious quarrel between herself and her plighted lover, Gawin Goodluck; but all ends merrily. The metre is the somewhat unformeddoggerel couplet of twelve syllables or thereabouts, with a strong cæsurain the middle, and is varied and terminated by songs from Custance's maidsand others. Indeed the chief charm of the piece is the genuine and unforcedmerriment which pervades it. Although Merrygreek's practices on Ralph'ssilliness sometimes tend a little to tediousness, the action on the wholemoves trippingly enough, and despite the strong flavour of the "stock part"in the characters they have considerable individuality. The play is, moreover, as a whole remarkably free from coarseness, and there is nodifficulty in finding an illustrative extract. _C. Custance loquitur. _ "O Lord! how necessary it is now o' days, That each body live uprightly all manner ways; For let never so little a gap be open, And be sure of this, the worst shall be spoken. How innocent stand I in this frame o' thought, And yet see what mistrust towards me it hath wrought. But thou, Lord, knowest all folks' thoughts and eke intents; And thou art the deliverer of all innocents. Thou didst keep the advoutress, [19] that she might be amended; Much more then keep, Lord, [20] that never sin intended. Thou didst keep Susanna, wrongfully accused, And no less dost thou see, Lord, how I am now abused. Thou didst keep Hester, when she should have died, Keep also, good Lord, that my truth may be tried. Yet, if Gawin Goodluck with Tristram Trusty speak, I trust of ill-report the force shall be but weak; And lo! yond they come talking sadly together: I will abide, and not shrink for their coming hither. " [19] Adulteress. [20] Understand "me. " Freedom from coarseness is more than can be predicated of the still morefamous _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, attributed to, and all but certainly knownto be, by John Still, afterwards bishop. The authorship, indeed, is notquite certain; and the curious reference in Martin Marprelate's _Epistle_(ed. Arber, p. 11) to "this trifle" as "shewing the author to have had somewit and invention in him" only disputes the claim of Dr. Bridges to thosequalities, and does not make any suggestion as to the identity of the morefavoured author. Still was the son of a Lincolnshire gentleman, is supposedto have been born about 1543, was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, and after a course of preferment through the positions of parish priest inLondon and at Hadleigh, Dean of Bocking, Canon of Westminster, Mastersuccessively of St. John's and Trinity, and Vice-Chancellor of his ownUniversity, was at the beginning of 1593 made Bishop of Bath and Wells, anoffice which he held for fifteen years. His play (taking it as his) was hisonly work of the kind, and was the first English play acted at eitheruniversity, though later he himself had to protest officially against theuse of the vernacular in a piece performed before the Queen. _GammerGurton's Needle_, as has been said, is, despite the subsequent history ofits author and the academic character of its appearance, of a much lowerorder of comedy than _Ralph Roister Doister_, though it is also morespontaneous, less imitative, and, in short, more original. The best thingabout it is the magnificent drinking song, "Back and Side go Bare, goBare, " one of the most spirited and genuine of all bacchanalian lyrics; butthe credit of this has sometimes been denied to Still. The metre of theplay itself is very similar to that of _Ralph Roister Doister_, though thelong swinging couplet has a tendency to lengthen itself still further, tothe value of fourteen or even sixteen syllables, the central cæsura beingalways well marked, as may be seen in the following:-- _Diccon. _ "Here will the sport begin, if these two once may meet, Their cheer, [I] durst lay money, will prove scarcely sweet. My gammer sure intends to be upon her bones, With staves, or with clubs, or else with cobble stones. Dame Chat on the other side, if she be far behind, I am right far deceived, she is given to it of kind. He that may tarry by it a while, and that but short, I warrant him trust to it, he shall see all the sport. Into the town will I, my friends to visit there, And hither straight again to see the end of this gear. In the meantime, fellows, pipe up your fiddles; I say, take them, And let your friends hear such mirth as ye can make them. " As for the story, it is of the simplest, turning merely on the losing ofher needle by Gammer Gurton as she was mending her man Hodge's breeches, onthe search for it by the household, on the tricks by which Diccon theBedlam (the clown or "vice" of the piece) induces a quarrel between Gammerand her neighbours, and on the final finding of the needle in the exactplace on which Gammer Gurton's industry had been employed. The action iseven better sustained and livelier than in Udall's play, and the swingingcouplets canter along very cheerfully with great freedom and fluency oflanguage. Unfortunately this language, whether in order to raise a laugh orto be in strict character with the personages, is anything but choice. There is (barring a possible double meaning or two) nothing of the kindgenerally known as licentious; it is the merely foul and dirty language ofcommon folk at all times, introduced, not with humorous extravagance in theRabelaisian fashion, but with literal realism. If there had been a littleless of this, the piece would have been much improved; but even as it is, it is a capital example of farce, just as _Ralph Roister Doister_ is of arather rudimentary kind of regular comedy. The strangeness of the contrast which these two plays offer when comparedwith the third is peculiar in English literature. Elsewhere it is commonenough. That tragedy should be stately, decorous, and on the whole somewhatuneventful as far as visible action goes, --comedy bustling, crammed withincident, and quite regardless of decorum, --might seem a law of nature tothe audience of Æschylus and Aristophanes, of Plautus and Pacuvius, even tothe audience of Molière and Racine. But the vast and final change, theinception of which we have here to record, has made tragedy, tragi-comedy, comedy, and farce pass into one another so gradually, and with so little ofa break in the English mind, that _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ and _Gorboduc_, though they were presented to the same audiences, and in all probabilitywritten within ten years of each other at furthest, seem to belong todifferent worlds of literature and society. The two comedies just noticedare framed upon no literary model at all as wholes, but simply upon themodel of human nature. _Gorboduc_ is framed, though not with absolutefidelity, on the model of the tragedies of Seneca, which had, during theearly years of the sixteenth century, mastered the attention of theliterary playwrights of Italy, France, and even to some extent Germany, andwhich determined for three hundred years, at any rate, the form of thetragedy of France. This model--which may be briefly described as the modelof Greek tragedy, still further pruned of action, with the chorusesretained, but estranged from their old close connection with the dialogue, and reduced to the level of elaborate lyrical moralisings, and with thetendency to such moralising in dialogue as well as in chorus largelyincreased--was introduced in England with hardly less advantage thanabroad. Sackville, one of the reputed authors of _Gorboduc_, was farsuperior to Jodelle, both as poet and as versifier, and the existence ofthe two universities in England gave a support, to which nothing in Francecorresponded, to the influence of learned writers. Indeed, till nearly theclose of our present period, the universities had the practical control ofliterary production. But the genius of the English nation would have noneof Seneca. It refused him when he was first introduced by Sackville andothers; it refused him once more when Daniel and the set of the Countess ofPembroke again attempted to introduce him; it refused him again and againin the later seventeenth century, when imitation, first of his earlierFrench followers, and then of the greater tragedy of Corneille and Racine(which was only the Senecan model strengthened and improved) was repeatedlytried by fine gentlemen and by needy hacks, by devotees of the unities, andby devotees of court fashion. I hardly know any other instance in literaryhistory of a similar resistance offered to a similar tide of literaryinfluence in Europe. We have little room here for fanciful comparisons, yetmight the dramatic events of 1560-1590 in England well seem a literarybattle of Tours, in which an English Charles Martel stemmed and turned backfor ever and ever the hitherto resistless march of a literary invader andspread of a literary heresy. To the modern reader _Gorboduc_ (part of which is attributed to ThomasNorton, and which was acted on 18th January 1561, published piratically in1565, and authoritatively under the title of _Ferrex and Porrex_ in 1571?)is scarcely inviting, but that is not a criterion of its attractiveness toits own contemporaries. Perhaps the most curious thing about it is theviolence done to the Horatian and Senecan theories, or rather the _naïf_outwitting of those theories, by an arrangement of dumb shows between theacts to satisfy the hunger for real action which the model refused tocountenance. All the rest is of the most painful regularity: and thescrupulosity with which each of the rival princes is provided with acounsellor and a parasite to himself, and the other parts are allotted withsimilar fairness, reaches such a point that it is rather surprising thatGorboduc was not provided with two queens--a good and a bad. Such action asthere is lies wholly in the mouths of messengers, and the speeches are ofexcessive length. But even these faults are perhaps less trying to themodern reader than the inchoate and unpolished condition of the metre inthe choruses, and indeed in the blank verse dialogue. Here and there, thereare signs of the stateliness and poetical imagery of the "Induction"; butfor the most part the decasyllables stop dead at their close and beginafresh at their beginning with a staccato movement and a dull monotony ofcadence which is inexpressibly tedious, as will be seen in the following:-- (_Videna soliloquises. _) "Why should I live and linger forth my time In longer life to double my distress? O me, most woeful wight, whom no mishap Long ere this day could have bereaved hence. Might not these hands, by fortune or by fate, Have pierc'd this breast, and life with iron reft? Or in this palace here where I so long Have spent my days, could not that happy hour Once, once have happ'd in which these hugy frames With death by fall might have oppressed me? Or should not this most hard and cruel soil, So oft where I have press'd my wretched steps, Some time had ruth of mine accursed life, To rend in twain and swallow me therein? So had my bones possessed now in peace Their happy grave within the closed ground, And greedy worms had gnawn this pined heart Without my feeling pain: so should not now This living breast remain the ruthful tomb Wherein my heart yielden to death is graved; Nor dreary thoughts, with pangs of pining grief, My doleful mind had not afflicted thus. " There is no blame due to Sackville in that he did not invent what no singleman invented, and what even in England, where only it has been originallyattained, took some thirty years of the genius of the nation workingthrough innumerable individual tentatives and failures to bring about. Buthe did not invent it; he did not even make any attempt to invent it; andhad this first English tragedy been generally followed, we should have beenfor an unknown period in the land of bondage, in the classical dungeonwhich so long retained the writers of a nation, certainly not, at the timeof the appearance of _Gorboduc_, of less literary promise than our own. In describing these tentatives and failures it will be impossible here toenter into any lengthened criticism of particular works. We shall have tocontent ourselves with a description of the general lines and groups, whichmay be said to be four in number: (1) The few unimportant and failingfollowers of Sackville; (2) The miscellaneous farce-and-interlude-writers, who, incult and formless as their work was, at least maintained theliterary tradition; (3) The important and most interesting group of"university wits" who, with Marlowe at their head, made the blank verseline for dramatic purposes, dismissed, cultivated as they were, thecultivation of classical models, and gave English tragedy its Magna Chartaof freedom and submission to the restrictions of actual life only, but whofailed, from this cause or that, to achieve perfect life-likeness; and (4)The actor-playwrights who, rising from very humble beginnings, butpossessing in their fellow Shakespere a champion unparalleled in ancientand modern times, borrowed the improvements of the University Wits, addedtheir own stage knowledge, and with Shakespere's aid achieved the masterdrama of the world. A very few lines will suffice for the first group, who are the merestliterary curiosities. Indeed the actual number of Senecan dramas in Englishis very small indeed, though there may possibly be some undiscovered in MS. The _Tancred and Gismund_ of Robert Wilmot (acted 1568, and of some merit), the _Cornelia_ of Garnier, translated by Kyd and printed in 1594, thecurious play called _The Misfortunes of Arthur_, acted before the Queen inthe Armada year, with "triumphs" partly devised by Francis Bacon, the twoplays of Samuel Daniel, and a very few others, complete the list; indeed_Cornelia_, _Cleopatra_, and _Philotas_ are almost the only three that keepreally close to the model. At a time of such unbounded respect for theclassics, and when Latin plays of the same stamp were constantly acted atthe universities, such a paucity of examples in English can only testify toa strong national distaste--an instinctive feeling that this would neverdo. The nondescript followings of morality and farce are infinitely morenumerous, and perhaps intrinsically more interesting; but they can hardlybe said to be, except in bulk, of much greater importance. Their realinterest to the reader as he turns them over in the first seven or eightvolumes of Dodsley, or in the rarer single editions where they occur, isagain an interest of curiosity--a desire to trace the various shiftings andturnings of the mighty but unorganised genius which was soon to find itsway. Next to the difficulty of inventing a conveniently plastic form seemsto have been the difficulty of inventing a suitable verse. For some timethe swinging or lumbering doggerel in which a tolerably good rhyme isreached by a kind of scramble through four or five feet, which are mostlike a very shuffling anapæst--the verse which appears in the comedies ofUdall and Still--held its ground. We have it in the morality of the _NewCustom_, printed in 1573, but no doubt written earlier, in the Interludeof _The Trial of Treasure_, in the farcical comedy of _Like Will to Like_, a coarse but lively piece, by Ulpian Fulwell (1568). In the very curioustragi-comedy of _Cambyses_ this doggerel appears partly, but is alternatedwith the less lawless but scarcely more suitable "fourteener" (divided ornot as usual, according to printer's exigencies) which, as was shown in thelast chapter, for a time almost monopolised the attention of English poets. The same mixture appears to some extent, though the doggerel occupies themain text, in the _Damon and Pythias_ of Richard Edwards, the editor of_The Paradise of Dainty Devices_. In _Appius and Virginia_ (a decidedlyinteresting play) the fourteener on the contrary is the staple verse, thedoggerel being only occasional. Something the same may be said of a verylate morality, _The Conflict of Conscience_. Both doggerel and fourteenersappear in the quaint productions called _Three Ladies of London_, etc. ; butby this time the decasyllable began to appear with them and to edge themout. They died hard, however, thoroughly ill-fitted as they were fordramatic use, and, as readers of _Love's Labour Lost_ know, survived evenin the early plays of Shakespere. Nor were the characters and minor detailsgenerally of this group less disorderly and inadequate than the generalschemes or the versification. Here we have the abstractions of the oldMorality; there the farcical gossip of the _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ class;elsewhere the pale and dignified personages of _Gorboduc_: all three beingoften jumbled together all in one play. In the lighter parts there aresometimes fair touches of low comedy; in the graver occasionally, thoughmuch more rarely, a touching or dignified phrase or two. But the plays aswholes are like Ovid's first-fruits of the deluge--nondescripts incapableof life, and good for no useful or ornamental purpose. It is at this moment that the cleavage takes place. And when I say "thismoment, " I am perfectly conscious that the exact moment in dates and yearscannot be defined. Not a little harm has been done to the history ofEnglish literature by the confusion of times in which some of itshistorians have pleased themselves. But even greater harm might be done ifone were to insist on an exact chronology for the efflorescence of thereally poetical era of Elizabethan literature, if the blossoming of thealoe were to be tied down to hour and day. All that we can say is that incertain publications, in certain passages even of the same publication, wefind the old respectable plodding, the old blind tentative experiment inpoetry and drama: and then without warning--without, as it seems, anypossible opportunity of distinguishing chronologically--we find theunmistakable marks of the new wine, of the unapproachable poetry proper, which all criticism, all rationalisation can only indicate and not accountfor. We have hardly left (if we take their counterparts later we have notleft) the wooden verse of _Gorboduc_, the childish rusticity of _Like Willto Like_, when suddenly we stumble on the bower-- "Seated in hearing of a hundred streams"-- of George Peele, on the myriad graceful fancies of Lyly, on the exquisitesnatches of Greene, on the verses, to this day the high-water mark ofpoetry, in which Marlowe speaks of the inexpressible beauty which is theobject and the despair of the poet. This is wonderful enough. But what ismore wonderful is, that these lightning flashes are as evanescent aslightning. Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe himself, in probably the very nextpassages, certainly in passages not very remote, tell us that this is allmatter of chance, that they are all capable of sinking below the level ofSackville at his even conceivably worst, close to the level of Edwards, andthe various anonymous or half-anonymous writers of the dramaticmiscellanies just noted. And then beyond these unequal wits arises thefigure of Shakespere; and the greatest work of all literature swims slowlyinto our ken. There has been as yet no history of this unique phenomenonworthy of it: I have not the least pretension to supply one that shall beworthy. But at least the uniqueness of it shall here have due celebration. The age of Pericles, the age of Augustus, the age of Dante, had no suchcurious ushering-in unless time has dealt exceptional injustice to theforerunners of all of them. We do not, in the period which comes nearest intime and nature to this, see anything of the same kind in the middle spacebetween Villon and Ronsard, between Agrippa d'Aubigné and Corneille. Hereif anywhere is the concentrated spirit of a nation, the thrice-decoctedblood of a people, forcing itself into literary expression through mediumsmore and more worthy of it. If ever the historical method was justified (asit always is), now is its greatest justification as we watch the gradualimprovements, the decade-by-decade, almost year-by-year acquisitions, whichlead from Sackville to Shakespere. The rising sap showed itself in two very different ways, in two branches ofthe national tree. In the first place, we have the group of UniversityWits, the strenuous if not always wise band of professed men of letters, atthe head of whom are Lyly, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Lodge, Nash, andprobably (for his connection with the universities is not certainly known)Kyd. In the second, we have the irregular band of outsiders, players andothers, who felt themselves forced into literary and principally dramaticcomposition, who boast Shakespere as their chief, and who can claim asseconds to him not merely the imperfect talents of Chettle, Munday, andothers whom we may mention in this chapter, but many of the perfectedornaments of a later time. It may be accident or it may not, but the beginning of this period iscertainly due to the "university wits. " Lyly stands a good deal apart fromthem personally, despite his close literary connection. We have no kind ofevidence which even shows that he was personally acquainted with any one ofthe others. Of Kyd, till Mr. Boas's recent researches, we knew next tonothing, and we still know very little save that he was at MerchantTaylors' School and was busy with plays famous in their day. But the otherfive were closely connected in life, and in their deaths they were hardlydivided. Lodge only of the five seems to have freed himself, partly invirtue of a regular profession, and partly in consequence of his adherenceto the Roman faith, from the Bohemianism which has tempted men of lettersat all times, and which was especially dangerous in a time of suchunlimited adventure, such loose public morals, and such unco-ordinatedsociety as the Elizabethan era. Whatever details we have of their lives(and they are mostly very meagre and uncertain) convey the idea of timesout of joint or not yet in joint. The atheism of Marlowe rests on no proofwhatever, though it has got him friends in this later time. I am myself byno means sure that Greene's supposed debauchery is not, to a great extent, "copy. " The majority of the too celebrated "jests" attributed to GeorgePeele are directly traceable to Villon's _Repues Franches_ and similarcompilations, and have a suspiciously mythical and traditional air to thestudent of literary history. There is something a little more trustworthilyautobiographical about Nash. But on the whole, though we need not doubtthat these ancestors of all modern Englishmen who live by the gray goosequill tasted the inconveniences of the profession, especially at a timewhen it was barely constituted even as a vocation or employment (to quotethe Income Tax Papers), we must carefully avoid taking too gloomy a view oftheir life. It was usually short, it was probably merry, but we know verylittle else about it. The chief direct documents, the remarkable pamphletswhich some of them have left, will be dealt with hereafter. Here we arebusied only with their dates and their dramatic work, which was in no case(except perhaps in that of Kyd) their sole known work, but which in everycase except those of Nash and perhaps Greene was their most remarkable. In noticing _Euphues_ an account has already been given of Lyly's life, orrather of the very scanty particulars which are known of it. His plays dateconsiderably later than _Euphues_. But they all bear the character of thecourtier about them; and both in this characteristic and in the absence ofany details in the gossipping literature of the time to connect him withthe Bohemian society of the playhouse, the distinction which separates Lylyfrom the group of "university wits" is noteworthy. He lost as well asgained by the separation. All his plays were acted "by the children ofPaul's before her Majesty, " and not by the usual companies before Dick, Tom, and Harry. The exact date and order of their writing is veryuncertain, and in one case at least, that of _The Woman in the Moon_, weknow that the order was exactly reversed in publication: this being thelast printed in Lyly's lifetime, and expressly described as the firstwritten. His other dramatic works are _Campaspe_, _Sappho and Phaon_, _Endymion_, _Galathea_, _Midas_, _Mother Bombie_, and _Love'sMetamorphosis_; another, _The Maid's Metamorphosis_, which has beenattributed to him, is in all probability not his. The peculiar circumstances of the production of Lyly's plays, and thestrong or at any rate decided individuality of the author, keep them in adivision almost to themselves. The mythological or pastoral character oftheir subject in most cases might not of itself have prevented theirmarking an advance in the dramatic composition of English playwrights. _AMidsummer Night's Dream_ and much other work of Shakespere's show how farfrom necessary it is that theme, or class of subject, should affect meritof presentment. But Lyly's work generally has more of the masque than theplay. It sometimes includes charming lyrics, such as the famous _Campaspe_song and others. But most of it is in prose, and it gave beyonddoubt--though Gascoigne had, as we have seen, set the example in drama--nosmall impetus to the use and perfectioning of that medium. For Lyly'sdramatic prose, though sometimes showing the same faults, is often betterthan _Euphues_, as here:-- _End. _ "O fair Cynthia, why do others term thee unconstant, whom I have ever found immovable? Injurious time, corrupt manners, unkind men, who finding a constancy not to be matched in my sweet mistress, have christened her with the name of wavering, waxing, and waning. Is she inconstant that keepeth a settled course, which since her first creation altereth not one minute in her moving? There is nothing thought more admirable, or commendable in the sea, than the ebbing and flowing; and shall the moon, from whom the sea taketh this virtue, be accounted fickle for increasing and decreasing? Flowers in their buds are nothing worth till they be blown; nor blossoms accounted till they be ripe fruit; and shall we then say they be changeable, for that they grow from seeds to leaves, from leaves to buds, from buds to their perfection? then, why be not twigs that become trees, children that become men, and mornings that grow to evenings, termed wavering, for that they continue not at one stay? Ay, but Cynthia being in her fulness decayeth, as not delighting in her greatest beauty, or withering when she should be most honoured. When malice cannot object anything, folly will; making that a vice which is the greatest virtue. What thing (my mistress excepted) being in the pride of her beauty, and latter minute of her age, that waxeth young again? Tell me, Eumenides, what is he that having a mistress of ripe years, and infinite virtues, great honours, and unspeakable beauty, but would wish that she might grow tender again? getting youth by years, and never-decaying beauty by time; whose fair face, neither the summer's blaze can scorch, nor winter's blast chap, nor the numbering of years breed altering of colours. Such is my sweet Cynthia, whom time cannot touch, because she is divine, nor will offend because she is delicate. O Cynthia, if thou shouldest always continue at thy fulness, both gods and men would conspire to ravish thee. But thou, to abate the pride of our affections, dost detract from thy perfections; thinking it sufficient if once in a month we enjoy a glimpse of thy majesty; and then, to increase our griefs, thou dost decrease thy gleams; coming out of thy royal robes, wherewith thou dazzlest our eyes, down into thy swath clouts, beguiling our eyes; and then----" In these plays there are excellent phrases and even striking scenes. Butthey are not in the true sense dramatic, and are constantly spoilt byLyly's strange weakness for conceited style. Everybody speaks inantitheses, and the intolerable fancy similes, drawn from a kind ofimaginary natural history, are sometimes as prominent as in _Euphues_itself. Lyly's theatre represents, in short, a mere backwater in thegeneral stream of dramatic progress, though not a few allusions in othermen's work show us that it attracted no small attention. With Nash alone, of the University Wits proper, was Lyly connected, and this onlyproblematically. He was an Oxford man, and most of them were of Cambridge;he was a courtier; if a badly-paid one, and they all lived by their wits;and, if we may judge by the very few documents remaining, he was notinclined to be hail-fellow-well-met with anybody, while they were all bornBohemians. Yet none of them had a greater influence on Shakespere thanLyly, though it was anything but a beneficial influence, and for this aswell as for the originality of his production he deserves notice, even hadthe intrinsic merit of his work been less than it is. But, in fact, it isvery great, being almost a typical production of talent helped byknowledge, but not mastered by positive genius, or directed in its way bythe precedent work of others. In the work of the University Wits proper--Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Lodge, Nash, and Kyd, the last of whom, it must again be said, is not certainlyknown to have belonged to either university, though the probabilities areall in favour of that hypothesis--a very different kind of work is found. It is always faulty, as a whole, for even _Dr. Faustus_ and _Edward II. _, despite their magnificent poetry and the vast capabilities of their form, could only be called good plays or good compositions as any kind of wholeby a critic who had entirely lost the sense of proportion. But in the wholegroup, and especially in the dramatic work of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, andKyd (for that of Lodge and Nash is small in amount and comparativelyunimportant in manner), the presence, the throes of a new dramatic styleare evident. Faults and beauties are more or less common to the wholequartet. In all we find the many-sided activity of the Shakesperian dramaas it was to be, sprawling and struggling in a kind of swaddling clothes ofwhich it cannot get rid, and which hamper and cripple its movements. In allthere is present a most extraordinary and unique rant and bombast ofexpression which reminds one of the shrieks and yells of a band of healthyboys just let out to play. The passages which (thanks chiefly to Pistol'sincomparable quotations and parodies of them) are known to every one, the"Pampered jades of Asia, " the "Have we not Hiren here, " the "Feed and growfat, my fair Callipolis, " the other quips and cranks of mine ancient arescattered broadcast in their originals, and are evidently meant quiteseriously throughout the work of these poets. Side by side with this maniafor bombast is another mania, much more clearly traceable to education andassociations, but specially odd in connection with what has just beennoticed. This is the foible of classical allusion. The heathen gods andgoddesses, the localities of Greek and Roman poetry, even the moreout-of-the-way commonplaces of classical literature, are put in the mouthsof all the characters without the remotest attempt to consider propriety orrelevance. Even in still lesser peculiarities the blemishes are uniform andconstant--such as the curious and childish habit of making speakers speakof themselves in the third person, and by their names, instead of using "I"and "me. " And on the other hand, the merits, though less evenly distributedin degree, are equally constant in kind. In Kyd, in Greene still more, inPeele more still, in Marlowe most of all, phrases and passages of blindingand dazzling poetry flash out of the midst of the bombast and the tedium. Many of these are known, by the hundred books of extract which havefollowed Lamb's _Specimens_, to all readers. Such, for instance, is the "See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament" of Marlowe, and his even more magnificent passage beginning "If all the pens that ever poets held;" such Peele's exquisite bower, "Seated in hearing of a hundred streams, " which is, with all respect to Charles Lamb, to be paralleled by a score ofother jewels from the reckless work of "George Pyeboard": such Greene's "Why thinks King Henry's son that Margaret's love Hangs in the uncertain balance of proud time?" such even Kyd's "There is a path upon your left hand side That leadeth from a guilty conscience Unto a forest of distrust and fear. " But the whole point of the thing is that these flashes, which are not to befound at all before the date of this university school, are to be foundconstantly in its productions, and that, amorphous, inartistic, incompleteas those productions are, they still show _Hamlet_ and _A Midsummer Night'sDream_ in embryo. Whereas the greatest expert in literary embryology mayread _Gorboduc_ and _The Misfortunes of Arthur_ through without discerningthe slightest signs of what was coming. Nash and Lodge are so little dramatists (the chief, if not only play of theformer being the shapeless and rather dull comedy, _Will Summer'sTestament_, relieved only by some lyrics of merit which are probably notNash's, while Lodge's _Marius and Sylla_, while it wants the extravagance, wants also the beauty of its author's companions' work), that what has tobe said about them will be better said later in dealing with their otherbooks. Greene's prose pieces and his occasional poems are, no doubt, betterthan his drama, but the latter is considerable, and was probably hisearliest work. Kyd has left nothing, and Peele little, but drama; whilebeautiful as Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ is, I do not quite understand howany one can prefer it to the faultier but far more original dramas of itsauthor. We shall therefore deal with these four individually here. The eldest of the four was George Peele, variously described as a Londonerand a Devonshire man, who was probably born about 1558. He was educated atChrist's Hospital (of which his father was "clerk") and at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, and had some credit in the university as anarranger of pageants, etc. He is supposed to have left Oxford for Londonabout 1581, and had the credit of living a Bohemian, not to saydisreputable, life for about seventeen years; his death in 1597(?) beingnot more creditable than his life. But even the scandals about Peele aremuch more shadowy than those about Marlowe and Greene. His dramatic workconsists of some half-dozen plays, the earliest of which is _TheArraignment of Paris_, 1581(?), one of the most elaborate and barefaced ofthe many contemporary flatteries of Elizabeth, but containing someexquisite verse. In the same way Peele has been accused of having in_Edward I. _ adopted or perhaps even invented the basest and most groundlessscandals against the noble and stainless memory of Eleanor of Castile;while in his _Battle of Alcazar_ he certainly gratifies to the utmost thepopular anti-Spanish and anti-Popish feeling. So angry have critics beenwith Peele's outrage on Eleanor, that some of them have declared that nonebut he could have been guilty of the not dissimilar slur cast on Joan ofArc's character in _Henry VI. _, the three parts of which it has been thegood pleasure of Shakesperian commentators to cut and carve between theUniversity Wits _ad libitum_. I cannot myself help thinking that all thishas arisen very much from the idea of Peele's vagabondism given by theuntrustworthy "Jests. " The slander on Queen Eleanor was pretty certainlysupplied to him by an older ballad. There is little or nothing else inPeele's undoubted writings which is at all discreditable. His miscellaneouspoems show a man by no means given to low company or low thoughts, and onegifted with the truest poetic vein; while his dramas, besides exhibiting agreater command over blank verse than any of his predecessors and than anyexcept Marlowe of his contemporaries can claim, are full of charmingpassages. _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_, which has been denied to him--aninteresting play on the rare basis of the old romance--is written not inblank verse but in the fourteener. The _Old Wives' Tale_ pretty certainlyfurnished Milton with the subject of Comus, and this is its chief merit. _Edward I. _ and _The Battle of Alcazar_, but especially the latter, containabundance of the hectoring rant which has been marked as one of thecharacteristics of the school, and which is half-excused by the sparks ofvalour that often break from its smoke and clatter. But Peele wouldundoubtedly stand higher, though he might not be so interesting a literaryfigure, if we had nothing of his save _The Arraignment of Paris_ and _Davidand Bethsabe_. _The Arraignment_ (written in various metres, but mainly ina musical and varied heroic couplet), is partly a pastoral, partly amasque, and wholly a Court play. It thus comes nearest to Lyly, but isaltogether a more dramatic, livelier, and less conceited performance thananything by the author of _Euphues_. As for _David and Bethsabe_, it iscrammed with beauties, and Lamb's curiously faint praise of it has alwaysbeen a puzzle to me. As Marlowe's are the mightiest, so are Peele's thesoftest, lines in the drama before Shakespere; while the spirit and humour, which the author also had in plenty, save his work from the merely cloyingsweetness of some contemporary writers. Two of his interposed or occasionallyrics will be given later: a blank verse passage may find room here:-- _Bethsabe. _ "Come, gentle Zephyr, trick'd with those perfumes That erst in Eden sweeten'd Adam's love, And stroke my bosom with thy silken fan: This shade, sun-proof, [21] is yet no proof for thee; Thy body, smoother than this waveless spring, And purer than the substance of the same, Can creep through that his lances cannot pierce: Thou, and thy sister, soft and sacred Air, Goddess of life, and governess of health, Keep every fountain fresh and arbour sweet; No brazen gate her passage can repulse, Nor bushy thicket bar thy subtle breath: Then deck thee with thy loose delightsome robes, And on thy wings bring delicate perfumes, To play the wanton with us through the leaves. " [21] Cf. Milton's "elms star-proof" in the _Arcades_. Milton evidently knewPeele well. Robert Greene, probably, if not certainly, the next in age of the group toPeele, was born in 1560, the son of apparently well-to-do parents atNorwich, and was educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge, where he took hisMaster's degree in 1553. He was subsequently incorporated at Oxford, andbeing by no means ill-inclined to make the most of himself, sometimes tookthe style of a member "Utriusque Academiæ. " After leaving the universityhe seems to have made a long tour on the Continent, not (according to hisown account) at all to the advantage of his morals or means. He is said tohave actually taken orders, and held a living for some short time, while heperhaps also studied if he did not practise medicine. He married a lady ofvirtue and some fortune, but soon despoiled and deserted her, and for thelast six years of his life never saw her. At last in 1592, aged only twoand thirty, --but after about ten years it would seem of reckless living andhasty literary production, --he died (of a disease caused or aggravated by adebauch on pickled herrings and Rhenish) so miserably poor that he had totrust to his injured wife's forgiveness for payment of the money to theextent of which a charitable landlord and landlady had trusted him. Thefacts of this lamentable end may have been spitefully distorted by GabrielHarvey in his quarrel with Nash; but there is little reason to doubt thatthe received story is in the main correct. Of the remarkable prosepamphlets which form the bulk of Greene's work we speak elsewhere, as alsoof the pretty songs (considerably exceeding in poetical merit anything tobe found in the body of his plays) with which both pamphlets and plays arediversified. His actual dramatic production is not inconsiderable: aworking-up of the _Orlando Furioso_; _A Looking Glass for London andEngland_ (Nineveh) with Lodge; _James IV. _ (of Scotland), a wildlyunhistorical romance; _Alphonsus, King of Arragon_; and perhaps _The Pinnerof Wakefield_, which deals with his own part namesake George-a-Greene; notimpossibly also the pseudo-Shakesperian _Fair Em_. His best play withoutdoubt is _The History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, in which, after afavourite fashion of the time, he mingles a certain amount of history, or, at least, a certain number of historical personages, with a plentiful doseof the supernatural and of horseplay, and with a very graceful andprettily-handled love story. With a few touches from the master's hand, Margaret, the fair maid of Fressingfield, might serve as handmaid toShakespere's women, and is certainly by far the most human heroineproduced by any of Greene's own group. There is less rant in Greene (thoughthere is still plenty of it) than in any of his friends, and his fancy forsoft female characters, loving, and yet virtuous, appears frequently. Buthis power is ill-sustained, as the following extract will show:-- _Margaret. _ "Ah, father, when the harmony of heaven Soundeth the measures of a lively faith, The vain illusions of this flattering world Seem odious to the thoughts of Margaret. I lovèd once, --Lord Lacy was my love; And now I hate myself for that I loved, And doted more on him than on my God, -- For this I scourge myself with sharp repents. But now the touch of such aspiring sins Tells me all love is lust but love of heaven; That beauty used for love is vanity: The world contains naught but alluring baits, Pride, flattery [ ], and inconstant thoughts. To shun the pricks of death I leave the world, And vow to meditate on heavenly bliss, To live in Framlingham a holy nun, Holy and pure in conscience and in deed; And for to wish all maids to learn of me To seek heaven's joy before earth's vanity. " We do not know anything of Thomas Kyd's, except _The Spanish Tragedy_, which is a second part of an extremely popular play (sometimes attributedto Kyd himself, but probably earlier) called _Jeronimo_, and thetranslation of _Cornelia_, though others are doubtfully attributed. Thewell-known epithet of Jonson, "sporting" Kyd, seems to have been either amere play on the poet's name, or else _a lucus a non lucendo_; for both_Jeronimo_ and its sequel are in the ghastliest and bloodiest vein oftragedy, and _Cornelia_ is a model of stately dullness. The two "Jeronimo"or "Hieronimo" plays were, as has been said, extremely popular, and it ispositively known that Jonson himself, and probably others, were employedfrom time to time to freshen them up; with the consequence that the exactauthorship of particular passages is somewhat problematical. Both plays, however, display, nearly in perfection, the rant, not always quiteridiculous, but always extravagant, from which Shakespere rescued thestage; though, as the following extract will show, this rant is by no meansalways, or indeed often, smoke without fire:-- "O! forbear, For other talk for us far fitter were. But if you be importunate to know The way to him, and where to find him out, Then list to me, and I'll resolve your doubt. There is a path upon your left hand side, That leadeth from a guilty conscience Unto a forest of distrust and fear-- A darksome place and dangerous to pass. There shall you meet with melancholy thoughts Whose baleful humours if you but uphold, It will conduct you to despair and death. Whose rocky cliffs when you have once beheld Within a hugy dale of lasting night-- That, kindled with the world's iniquities, Doth cast up filthy and detested fumes-- Not far from thence, where murderers have built An habitation for their cursed souls, There is a brazen cauldron fixed by Jove In his fell wrath upon a sulphur flame. Yourselves shall find Lorenzo bathing him In boiling lead and blood of innocents. " But nothing, except citation of whole scenes and acts, could show theextraordinary jumble of ghosts, blood, thunder, treachery, and horrors ofall sorts which these plays contain. Now for a very different citation:-- "If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And every sweetness that inspir'd their hearts, Their minds, and muses, on admired themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they 'still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein as in a mirror we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit; If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least Which into words no virtue can digest. " It is no wonder that the whole school has been dwarfed in the generalestimation, since its work was critically considered and isolated fromother work, by the towering excellence of this author. Little as is knownof all the band, that little becomes almost least in regard to their chiefand leader. Born (1564) at Canterbury, the son of a shoemaker, he waseducated at the Grammar School of that city, and at Benet (afterwardsCorpus) College, Cambridge; he plunged into literary work and dissipationin London; and he outlived Greene only to fall a victim to debauchery in astill more tragical way. His death (1593) was the subject of much gossip, but the most probable account is that he was poniarded in self-defence by acertain Francis Archer, a serving-man (not by any means necessarily, asCharles Kingsley has it, a footman), while drinking at Deptford, and thatthe cause of the quarrel was a woman of light character. He has also beenaccused of gross vices not to be particularised, and of atheism. Theaccusation is certain; and Mr. Boas's researches as to Kyd, who was alsoconcerned in the matter, have thrown some light on it; but much is stillobscure. The most offensive charges were due to one Bame or Baines, who wasafterwards hanged at Tyburn. That Marlowe was a Bohemian in the fullestsense is certain; that he was anything worse there is no evidence whatever. He certainly was acquainted with Raleigh and other distinguished persons, and was highly spoken of by Chapman and others. But the interest of Marlowe's name has nothing to do with these obscurescandals of three hundred years ago, though it may be difficult to passthem over entirely. He is the undoubted author of some of the masterpiecesof English verse; the hardly to be doubted author of others not muchinferior. Except the very greatest names--Shakespere, Milton, Spenser, Dryden, Shelley--no author can be named who has produced, when the properhistorical estimate is applied to him, such work as is to be found in_Tamburlaine_, _Doctor Faustus_, _The Jew of Malta_, _Edward the Second_, in one department; _Hero and Leander_ and the _Passionate Shepherd_ inanother. I have but very little doubt that the powerful, if formless, playof _Lust's Dominion_ is Marlowe's, though it may have been rewritten, andthe translations of Lucan and Ovid and the minor work which is more or lessprobably attributed to him, swell his tale. Prose he did not write, perhapscould not have written. For the one characteristic lacking to his geniuswas measure, and prose without measure, as numerous examples have shown, isusually rubbish. Even his dramas show a singular defect in thearchitectural quality of literary genius. The vast and formless creationsof the writer's boundless fancy completely master him; his aspirationsafter the immense too frequently leave him content with the simplyunmeasured. In his best play as a play, _Edward the Second_, thelimitations of a historical story impose something like a restraining formon his glowing imagination. But fine as this play is, it is noteworthy thatno one of his greatest things occurs in it. _The Massacre at Paris_, wherehe also has the confinement of reality after a fashion, is a chaotic thingas a whole, without any great beauty in parts. _The Tragedy of Dido_ (to bedivided between him and Nash) is the worst thing he ever did. But in thepurely romantic subjects of _Tamburlaine_, _Faustus_, and _The Jew ofMalta_, his genius, untrammelled by any limits of story, showed itselfequally unable to contrive such limits for itself, and able to develop themost marvellous beauties of detail. Shakespere himself has not surpassed, which is equivalent to saying that no other writer has equalled, the famousand wonderful passages in _Tamburlaine_ and _Faustus_, which are familiarto every student of English literature as examples of the _ne plus ultra_of the poetic powers, not of the language but of language. The tragicimagination in its wildest flights has never summoned up images of pityand terror more imposing, more moving, than those excited by _The Jew ofMalta_. The riot of passion and of delight in the beauty of colour and formwhich characterises his version of _Hero and Leander_ has never beenapproached by any writer. But Marlowe, with the fullest command of the_apeiron_, had not, and, as far as I can judge, never would have had, anypower of introducing into it the law of the _peras_. It is usual to saythat had he lived, and had his lot been happily cast, we should have hadtwo Shakesperes. This is not wise. In the first place, Marlowe was totallydestitute of humour--the characteristic which, united with his tragic andimaginative powers, makes Shakespere as, in a less degree, it makes Homer, and even, though the humour is grim and intermittent, Dante. In otherwords, he was absolutely destitute of the first requisite ofself-criticism. In the natural course of things, as the sap of his youthfulimagination ceased to mount, and as his craving for immensity hardeneditself, he would probably have degenerated from bombast shot through withgenius to bombast pure and simple, from _Faustus_ to _Lust's Dominion_, andfrom _Lust's Dominion_ to _Jeronimo_ or _The Distracted Emperor_. Apartfrom the magnificent passages which he can show, and which are simplyintoxicating to any lover of poetry, his great title to fame is thediscovery of the secret of that "mighty line" which a seldom-erring criticof his own day, not too generously given, vouchsafed to him. Up to his timethe blank verse line always, and the semi-couplet in heroics, or member ofthe more complicated stanza usually, were either stiff or nerveless. Compared with his own work and with the work of his contemporaries andfollowers who learnt from him, they are like a dried preparation, likesomething waiting for the infusion of blood, for the inflation of livingbreath. Marlowe came, and the old wooden versification, the old lay-figurestructure of poetic rhythm, was cast once for all into the lumber-room, where only poetasters of the lowest rank went to seek it. It is impossibleto call Marlowe a great dramatist, and the attempts that have been made tomake him out to be such remind one of the attempts that have been made tocall Molière a great poet. Marlowe was one of the greatest poets of theworld whose work was cast by accident and caprice into an imperfect mouldof drama; Molière was one of the greatest dramatists of the world who wasobliged by fashion to use a previously perfected form of verse. The stateof Molière was undoubtedly the more gracious; but the splendour ofMarlowe's uncut diamonds of poetry is the more wonderful. The characteristics of this strange and interesting school may be summed upbriefly, but are of the highest importance in literary history. Unliketheir nearest analogues, the French romantics of the 1830 type, they wereall of academic education, and had even a decided contempt (despite theirBohemian way of life) for unscholarly innovators. They manifested (exceptin Marlowe's fortuitous and purely genial discovery of the secret of blankverse) a certain contempt for form, and never, at least in drama, succeededin mastering it. But being all, more or less, men of genius, and having thekeenest sense of poetry, they supplied the dry bones of the precedentdramatic model with blood and breath, with vigour and variety, which notmerely informed but transformed it. _David and Bethsabe_, _Doctor Faustus_, _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, are chaotic enough, but they are of thechaos that precedes cosmic development. The almost insane bombast thatmarks the whole school has (as has been noticed) the character of theshrieks and gesticulations of healthy childhood, and the insensibility tothe really comic which also marks them is of a similar kind. Every oneknows how natural it is to childhood to appreciate bad jokes, how seldom achild sees a good one. Marlowe and his crew, too (the comparison has nodoubt often been used before), were of the brood of Otus and Ephialtes, whogrew so rapidly and in so disorderly a fashion that it was necessary forthe gods to make an end of them. The universe probably lost little, and itcertainly gained something. Side by side with this learned, extravagant, gifted, ill-regulated school, there was slowly growing up a very different one, which was to inherit allthe gifts of the University Wits, and to add to them the gifts of measureand proportion. The early work of the actor school of English dramatists isa difficult subject to treat in any fashion, and a particularly difficultsubject to treat shortly. Chronology, an important aid, helps us not verymuch, though such help as she does give has been as a rule neglected byhistorians, so that plays before 1590 (which may be taken roughly as thedividing date), and plays after it have been muddled up ruthlessly. We donot know the exact dates of many of those which are (many of the plays ofthe earlier time are not) extant; and of those which are extant, and ofwhich the dates are more or less known, the authors are in not a few mostimportant cases absolutely undiscoverable. Yet in the plays which belong tothis period, and which there is no reason to attribute wholly to any of theMarlowe group, or much reason to attribute to them under the guidance, orperhaps with the collaboration of practical actors (some at least of whomwere like Shakespere himself, men of no known regular education), there arecharacteristics which promise at least as well for the future as thewonderful poetic outbursts of the Marlowe school itself. Of these outburstswe find few in this other division. But we find a growing knowledge of whata play is, as distinguished from a series of tableaux acted by not toolifelike characters. We find a glimmering (which is hardly anywhere to beseen in the more literary work of the other school) of the truth that thecharacters must be made to work out the play, and not the play be writtenin a series of disjointed scenes to display, in anything but a successfulfashion, the characters. With fewer flights we have fewer absurdities; withless genius we have more talent. It must be remembered, of course, that theplays of the university school itself were always written for players, andthat some of the authors had more or less to do with acting as well as withwriting. But the flame of discord which burns so fiercely on the one sidein the famous real or supposed dying utterances of Greene, and which yearsafterwards breaks out on the other in the equally famous satire of _TheReturn from Parnassus_, [22] illuminates a real difference--a differencewhich study of the remains of the literature of the period can only makeplainer. The same difference has manifested itself again, and more thanonce in other departments of literature, but hardly in so interesting amanner, and certainly not with such striking results. [22] The outburst of Greene about "the only Shakescene, " the "upstart crowbeautified with our feathers, " and so forth, is too well known to needextracting here. _The Return from Parnassus_, a very curious tripartiteplay, performed 1597-1601 but retrospective in tone, is devoted to thetroubles of poor scholars in getting a livelihood, and incidentally givesmuch matter on the authors of the time from Shakespere downward, and on thejealousy of professional actors felt by scholars, and _vice versâ_. CHAPTER IV "THE FAËRIE QUEENE" AND ITS GROUP "Velut inter ignes luna minores" There is no instance in English history of a poet receiving such immediaterecognition, and deserving it so thoroughly, as did Edmund Spenser at thedate of _The Shepherd's Calendar_. In the first chapter of this volume theearlier course of Elizabethan poetry has been described, and it will havebeen seen that, with great intention, no very great accomplishment had beenachieved. It was sufficiently evident that a poetic language and a generalpoetic spirit were being formed, such as had not existed in England sinceChaucer's death; but no one had yet arisen who could justify theexpectation based on such respectable tentatives. It seems from many minuteindications which need not be detailed here, that at the advent of _TheShepherd's Calendar_ all the best judges recognised the expected poet. Yetthey could hardly have known how just their recognition was, or whatextraordinary advances the poet would make in the twenty years which passedbetween its publication and his death. The life of Spenser is very little known, and here and elsewhere theconditions of this book preclude the reproduction or even the discussion ofthe various pious attempts which have been made to supply the deficiency ofdocuments. The chief of these in his case is to be found in Dr. Grosart'smagnificent edition, the principal among many good works of its editor. That he belonged to a branch--a Lancashire branch in all probability--ofthe family which produced the Le Despensers of elder, and the Spencers ofmodern English history, may be said to be unquestionable. But he appears tohave been born about 1552 in London, and to have been educated at MerchantTaylors', whence in May 1569 he matriculated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar. At or before this time he must have contributed (though thereare puzzles in the matter) certain translations of sonnets from Petrarchand Du Bellay to a book called _The Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings_, published by a Brabanter, John van der Noodt. These, slightly changed fromblank verse to rhyme, appeared long afterwards with his minor poems of1590. But the original pieces had been claimed by the Dutchman; and thoughthere are easy ways of explaining this, the thing is curious. However itmay be with these verses, certainly nothing else of Spenser's appeared inprint for ten years. His Cambridge life, except for some vague allusions(which, as usual in such cases, have been strained to breaking bycommentators and biographers), is equally obscure; save that he certainlyfulfilled seven years of residence, taking his Bachelor's Degree in 1573, and his Master's three years later. But he did not gain a fellowship, andthe chief discoverable results of his Cambridge sojourn were the thoroughscholarship which marks his work, and his friendship with the notoriousGabriel Harvey--his senior by some years, a Fellow of Pembroke, and aperson whose singularly bad literary taste, as shown in his correspondencewith Spenser, may be perhaps forgiven, first, because it did no harm, andsecondly, because without him we should know even less of Spenser than wedo. It is reasonably supposed from the notes of his friend, "E. K. "(apparently Kirke, a Pembroke man), to _The Shepherd's Calendar_, that hewent to his friends in the north after leaving Cambridge and spent a yearor two there, falling in love with the heroine, poetically named Rosalind, of _The Calendar_, and no doubt writing that remarkable book. Then(probably very late in 1578) he went to London, was introduced by Harveyto Sidney and Leicester, and thus mixed at once in the best literary andpolitical society. He was not long in putting forth his titles to itsattention, for _The Shepherd's Calendar_ was published in the winter of1579, copiously edited by "E. K. , " whom some absurdly suppose to be Spenserhimself. The poet seems to have had also numerous works (the titles ofwhich are known) ready or nearly ready for the press. But all weresubsequently either changed in title, incorporated with other work, orlost. He had already begun _The Faërie Queene_, much to the pedant Harvey'sdisgust; and he dabbled in the fashionable absurdity of classical metres, like his inferiors. But he published nothing more immediately; and powerfulas were his patrons, the only preferment which he obtained was in thatEldorado-Purgatory of Elizabethan ambition--Ireland. Lord Grey took him asprivate secretary when he was in 1580 appointed deputy, and shortlyafterwards he received some civil posts in his new country, and a lease ofabbey lands at Enniscorthy, which lease he soon gave up. But he stayed inIreland, notwithstanding the fact that his immediate patron Grey soon leftit. Except a few bare dates and doubtful allusions, little or nothing isheard of him between 1580 and 1590. On the eve of the latter year (the 1stof December 1589) the first three books of _The Faërie Queene_ were enteredat Stationers' Hall, and were published in the spring of the next year. Hehad been already established at Kilcolman in the county Cork on a grant ofmore than three thousand acres of land out of the forfeited Desmondestates. And henceforward his literary activity, at least in publication, became more considerable, and he seems to have been much backwards andforwards between England and Ireland. In 1590 appeared a volume of minorpoems (_The Ruins of Time_, _The Tears of the Muses_, _Virgil's Gnat_, _Mother Hubbard's Tale_, _The Ruins of Rome_, _Muiopotmos_, and the_Visions_), with an address to the reader in which another list offorthcoming works is promised. These, like the former list of Kirke, seemoddly enough to have also perished. The whole collection was called_Complaints_, and a somewhat similar poem, _Daphnaida_, is thought to haveappeared in the same year. On the 11th of June 1594 the poet married(strangely enough it was not known whom, until Dr. Grosart ingeniouslyidentified her with a certain Elizabeth Boyle _alias_ Seckerstone), and in1595 were published the beautiful _Amoretti_ or love sonnets, and the stillmore beautiful _Epithalamion_ describing his courtship and marriage, withthe interesting poem of _Colin Clout's Come Home Again_; while in the sameyear (old style; in January 1596, new style) the fourth, fifth, and sixthbooks of _The Faërie Queene_ were entered for publication and soonappeared. The supposed allusions to Mary Stuart greatly offended her sonJames. The _Hymns_ and the _Prothalamion_ followed in the same year. Spenser met with difficulties at Court (though he had obtained a smallpension of fifty pounds a year), and had like other Englishmen troubleswith his neighbours in Ireland; yet he seemed to be becoming moreprosperous, and in 1598 he was named Sheriff of Cork. A few weeks later theIrish Rebellion broke out; his house was sacked and burnt with one of hischildren; he fled to England and died on the 16th of January 1599 at KingStreet, Westminster, perhaps not "for lack of bread, " as Jonson says, butcertainly in no fortunate circumstances. In the year of his misfortune hadbeen registered, though it was never printed till more than thirty yearslater, his one prose work of substance, the remarkable _View of the PresentState of Ireland_; an admirable piece of prose, and a political tract, thewisdom and grasp of which only those who have had to give close attentionto Irish politics can fully estimate. It is probably the most valuabledocument on any given period of Irish history that exists, and is certainlysuperior in matter, no less than in style, to any political tract inEnglish, published before the days of Halifax eighty years after. It has been said that _The Shepherd's Calendar_ placed Spenser at once atthe head of the English poets of his day; and it did so. But had he writtennothing more, he would not (as is the case with not a few distinguishedpoets) have occupied as high or nearly as high a position in quality, ifnot in quantity, as he now does. He was a young man when he published it;he was not indeed an old man when he died; and it would not appear that hehad had much experience of life beyond college walls. His choice ofmodels--the artificial pastorals in which the Renaissance had modelleditself on Virgil and Theocritus, rather than Virgil and Theocritusthemselves--was not altogether happy. He showed, indeed, already hisextraordinary metrical skill, experimenting with rhyme-royal and otherstanzas, fourteeners or eights and sixes, anapæsts more or less irregular, and an exceedingly important variety of octosyllable which, whatever mayhave been his own idea in practising it, looked back to early MiddleEnglish rhythms and forward to the metre of _Christabel_, as Coleridge wasto start it afresh. He also transgressed into religious politics, taking(as indeed he always took, strange as it may seem in so fanatical aworshipper of beauty) the Puritan side. Nor is his work improved as poetry, though it acquires something in point of quaint attractiveness, by good Mr. "E. K. 's" elaborate annotations, introductions, explanations, and generalgentleman-usherings--the first in English, but most wofully not the last byhundreds, of such overlayings of gold with copper. Yet with all thesedrawbacks _The Shepherd's Calendar_ is delightful. Already we can see in itthat double command, at once of the pictorial and the musical elements ofpoetry, in which no English poet is Spenser's superior, if any is hisequal. Already the unmatched power of vigorous allegory, which he was todisplay later, shows in such pieces as _The Oak and the Briar_. In the lessdeliberately archaic divisions, such as "April" and "November, " the commandof metrical form, in which also the poet is almost peerless, discoversitself. Much the same may be said of the volume of _Complaints_, which, though published later than _The Faërie Queene_, represents beyond allquestion very much earlier work. Spenser is unquestionably, when he is notat once spurred and soothed by the play of his own imagination, as in _TheQueene_, a melancholy poet, and the note of melancholy is as strong inthese poems as in their joint title. It combines with his delight inemblematic allegory happily enough, in most of these pieces except _MotherHubbard's Tale_. This is almost an open satire, and shows that if Spenser'sgenius had not found a less mongrel style to disport itself in, not merelywould Donne, and Lodge, and Hall, and Marston have had to abandon theirdispute for the post of first English satirist, but the attainment ofreally great satire in English might have been hastened by a hundred years, and _Absalom and Achitophel_ have been but a second. Even here, however, the piece still keeps the Chaucerian form and manner, and is only a kind ofexercise. The sonnets from and after Du Bellay and others are moreinteresting. As in the subsequent and far finer _Amoretti_, Spenser prefersthe final couplet form to the so-called Petrarchian arrangement; and, indeed, though the most recent fashion in England has inclined to thelatter, an impartial judgment must pronounce both forms equally good andequally entitled to place. The _Amoretti_ written in this metre, andundoubtedly representing some, at least, of Spenser's latest written work, rank with the best of Sidney's, and hardly below the best of Shakespere's;while both in them and in the earlier sonnets the note of regret mingledwith delight--the special Renaissance note--sounds as it rarely does in anyother English verse. Of the poems of the later period, however (leaving_The Faërie Queene_ for a moment aside), the _Epithalamion_ and the _FourHymns_ rank undoubtedly highest. For splendour of imagery, for harmony ofverse, for delicate taste and real passion, the _Epithalamion_ excels allother poems of its class, and the _Four Hymns_ express a rapture ofPlatonic enthusiasm, which may indeed be answerable for the unreadable_Psyches_ and _Psychozoias_ of the next age, but which is itself married toimmortal verse in the happiest manner. Still, to the ordinary reader, Spenser is the poet of _The Faërie Queene_, and for once the ordinary reader is right. Every quality found in his otherpoems is found in this greatest of them in perfection; and much is foundthere which is not, and indeed could not be, found anywhere else. Itsgeneral scheme is so well known (few as may be the readers who really knowits details) that very slight notice of it may suffice. Twelve knights, representing twelve virtues, were to have been sent on adventures from theCourt of Gloriana, Queen of Fairyland. The six finished books give thelegends (each subdivided into twelve cantos, averaging fifty or sixtystanzas each) of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, andCourtesy; while a fragment of two splendid "Cantos on Mutability" issupposed to have belonged to a seventh book (not necessarily seventh inorder) on Constancy. Legend has it that the poem was actually completed;but this seems improbable, as the first three books were certainly tenyears in hand, and the second three six more. The existing poemcomprehending some four thousand stanzas, or between thirty and fortythousand lines, exhibits so many and such varied excellences that it isdifficult to believe that the poet could have done anything new in kind. Nopart of it is as a whole inferior to any other part, and the fragmentarycantos contain not merely one of the most finished pictorial pieces--theProcession of the Months--to be found in the whole poem, but much of thepoet's finest thought and verse. Had fortune been kinder, the volume ofdelight would have been greater, but its general character would probablynot have changed much. As it is, _The Faërie Queene_ is the only long poemthat a lover of poetry can sincerely wish longer. It deserves some critical examination here from three points of view, regarding respectively its general scheme, its minor details of form inmetre and language, and lastly, its general poetical characteristics. Thefirst is simple enough in its complexity. The poem is a long _Romand'Aventure_ (which it is perhaps as well to say, once for all, is not thesame as a "Romance of Chivalry, " or a "Romance of Adventure"), redeemedfrom the aimless prolixity incident to that form by its regular plan, bythe intercommunion of the adventures of the several knights (none of whomdisappears after having achieved his own quest), and by the constantpresence of a not too obtrusive allegory. This last characteristic attachesit on the other side to the poems of the _Roman de la Rose_ order, whichsucceeded the _Romans d'Aventures_ as objects of literary interest andpractice, not merely in France, but throughout Europe. This allegory hasbeen variously estimated as a merit or defect of the poem. It is sometimespolitical, oftener religious, very often moral, and sometimes purelypersonal--the identifications in this latter case being sometimes clear, asthat of Gloriana, Britomart, and Belphoebe with Queen Elizabeth, sometimesprobable, as that of Duessa with Queen Mary (not one of Spenser's mostknightly actions), and of Prince Arthur with Leicester, and sometimes moreor less problematical, as that of Artegall with Lord Grey, of Timias theSquire with Raleigh, and so forth. To those who are perplexed by thesedouble meanings the best remark is Hazlitt's blunt one that "the allegorywon't bite them. " In other words, it is always perfectly possible to enjoythe poem without troubling oneself about the allegory at all, except in itsbroad ethical features, which are quite unmistakable. On the other hand, Iam inclined to think that the presence of these under-meanings, with theinterest which they give to a moderately instructed and intelligent personwho, without too desperate a determination to see into millstones, understands "words to the wise, " is a great addition to the hold of thepoem over the attention, and saves it from the charge of meredesultoriness, which some, at least, of the other greatest poems of thekind (notably its immediate exemplar, the _Orlando Furioso_) must undergo. And here it may be noted that the charge made by most foreign critics whohave busied themselves with Spenser, and perhaps by some of his countrymen, that he is, if not a mere paraphrast, yet little more than a transplanterinto English of the Italian, is glaringly uncritical. Not, perhaps, tillAriosto and Tasso have been carefully read in the original, is Spenser'sreal greatness understood. He has often, and evidently of purpose, challenged comparison; but in every instance it will be found that hisbeauties are emphatically his own. He has followed his leaders only asVirgil has followed Homer; and much less slavishly. It is strange to find English critics of this great if not greatest Englishpoem even nowadays repeating that Spenser borrowed his wonderful stanzafrom the Italians. He did nothing of the kind. That the _ottava rima_ onthe one hand, and the sonnet on the other, may have suggested the idea ofit is quite possible. But the Spenserian stanza, as it is justly called, ishis own and no one else's, and its merits, especially that primal merit ofadaptation to the subject and style of the poem, are unique. Nothing elsecould adapt itself so perfectly to the endless series of vignettes anddissolving views which the poet delights in giving; while, at the sametime, it has, for so elaborate and apparently integral a form, a singularfaculty of hooking itself on to stanzas preceding and following, so as notto interrupt continuous narrative when continuous narrative is needed. Itsgreat compass, admitting of an almost infinite variety of cadence andcomposition, saves it from the monotony from which even the consummate artof Milton could not save blank verse now and then, and from which no writerhas ever been able to save the couplet, or the quatrain, or the stanzasending with a couplet, in narratives of very great length. But the mostremarkable instance of harmony between metrical form and othercharacteristics, both of form and matter, in the metrist has yet to bementioned. It has been said how well the stanza suits Spenser's pictorialfaculty; it certainly suits his musical faculty as well. The slightly (veryslightly, for he can be vigorous enough) languid turn of his grace, thevoluptuous cadences of his rhythm, find in it the most perfect exponentpossible. The verse of great poets, especially Homer's, has often beencompared to the sea. Spenser's is more like a river, wide, and deep, andstrong, but moderating its waves and conveying them all in a steady, soft, irresistible sweep forwards. To aid him, besides this extraordinaryinstrument of metre, he had forged for himself another in his language. Agreat deal has been written on this--comments, at least of theunfavourable kind, generally echoing Ben Jonson's complaint that Spenser"writ no language"; that his dialect is not the dialect of any actual placeor time, that it is an artificial "poetic diction" made up of Chaucer, andof Northern dialect, and of classicisms, and of foreign words, and ofmiscellaneous archaisms from no matter where. No doubt it is. But if anyother excuse than the fact of a beautiful and satisfactory effect is wantedfor the formation of a poetic diction different from the actually spoken orthe ordinarily written tongue of the day (and I am not sure that any suchexcuse is required) it is to be found at once. There was no actually spokenor ordinarily written tongue in Spenser's day which could claim to be"Queen's English. " Chaucer was obsolete, and since Chaucer there was nosingle person who could even pretend to authority. Every writer more orless endowed with originality was engaged in beating out for himself, frompopular talk, and from classical or foreign analogy, an instrument ofspeech. Spenser's verse language and Lyly's prose are the most remarkableresults of the process; but it was, in fact, not only a common but anecessary one, and in no way to be blamed. As for the other criterionhinted at above, no one is likely to condemn the diction according to that. In its remoteness without grotesqueness, in its lavish colour, in itsabundance of matter for every kind of cadence and sound-effect, it isexactly suited to the subject, the writer, and the verse. It is this singular and complete adjustment of worker and implement which, with other peculiarities noted or to be noted, gives _The Faërie Queene_its unique unicity, if such a conceit may be pardoned. From some points ofview it might be called a very artificial poem, yet no poem runs with suchan entire absence of effort, with such an easy eloquence, with such aneffect, as has been said already, of flowing water. With all his learning, and his archaisms, and his classicisms, and his Platonisms, and his ismswithout end, hardly any poet smells of the lamp less disagreeably thanSpenser. Where Milton forges and smelts, his gold is native. The endless, various, brightly-coloured, softly and yet distinctly outlined picturesrise and pass before the eyes and vanish--the multiform, sweetly-linked, softly-sounding harmonies swell and die and swell again on the ear--withouta break, without a jar, softer than sleep and as continuous, gayer than therainbow and as undiscoverably connected with any obvious cause. And this isthe more remarkable because the very last thing that can be said of Spenseris that he is a poet of mere words. Milton himself, the severe Milton, extolled his moral teaching; his philosophical idealism is evidently nomere poet's plaything or parrot-lesson, but thoroughly thought out andbelieved in. He is a determined, almost a savage partisan in politics andreligion, a steady patriot, something of a statesman, very much indeed of afriend and a lover. And of all this there is ample evidence in his verse. Yet the alchemy of his poetry has passed through the potent alembics ofverse and phrase all these rebellious things, and has distilled them intothe inimitably fluent and velvet medium which seems to lull some readers toinattention by its very smoothness, and deceive others into a belief in itslack of matter by the very finish and brilliancy of its form. The showpassages of the poem which are most generally known--the House of Pride, the Cave of Despair, the Entrance of Belphoebe, the Treasury of Mammon, theGardens of Acrasia, the Sojourn of Britomart in Busirane's Castle, theMarriage of the Thames and Medway, the Discovery of the False Florimel, Artegall and the Giant, Calidore with Meliboeus, the Processions of theSeasons and the Months--all these are not, as is the case with so manyother poets, mere purple patches, diversifying and relieving dullness, butrather remarkable, and as it happens easily separable examples of a powerwhich is shown constantly and almost evenly throughout. Those who admirethem do well; but they hardly know Spenser. He, more than almost any otherpoet, must be read continuously and constantly till the eye and ear andmind have acquired the freedom of his realm of enchantment, and have learntthe secret (as far as a mere reader may learn it) of the poetical spellsby which he brings together and controls its wonders. The talk oftediousness, the talk of sameness, the talk of coterie-cultivation inSpenser shows bad taste no doubt; but it rather shows ignorance. The critichas in such cases stayed outside his author; he speaks but of what he has_not_ seen. The comparative estimate is always the most difficult in literature, andwhere it can be avoided it is perhaps best to avoid it. But in Spenser'scase this is not possible. He is one of those few who can challenge thetitle of "greatest English poet, " and the reader may almost of right demandthe opinion on this point of any one who writes about him. For my part Ihave no intention of shirking the difficulty. It seems to me that puttingShakespere aside as _hors concours_, not merely in degree but in kind, onlytwo English poets can challenge Spenser for the primacy. These are Miltonand Shelley. The poet of _The Faërie Queene_ is generally inferior toMilton in the faculty of concentration, and in the minting of thosemonumental phrases, impressive of themselves and quite apart from thecontext, which often count highest in the estimation of poetry. Hisvocabulary and general style, if not more remote from the vernacular, havesometimes a touch of deliberate estrangement from that vernacular which isno doubt of itself a fault. His conception of a great work is looser, moreexcursive, less dramatic. As compared with Shelley he lacks not merely themodern touches which appeal to a particular age, but the lyrical ability inwhich Shelley has no equal among English poets. But in each case he redeemsthese defects with, as it seems to me, far more than counterbalancingmerits. He is never prosaic as Milton, like his great successor Wordsworth, constantly is, and his very faults are the faults of a poet. He never (asShelley does constantly) dissolves away into a flux of words which simplybids good-bye to sense or meaning, and wanders on at large, unguided, without an end, without an aim. But he has more than these merely negativemerits. I have seen long accounts of Spenser in which the fact of hisinvention of the Spenserian stanza is passed over almost without a word ofcomment. Yet in the formal history of poetry (and the history of poetrymust always be pre-eminently a history of form) there is simply noachievement so astonishing as this. That we do not know the inventors ofthe great single poetic vehicles, the hexameter, the iambic Senarius, theEnglish heroic, the French Alexandrine, is one thing. It is another that inSpenser's case alone can the invention of a complicated but essentiallyintegral form be assigned to a given poet. It is impossible to say thatSappho invented the Sapphic, or Alcæus the Alcaic: each poet may have beena Vespucci to some precedent Columbus. But we are in a position to say thatSpenser did most unquestionably invent the English Spenserian stanza--aform only inferior in individual beauty to the sonnet, which is itselfpractically _adespoton_, and far superior to the sonnet in its capacity ofbeing used in multiples as well as singly. When the unlikelihood of such acomplicated measure succeeding in narrative form, the splendid success ofit in The _Faërie Queene_, and the remarkable effects which havesubsequently been got out of it by men so different as Thomson, Shelley, and Lord Tennyson, are considered, Spenser's invention must, I think, becounted the most considerable of its kind in literature. But it may be very freely admitted that this technical merit, great as itis, is the least part of the matter. Whosoever first invented butterfliesand pyramids in poetry is not greatly commendable, and if Spenser had donenothing but arrange a cunning combination of eight heroics, with interwovenrhymes and an Alexandrine to finish with, it may be acknowledged at oncethat his claims to primacy would have to be dismissed at once. It is notso. Independently of _The Faërie Queene_ altogether he has done work whichwe must go to Milton and Shelley themselves to equal. The varied andsingularly original strains of _The Calendar_, the warmth and delicacycombined of the _Epithalamion_, the tone of mingled regret and wonder (notinferior in its characteristic Renaissance ring to Du Bellay's own) of _TheRuins of Rome_, the different notes of the different minor poems, are allthings not to be found in any minor poet. But as does not always happen, and as is perhaps not the case with Milton, Spenser's greatest work is alsohis best. In the opinion of some at any rate the poet of _Lycidas_, of_Comus_, of _Samson Agonistes_, even of the _Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, ranks as high as, if not above, the poet of _Paradise Lost_. But the poetof _The Faërie Queene_ could spare all his minor works and lose only, ashas been said, quantity not quality of greatness. It is hardly necessary atthis time of day to repeat the demonstration that Macaulay in his famousjibe only succeeded in showing that he had never read what he jibed at; andthough other decriers of Spenser's masterpiece may not have laid themselvesopen to quite so crushing a retort, they seldom fail to show a somewhatsimilar ignorance. For the lover of poetry, for the reader who understandsand can receive the poetic charm, the revelation of beauty in metricallanguage, no English poem is the superior, or, range and variety beingconsidered, the equal of _The Faërie Queene_. Take it up where you will, and provided only sufficient time (the reading of a dozen stanzas ought tosuffice to any one who has the necessary gifts of appreciation) be given toallow the soft dreamy versicoloured atmosphere to rise round the reader, the languid and yet never monotonous music to gain his ear, the mood ofmixed imagination and heroism, adventure and morality, to impress itself onhis mind, and the result is certain. To the influence of no poet are thefamous lines of Spenser's great nineteenth-century rival so applicable asto Spenser's own. The enchanted boat, angel-guided, floating on away, afar, without conscious purpose, but simply obeying the instinct of sweet poetry, is not an extravagant symbol for the mind of a reader of Spenser. If suchreaders want "Criticisms of Life" first of all, they must go elsewhere, though they will find them amply given, subject to the limitations of thepoetical method. If they want story they may complain of slackness anddeviations. If they want glorifications of science and such like things, they had better shut the book at once, and read no more on that day nor onany other. But if they want poetry--if they want to be translated from aworld which is not one of beauty only into one where the very uglinessesare beautiful, into a world of perfect harmony in colour and sound, of anendless sequence of engaging event and character, of noble passions andactions not lacking their due contrast, then let them go to Spenser with acertainty of satisfaction. He is not, as are some poets, the poet of acertain time of life to the exclusion of others. He may be read inchildhood chiefly for his adventure, in later youth for his display ofvoluptuous beauty, in manhood for his ethical and historical weight, in agefor all combined, and for the contrast which his bright universe ofinvention affords with the work-day jejuneness of this troublesome world. But he never palls upon those who have once learnt to taste him; and nopoet is so little of an acquired taste to those who have any liking forpoetry at all. He has been called the poet's poet--a phrase honourable buta little misleading, inasmuch as it first suggests that he is not the poetof the great majority of readers who cannot pretend to be poets themselves, and secondly insinuates a kind of intellectual and æsthetic Pharisaism inthose who do admire him, which may be justly resented by those who do not. Let us rather say that he is the poet of all others for those who seek inpoetry only poetical qualities, and we shall say not only what is more thanenough to establish his greatness but what, as I for one believe, can bemaintained in the teeth of all gainsayers. [23] [23] Of Spenser as of two other poets in this volume, Shakespere andMilton, it seemed to be unnecessary and even impertinent to give anyextracts. Their works are, or ought to be, in all hands; and even if itwere not so, no space at my command could give sample of their infinitevarieties. The volume, variety, and vigour of the poetical production of the period inwhich Spenser is the central figure--the last twenty years of the sixteenthcentury--is perhaps proportionally the greatest, and may be said to beemphatically the most distinguished in purely poetical characteristics ofany period in our history. Every kind of poetical work is represented init, and every kind (with the possible exception of the semi-poetical kindof satire) is well represented. There is, indeed, no second name thatapproaches Spenser's, either in respect of importance or in respect ofuniform excellence of work. But in the most incomplete production of thistime there is almost always that poetical spark which is often entirelywanting in the finished and complete work of other periods. I shall, therefore, divide the whole mass into four groups, each with certaindistinguished names at its head, and a crowd of hardly undistinguishednames in its rank and file. These four groups are the sonneteers, thehistorians, the satirists, and lastly, the miscellaneous lyrists andpoetical miscellanists. Although it is only recently that its mass and its beauty have been fullyrecognised, the extraordinary outburst of sonnet-writing at a certainperiod of Elizabeth's reign has always attracted the attention of literaryhistorians. For many years after Wyatt and Surrey's work appeared the formattracted but little imitation or practice. About 1580 Spenser himselfprobably, Sidney and Thomas Watson certainly, devoted much attention to it;but it was some dozen years later that the most striking crop of sonnetsappeared. Between 1593 and 1596 there were published more than a dozencollections, chiefly or wholly of sonnets, and almost all bearing the nameof a single person, in whose honour they were supposed to be composed. Sosingular is this coincidence, showing either an intense _engouement_ inliterary society, or a spontaneous determination of energy in individuals, that the list with dates is worth giving. It runs thus:--In 1593 cameBarnes's _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_, Fletcher's _Licia_, and Lodge's_Phillis_. In 1594 followed Constable's _Diana_, Daniel's _Delia_, [24] theanonymous _Zepheria_, Drayton's _Idea_, Percy's _Coelia_, and Willoughby's_Avisa_; 1595 added the _Alcilia_ of a certain J. C. , and Spenser's perfect_Amoretti_; 1596 gave Griffin's _Fidessa_, Lynch's _Diella_, and Smith's_Chloris_, while Shakespere's earliest sonnets were probably not muchlater. Then the fashion changed, or the vein was worked out, or (morefancifully) the impossibility of equalling Spenser and Shakespere chokedoff competitors. The date of Lord Brooke's singular _Coelica_, notpublished till long afterwards, is uncertain; but he may, probably, beclassed with Sidney and Watson in period. [24] _Delia_ had appeared earlier in 1592, and partially in 1591; but thetext of 1594 is the definitive one. Several of these dates are doubtful ordisputed. Fulke, or, as he himself spelt it, Foulke Greville, in his later years LordBrooke, [25] was of a noble house in Warwickshire connected with theBeauchamps and the Willoughbys. He was born in 1554, was educated atShrewsbury with Philip Sidney, whose kinsman, lifelong friend, and firstbiographer he was--proceeded, not like Sidney to Oxford, but to Cambridge(where he was a member, it would seem, of Jesus College, not as usuallysaid of Trinity)--received early lucrative preferments chiefly inconnection with the government of Wales, was a favourite courtier ofElizabeth's during all her later life, and, obtaining a royal gift ofWarwick Castle, became the ancestor of the present earls of Warwick. In1614 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lord Brooke, who lived to aconsiderable age, was stabbed in a rather mysterious manner in 1628 by aservant named Haywood, who is said to have been enraged by discovering thathis master had left him nothing in his will. The story is, as has beensaid, mysterious, and the affair seems to have been hushed up. Lord Brookewas not universally popular, and a very savage contemporary epitaph on himhas been preserved. But he had been the patron of the youthful Davenant, and has left not a little curious literary work, which has only beenrecently collected, and little of which saw the light in his own lifetime. Of his two singular plays, _Mustapha_ and _Alaham_ (closet-dramas havingsomething in common with the Senecan model), _Mustapha_ was printed in1609; but it would seem piratically. His chief prose work, the _Life ofSidney_, was not printed till 1652. His chief work in verse, the singular_Poems of Monarchy_ (ethical and political treatises), did not appear tilleighteen years later, as well as the allied _Treatise on Religion_. Butpoems or tracts on human learning, on wars, and other things, together withhis tragedies as above, had appeared in 1633. This publication, a foliovolume, also contained by far the most interesting part of his work, theso-called sonnet collection of Coelica--a medley, like many of thosementioned in this chapter, of lyrics and short poems of all lengths andmetrical arrangements, but, unlike almost all of them, dealing with manysubjects, and apparently addressed to more than one person. It is here, andin parts of the prose, that the reader who has not a very great love forElizabethan literature and some experience of it, can be recommended toseek confirmation of the estimate in which Greville was held by CharlesLamb, and of the very excusable and pious, though perhaps excessive, admiration of his editor Dr. Grosart. Even _Coelica_ is very unlikely tofind readers as a whole, owing to the strangely repellent character ofBrooke's thought, which is intricate and obscure, and of his style, whichis at any rate sometimes as harsh and eccentric as the theories of poetrywhich made him compose verse-treatises on politics. Nevertheless there ismuch nobility of thought and expression in him, and not unfrequent flashesof real poetry, while his very faults are characteristic. He may berepresented here by a piece from _Coelica_, in which he is at his verybest, and most poetical because most simple-- [25] He is a little liable to be confounded with two writers (brothers of apatronymic the same as his title) Samuel and Christopher Brooke, the latterof whom wrote poems of some merit, which Dr. Grosart has edited. "I, with whose colours Myra dressed her head, I, that ware posies of her own hand making, I, that mine own name in the chimnies read By Myra finely wrought ere I was waking: Must I look on, in hope time coming may With change bring back my turn again to play? "I, that on Sunday at the church-stile found A garland sweet with true love knots in flowers, Which I to wear about mine arms, was bound That each of us might know that all was ours: Must I lead now an idle life in wishes, And follow Cupid for his loaves and fishes? "I, that did wear the ring her mother left, I, for whose love she gloried to be blamed, I, with whose eyes her eyes committed theft, I, who did make her blush when I was named: Must I lose ring, flowers, blush, theft, and go naked, Watching with sighs till dead love be awaked? "I, that when drowsy Argus fell asleep, Like jealousy o'erwatchèd with desire, Was ever warnéd modesty to keep While her breath, speaking, kindled Nature's fire: Must I look on a-cold while others warm them? Do Vulcan's brothers in such fine nets arm them? "Was it for this that I might Myra see _Washing the water with her beauties white_? Yet would she never write her love to me: Thinks wit of change when thoughts are in delight? Mad girls may safely love as they may leave; No man can print a kiss: lines may deceive. " Had Brooke always written with this force and directness he would have beena great poet. As it is, he has but the ore of poetry, not the smeltedmetal. For there is no doubt that Sidney here holds the primacy, not merely intime but in value, of the whole school, putting Spenser and Shakespereaside. That thirty or forty years' diligent study of Italian models hadmuch to do with the extraordinary advance visible in his sonnets over thoseof Tottel's _Miscellany_ is, no doubt, undeniable. But many causes besidesthe inexplicable residuum of fortunate inspiration, which eludes the mostcareful search into literary cause and effect, had to do with theproduction of the "lofty, insolent, and passionate vein, " which becomesnoticeable in English poetry for the first time about 1580, and whichdominates it, if we include the late autumn-summer of Milton's lastproductions, for a hundred years. Perhaps it is not too much to say thatthis makes its very first appearance in Sidney's verse, for _The Shepherd'sCalendar_, though of an even more perfect, is of a milder strain. Theinevitable tendency of criticism to gossip about poets instead ofcriticising poetry has usually mixed a great deal of personal matter withthe accounts of _Astrophel and Stella_, the series of sonnets which isSidney's greatest literary work, and which was first published some yearsafter his death in an incorrect and probably pirated edition by ThomasNash. There is no doubt that there was a real affection between Sidney(Astrophel) and Penelope Devereux (Stella), daughter of the Earl of Essex, afterwards Lady Rich, and that marriage proving unhappy, Lady Mountjoy. Butthe attempts which have been made to identify every hint and allusion inthe series with some fact or date, though falling short of the unimaginablefolly of scholastic labour-lost which has been expended on the sonnets ofShakespere, still must appear somewhat idle to those who know the usualgenesis of love-poetry--how that it is of imagination all compact, and thatactual occurrences are much oftener occasions and bases than causes andmaterial of it. It is of the smallest possible importance or interest to arational man to discover what was the occasion of Sidney's writing thesecharming poems--the important point is their charm. And in this respect(giving heed to his date and his opportunities of imitation) I should putSidney third to Shakespere and Spenser. The very first piece of the series, an oddly compounded sonnet of thirteen Alexandrines and a final heroic, strikes the note of intense and fresh poetry which is only heard afar offin Surrey and Wyatt, which is hopelessly to seek in the tentatives ofTurberville and Googe, and which is smothered with jejune and merelyliterary ornament in the less formless work of Sidney's contemporary, Thomas Watson. The second line-- "That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain, " the couplet-- "Oft turning others' leaves to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain, " and the sudden and splendid finale-- "'Fool!' said my muse, 'look in thy heart and write!'" are things that may be looked for in vain earlier. A little later we meet with that towering soar of verse which is alsopeculiar to the period: "When Nature made her chief work--Stella's eyes, In colour black why wrapt she beams so bright?"-- lines which those who deprecate insistence on the importance of form inpoetry might study with advantage, for the thought is a mere commonplaceconceit, and the beauty of the phrase is purely derived from the cunningarrangement and cadence of the verse. The first perfectly charming sonnetin the English language--a sonnet which holds its own after three centuriesof competition--is the famous "With how sad steps, O moon, thou climbst theskies, " where Lamb's stricture on the last line as obscure seems to meunreasonable. The equally famous phrase, "That sweet enemy France, " whichoccurs a little further on is another, and whether borrowed from GiordanoBruno or not is perhaps the best example of the felicity of expression inwhich Sidney is surpassed by few Englishmen. Nor ought the extraordinaryvariety of the treatment to be missed. Often as Sidney girds at those who, like Watson, "dug their sonnets out of books, " he can write in the learnedliterary manner with the best. The pleasant ease of his sonnet to thesparrow, "Good brother Philip, " contrasts in the oddest way with hisallegorical and mythological sonnets, in each of which veins he indulgeshardly less often, though very much more wisely than any of hiscontemporaries. Nor do the other "Songs of variable verse, " which follow, and in some editions are mixed up with the sonnets, display lessextraordinary power. The first song, with its refrain in the penultimateline of each stanza, "To you, to you, all song of praise is due, " contrasts in its throbbing and burning life with the faint and mistyimagery, the stiff and wooden structure, of most of the verse of Sidney'spredecessors, and deserves to be given in full:-- "Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes intendeth; Which now my breast o'ercharged to music lendeth? To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only in you my song begins and endeth. "Who hath the eyes which marry state with pleasure, Who keeps the keys of Nature's chiefest treasure? To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only for you the heaven forgat all measure. "Who hath the lips, where wit in fairness reigneth? Who womankind at once both decks and staineth? To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only by you Cupid his crown maintaineth. "Who hath the feet, whose steps all sweetness planteth? Who else; for whom Fame worthy trumpets wanteth? To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only to you her sceptre Venus granteth. "Who hath the breast, whose milk doth passions nourish? Whose grace is such, that when it chides doth cherish? To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only through you the tree of life doth flourish. "Who hath the hand, which without stroke subdueth? Who long dead beauty with increase reneweth? To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only at you all envy hopeless rueth. "Who hath the hair, which loosest fastest tieth? Who makes a man live then glad when he dieth? To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only of you the flatterer never lieth. "Who hath the voice, which soul from senses sunders? Whose force but yours the bolts of beauty thunders? To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only with you not miracles are wonders. "Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes intendeth? Which now my breast o'ercharged to music lendeth? To you! to you! all song of praise is due: Only in you my song begins and endeth. " Nor is its promise belied by those which follow, and which are among theearliest and the most charming of the rich literature of songs that reallyare songs--songs to music--which the age was to produce. All the scantyremnants of his other verse are instinct with the same qualities, especially the splendid dirge, "Ring out your bells, let mourning shows bespread, " and the pretty lines "to the tune of Wilhelmus van Nassau. " I mustquote the first:-- "Ring out your bells! let mourning shows be spread, For Love is dead. All love is dead, infected With the plague of deep disdain; Worth as nought worth rejected. And faith, fair scorn doth gain. From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female frenzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us! "Weep, neighbours, weep! Do you not hear it said That Love is dead? His deathbed, peacock's Folly; His winding-sheet is Shame; His will, False Seeming wholly; His sole executor, Blame. From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female frenzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us! "Let dirge be sung, and trentals rightly read, For Love is dead. Sir Wrong his tomb ordaineth My mistress' marble heart; Which epitaph containeth 'Her eyes were once his dart. ' From so ungrateful fancy, From such a female frenzy, From them that use men thus, Good Lord, deliver us! "Alas, I lie. Rage hath this error bred, Love is not dead. Love is not dead, but sleepeth In her unmatchèd mind: Where she his counsel keepeth Till due deserts she find. Therefore from so vile fancy To call such wit a frenzy, Who love can temper thus, Good Lord, deliver us!" The verse from the _Arcadia_ (which contains a great deal of verse) hasbeen perhaps injuriously affected in the general judgment by the fact thatit includes experiments in the impossible classical metres. But both it andthe Translations from the Psalms express the same poetical faculty employedwith less directness and force. To sum up, there is no Elizabethan poet, except the two named, who is more unmistakably imbued with poetical qualitythan Sidney. And Hazlitt's judgment on him, that he is "jejune" and"frigid" will, as Lamb himself hinted, long remain the chiefest and mostastonishing example of a great critic's aberrations when his prejudices areconcerned. Had Hazlitt been criticising Thomas Watson, his judgment, though harsh, would have been not wholly easy to quarrel with. It is probably theexcusable but serious error of judgment which induced his rediscoverer, Professor Arber, to rank Watson above Sidney in gifts and genius, that hasled other critics to put him unduly low. Watson himself, moreover, hasinvited depreciation by his extreme frankness in confessing that his_Passionate Century_ is not a record of passion at all, but an elaborateliterary _pastiche_ after this author and that. I fear it must be admittedthat the average critic is not safely to be trusted with such an avowal ofwhat he is too much disposed to advance as a charge without confession. Watson, of whom as usual scarcely anything is known personally, was aLondoner by birth, an Oxford man by education, a friend of most of theearlier literary school of the reign, such as Lyly, Peele, and Spenser, and a tolerably industrious writer both in Latin and English during hisshort life, which can hardly have begun before 1557, and was certainlyclosed by 1593. He stands in English poetry as the author of the_Hecatompathia_ or _Passionate Century_ of sonnets (1582), and the _Tearsof Fancy_, consisting of sixty similar poems, printed after his death. The_Tears of Fancy_ are regular quatorzains, the pieces composing the_Hecatompathia_, though called sonnets, are in a curious form of eighteenlines practically composed of three six-line stanzas rhymed A B, A B, C C, and not connected by any continuance of rhyme from stanza to stanza. Thespecial and peculiar oddity of the book is, that each sonnet has a prosepreface as thus: "In this passion the author doth very busily imitate andaugment a certain ode of Ronsard, which he writeth unto his mistress. Hebeginneth as followeth, _Plusieurs_, etc. " Here is a complete example ofone of Watson's pages:-- "There needeth no annotation at all before this passion, it is of itself so plain and easily conveyed. Yet the unlearned may have this help given them by the way to know what Galaxia is or Pactolus, which perchance they have not read of often in our vulgar rhymes. Galaxia (to omit both the etymology and what the philosophers do write thereof) is a white way or milky circle in the heavens, which Ovid mentioneth in this manner-- _Est via sublimis coelo manifesta sereno, _ _Lactea nomen habet, candore notabilis ipso. _ --Metamorph. Lib. 1. And Cicero thus in Somnio Scipionis: _Erat autem is splendissimo candore inter flammas circulus elucens, quem vos (ut a Graijs accepistis) orbem lacteum nuncupatis. _ Pactolus is a river in Lydia, which hath golden sands under it, as Tibullus witnesseth in this verse:-- _Nec me regna juvant, nec Lydius aurifer amnis. _--Tibul. Lib. 3. Who can recount the virtues of my dear, Or say how far her fame hath taken flight, That cannot tell how many stars appear In part of heaven, which Galaxia hight, Or number all the moats in Phoebus' rays, Or golden sands whereon Pactolus plays? And yet my hurts enforce me to confess, In crystal breast she shrouds a bloody heart, Which heart in time will make her merits less, Unless betimes she cure my deadly smart: For now my life is double dying still, And she defamed by sufferance of such ill; And till the time she helps me as she may, Let no man undertake to tell my toil, But only such, as can distinctly say, What monsters Nilus breeds, or Afric soil: For if he do, his labour is but lost, Whilst I both fry and freeze 'twixt flame and frost. " Now this is undoubtedly, as Watson's contemporaries would have said, "acooling card" to the reader, who is thus presented with a series ofelaborate poetical exercises affecting the acutest personal feeling, andyet confessedly representing no feeling at all. Yet the _Hecatompathia_ isremarkable, both historically and intrinsically. It does not seem likelythat at its publication the author can have had anything of Sidney's ormuch of Spenser's before him; yet his work is only less superior to thework of their common predecessors than the work of these two. By far thefinest of his _Century_ is the imitation of Ferrabosco-- "Resolved to dust intombed here lieth love. " The quatorzains of the _Tears of Fancy_ are more attractive in form andless artificial in structure and phraseology, but it must be rememberedthat by their time Sidney's sonnets were known and Spenser had writtenmuch. The seed was scattered abroad, and it fell in congenial soil infalling on Watson, but the _Hecatompathia_ was self-sown. This difference shows itself very remarkably in the vast outburst ofsonneteering which, as has been remarked, distinguished the middle of thelast decade of the sixteenth century. All these writers had Sidney andSpenser before them, and they assume so much of the character of a schoolthat there are certain subjects, for instance, "Care-charming sleep, " onwhich many of them (after Sidney) composed sets of rival poems, almost asdefinitely competitive as the sonnets of the later "Uranie et Job" and"Belle Matineuse" series in France. Nevertheless, there is in all ofthem--what as a rule is wanting in this kind of clique verse--theindependent spirit, the original force which makes poetry. The Smiths andthe Fletchers, the Griffins and the Lynches, are like little geysers roundthe great ones: the whole soil is instinct with fire and flame. We shall, however, take the production of the four remarkable years 1593-1596separately, and though in more than one case we shall return upon theirwriters both in this chapter and in a subsequent one, the unity of thesonnet impulse seems to demand separate mention for them here. In 1593 the influence of the Sidney poems (published, it must beremembered, in 1591) was new, and the imitators, except Watson (of whomabove), display a good deal of the quality of the novice. The chief of themare Barnabe Barnes, with his _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_, Giles Fletcher(father of the Jacobean poets, Giles and Phineas Fletcher), with his_Licia_, and Thomas Lodge, with his _Phillis_. Barnes is a moderndiscovery, for before Dr. Grosart reprinted him in 1875, from the uniqueoriginal at Chatsworth, for thirty subscribers only (of whom I had thehonour to be one), he was practically unknown. Mr. Arber has since, in his_English Garner_, opened access to a wider circle, to whom I at least donot grudge their entry. As with most of these minor Elizabethan poets, Barnes is a very obscure person. A little later than _Parthenophil_ hewrote _A Divine Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets_, having, like many of hiscontemporaries, an apparent desire poetically to make the best of bothworlds. He also wrote a wild play in the most daring Elizabethan style, called _The Devil's Charter_, and a prose political _Treatise of Offices_. Barnes was a friend of Gabriel Harvey's, and as such met with some roughusage from Nash, Marston, and others. His poetical worth, though there arefine passages in _The Devil's Charter_ and in the _Divine Centurie_, mustrest on _Parthenophil_. This collection consists not merely of sonnets butof madrigals, sestines, canzons, and other attempts after Italian masters. The style, both verbal and poetical, needs chastising in places, andBarnes's expression in particular is sometimes obscure. He is sometimescomic when he wishes to be passionate, and frequently verbose when hewishes to be expressive. But the fire, the full-bloodedness, the poeticalvirility, of the poems is extraordinary. A kind of intoxication of theeternal-feminine seems to have seized the poet to an extent not otherwiseto be paralleled in the group, except in Sidney; while Sidney's courtlysense of measure and taste did not permit him Barnes's forcibleextravagances. Here is a specimen:-- "Phoebus, rich father of eternal light, And in his hand a wreath of Heliochrise He brought, to beautify those tresses, Whose train, whose softness, and whose gloss more bright, Apollo's locks did overprize. Thus, with this garland, whiles her brows he blesses, The golden shadow with his tincture Coloured her locks, aye gilded with the cincture. " Giles Fletcher's _Licia_ is a much more pale and colourless performance, though not wanting in merit. The author, who was afterwards a mostrespectable clergyman, is of the class of _amoureux transis_, and dies forLicia throughout his poems, without apparently suspecting that it was muchbetter to live for her. His volume contained some miscellaneous poems, witha dullish essay in the historical style (see _post_), called _The Rising ofRichard to the Crown_. Very far superior is Lodge's _Phillis_, the chiefpoetical work of that interesting person, except some of the madrigals andodd pieces of verse scattered about his prose tracts (for which see ChapterVI. ) _Phillis_ is especially remarkable for the grace and refinement withwhich the author elaborates the Sidneian model. Lodge, indeed, as it seemsto me, was one of the not uncommon persons who can always do best with amodel before them. He euphuised with better taste than Lyly, but inimitation of him; his tales in prose are more graceful than those ofGreene, whom he copied; it at least seems likely that he out-MarlowedMarlowe in the rant of the _Looking-Glass for London_, and the stiffness ofthe _Wounds of Civil War_, and he chiefly polished Sidney in his sonnetsand madrigals. It is not to be denied, however, that in three out of thesefour departments he gave us charming work. His mixed allegiance to Marloweand Sidney gave him command of a splendid form of decasyllable, whichappears often in _Phillis_, as for instance-- "About thy neck do all the graces throng And lay such baits as might entangle death, " where it is worth noting that the whole beauty arises from the dexterousplacing of the dissyllable "graces, " and the trisyllable "entangle, "exactly where they ought to be among the monosyllables of the rest. Themadrigals "Love guards the roses of thy lips, " "My Phillis hath the morningsun, " and "Love in my bosom like a bee" are simply unsurpassed for sugaredsweetness in English. Perhaps this is the best of them:-- "Love in my bosom like a bee, Doth suck his sweet; Now with his wings he plays with me, Now with his feet. Within mine eyes he makes his nest His bed amidst my tender breast, My kisses are his daily feast; And yet he robs me of my rest? 'Ah, wanton! will ye?' "And if I sleep, then percheth he, With pretty flight, [26] And makes his pillow of my knee The livelong night. Strike I my lute, he tunes the string. He music plays, if so I sing. He lends me every lovely thing Yet cruel! he, my heart doth sting. 'Whist, wanton! still ye!' "Else I with roses, every day Will whip you hence, And bind you, when you want to play, For your offence. I'll shut my eyes to keep you in, I'll make you fast it for your sin, I'll count your power not worth a pin. Alas, what hereby shall I win If he gainsay me? "What if I beat the wanton boy With many a rod? He will repay me with annoy Because a god. Then sit thou safely on my knee, And let thy bower my bosom be. Lurk in mine eyes, I like of thee. O Cupid! so thou pity me, Spare not, but play thee. " [26] Printed in _England's Helicon_ "sleight. " 1594 was the most important of all the sonnet years, and here we arechiefly bound to mention authors who will come in for fuller notice later. The singular book known as Willoughby's _Avisa_ which, as having a supposedbearing on Shakespere and as containing much of that personal puzzlementwhich rejoices critics, has had much attention of late years, is notstrictly a collection of sonnets; its poems being longer and of differingstanzas. But in general character it falls in with the sonnet-collectionsaddressed or devoted to a real or fanciful personage. It is rathersatirical than panegyrical in character, and its poetical worth is very farfrom high. William Percy, a friend of Barnes (who dedicated the_Parthenophil_ to him), son of the eighth Earl of Northumberland, and aretired person who seems to have passed the greater part of a long life inOxford "drinking nothing but ale, " produced a very short collectionentitled _Coelia_, not very noteworthy, though it contains (probably inimitation of Barnes) one of the tricky things called echo-sonnets, which, with dialogue-sonnets and the like, have sometimes amused the leisure ofpoets. Much more remarkable is the singular anonymous collection called_Zepheria_. Its contents are called not sonnets but canzons, though most ofthem are orthodox quatorzains somewhat oddly rhymed and rhythmed. It isbrief, extending only to forty pieces, and, like much of the poetry of theperiod, begins and ends with Italian mottoes or dedication-phrases. Butwhat is interesting about it is the evidence it gives of deep familiaritynot only with Italian but with French models. This appears both in suchwords as "jouissance, " "thesaurise, " "esperance, " "souvenance, " "vatical"(a thoroughly Ronsardising word), with others too many to mention, and inother characteristics. Mr. Sidney Lee, in his most valuable collection ofthese sonneteers, endeavours to show that this French influence was lessuncommon than has sometimes been thought. Putting this aside, thecharacteristic of _Zepheria_ is unchastened vigour, full of promise, butdecidedly in need of further schooling and discipline, as the followingwill show:-- "O then Desire, father of Jouissance, The Life of Love, the Death of dastard Fear, The kindest nurse to true persèverance, Mine heart inherited, with thy love's revere. [?] Beauty! peculiar parent of Conceit, Prosperous midwife to a travelling muse, The sweet of life, Nepenthe's eyes receipt, Thee into me distilled, O sweet, infuse! Love then (the spirit of a generous sprite, An infant ever drawing Nature's breast, The Sum of Life, that Chaos did unnight!) Dismissed mine heart from me, with thee to rest. And now incites me cry, 'Double or quit! Give back my heart, or take his body to it!'" This cannot be said of the three remarkable collections yet to be noticedwhich appeared in this year, to wit, Constable's _Diana_, Daniel's _Delia_, and Drayton's _Idea_. These three head the group and contain the best work, after Shakespere and Spenser and Sidney, in the English sonnet of the time. Constable's sonnets had appeared partly in 1592, and as they stand infullest collection were published in or before 1594. Afterwards he wrote, like others, "divine" sonnets (he was a Roman Catholic) and somemiscellaneous poems, including a very pretty "Song of Venus and Adonis. " Hewas a close friend of Sidney, many of whose sonnets were published withhis, and his work has much of the Sidneian colour, but with fewer flightsof happily expressed fancy. The best of it is probably the followingsonnet, which is not only full of gracefully expressed images, but keeps upits flight from first to last--a thing not universal in these Elizabethansonnets:-- "My Lady's presence makes the Roses red, Because to see her lips they blush for shame. The Lily's leaves, for envy, pale became; And her white hands in them this envy bred. The Marigold the leaves abroad doth spread; Because the sun's and her power is the same. The Violet of purple colour came, Dyed in the blood she made my heart to shed. In brief all flowers from her their virtue take; From her sweet breath, their sweet smells do proceed; The living heat which her eyebeams doth make Warmeth the ground, and quickeneth the seed. The rain, wherewith she watereth the flowers, Falls from mine eyes, which she dissolves in showers. " Samuel Daniel had an eminently contemplative genius which might haveanticipated the sonnet as it is in Wordsworth, but which the fashion of theday confined to the not wholly suitable subject of Love. In the splendid"Care-charmer Sleep, " one of the tournament sonnets above noted, hecontrived, as will be seen, to put his subject under the influence of hisprevailing faculty. "Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born, Relieve my anguish, and restore the light, With dark forgetting of my cares, return; And let the day be time enough to mourn The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth; Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn Without the torment of the night's untruth. Cease, Dreams, th' imag'ry of our day-desires, To model forth the passions of the morrow, Never let rising sun approve you liars, To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow. Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain; And never wake to feel the day's disdain. " But as a rule he is perhaps too much given to musing, and too little torapture. In form he is important, as he undoubtedly did much to establishthe arrangement of three alternate rhymed quatrains and a couplet which, inShakespere's hands, was to give the noblest poetry of the sonnet and of theworld. He has also an abundance of the most exquisite single lines, such as "O clear-eyed rector of the holy hill, " and the wonderful opening of Sonnet XXVII. , "The star of my mishap imposedthis pain. " The sixty-three sonnets, varied in different editions of Drayton's _Idea_, are among the most puzzling of the whole group. Their average value is notof the very highest. Yet there are here and there the strangest suggestionsof Drayton's countryman, Shakespere, and there is one sonnet, No. 61, beginning, "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part, " which I havefound it most difficult to believe to be Drayton's, and which is Shakespereall over. That Drayton was the author of _Idea_ as a whole is certain, notmerely from the local allusions, but from the resemblance to the moresuccessful exercises of his clear, masculine, vigorous, fertile, butoccasionally rather unpoetical style. The sonnet just referred to is itselfone of the very finest existing--perhaps one of the ten or twelve bestsonnets in the world, and it may be worth while to give it with another incontrast:-- "Our flood's Queen, Thames, for ships and swans is crowned; And stately Severn for her shore is praised. The crystal Trent for fords and fish renowned; And Avon's fame to Albion's cliffs is raised; Carlegion Chester vaunts her holy Dee; York many wonders of her Ouse can tell. The Peak her Dove, whose banks so fertile be; And Kent will say her Medway doth excel. Cotswold commends her Isis to the Tame; Our northern borders boast of Tweed's fair flood Our western parts extol their Wily's fame; And the old Lea brags of the Danish blood. Arden's sweet Ankor, let thy glory be That fair Idea only lives by thee!" * * * * * "Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part! Nay, I have done. You get no more of me And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart That thus so cleanly I myself can free. Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows, And when we meet at any time again Be it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love retain. Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath, When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies; When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And Innocence is closing up his eyes: Now, if thou would'st, when all have given him over, From death to life thou might'st him yet recover!" 1595 chiefly contributed the curious production called _Alcilia_, by J. C. , who gives the name of sonnets to a series of six-line stanzas, variedoccasionally by other forms, such as that of the following pretty verses. It may be noted that the citation of proverbs is very characteristic of_Alcilia_:-- "Love is sorrow mixed with gladness, Fear with hope, and hope with madness. Long did I love, but all in vain; I loving, was not loved again: For which my heart sustained much woe. It fits not maids to use men so, Just deserts are not regarded, Never love so ill rewarded. But 'all is lost that is not sought, ' 'Oft wit proves best that's dearest bought. ' "Women were made for men's relief; To comfort, not to cause their grief. Where most I merit, least I find: No marvel, since that love is blind. Had she been kind as she was fair, My case had been more strange and rare. But women love not by desert, Reason in them hath weakest part. Then henceforth let them love that list, I will beware of 'had I wist. '" 1596 (putting the _Amoretti_, which is sometimes assigned to this year, aside) was again fruitful with Griffin's _Fidessa_, Lynch's _Diella_, andSmith's _Chloris_. _Fidessa_, though distinctly "young, " is one of the mostinteresting of the clearly imitative class of these sonnets, and containssome very graceful poetry, especially the following, one of the Sleepclass, which will serve as a good example of the minor sonneteers:-- "Care-charmer Sleep! sweet ease in restless misery! The captive's liberty, and his freedom's song! Balm of the bruisèd heart! man's chief felicity! Brother of quiet Death, when Life is too too long! A Comedy it is, and now an History; What is not sleep unto the feeble mind? It easeth him that toils, and him that's sorry; It makes the deaf to hear; to see, the blind; Ungentle Sleep! thou helpest all but me, For when I sleep my soul is vexèd most. It is Fidessa that doth master thee If she approach; alas! thy power is lost. But here she is! See, how he runs amain! I fear, at night, he will not come again. " _Diella_, a set of thirty-eight sonnets prefixed to the "Amorous poem ofDiego and Genevra, " is more elaborate in colouring but somewhat less freshand genuine; while _Chloris_, whose author was a friend of Spenser's, approaches to the pastoral in the plan and phrasing of its fifty sonnets. Such are the most remarkable members of a group of English poetry, whichyields to few such groups in interest. It is connected by a strongsimilarity of feeling--if any one likes, even by a strong imitation of thesame models. But in following those models and expressing those feelings, its members, even the humblest of them, have shown remarkable poeticalcapacity; while of the chiefs we can only say, as has been said more thanonce already, that the matter and form together acknowledge, and indeedadmit of, no superior. In close connection with these groups of sonnets, displaying very much thesame poetical characteristics and in some cases written by the sameauthors, there occurs a great body of miscellaneous poetical writingproduced during the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, and rangingfrom long poems of the allegorical or amatory kind to the briefest lyricsand madrigals. Sometimes this work appeared independently; sometimes it wasinserted in the plays and prose pamphlets of the time. As has already beensaid, some of our authors, notably Lodge and Greene, did in this way workwhich far exceeds in merit any of their more ambitious pieces, and which ina certain unborrowed and incommunicable poetic grace hardly leaves anythingof the time behind it. Shakespere himself, in _Venus and Adonis_ and_Lucrece_, has in a more elaborate but closely allied kind of poetrydisplayed less mature, but scarcely less, genius than in his dramatic andsonnet work. It is my own opinion that the actual poetical worth of RichardBarnfield, to whom an exquisite poem in _The Passionate Pilgrim_, longascribed to Shakespere, is now more justly assigned, has, owing to thisassignment and to the singular character of his chief other poem, _TheAffectionate Shepherd_, been considerably overrated. It is unfortunately ascomplete if not as common a mistake to suppose that any one who disdainshis country's morality must be a good poet, as to set down any one whodisdains it without further examination for a bad one. The simple fact, asit strikes a critic, is that "As it fell upon a day" is miles aboveanything else of Barnfield's, and is not like anything else of his, whileit is very like things of Shakespere's. The best thing to be said forBarnfield is that he was an avowed and enthusiastic imitator and followerof Spenser. His poetical work (we might have included the short series ofsonnets to _Cynthia_ in the division of sonneteers) was all written when hewas a very young man, and he died when he was not a very old one, abachelor country-gentleman in Warwickshire. Putting the exquisite "As itfell upon a day" out of question (which, if he wrote it, is one of the notvery numerous examples of perfect poetry written by a very imperfect poet), Barnfield has, in no extraordinary measure, the common attributes of thiswonderful time--poetical enthusiasm, fresh and unhackneyed expression, metrical charm, and gorgeous colouring, which does not find itselfill-matched with accurate drawing of nature. He is above the averageElizabethan, and his very bad taste in _The Affectionate Shepherd_ (afollowing of Virgil's Second Eclogue) may be excused as a humanist crotchetof the time. His rarity, his eccentricity, and the curious mixing up of hiswork with Shakespere's have done him something more than yeoman's servicewith recent critics. But he may have a specimen:-- "And thus it happened: Death and Cupid met Upon a time at swilling Bacchus' house, Where dainty cates upon the board were set, And goblets full of wine to drink carouse: Where Love and Death did love the liquor so That out they fall, and to the fray they go. "And having both their quivers at their back Filled full of arrows--the one of fatal steel, The other all of gold; Death's shaft was black, But Love's was yellow--Fortune turned her wheel, And from Death's quiver fell a fatal shaft That under Cupid by the wind was waft. "And at the same time by ill hap there fell Another arrow out of Cupid's quiver; The which was carried by the wind at will, And under Death the amorous shaft did shiver. [27] They being parted, Love took up Death's dart, And Death took up Love's arrow for his part. " [27] Not, of course = "break, " but "shudder. " There is perhaps more genuine poetic worth, though there is lessaccomplishment of form, in the unfortunate Father Robert Southwell, who wasexecuted as a traitor on the 20th of February 1595. Southwell belonged to adistinguished family, and was born (probably) at Horsham St. Faiths, inNorfolk, about the year 1560. He was stolen by a gipsy in his youth, butwas recovered; and a much worse misfortune befell him in being sent foreducation not to Oxford or Cambridge but to Douay, where he got into thehands of the Jesuits, and joined their order. He was sent on a mission toEngland; and (no doubt conscientiously) violating the law there, was aftersome years of hiding and suspicion betrayed, arrested, treated with greatharshness in prison, and at last, as has been said, executed. No specificacts of treason were even charged against him; and he earnestly denied anydesigns whatever against the Queen and kingdom, nor can it be doubted thathe merely paid the penalty of others' misdeeds. His work both in prose andpoetry was not inconsiderable, and the poetry was repeatedly printed inrather confusing and imperfect editions after his death. The longest, butby no means the best, piece is _St. Peter's Complaint_. The bestunquestionably is _The Burning Babe_, which, though fairly well known, mustbe given:-- "As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow, Surpris'd I was with sudden heat, which made my heart to glow; And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near, A pretty Babe all burning bright, did in the air appear, Who scorchèd with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed, As though His floods should quench His flames which with His tears were fed; 'Alas!' quoth He, 'but newly born, in fiery heats I fry, Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel My fire but I! My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns, Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns; The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals; The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defilèd souls, For which, as now on fire I am, to work them to their good So will I melt into a bath to wash them in My blood:' With these He vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away, And straight I callèd unto mind that it was Christmas Day. " Something of the glow of this appears elsewhere in the poems, which are, without exception, religious. They have not a little of the "hectic" tone, which marks still more strongly the chief English Roman Catholic poet ofthe next century, Crashaw; but are never, as Crashaw sometimes is, hysterical. On the whole, as was remarked in a former chapter, they belongrather to the pre-Spenserian class in diction and metre, though withsomething of the Italian touch. Occasional roughnesses in them may be atleast partly attributed to the evident fact that the author thought ofnothing less than of merely "cultivating the muses. " His religious fervouris of the simplest and most genuine kind, and his poems are a natural andunforced expression of it. It is difficult in the brief space which can here be allotted to thesubject to pass in review the throng of miscellaneous poets and poetryindicated under this group. The reprints of Dr. Grosart and Mr. Arber, supplemented in a few cases by recourse to the older recoveries of Brydges, Haslewood, Park, Collier, and others, bring before the student a mass ofbrilliant and beautiful matter, often mixed with a good deal of slag andscoriæ, but seldom deficient in the true poetical ore. The mere collectionsof madrigals and songs, actually intended for casual performance at a timewhen almost every accomplished and well-bred gentleman or lady was expectedto oblige the company, which Mr. Arber's invaluable _English Garner_ andMr. Bullen's _Elizabethan Lyrics_ give from the collections edited orproduced by Byrd, Yonge, Campion, Dowland, Morley, Alison, Wilbye, andothers, represent such a body of verse as probably could not be gottogether, with the same origin and circumstances, in any quarter-century ofany nation's history since the foundation of the world. In Campionespecially the lyrical quality is extraordinary. He was long almostinaccessible, but Mr. Bullen's edition of 1889 has made knowledge of himeasy. His birth-year is unknown, but he died in 1620. He was a Cambridgeman, a member of the Inns of Court, and a physician in good practice. Hehas left us a masque; four _Books of Airs_ (1601-17?), in which the gemsgiven below, and many others, occur; and a sometimes rather unfairlycharacterised critical treatise, _Observations on the Art of EnglishPoesy_, in which he argues against rhyme and for strict quantitativemeasures, but on quite different lines from those of the craze ofStanyhurst and Harvey. Some of his illustrations of his still ratherunnatural fancy (especially "Rose-cheeked Laura, " which is now tolerablyfamiliar in anthologies) are charming, though never so charming as hisrhymed "Airs. " The poetry is, indeed, mostly in flashes, and it is not veryoften that any song is a complete gem, like the best of the songs from thedramatists, one or two of which will be given presently for comparison. Butby far the greater number contain and exemplify those numerouscharacteristics of poetry, as distinguished from verse, which at one timeof literary history seem naturally to occur--seem indeed to be had for thegathering by any one who chooses--while at another time they are butsparingly found in the work of men of real genius, and seem altogether toescape men of talent, accomplishment, and laborious endeavour. Here are afew specimens from Peele and others, especially Campion. As it is, anexceptional amount of the small space possible for such things in thisvolume has been given to them, but there is a great temptation to givemore. Lyly's lyrical work, however, is fairly well known, and more than onecollection of "Songs from the Dramatists" has popularised others. _Æ. _ "Fair and fair, and twice so fair, As fair as any may be; The fairest shepherd on our green, A love for any lady. _Par. _ Fair and fair, and twice so fair, As fair as any may be: Thy love is fair for thee alone, And for no other lady. _Æ. _ My love is fair, my love is gay, As fresh as bin the flowers in May, And of my love my roundelay Concludes with Cupid's curse, They that do change old love for new Pray gods, they change for worse! _Ambo, simul. _ They that do change, etc. , etc. _Æ. _ Fair and fair, etc. _Par. _ Fair and fair, etc. _Æ. _ My love can pipe, my love can sing, My love can many a pretty thing, And of his lovely praises ring My merry, merry roundelays. Amen to Cupid's curse, They that do change, etc. " PEELE. "His golden locks time hath to silver turned; O time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing! His youth 'gainst time and age hath ever spurned, But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing: Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen. Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green. "His helmet now shall make a hive for bees, And lovers' songs be turned to holy psalms; A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees, And feed on prayers, which are old age's alms: But though from court to cottage he depart, His saint is sure of his unspotted heart. "And when he saddest sits in homely cell, He'll teach his swains this carol for a song: 'Blessed be the hearts that wish my Sovereign well, Cursed be the souls that think her any wrong. ' Goddess allow this aged man his right, To be your beadsman now that was your knight. " PEELE. "Fain would I change that note To which fond love hath charm'd me, Long, long to sing by rote Fancying that that harm'd me: Yet when this thought doth come, 'Love is the perfect sum Of all delight!' I have no other choice Either for pen or voice To sing or write. "O Love, they wrong thee much That say thy sweet is bitter, When thy rich fruit is such As nothing can be sweeter. Fair house of joy and bliss Where truest pleasure is, I do adore thee; I know thee what thou art. I serve thee with my heart And fall before thee. _Anon. In_ BULLEN. "Turn all thy thoughts to eyes, Turn all thy hairs to ears, Change all thy friends to spies, And all thy joys to fears: True love will yet be free In spite of jealousy. "Turn darkness into day, Conjectures into truth, Believe what th' curious say, Let age interpret youth: True love will yet be free In spite of jealousy. "Wrest every word and look, Rack every hidden thought; Or fish with golden hook, True love cannot be caught: For that will still be free In spite of jealousy. " CAMPION _in_ BULLEN. "Come, O come, my life's delight! Let me not in languor pine! Love loves no delay; thy sight The more enjoyed, the more divine. O come, and take from me The pain of being deprived of thee! "Thou all sweetness dost enclose Like a little world of bliss; Beauty guards thy looks, the rose In them pure and eternal is: Come, then, and make thy flight As swift to me as heavenly light!" CAMPION. "Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet! Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet! There, wrapped in cloud of sorrow, pity move, And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her love. But if she scorns my never-ceasing pain, Then burst with sighing in her sight and ne'er return again. "All that I sang still to her praise did tend, Still she was first, still she my songs did end; Yet she my love and music both doth fly, The music that her echo is and beauty's sympathy: Then let my notes pursue her scornful flight! It shall suffice that they were breathed and died for her delight. " CAMPION. "What if a day, or a month, or a year, Crown thy delights with a thousand sweet contentings! Cannot a chance of a night or an hour Cross thy desires with as many sad tormentings? Fortune, Honour, Beauty, Youth, are but blossoms dying, Wanton Pleasure, doating Love, are but shadows flying. All our joys are but toys! idle thoughts deceiving: None have power, of an hour, in their lives bereaving. "Earth's but a point to the world, and a man Is but a point to the world's comparèd centre! Shall then a point of a point be so vain As to triumph in a silly point's adventure? All is hazard that we have, there is nothing biding; Days of pleasure are like streams through fair meadows gliding. Weal and woe, time doth go! time is never turning; Secret fates guide our states, both in mirth and mourning. " CAMPION. "'Twas I that paid for all things, 'Twas others drank the wine, I cannot now recall things; Live but a fool, to pine. 'Twas I that beat the bush, The bird to others flew; For she, alas, hath left me. Falero! lero! loo! "If ever that Dame Nature (For this false lover's sake) Another pleasing creature Like unto her would make; Let her remember this, To make the other true! For this, alas! hath left me. Falero! lero! loo! "No riches now can raise me, No want makes me despair, No misery amaze me, Nor yet for want I care: I have lost a World itself, My earthly Heaven, adieu! Since she, alas! hath left me. Falero! lero! loo!" _Anon. In_ ARBER. Beside these collections, which were in their origin and inception chieflymusical, and literary, as it were, only by parergon, there are successorsof the earlier Miscellanies in which, as in _England's Helicon_ and thecelebrated _Passionate Pilgrim_, there is some of the most exquisite of ourverse. And, yet again, a crowd of individual writers, of few of whom ismuch known, contributed, not in all cases their mites by any means, butoften very respectable sums, to the vast treasury of English poetry. Thereis Sir Edward Dyer, the friend of Raleigh and Sidney, who has beenimmortalised by the famous "My mind to me a kingdom is, " and who wroteother pieces not much inferior. There is Raleigh, to whom the gloriouspreparatory sonnet to _The Faërie Queene_ would sufficiently justify theascription of "a vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate, " if a veryconsiderable body of verse (independent of the fragmentary _Cynthia_) didnot justify this many times over, as two brief quotations in addition tothe sonnet will show:-- "Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay, Within that temple where the vestal flame Was wont to burn: and, passing by that way To see that buried dust of living fame, Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept, All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen, At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept; And from henceforth those graces were not seen, For they this Queen attended; in whose stead Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse. Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed, And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce: Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief, And curse the access of that celestial thief. " * * * * * "Three things there be that prosper all apace, And flourish while they are asunder far; But on a day they meet all in a place, And when they meet they one another mar. "And they be these--the Wood, the Weed, the Wag: The Wood is that that makes the gallows tree; The Weed is that that strings the hangman's bag; The Wag, my pretty knave, betokens thee. "Now mark, dear boy--while these assemble not, Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the Wag is wild; But when they meet, it makes the timber rot, It frets the halter, and it chokes the child. "God bless the Child!" * * * * * "Give me my scallop-shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon, My scrip of joy, immortal diet, My bottle of salvation, My gown of glory, hope's true gage; And thus I'll take my pilgrimage. "Blood must be my body's balmer; No other balm will there be given; Whilst my soul, like quiet palmer, Travelleth towards the land of heaven; Over the silver mountains Where spring the nectar fountains: There will I kiss The bowl of bliss; And drink mine everlasting fill Upon every milken hill. My soul will be a-dry before, But after it will thirst no more. " There is Lord Oxford, Sidney's enemy (which he might be if he chose), andapparently a coxcomb (which is less pardonable), but a charming writer ofverse, as in the following:-- "Come hither, shepherd swain! Sir, what do you require? I pray thee, shew to me thy name! My name is Fond Desire. "When wert thou born, Desire? In pomp and prime of May. By whom, sweet boy, wert thou begot? By fond Conceit, men say. "Tell me, who was thy nurse Fresh youth, in sugared joy. What was thy meat and daily food? Sad sighs, with great annoy. "What hadst thou then to drink? Unfeigned lovers' tears. What cradle wert thou rocked in? In hope devoid of fears. "What lulled thee then asleep? Sweet speech which likes me best. Tell me, where is thy dwelling-place? In gentle hearts I rest. "What thing doth please thee most? To gaze on beauty still. Whom dost thou think to be thy foe? Disdain of my good will. "Doth company displease? Yes, surely, many one. Where doth desire delight to live? He loves to live alone. "Doth either time or age Bring him unto decay? No, no! Desire both lives and dies A thousand times a day. "Then, fond Desire, farewell! Thou art no mate for me; I should be loath, methinks, to dwell With such a one as thee. There is, in the less exalted way, the industrious man of all work, Nicholas Breton, whom we shall speak of more at length among thepamphleteers, and John Davies of Hereford, no poet certainly, but a mostindustrious verse-writer in satiric and other forms. Mass of production, and in some cases personal interest, gives these a certain standing abovetheir fellows. But the crowd of those fellows, about many of whom even thepainful industry of the modern commentator has been able to tell us next tonothing, is almost miraculous when we remember that printing was stillcarried on under a rigid censorship by a select body of monopolists, andthat out of London, and in rare cases the university towns, it wasimpossible for a minor poet to get into print at all unless he trusted tothe contraband presses of the Continent. In dealing with this crowd ofenthusiastic poetical students it is impossible to mention all, andinvidious to single out some only. The very early and interesting _Posy ofGillyflowers_ of Humphrey Gifford (1580) exhibits the first stage of ourperiod, and might almost have been referred to the period before it; thesame humpty-dumpty measure of eights and sixes, and the same vestiges ofrather infantine alliteration being apparent in it, though something of thefire and variety of the new age of poetry appears beside them, notably inthis most spirited war-song:-- (_For Soldiers. _) "Ye buds of Brutus' land, courageous youths now play your parts, [28] Unto your tackle stand, abide the brunt with valiant hearts, For news is carried to and fro, that we must forth to warfare go: Then muster now in every place, and soldiers are pressed forth apace. Faint not, spend blood to do your Queen and country good: Fair words, good pay, will make men cast all care away. "The time of war is come, prepare your corslet, spear, and shield: Methinks I hear the drum strike doleful marches to the field. Tantara, tantara the trumpets sound, which makes our hearts with joy abound. The roaring guns are heard afar, and everything announceth war. Serve God, stand stout; bold courage brings this gear about; Fear not, forth run: faint heart fair lady never won. "Ye curious carpet-knights that spend the time in sport and play, Abroad and see new sights, your country's cause calls you away: Do not, to make your ladies' game, bring blemish to your worthy name. Away to field and win renown, with courage beat your enemies down; Stout hearts gain praise, when dastards sail in slander's seas. Hap what hap shall, we soon shall die but once for all. "Alarm! methinks they cry. Be packing mates, begone with speed, Our foes are very nigh: shame have that man that shrinks at need. Unto it boldly let us stand, God will give right the upper hand. Our cause is good we need not doubt: in sign of courage give a shout; March forth, be strong, good hap will come ere it be long. Shrink not, fight well, for lusty lads must bear the bell. "All you that will shun evil must dwell in warfare every day. The world, the flesh, the devil always do seek our souls' decay. Strive with these foes with all your might, so shall you fight a worthy fight. That conquest dost deserve most praise, whose vice do[th] yield to virtue's ways. Beat down foul sin, a worthy crown then shall ye win: If ye live well, in Heaven with Christ our souls shall dwell. " [28] I print this as in the original, but perhaps the rhythm, which is anodd one, would be better marked if lines 1 and 2 were divided into sixesand eights, lines 3 and 4 into eights, and lines 5 and 6 into fours andeights as the rhyme ends. Of the same date, or indeed earlier, are the miscellaneous poems of ThomasHowell, entitled _The Arbour of Amity_, and chiefly of an ethicalcharacter. Less excusable for the uncouthness of his verse is MatthewGrove, who, writing, or at least publishing, his poems in 1587, should havelearnt something, but apparently had not. It has to be said in excuse ofhim that his date and indeed existence are shadowy, even among the shadowyElizabethan bards; his editor, in worse doggerel than his own, franklyconfessing that he knew nothing about him, not so much as whether he wasalive or dead. But his work, Howell's, and even part of Gifford's, ischiefly interesting as giving us in the very sharpest contrast thedifferences of the poetry before and after the melodious bursts of whichSpenser, Sidney, and Watson were the first mouthpieces. Except an utterdunce (which Grove does not seem to have been by any means) no one who hadbefore him _The Shepherd's Calendar_, or the _Hecatompathia_, or a MS. Copyof _Astrophel and Stella_, could have written as Grove wrote. There areechoes of this earlier and woodener matter to be found later, but, as awhole, the passionate love of beauty, the sense--if only a gropingsense--of form, and the desire to follow, and if possible improve upon themodels of melodious verse which the Sidneian school had given, preservedeven poetasters from the lowest depths. To classify the miscellaneous verse of 1590-1600 (for the second decade ismuch richer than the first) under subjects and styles is a laborious and, at best, an uncertain business. The semi-mythological love-poem, with amore or less tragic ending, had not a few followers; the collection ofpoems of various character in praise of a real or imaginary mistress, similar in design to the sonnet collections, but either more miscellaneousin form or less strung together in one long composition, had even more;while the collection pure and simple, resembling the miscellanies inabsence of special character, but the work of one, not of many writers, wasalso plentifully represented. Satirical allegory, epigram, and other kinds, had numerous examples. But there were two classes of verse which were bothsufficiently interesting in themselves and were cultivated by persons ofsufficient individual repute to deserve separate and detailed mention. These were the historical poem or history--a kind of companion productionto the chronicle play or chronicle, and a very popular one--which, besidesthe names of Warner, Daniel, and Drayton, counted not a few minor adherentsamong Elizabethan bards. Such were the already-mentioned Giles Fletcher;such Fitz-Geoffrey in a remarkable poem on Drake, and Gervase Markham in anot less noteworthy piece on the last fight of _The Revenge_; such numerousothers, some of whom are hardly remembered, and perhaps hardly deserve tobe. The other, and as a class the more interesting, though nothing actuallyproduced by its practitioners may be quite equal to the best work ofDrayton and Daniel, was the beginning of English satire. This beginning isinteresting not merely because of the apparent coincidence of instinctwhich made four or five writers of great talent simultaneously hit on thestyle, so that it is to this day difficult to award exactly the palm ofpriority, but also because the result of their studies, in some peculiarand at first sight rather inexplicable ways, is some of the mostcharacteristic, if very far from being some of the best, work of the wholepoetical period with which we are now busied. In passing, moreover, fromthe group of miscellaneous poets to these two schools, if we lose not alittle of the harmony and lyrical sweetness which characterise the bestwork of the Elizabethan singer proper, we gain greatly in bulk and dignityof work and in intrinsic value. Of at least one of the poets mentioned inthe last paragraph his modern editor--a most enthusiastic and tolerantgodfather of waifs and strays of literature--confesses that he really doesnot quite know why he should be reprinted, except that the original isunique, and that almost every scrap of literature in this period is of somevalue, if only for lexicographic purposes. No one would dream of speakingthus of Drayton or of Daniel, of Lodge, Hall, Donne, or Marston; while evenWarner, the weakest of the names to which we shall proceed to give separatenotice, can be praised without too much allowance. In the latter case, moreover, if not in the first (for the history-poem, until it was taken upin a very different spirit at the beginning of this century, never was asuccess in England), the matter now to be reviewed, after being in its ownkind neglected for a couple of generations, served as forerunner, if notexactly as model, to the magnificent satiric work of Dryden, and throughhis to that of Pope, Young, Churchill, Cowper, and the rest of the moreaccomplished English satirists. The acorn of such an oak cannot be withoutinterest. The example of _The Mirror for Magistrates_ is perhaps sufficient toaccount for the determination of a certain number of Elizabethan poetstowards English history; especially if we add the stimulating effect ofHolinshed's _Chronicle_, which was published in 1580. The first of theso-called historians, William Warner, belongs in point of poetical style tothe pre-Spenserian period, and like its other exponents employs thefourteener; while, unlike some of them, he seems quite free from anyItalian influence in phraseology or poetical manner. Nevertheless _Albion'sEngland_ is, not merely in bulk but in merit, far ahead of the average workof our first period, and quite incommensurable with such verse as that ofGrove. It appeared by instalments (1586-1606-1612). Of its author, WilliamWarner, the old phrase has to be repeated, that next to nothing is known ofhim. He was an Oxfordshire man by birth, and an Oxford man by education; hehad something to do with Cary, Lord Hunsdon, became an Attorney of theCommon Pleas, and died at Amwell suddenly in his bed in 1609, being, as itis guessed rather than known, fifty years old or thereabouts. _Albion'sEngland_ was seized as contraband, by orders of the Archbishop ofCanterbury--a proceeding for which no one has been able to account (thesuggestion that parts of it are indelicate is, considering the manners ofthe time, quite ludicrous), and which may perhaps have been due to sometechnical informality. It is thought that he is the author of a translationof Plautus's _Menæchmi_; he certainly produced in 1585? a prose story, orrather collection of stories, entitled _Syrinx_, which, however, isscarcely worth reading. _Albion's England_ is in no danger of incurringthat sentence. In the most easily accessible edition, that of Chalmers's"Poets, " it is spoilt by having the fourteeners divided into eights andsixes, and it should if possible be read in the original arrangement. Considering how few persons have written about it, an odd collection ofcritical slips might be made. Philips, Milton's nephew, in this case it maybe hoped, not relying on his uncle, calls Warner a "good plain writer ofmoral rules and precepts": the fact being that though he sometimesmoralises he is in the main a story-teller, and much more bent on narrativethan on teaching. Meres calls him "a refiner of the English tongue, " andattributes to him "rare ornaments and resplendent habiliments of the pen":the truth being that he is (as Philips so far correctly says) a singularlyplain, straightforward, and homely writer. Others say that he wrote in"Alexandrines"--a blunder, and a serious one, which has often been repeatedup to the present day in reference to other writers of the seven-footverse. He brings in, according to the taste and knowledge of his time, allthe fabulous accounts of the origins of Britain, and diversifies them withmany romantic and pastoral histories, classical tales, and sometimes mere_Fabliaux_, down to his own time. The chief of the episodes, the story ofArgentile and Curan, has often, and not undeservedly, met with high praise, and sometimes in his declamatory parts Warner achieves a really greatsuccess. Probably, however, what commended his poem most to the taste ofthe day was its promiscuous admixture of things grave and gay--a mixturewhich was always much to the taste of Elizabeth's men, and the popularityof which produced and fostered many things, from the matchless tragi-comedyof _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ to the singularly formless pamphlets of which weshall speak hereafter. The main interest of Warner is his insensibility tothe new influences which Spenser and Sidney directed, and which are foundproducing their full effect on Daniel and Drayton. There were those in hisown day who compared him to Homer: one of the most remarkable instances ofthoroughly unlucky critical extravagance to be found in literary history, as the following very fair average specimen will show:-- "Henry (as if by miracle preserved by foreigns long, From hence-meant treasons) did arrive to right his natives' wrong: And chiefly to Lord Stanley, and some other succours, as Did wish and work for better days, the rival welcome was. Now Richard heard that Richmond was assisted and ashore, And like unkennel'd Cerberus, the crookèd tyrant swore, And all complexions act at once confusedly in him: He studieth, striketh, threats, entreats, and looketh mildly grim, Mistrustfully he trusteth, and he dreadingly did dare, And forty passions in a trice, in him consort and square. But when, by his consented force, his foes increasèd more, He hastened battle, finding his co-rival apt therefore. When Richmond, orderly in all, had battlèd his aid, Inringèd by his complices, their cheerful leader said: 'Now is the time and place (sweet friends) and we the persons be That must give England breath, or else unbreathe for her must we. No tyranny is fabled, and no tyrant was in deed Worse than our foe, whose works will act my words, if well he speed: For ill to ills superlative are easily enticed, But entertains amendment as the Gergesites did Christ. Be valiant then, he biddeth so that would not be outbid, For courage yet shall honour him though base, that better did. I am right heir Lancastrian, he, in York's destroyèd right Usurpeth: but through either ours, for neither claim I fight, But for our country's long-lack'd weal, for England's peace I war: Wherein He speed us! unto Whom I all events refer. ' Meanwhile had furious Richard set his armies in array, And then, with looks even like himself, this or the like did say: 'Why, lads, shall yonder Welshman with his stragglers overmatch? Disdain ye not such rivals, and defer ye their dispatch? Shall Tudor from Plantagenet, the crown by cracking snatch? Know Richard's very thoughts' (he touch'd the diadem he wore) 'Be metal of this metal: then believe I love it more Than that for other law than life, to supersede my claim, And lesser must not be his plea that counterpleads the same. ' The weapons overtook his words, and blows they bravely change, When, like a lion thirsting blood, did moody Richard range, And made large slaughters where he went, till Richmond he espied, Whom singling, after doubtful swords, the valorous tyrant died. " Of the sonnet compositions of Daniel and Drayton something has been saidalready. But Daniel's sonnets are a small and Drayton's an infinitesimalpart of the work of the two poets respectively. Samuel Daniel was aSomersetshire man, born near Taunton in 1562. He is said to have been theson of a music master, but was educated at Oxford, made powerful friends, and died an independent person at Beckington, in the county of his birth, in the year 1619. He was introduced early to good society and patronage, became tutor to Lady Anne Clifford, a great heiress of the North, wasfavoured by the Earl of Southampton, and became a member of the Pembroke or_Arcadia_ coterie. His friends or his merits obtained for him, it is said, the Mastership of the Revels, the posts of Gentleman Extraordinary to JamesI. , and Groom of the Privy Chamber to Anne of Denmark. His literaryproduction besides _Delia_ was considerable. With the first authorisededition of that collection he published _The Complaint of Rosamond_; ahistorical poem of great grace and elegance though a little wanting instrength. In 1594 came his interesting Senecan tragedy of _Cleopatra_; in1595 the first part of his chief work, _The History of the Civil Wars_, andin 1601 a collected folio of "Works. " Then he rested, at any rate frompublication, till 1605, when he produced _Philotas_, another Senecantragedy in verse. In prose he wrote the admirable _Defence of Rhyme_, whichfinally smashed the fancy for classical metres dear even to such a man asCampion. _Hymen's Triumph_, a masque of great beauty, was not printed tillfour years before his death. He also wrote a History of England as well asminor works. The poetical value of Daniel may almost be summed up in twowords--sweetness and dignity. He is decidedly wanting in strength, and, despite _Delia_, can hardly be said to have had a spark of passion. Even inhis own day it was doubted whether he had not overweighted himself with hischoice of historical subjects, though the epithet of "well-languaged, "given to him at the time, evinces a real comprehension of one of his bestclaims to attention. No writer of the period has such a command of pureEnglish, unadulterated by xenomania and unweakened by purism, as Daniel. Whatever unfavourable things have been said of him from time to time havebeen chiefly based on the fact that his chaste and correct style lacks thefiery quaintness, the irregular and audacious attraction of hiscontemporaries. Nor was he less a master of versification than ofvocabulary. His _Defence of Rhyme_ shows that he possessed the theory: allhis poetical works show that he was a master of the practice. He rarelyattempted and probably would not have excelled in the lighter lyricalmeasures. But in the grave music of the various elaborate stanzas in whichthe Elizabethan poets delighted, and of which the Spenserian, though thecrown and flower, is only the most perfect, he was a great proficient, andhis couplets and blank verse are not inferior. Some of his single lineshave already been quoted, and many more might be excerpted from his work ofthe best Elizabethan brand in the quieter kind. Quiet, indeed, is theovermastering characteristic of Daniel. It was this no doubt which made himprefer the stately style of his Senecan tragedies, and the hardly moredisturbed structure of pastoral comedies and tragi-comedies, like the_Queen's Arcadia_ and _Hymen's Triumph_, to the boisterous revels of thestage proper in his time. He had something of the schoolmaster in hisnature as well as in his history. Nothing is more agreeable to him than tomoralise; not indeed in any dull or crabbed manner, but in a mellifluousand at the same time weighty fashion, of which very few other poets havethe secret. It is perhaps by his scrupulous propriety, by his anxiousdecency (to use the word not in its modern and restricted sense, but in itsproper meaning of the generally becoming), that Daniel brought upon himselfthe rather hard saying that he had a manner "better suiting prose. " The sentence will scarcely be echoed by any one who has his best thingsbefore him, however much a reader of some of the duller parts of thehistorical poems proper may feel inclined to echo it. Of his sonnets onehas been given. The splendid Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland is notsurpassed as ethical poetry by anything of the period, and often as it hasbeen quoted, it must be given again, for it is not and never can be toowell known:-- "He that of such a height hath built his mind, And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame Of his resolvèd powers; nor all the wind Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong His settled peace, or to disturb the same: What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may The boundless wastes and wealds of man survey! "And with how free an eye doth he look down Upon these lower regions of turmoil! Where all the storms of passion mainly beat On flesh and blood: where honour, power, renown, Are only gay afflictions, golden toil; Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet As frailty doth; and only great doth seem To little minds, who do it so esteem. "He looks upon the mightiest monarch's wars But only as on stately robberies; Where evermore the fortune that prevails Must be the right: the ill-succeeding mars The fairest and the best fac'd enterprise. Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails: Justice, he sees (as if seducèd) still Conspires with power, whose cause must not be ill. "He sees the face of right t'appear as manifold As are the passions of uncertain man; Who puts it in all colours, all attires, To serve his ends, and make his courses hold. He sees, that let deceit work what it can, Plot and contrive base ways to high desires, That the all-guiding Providence doth yet All disappoint, and mocks the smoke of wit. "Nor is he mov'd with all the thunder cracks Of tyrants' threats, or with the surly brow Of Power, that proudly sits on others' crimes; Charg'd with more crying sins than those he checks. The storms of sad confusion, that may grow Up in the present for the coming times Appal not him; that hath no side at all, But of himself, and knows the worst can fall. "Although his heart (so near allied to Earth) Cannot but pity the perplexèd state Of troublous and distress'd Mortality, That thus make way unto the ugly birth Of their own sorrows, and do still beget Affliction upon imbecility: Yet seeing thus the course of things must run, He looks thereon not strange, but as fore-done. "And whilst distraught ambition compasses, And is encompass'd; whilst as craft deceives, And is deceiv'd: whilst man doth ransack man And builds on blood, and rises by distress; And th' inheritance of desolation leaves To great-expecting hopes: he looks thereon, As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye, And bears no venture in impiety. " In sharp contrast with this the passage from _Hymen's Triumph_, "Ah, I remember well, and how can I, " shows the sweetness without namby-pambyness which Daniel had at constantcommand. Something of the same contrast may be found between the whole of_Hymen's Triumph_ and the _Queen's Arcadia_ on the one side, and_Cleopatra_ and _Philotas_ on the other. All are written in mixed blank andrhymed verse, much interlaced and "enjambed. " The best of the historicalpoems is, by common consent, _Rosamond_, which is instinct with a mostremarkable pathos, nor are fine passages by any means to seek in thegreater length and less poetical subject of _The Civil Wars of York andLancaster_. The fault of this is that the too conscientious historian isconstantly versifying what must be called mere expletive matter. This mustalways make any one who speaks with critical impartiality admit that muchof Daniel is hard reading; but the soft places (to use the adjective in noill sense) are frequent enough, and when the reader comes to them he musthave little appreciation of poetry if he does not rejoice in the foliageand the streams of the poetical oasis which has rewarded him after hispilgrimage across a rather arid wilderness. Michael Drayton was much better fitted for the arduous, and perhaps notwholly legitimate, business of historical poetry than Daniel. If his geniuswas somewhat less fine, it was infinitely better thewed and sinewed. Hisability, indeed, to force any subject which he chose to treat into poetryis amazing, and can hardly be paralleled elsewhere except in a poet who wasborn but just before Drayton's death, John Dryden. He was pretty certainlya gentleman by birth, though not of any great possessions, and is said tohave been born at Hartshill, in Warwickshire, in the year 1563. He is alsosaid, but not known, to have been a member of the University of Oxford, andappears to have been fairly provided with patrons, in the family of someone of whom he served as page, though he never received any great orpermanent preferment. [29] On the other hand, he was not a successfuldramatist (the only literary employment of the time that brought in muchmoney), and friend as he was of nearly all the men of letters of the time, it is expressly stated in one of the few personal notices we have of him, that he could not "swagger in a tavern or domineer in a hothouse" [house ofill-fame]--that is to say, that the hail-fellow well-met Bohemianism of thetime, which had led Marlowe and many of his group to evil ends, and whichwas continued in a less outrageous form under the patronage of Ben Jonsontill far into the next age, had no charms for him. Yet he must have livedsomehow and to a good age, for he did not die till the 23d December 1631. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a fact which drew from Goldsmith, in_The Citizen of the World_, a gibe showing only the lamentable ignorance ofthe best period of English poetry, in which Goldsmith was not indeedalone, but in which he was perhaps pre-eminent among contemporaries eminentfor it. [29] Drayton has been thoroughly treated by Professor Oliver Elton in_Michael Drayton_ (London, 1905), enlarged from a monograph for the SpenserSociety. Drayton's long life was as industrious as it was long. He began in 1591with a volume of sacred verse, the _Harmony of the Church_, which, for somereason not merely undiscovered but unguessed, displeased the censors, andwas never reprinted with his other works until recently. Two years laterappeared _Idea, The Shepherd's Garland_--a collection of eclogues not to beconfounded with the more famous collection of sonnets in praise of the samereal or fancied mistress which appeared later. In the first of theseDrayton called himself "Rowland, " or "Roland, " a fact on which some ratherrickety structures of guesswork have been built as to allusions to him inSpenser. His next work was _Mortimeriados_, afterwards refashioned andcompleted under the title of _The Barons' Wars_, and this was followed in1597 by one of his best works, _England's Heroical Epistles_. _The Owl_, some _Legends_, and other poems succeeded; and in 1605 he began to collecthis Works, which were frequently reprinted. The mighty poem of the_Polyolbion_ was the fruit of his later years, and, in strictness, belongsto the period of a later chapter; but Drayton's muse is eminently one andindivisible, and, notwithstanding the fruits of pretty continual studywhich his verses show, they belong, in the order of thought, to the middleand later Elizabethan period rather than to the Jacobean. Few poets of anything like Drayton's volume (of which some idea may beformed by saying that his works, in the not quite complete form in whichthey appear in Chalmers, fill five hundred of the bulky pages of that work, each page frequently containing a hundred and twenty-eight lines) show suchuniform mixture of imagination and vigour. In the very highest and rarestgraces of poetry he is, indeed, by common consent wanting, unless one ofthese graces in the uncommon kind of the war-song be allowed, as perhaps itmay be, to the famous and inimitable though often imitated _Ballad ofAgincourt_, "To the brave Cambro-Britons and their Harp, " not to beconfounded with the narrative "Battle of Agincourt, " which is of a lessrare merit. The Agincourt ballad, "Fair stood the wind for France, " is quite at the head of its own class of verse in England--Campbell's twomasterpieces, and Lord Tennyson's still more direct imitation in the "SixHundred, " falling, the first somewhat, and the last considerably, short ofit. The sweep of the metre, the martial glow of the sentiment, and theskill with which the names are wrought into the verse, are altogetherbeyond praise. Drayton never, unless the enigmatical sonnet to Idea (see_ante_) be really his, rose to such concentration of matter and suchelaborate yet unforced perfection of manner as here, yet his greatqualities are perceptible all over his work. The enormous _Polyolbion_, written in a metre the least suitable to continuous verse of any inEnglish--the Alexandrine--crammed with matter rebel to poetry, and obligingthe author to find his chief poetical attraction rather in superaddedornament, in elaborately patched-on passages, than in the actual andnatural evolution of his theme, is still a very great work in another thanthe mechanical sense. Here is a fairly representative passage:-- "The haughty Cambrian hills enamoured of their praise, (As they who only sought ambitiously to raise The blood of God-like Brute) their heads do proudly bear: And having crown'd themselves sole regents of the air (Another war with Heaven as though they meant to make) Did seem in great disdain the bold affront to take, That any petty hill upon the English side, Should dare, not (with a crouch) to veil unto their pride. When Wrekin, as a hill his proper worth that knew, And understood from whence their insolency grew, For all that they appear'd so terrible in sight, Yet would not once forego a jot that was his right, And when they star'd on him, to them the like he gave, And answer'd glance for glance, and brave for brave: That, when some other hills which English dwellers were, The lusty Wrekin saw himself so well to bear Against the Cambrian part, respectless of their power; His eminent disgrace expecting every hour Those flatterers that before (with many cheerful look) Had grac'd his goodly sight, him utterly forsook, And muffled them in clouds, like mourners veiled in black, Which of their utmost hope attend the ruinous wrack: That those delicious nymphs, fair Team and Rodon clear (Two brooks of him belov'd, and two that held him dear; He, having none but them, they having none but he Which to their mutual joy might either's object be) Within their secret breast conceivèd sundry fears, And as they mix'd their streams, for him so mix'd their tears. Whom, in their coming down, when plainly he discerns, For them his nobler heart in his strong bosom yearns: But, constantly resolv'd, that dearer if they were The Britons should not yet all from the English bear; 'Therefore, ' quoth he, 'brave flood, tho' forth by Cambria brought, Yet as fair England's friend, or mine thou would'st be thought (O Severn) let thine ear my just defence partake. '" Happy phrases abound, and, moreover, every now and then there are setpieces, as they may be called, of fanciful description which are full ofbeauty; for Drayton (a not very usual thing in a man of such unflaggingindustry, and even excellence of work) was full of fancy. The fairy poem of_Nymphidia_ is one of the most graceful trifles in the language, possessinga dancing movement and a felicitous choice of imagery and language whichtriumphantly avoid the trivial on the one hand, and the obviously burlesqueon the other. The singular satirical or quasi-satirical poems of _TheMooncalf_, _The Owl_, and _The Man in the Moon_, show a faculty of comictreatment less graceful indeed, but scarcely inferior, and the lyricscalled _Odes_ (of which the _Ballad of Agincourt_ is sometimes classed asone) exhibit a command of lyric metre hardly inferior to the commanddisplayed in that masterpiece. In fact, if ever there was a poet who couldwrite, and write, perhaps beautifully, certainly well, about anyconceivable broomstick in almost any conceivable manner, that poet wasDrayton. His historical poems, which are inferior in bulk only to the huge_Polyolbion_, contain a great deal of most admirable work. They consist ofthree divisions--_The Barons' Wars_ in eight-lined stanzas, the _HeroicEpistles_ (suggested, of course, by Ovid, though anything but Ovidian) inheroic couplets, _The Miseries of Queen Margaret_ in the same stanza as_The Barons' Wars_, and _Four Legends_ in stanzas of various form andrange. That this mass of work should possess, or should, indeed, admit ofthe charms of poetry which distinguish _The Faërie Queene_ would beimpossible, even if Drayton had been Spenser, which he was far from being. But to speak of his "dull creeping narrative, " to accuse him of the"coarsest vulgarities, " of being "flat and prosaic, " and so on, as was doneby eighteenth-century critics, is absolutely uncritical, unless it be verymuch limited. _The Barons' Wars_ is somewhat dull, the author being toocareful to give a minute history of a not particularly interesting subject, and neglecting to take the only possible means of making it interesting bybringing out strongly the characters of heroes and heroines, and soinfusing a dramatic interest. But this absence of character is a constantdrawback to the historical poems of the time. And even here we find manypassages where the drawback of the stanza for narrative is most skilfullyavoided, and where the vigour of the single lines and phrases isunquestionable on any sound estimate. Still the stanza, though Drayton himself defends it (it should be mentionedthat his prose prefaces are excellent, and constitute another link betweenhim and Dryden), is something of a clog; and the same thing is felt in _TheMiseries of Queen Margaret_ and the _Legends_, where, however, it is againnot difficult to pick out beauties. The _Heroical Epistles_ can be praisedwith less allowance. Their shorter compass, their more manageable metre(for Drayton was a considerable master of the earlier form of couplet), andthe fact that a personal interest is infused in each, give them a greatadvantage; and, as always, passages of great merit are not infrequent. Finally, Drayton must have the praise (surely not quite irrelevant) of amost ardent and lofty spirit of patriotism. Never was there a betterEnglishman, and as his love of his country spirited him up to the brillianteffort of the _Ballad of Agincourt_, so it sustained him through the"strange herculean task" of the _Polyolbion_, and often put light and lifeinto the otherwise lifeless mass of the historic poems. Yet I have myselfno doubt that these historic poems were a mistake, and that theircomposition, though prompted by a most creditable motive, the burningattachment to England which won the fight with Spain, and laid thefoundation of the English empire, was not altogether, perhaps was not byany means, according to knowledge. The almost invariable, and I fear it must be said, almost invariably idlecontroversy about priority in literary styles has been stimulated, in thecase of English satire, by a boast of Joseph Hall's made in his own_Virgidemiarum_-- "Follow me who list, And be the _second_ English satirist. " It has been pleaded in Hall's favour that although the date of publicationof his _Satires_ is known, the date of their composition is not known. Itis not even necessary to resort to this kind of special pleading; fornothing can be more evident than that the bravado is not very serious. Onthe literal supposition, however, and if we are to suppose that publicationimmediately followed composition, Hall was anticipated by more than one ortwo predecessors, in the production of work not only specifically satiricalbut actually called satire, and by two at least in the adoption of theheroic couplet form which has ever since been consecrated to the subject. Satirical poetry, of a kind, is of course nearly if not quite as old as thelanguage, and in the hands of Skelton it had assumed various forms. But thesatire proper--the following of the great Roman examples of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius in general lashing of vice and folly--can hardly traceitself further back in England than George Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_, whichpreceded Hall's _Virgidemiarum_ by twenty years, and is interesting notonly for itself but as being ushered in by the earliest known verses ofWalter Raleigh. It is written in blank verse, and is a rather ramblingcommentary on the text _vanitas vanitatum_, but it expressly calls itself asatire and answers sufficiently well to the description. More immediateand nearer examples were to be found in the Satires of Donne and Lodge. Thefirst named were indeed, like the other poetical works of theirmarvellously gifted writer, not published till many years after; butuniversal tradition ascribes the whole of Donne's profane poems to hisearly youth, and one document exists which distinctly dates "John Donne, his Satires, " as early as 1593. We shall therefore deal with them, as withthe other closely connected work of their author, here and in this chapter. But there has to be mentioned first the feebler but chronologically morecertain work of Thomas Lodge, _A Fig for Momus_, which fulfils both therequirements of known date and of composition in couplets. It appeared in1595, two years before Hall, and is of the latest and weakest of Lodge'sverse work. It was written or at least produced when he was just abandoninghis literary and adventurous career and settling down as a quiet physicianwith no more wild oats to sow, except, perhaps, some participation inpopish conspiracy. The style did not lend itself to the display of any ofLodge's strongest gifts--romantic fancy, tenderness and sweetness offeeling, or elaborate embroidery of precious language. He follows Horacepretty closely and with no particular vigour. Nor does the book appear tohave attracted much attention, so that it is just possible that Hall maynot have heard of it. If, however, he had not, it is certainly a curiouscoincidence that he, with Donne and Lodge, should all have hit on thecouplet as their form, obvious as its advantages are when it is once tried. For the rhyme points the satirical hits, while the comparatively briefspace of each distich prevents that air of wandering which naturallyaccompanies satire in longer stanzas. At any rate after the work (in somany ways remarkable) of Donne, Hall, and Marston, there could hardly beany more doubt about the matter, though part of the method which thesewriters, especially Donne and Marston, took to give individuality and"bite" to their work was as faulty as it now seems to us peculiar. Ben Jonson, the least gushing of critics to his contemporaries, said ofJohn Donne that he was "the first poet of the world in some things, " and Iown that without going through the long catalogue of singularlycontradictory criticisms which have been passed on Donne, I feel disposedto fall back on and adopt this earliest, simplest, and highest encomium. Possibly Ben might not have meant the same things that I mean, but thatdoes not matter. It is sufficient for me that in one special point of thepoetic charm--the faculty of suddenly transfiguring common things by aflood of light, and opening up strange visions to the capableimagination--Donne is surpassed by no poet of any language, and equalled byfew. That he has obvious and great defects, that he is wholly and in allprobability deliberately careless of formal smoothness, that he adopted thefancy of his time for quaint and recondite expression with an almostperverse vigour, and set the example of the topsy-turvified conceits whichcame to a climax in Crashaw and Cleveland, that he is almost impudentlylicentious in thought and imagery at times, that he alternates the highestpoetry with the lowest doggerel, the noblest thought with the most trivialcrotchet--all this is true, and all this must be allowed for; but it onlychequers, it does not obliterate, the record of his poetic gifts andgraces. He is, moreover, one of the most historically important of poets, although by a strange chance there is no known edition of his poems earlierthan 1633, some partial and privately printed issues having disappearedwholly if they ever existed. His influence was second to the influence ofno poet of his generation, and completely overshadowed all others, towardshis own latter days and the decades immediately following his death, exceptthat of Jonson. Thomas Carew's famous description of him as "A king who ruled as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit, " expresses the general opinion of the time; and even after the revolt headedby Waller had dethroned him from the position, Dryden, his successor in thesame monarchy, while declining to allow him the praise of "the best poet"(that is, the most exact follower of the rules and system of versifyingwhich Dryden himself preferred), allowed him to be "the greatest wit of thenation. " His life concerns us little, and its events are not disputed, or rather, inthe earlier part, are still rather obscure. Born in 1573, educated at bothuniversities and at Lincoln's Inn, a traveller, a man of pleasure, alaw-student, a soldier, and probably for a time a member of the RomanChurch, he seems just before reaching middle life to have experienced somereligious change, took orders, became a famous preacher, was made Dean ofSt. Paul's, and died in 1631. It has been said that tradition and probability point to the composition ofmost, and that all but certain documentary evidence points to thecomposition of some, of his poems in the earlier part of his life. Unlessthe date of the Harleian MS. Is a forgery, some of his satires were writtenin or before 1593, when he was but twenty years old. The boiling passion, without a thought of satiety, which marks many of his elegies would alsoincline us to assign them to youth, and though some of his epistles, andmany of his miscellaneous poems, are penetrated with a quieter and morereflective spirit, the richness of fancy in them, as well as the amatorycharacter of many, perhaps the majority, favour a similar attribution. Allalike display Donne's peculiar poetical quality--the fiery imaginationshining in dark places, the magical illumination of obscure and shadowythoughts with the lightning of fancy. In one remarkable respect Donne has apeculiar cast of thought as well as of manner, displaying that mixture ofvoluptuous and melancholy meditation, that swift transition of thought fromthe marriage sheet to the shroud, which is characteristic of FrenchRenaissance poets, but less fully, until he set the example, of English. The best known and most exquisite of his fanciful flights, the idea of thediscovery of "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" of his own long interred skeleton: the wish-- "I long to talk with some old lover's ghost Who died before the god of love was born, " and others, show this peculiarity. And it recurs in the most unexpectedplaces, as, for the matter of that, does his strong satirical faculty. Insome of his poems, as the _Anatomy of the World_, occasioned by the deathof Mrs. Elizabeth Drury, this melancholy imagery mixed with touches (onlytouches here) of the passion which had distinguished the author earlier(for the _Anatomy_ is not an early work), and with religious andphilosophical meditation, makes the strangest amalgam--shot through, however, as always, with the golden veins of Donne's incomparable poetry. Expressions so strong as this last may seem in want of justification. Andthe three following pieces, the "Dream, " a fragment of satire, and anextract from the _Anatomy_, may or may not, according to taste, supplyit:-- "Dear love, for nothing less than thee Would I have broke this happy dream. It was a theme For reason, much too strong for fantasy: Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely; yet My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it: Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee suffice To make dreams true, and fables histories; Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest. "As lightning or a taper's light Thine eyes, and not thy noise, wak'd me; Yet I thought thee (For thou lov'st truth) an angel at first sight, But when I saw thou saw'st my heart And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art, When thou knew'st what I dreamt, then thou knew'st when Excess of joy would wake me, and cam'st then; _I must confess, it could not choose but be_ _Profane to think thee anything but thee. _ "Coming and staying show'd thee thee, But rising makes me doubt that now Thou art not thou. That love is weak where fears are strong as he; 'Tis not all spirit, pure and brave, If mixture it of fear, shame, honour, have. Perchance as torches which must ready be Men light, and put out, so thou deal'st with me. Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come: then I Will dream that hope again, or else would die. " * * * * * "O age of rusty iron! some better wit Call it some worse name, if ought equal it. Th' iron age was, when justice was sold: now Injustice is sold dearer far; allow All claim'd fees and duties, gamesters, anon The money, which you sweat and swear for's gone Into other hands; so controverted lands 'Scape, like Angelica, the striver's hands. If law be in the judge's heart, and he Have no heart to resist letter or fee, Where wilt thou appeal? power of the courts below Flows from the first main head, and these can throw Thee, if they suck thee in, to misery, To fetters, halters. But if th' injury Steel thee to dare complain, alas! thou go'st Against the stream upwards when thou art most Heavy and most faint; and in these labours they 'Gainst whom thou should'st complain will in thy way Become great seas, o'er which when thou shalt be Forc'd to make golden bridges, thou shalt see That all thy gold was drowned in them before. " * * * * * "She, whose fair body no such prison was But that a soul might well be pleased to pass An age in her; she, whose rich beauty lent Mintage to other beauties, for they went But for so much as they were like to her; She, in whose body (if we dare prefer This low world to so high a mark as she), The western treasure, eastern spicery, Europe and Afric, and the unknown rest Were easily found, or what in them was best; And when we've made this large discovery Of all, in her some one part then will be Twenty such parts, whose plenty and riches is Enough to make twenty such worlds as this; She, whom had they known, who did first betroth The tutelar angels and assigned one both To nations, cities, and to companies, To functions, offices, and dignities, And to each several man, to him and him, They would have giv'n her one for every limb; She, of whose soul if we may say 'twas gold, Her body was th' electrum and did hold Many degrees of that; we understood Her by her sight; _her pure and eloquent blood_ _Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought_ _That one might almost say, her body thought_; She, she thus richly and largely hous'd is gone And chides us, slow-paced snails who crawl upon Our prison's prison earth, nor think us well Longer than whilst we bear our brittle shell. " But no short extracts will show Donne, and there is no room for a fullanthology. He must be read, and by every catholic student of Englishliterature should be regarded with a respect only "this side idolatry, "though the respect need not carry with it blindness to his undoubtedlyglaring faults. Those faults are not least seen in his Satires, though neither theunbridled voluptuousness which makes his Elegies shocking to modernpropriety, nor the far-off conceit which appears in his meditative andmiscellaneous poems, is very strongly or specially represented here. Nor, naturally enough, is the extreme beauty of thought and allusion distinctlynoteworthy in a class of verse which does not easily admit it. On the otherhand, the force and originality of Donne's intellect are nowhere bettershown. It is a constant fault of modern satirists that in their justadmiration for Horace and Juvenal they merely paraphrase them, and, insteadof going to the fountainhead and taking their matter from human nature, merely give us fresh studies of _Ibam forte via sacra_ or the Tenth ofJuvenal, adjusted to the meridians of Paris or London. Although Donne isnot quite free from this fault, he is much freer than either of hiscontemporaries, Regnier or Hall. And the rough vigour of his sketches andsingle lines is admirable. Yet it is as rough as it is vigorous; and thebreakneck versification and contorted phrase of his satires, softened alittle in Hall, roughened again and to a much greater degree in Marston, and reaching, as far as phrase goes, a rare extreme in the _TransformedMetamorphosis_ of Cyril Tourneur, have been the subject of a great deal ofdiscussion. It is now agreed by all the best authorities that it would be amistake to consider this roughness unintentional or merely clumsy, and thatit sprung, at any rate in great degree, from an idea that the ancientsintended the _Satura_ to be written in somewhat unpolished verse, as wellas from a following of the style of Persius, the most deliberately obscureof all Latin if not of all classical poets. In language Donne is not (asfar as his Satires are concerned) a very great sinner; but hisversification, whether by his own intention or not, leaves much to desire. At one moment the ten syllables are only to be made out by a Chaucerianlengthening of the mute _e_; at another the writer seems to be emulatingWyatt in altering the accent of syllables, and coolly making the finaliambus of a line out of such a word as "answer. " It is no wonder that poetsof the "correct" age thought him in need of rewriting; though even theycould not mistake the force of observation and expression whichcharacterises his Satires, and which very frequently reappears even in hisdreamiest metaphysics, his most recondite love fancies, and his warmest andmost passionate hymns to Aphrodite Pandemos. These artificial characteristics are supplemented in the Elizabethansatirists, other than Donne, by yet a third, which makes them, I confess, to me rather tedious reading, independently of their shambling metre, andtheir sometimes almost unconstruable syntax. This is the absurd affectationof extreme moral wrath against the corruptions of their time in which theyall indulge. Marston, who is nearly the foulest, if not quite the foulestwriter of any English classic, gives himself the airs of the mostsensitive puritan; Hall, with a little less of this contrast, sinsconsiderably in the same way, and adds to his delinquencies a most petulantand idle attempt to satirise from the purely literary point of view writerswho are a whole head and shoulders above himself. And these two, followedby their imitator, Guilpin, assail each other in a fashion which argueseither a very absurd sincerity of literary jealousy, or a very ignoblesimulation of it, for the purpose of getting up interest on the part of thepublic. Nevertheless, both Marston and Hall are very interesting figures inEnglish literature, and their satirical performances cannot be passed overin any account of it. Joseph Hall was born near Ashby de la Zouch, of parents in the lower yeomanrank of life, had his education at the famous Puritan College of Emanuel atCambridge, became a Fellow thereof, proceeded through the living ofHawstead and a canonry at Wolverhampton to the sees of Exeter and Norwich, of the latter of which he was violently deprived by the Parliament, and, not surviving long enough to see the Restoration, died (1656) in a suburbof his cathedral city. His later life was important for religiousliterature and ecclesiastical politics, in his dealings with the latter ofwhich he came into conflict, not altogether fortunately for the younger andgreater man of letters, with John Milton. His Satires belong to his earlyCambridge days, and to the last decade of the sixteenth century. They haveon the whole been rather overpraised, though the variety of their matterand the abundance of reference to interesting social traits of the time tosome extent redeem them. The worst point about them, as already noted, isthe stale and commonplace impertinence with which their author, unlike thebest breed of young poets and men of letters, attempts to satirise hisliterary betters; while they are to some extent at any rate tarred with theother two brushes of corrupt imitation of the ancients, and of sham moralindignation. Indeed the want of sincerity--the evidence of the literaryexercise--injures Hall's satirical work in different ways throughout. We donot, as we read him, in the least believe in his attitude of Hebrewprophet crossed with Roman satirist, and the occasional presence of avigorous couplet or a lively metaphor hardly redeems this disbelief. Nevertheless, Hall is here as always a literary artist--a writer who tooksome trouble with his writings; and as some of his satires are short, awhole one may be given:-- "A gentle squire would gladly entertain Into his house some trencher-chaplain;[30] Some willing man that might instruct his sons And that would stand to good conditions. First, that he lie upon the truckle bed, Whiles his young master lieth o'er his head. Second, that he do, on no default, [31] Ever presume to sit above the salt. Third, that he never change his trencher twice. Fourth, that he use all common courtesies; Sit bare at meals, and one half rise and wait. Last, that he never his young master beat, But he must ask his mother to define, How many jerks she would his breech should line. All these observ'd he could contented be To give five marks and winter livery. " [30] "Chaplain"--trisyllable like "capellan. " [31] Missing syllable. John Marston, who out-Halled Hall in all his literary misdeeds, was, itwould appear, a member of a good Shropshire family which had passed intoWarwickshire. He was educated at Coventry School, and at Brasenose College, Oxford, and passed early into London literary society, where he involvedhimself in the inextricable and not-much-worth-extricating quarrels whichhave left their mark in Jonson's and Dekker's dramas. In the first decadeof the seventeenth century he wrote several remarkable plays, of muchgreater literary merit than the work now to be criticised. Then he tookorders, was presented to the living of Christchurch, and, like others ofhis time, seems to have forsworn literature as an unholy thing. He died in1634. Here we are concerned only with two youthful works ofhis--_Pigmalion's Image_ and some Satires in 1598, followed in the sameyear by a sequel, entitled _The Scourge of Villainy_. In these works hecalled himself "W. Kinsayder, " a pen-name for which various explanationshave been given. It is characteristic and rather comical that, while boththe earlier Satires and _The Scourge_ denounce lewd verse mostfullmouthedly, _Pigmalion's Image_ is a poem in the _Venus and Adonis_style which is certainly not inferior to its fellows in lusciousdescriptions. It was, in fact, with the _Satires_ and much similar work, formally condemned and burnt in 1599. Both in Hall and in Marstonindustrious commentators have striven hard to identify the personages ofthe satire with famous living writers, and there may be a chance that someat least of their identifications (as of Marston's Tubrio with Marlowe) arecorrect. But the exaggeration and insincerity, the deliberate"society-journalism" (to adopt a detestable phrase for a correspondingthing of our own days), which characterise all this class of writing makethe identifications of but little interest. In every age there are writerswho delight in representing that age as the very worst of the history ofthe world, and in ransacking literature and imagination for accusationsagainst their fellows. The sedate philosopher partly brings and partlydraws the conviction that one time is very like another. Marston, however, has fooled himself and his readers to the very top of his and their bent;and even Churchill, restrained by a more critical atmosphere, has not comequite near his confused and only half-intelligible jumble of indictmentsfor indecent practices and crude philosophy of the moral and metaphysicalkind. A vigorous line or phrase occasionally redeems the chaos of rant, fustian, indecency, ill-nature, and muddled thought. "Ambitious Gorgons, wide-mouth'd Lamians, Shape-changing Proteans, damn'd Briarians, Is Minos dead, is Radamanth asleep, That ye thus dare unto Jove's palace creep? What, hath Ramnusia spent her knotted whip, That ye dare strive on Hebe's cup to sip? Ye know Apollo's quiver is not spent, But can abate your daring hardiment. Python is slain, yet his accursed race Dare look divine Astrea in the face; Chaos return and with confusion Involve the world with strange disunion; For Pluto sits in that adorèd chair Which doth belong unto Minerva's heir. O hecatombs! O catastrophe! From Midas' pomp to Trus' beggary! Prometheus, who celestial fire Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind, Whereby we might the depth of nature find, Is ding'd to hell, and vulture eats his heart Which did such deep philosophy impart To mortal men. " The contrast of this so-called satire, and the really satiric touches ofMarston's own plays, when he was not cramped by the affectations of thestyle, is very curious. Edward Gilpin or Guilpin, author of the rare book _Skialetheia_, publishedbetween the dates of Hall and Marston, is, if not a proved plagiarist fromeither, at any rate an obvious follower in the same track. There is thesame exaggeration, the same petulant ill-nature, the same obscurity ofphrase and ungainliness of verse, and the same general insincerity. But thefine flower of the whole school is perhaps to be found in the miraculous_Transformed Metamorphosis_, attributed to the powerful but extravagantdramatist, Cyril Tourneur, who wrote this kind of thing:-- "From out the lake a bridge ascends thereto, Whereon in female shape a serpent stands. Who eyes her eye, or views her blue-vein'd brow, With sense-bereaving glozes she enchants, And when she sees a worldling blind that haunts The pleasure that doth seem there to be found, She soothes with Leucrocutanized sound. "Thence leads an entry to a shining hall Bedecked with flowers of the fairest hue; The Thrush, the Lark, and night's-joy Nightingale There minulize their pleasing lays anew, This welcome to the bitter bed of rue; This little room will scarce two wights contain T' enjoy their joy, and there in pleasure reign. "But next thereto adjoins a spacious room, More fairly fair adorned than the other: (O woe to him at sin-awhaping doom, That to these shadows hath his mind given over) For (O) he never shall his soul recover: If this sweet sin still feeds him with her smack And his repentant hand him hales not back. "[32] [32] Mr. Churton Collins is "tolerably confident, " and perhaps he mighthave been quite certain, that Leucrocutanized refers to one of the Fauna offancy, --a monster that spoke like a man. "Minulise, " from minurizô, "Ising. " "To awhape" = "to confound. " We could hardly end with anything farther removed from the clear philosophyand the serene loveliness of _The Faërie Queene_. CHAPTER V THE SECOND DRAMATIC PERIOD--SHAKESPERE The difficulty of writing about Shakespere is twofold; and though it is adifficulty which, in both its aspects, presents itself when other greatwriters are concerned, there is no other case in which it besets the criticto quite the same extent. Almost everything that is worth saying has beenalready said, more or less happily. A vast amount has been said which isnot in the least worth saying, which is for the most part demonstrablyfoolish or wrong. As Shakespere is by far the greatest of all writers, ancient or modern, so he has been the subject of commentatorial folly to anextent which dwarfs the expense of that folly on any other single subject. It is impossible to notice the results of this folly except at greatlength; it is doubtful whether they are worth noticing at all; yet there isalways the danger either that some mischievous notions may be leftundisturbed by the neglect to notice them, or that the critic himself maybe presumed to be ignorant of the foolishness of his predecessors. Theseinconveniences, however, must here be risked, and it may perhaps be thoughtthat the necessity of risking them is a salutary one. In no other case isit so desirable that an author should be approached by students with theminimum of apparatus. The scanty facts and the abundant fancies as to Shakespere's life are acommonplace of literature. He was baptized on the 26th of April 1564 atStratford-on-Avon, and must have been born either on the same day, or onone of those immediately preceding. His father was John Shakespere, hismother Mary Arden, both belonging to the lower middle class and connected, personally and by their relations, with yeomanry and small landed gentry onthe one side, and with well-to-do tradesmen on the other. Nothing is knownof his youth and little of his education; but it was a constant traditionof men of his own and the immediately succeeding generation that he hadlittle school learning. Before he was nineteen he was married, at the endof November 1582, to Anne Hathaway, who was seven years his senior. Theirfirst child, Susannah, was baptized six months later. He is said to haveleft Stratford for London in 1585, or thereabouts, and to have connectedhimself at once with the theatre, first in humble and then in moreimportant positions. But all this is mist and myth. He is transparentlyreferred to by Robert Greene in the summer or autumn of 1592, and the termsof the reference prove his prosperity. The same passage brought out acomplimentary reference to Shakespere's intellectual and moral characterfrom Chettle, Greene's editor. He published _Venus and Adonis_ in 1593, and_Lucrece_ next year. His plays now began to appear rapidly, and brought himmoney enough to buy, in 1597, the house of New Place at Stratford, and toestablish himself there after, it is supposed, twelve years' almostcomplete absence from his birthplace and his family. Documentary referencesto his business matters now become not infrequent, but, except as showingthat he was alive and prosperous, they are quite uninteresting. The samemay be said of the marriages and deaths of his children. In 1609 appearedthe _Sonnets_, some of which had previously been printed in unauthorisedand piratical publications. He died on the 23d of April (supposed generallyto be his birthday) 1616, and was buried at Stratford. His plays had beenonly surreptitiously printed, the retention of a play in manuscript beingof great importance to the actors, and the famous first folio did notappear till seven years after his death. The canon of Shakespere's plays, like everything else connected with him, has been the subject of endless discussion. There is no reasonable doubtthat in his earlier days (the first printed play among those ordinarilyassigned to him, _Romeo and Juliet_, dates from 1597) he had taken part indramatic work which is now mostly anonymous or assigned to other men, andthere is also no doubt that there may be passages in the accepted playswhich he owed to others. But my own deliberate judgment is that noimportant and highly probable ascription of extant work to Shakespere canbe made outside the canon as usually printed, with the doubtful exceptionof _The Two Noble Kinsmen_; and I do not believe that in the plays usuallyaccepted, any very important or characteristic portion is not Shakespere's. As for Shakespere-Bacon theories, and that kind of folly, they are scarcelyworthy even of mention. Nor among the numerous other controversies anderrors on the subject shall I meddle with more than one--the constantlyrepeated assertion that England long misunderstood or neglected Shakespere, and that foreign aid, chiefly German (though some include Voltaire!), wasrequired to make her discover him. A very short way is possible with thisabsurdity. It would be difficult to name any men more representative ofcultivated literary opinion and accomplishment in the six generations(taking a generation at the third of a century) which passed betweenShakespere's death and the battle of Waterloo (since when Englishadmiration of Shakespere will hardly be denied), than Ben Jonson, JohnMilton, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel TaylorColeridge. Their lives overlapped each other considerably, so that noperiod is left uncovered. They were all typical men of letters, each of hisown time, and four at least of them were literary dictators. Now, BenJonson's estimate of Shakespere in prose and verse is on record in moreplaces than one, and is as authentic as the silly stories of his envy aremythical. If Milton, to his eternal disgrace, flung, for party purposes, the study of Shakespere as a reproach in his dead king's face, he hadhimself long before put on record his admiration for him, and his ownstudy is patent to every critical reader of his works. Dryden, but a yearor two after the death of Shakespere's daughter, drew up that famous andmemorable eulogy which ought to be familiar to all, and which, long beforeany German had spoken of Shakespere, and thirty years before Voltaire hadcome into the world, exactly and precisely based the structure ofShakespere-worship. Pope edited Shakespere. Johnson edited him. Coleridgeis acknowledged as, with his contemporaries Lamb and Hazlitt, the founderof modern appreciation. It must be a curious reckoning which, in face ofsuch a catena as this, stretching its links over the whole period, maintains that England wanted Germans to teach her how to admire the writerwhom Germans have done more to mystify and distort than even his owncountrymen. The work of Shakespere falls into three divisions very unequal in bulk. There is first (speaking both in the order of time and in that of thought, though not in that of literary importance and interest) the small divisionof poems, excluding the _Sonnets_, but including _Venus and Adonis_, _TheRape of Lucrece_, and the few and uncertain but exquisite scraps, the_Lover's Complaint_, _The Passionate Pilgrim_, and so forth. All these arelikely to have been the work of early youth, and they are much more likethe work of other men than any other part of Shakespere's work, differingchiefly in the superior sweetness of those wood-notes wild, which Miltonjustly, if not altogether adequately, attributed to the poet, and in theoccasional appearance of the still more peculiar and unique touches ofsympathy with and knowledge of universal nature which supply the mainShakesperian note. The _Venus_ and the _Lucrece_ form part of a largecollection (see last chapter) of extremely luscious, not to say voluptuous, poetry which the imitation of Italian models introduced into England, whichhas its most perfect examples in the earlier of these two poems, innumerous passages of Spenser, and in the _Hero and Leander_ of Marlowe, butwhich was written, as will have been seen from what has been already said, with extraordinary sweetness and abundance, by a vast number ofElizabethan writers. There are extant mere _adespota_, and mere "minorpoems" (such as the pretty "Britain's Ida, " which used to be printed asSpenser's, and which some critics have rather rashly given to PhineasFletcher), good enough to have made reputation, if not fortune, at othertimes. There is no reason to attribute to Shakespere on the one hand, anydeliberate intention of executing a _tour de force_ in the composition ofthese poems or, in his relinquishment of the style, any deliberaterejection of the kind as unworthy of his powers on the other. He appears tohave been eminently one of those persons who care neither to be in nor outof the fashion, but follow it as far as suits and amuses them. Yet, beautiful as these poems are, they so manifestly do not present theirauthor at the full of his powers, or even preluding in the kind wherein thebest of those powers were to be shown, that they require comparativelylittle critical notice. As things delightful to read they can hardly beplaced too high, especially the _Venus_; as evidences of the poet'smany-sided nature, they are interesting. But they are in somewhat otherthan the usual sense quite "simple, sensuous, and passionate. " Themisplaced ingenuity which, neglecting the _unum necessarium_, will busyitself about all sorts of unnecessary things, has accordingly been ratherhard put to it with them, and to find any pasture at all has had to browseon questions of dialect, and date, and personal allusion, even more jejuneand even more unsubstantial than usual. It is quite otherwise with the _Sonnets_. In the first place nowhere inShakespere's work is it more necessary to brush away the cobwebs of thecommentators. This side of madness, no vainer fancies have ever entered themind of man than those which have been inspired by the immaterial part ofthe matter. The very initials of the dedicatee "W. H. " have had volumeswritten about them; the _Sonnets_ themselves have been twisted andclassified in every conceivable shape; the persons to whom they areaddressed, or to whom they refer, have been identified with half thegentlemen and ladies of Elizabeth's court, and half the men of letters ofthe time; and every extremity and eccentricity of non-naturalinterpretation has been applied to them. When they are freed from thistorture and studied rationally, there is nothing mysterious about themexcept the mystery of their poetical beauty. Some of them are evidentlyaddressed in the rather hyperbolical language of affection, common at thetime, and derived from the study of Greek and Italian writers, to a man;others, in language not hyperbolical at all, to a woman. Disdain, rivalry, suspense, short-lived joy, long sorrow, all the symptoms and concomitantsof the passion of love--which are only commonplaces as death and life arecommonplace--form their motives. For my part I am unable to find theslightest interest or the most rudimentary importance in the questionswhether the Mr. W. H. Of the dedication was the Earl of Pembroke, and ifso, whether he was also the object of the majority of the _Sonnets_;whether the "dark lady, " the "woman coloured ill, " was Miss Mary Fitton;whether the rival poet was Chapman. Very likely all these things are true:very likely not one of them is true. They are impossible of settlement, andif they were settled they would not in the slightest degree affect thepoetical beauty and the human interest of the _Sonnets_, which, in astrange _reductio ad absurdum_ of eighteenth century commonsense criticism, Hallam thought it impossible not to wish that Shakespere had not written, and which some critics, not perhaps of the least qualified, have regardedas the high-water mark of English, if not of all, poetry. This latter estimate will only be dismissed as exaggerated by those who aredebarred from appreciation by want of sympathy with the subject, ordistracted by want of comprehension of it. A harmony of the two chiefopposing theories of poetry will teach us that we must demand of the veryhighest poetry first--the order is not material--a certain quality ofexpression, and secondly, a certain quality of subject. "What that qualityof subject must be has been, as it seems to me, crudely and wrongly stated, but rightly indicated, in Mr. Matthew Arnold's formula of the "Criticismof Life. " That is to say, in less debatable words, the greatest poet mustshow most knowledge of human nature. Now both these conditions arefulfilled in the sonnets of Shakespere with a completeness and intensityimpossible to parallel elsewhere. The merits of the formal and expressivepart hardly any one will now question; the sonnets may be opened almost atrandom with the certainty of finding everywhere the phrases, the verses, the passages which almost mechanically recur to our minds when we are askedto illustrate the full poetical capacity and beauty of the English tongue, such as: "The painful warrior, famousèd for fight, After a thousand victories once foiled, Is from the book of honour razed quite And all the rest forgot for which he toiled;" or "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past;" or "Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, Bound for the prize of all too precious you?" or "Then hate me if thou wilt, " with the whole sonnet which it opens; or "When in the chronicle of a wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights;" or that most magnificent quatrain of all, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. " Any competent judge of the formal part of poetry must admit that its forcecan no farther go. Verse and phrase cannot be better moulded to themelodious suggestion of beauty. Nor, as even these scraps show, is thethought below the verse. Even if Hallam's postulate of misplaced andill-regulated passion be granted (and I am myself very far from grantingit), the extraordinary wealth of thought, of knowledge, of nature, ofself-knowledge, of clear vision of others in the very midst of thecircumstances which might make for unclear vision, is still unmistakable. And if the poet's object was to catch up the sum of love and utter it withor even without any special relation to his own actual feelings for anyactual person (a hypothesis which human nature in general, and the natureof poets in particular, makes not improbable), then it can only be saidthat he has succeeded. From Sappho and Solomon to Shelley and Mr. Swinburne, many bards have spoken excellently of love: but what they havesaid could be cut out of Shakespere's sonnets better said than they havesaid it, and yet enough remain to furnish forth the greatest of poets. With the third and in every sense chief division of the work, thenecessities for explanation and allowance cease altogether. Thethirty-seven plays of the ordinary Shakesperian canon comprise thegreatest, the most varied, the most perfect work yet done by any man inliterature; and what is more, the work of which they consist is on thewhole the most homogeneous and the least unequal ever so done. The latterstatement is likely to be more questioned than the former; but I have nofear of failing to make it out. In one sense, no doubt, Shakespere isunequal--as life is. He is not always at the tragic heights of Othello andHamlet, at the comic raptures of Falstaff and Sir Toby, at the romanticecstasies of Romeo and Titania. Neither is life. But he is always--and thisis the extraordinary and almost inexplicable difference, not merely betweenhim and all his contemporaries, but between him and all other writers--atthe height of the particular situation. This unique quality is uniquelyillustrated in his plays. The exact order of their composition is entirelyunknown, and the attempts which have been made to arrange it into periods, much more to rank play after play in regular sequence, are obviousfailures, and are discredited not merely by the inadequate means--such ascounting syllables and attempting to classify the cadence oflines--resorted to in order to effect them, but by the hopeless discrepancybetween the results of different investigators and of the same investigatorat different times. We know indeed pretty certainly that _Romeo and Juliet_was an early play, and _Cymbeline_ a late one, with other general facts ofthe same kind. We know pretty certainly that the _Henry the Sixth_ serieswas based on a previous series on the same subject in which Shakespere notimprobably had a hand; that _King John_ and _The Taming of the Shrew_ hadin the same way first draughts from the same or other hands, and so forth. But all attempts to arrange and elucidate a chronological development ofShakespere's mind and art have been futile. Practically the Shakesperiangifts are to be found _passim_ in the Shakesperian canon--even in thedullest of all the plays, as a whole, _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, evenin work so alien from his general practice, and so probably mixed withother men's work, as _Titus Andronicus_ and _Pericles_. There are rarelyelsewhere--in _The Maid's Tragedy_ of Fletcher, in _The Duchess of Malfi_of Webster, in _The Changeling_ of Middleton--passages or even scenes whichmight conceivably have been Shakespere's. But there is, with the doubtfulexception of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, no play in any other man's work whichas a whole or in very great part is Shakesperian, and there is no playusually recognised as Shakespere's which would not seem out of place andstartling in the work of any contemporary. This intense, or rather (for intense is not the right word) thisextraordinarily diffused character, is often supposed to be a mere fancy ofShakespere-worshippers. It is not so. There is something, not so much inthe individual flashes of poetry, though it is there too, as in the entirescope and management of Shakespere's plays, histories, tragedies, andcomedies alike, which distinguishes them, and it is exactly thecharacteristic noted above, and well put by Dryden in his famousdefinition of Shakespere. Perhaps the first branch or phase of thisdistinction is that Shakespere is never, in the vulgar sense of the word, unnatural. He has not the slightest objection to horrors; the alarmedforeign critics who described his theatre as a "shambles" need not havegone farther than his greatest plays to justify themselves literally. Butwith barely even the exception which has so often to be made of _TitusAndronicus_, his horrors are never sought beyond a certain usual andprobable round of circumstance, and are almost always tempered andhumanised by touches of humour or pathos, or both. The cool sarcasticvillany of Aaron (a mood hit off nowhere out of Shakespere, except inMiddleton's De Flores, and not fully there) is the point on which I shouldchiefly put the finger to justify at least a partial Shakesperianauthorship. Contrast the character with the nightmare ghastlinesses andextravagances not merely of Tourneur and Webster, but even of Marlowe inBarabas, and the difference of Shakespere's handling will be felt at once. Another point which has been often, yet perhaps not quite fully, noticed isthe distinct and peculiar attitude of Shakespere towards what is in thecommon sense called morality. Nobody can possibly call him squeamish: I donot know that even any French naturalist of the latest school has chargedthe author of _Pericles_, and _Love's Labour Lost_, and _Henry IV. _, withthat _pruderie bête_ of which they accuse Scott. But he never makes thoseforms of vice which most trouble and corrupt society triumphant; he neverdiverges into the morbid pathology of the amatory passion, and above all, and most remarkably of all, though I think least remarked, he never makeshis personages show the singular toleration of the most despicableimmorality which almost all his dramatic contemporaries exhibit. One isconstantly astonished at the end of an Elizabethan play, when, after vicehas been duly baffled or punished, and virtue rewarded (for they all moreor less follow that rule), reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuriesfollow, to observe the complacency with which husbands who have sold theirwives' favours, wives who have been at the command of the first comer orthe highest bidder, mix cheek by jowl, and apparently unrebuked, with themodest maidens, the virtuous matrons, the faithful lovers of the piece. Shakespere never does this. Mrs. Quickly is indeed at one time theconfidante of Anne Fenton, and at another the complaisant hostess of DollTear-sheet, but not in the same play. We do not find Marina's master andmistress rewarded, as they would very likely have been by Fletcher orMiddleton, with comfortable if not prominent posts at the court ofPericles, or the Government-house of Mytilene. The ugly and artisticallyunmanageable situation of the husband who trades in his wife's honoursimply does not occur in all the wide license and variety of Shakespere'sforty plays. He is in his own sense liberal as the most easy going candemand, but he never mixes vice and virtue. Yet again, while practisingthis singular moderation in the main element, in the most fertile motives, of tragedy and comedy respectively, he is equally alone in his use in bothof the element of humour. And here we are on dangerous ground. To manyexcellent persons of all times since his own, as well as in it, Shakespere's humour and his use of it have been stumbling-blocks. Some ofthem have been less able to away with the use, some with the thing. Shakesperian clowns are believed to be red rags to some experiencedplaywrights and accomplished wits of our own days: the porter in _Macbeth_, the gravediggers in _Hamlet_, the fool in _Lear_, even the humours in_Love's Labour Lost_ and _The Merchant of Venice_ have offended. I avowmyself an impenitent Shakesperian in this respect also. The constant oralmost constant presence of that humour which ranges from the sarcasticquintessence of Iago, and the genial quintessence of Falstaff, through thefantasies of Feste and Edgar, down to the sheer nonsense which notunfrequently occurs, seems to me not only delightful in itself, but, as Ihave hinted already, one of the chief of those spells by which Shakesperehas differentiated his work in the sense of universality from that of allother dramatists. I have used the word nonsense, and I may be thought tohave partly given up my case by it. But nonsense, as hardly any critic butHazlitt has had the courage to avow openly, is no small part of life, andit is a part the relish of which Englishmen, as the same great but unequalcritic justly maintains, are almost alone in enjoying and recognising. Itis because Shakespere dares, and dares very frequently, simply _desipere_, simply to be foolish, that he is so pre-eminently wise. The others try tobe always wise, and, alas! it is not necessary to complete the antithesis. These three things--restraint in the use of sympathy with suffering, restraint in the use of interest in voluptuous excess, and humour--are, asit seems to me, the three chief distinguishing points in Shakespere'shandling which are not found in any of his contemporaries, for though thereis humour in not a few of these, none of them is a perfect humorist in thesame sense. Here, as well as in that general range or width of subject andthought which attracted Dryden's eulogium, he stands alone. In otherrespects he shares the qualities which are perceptible almost throughoutthis wonderfully fertile department of literature; but he shares them asinfinitely the largest shareholder. It is difficult to think of any otherpoet (for with Homer we are deprived of the opportunity of comparison) whowas so completely able to meet any one of his contemporaries on thatcontemporary's own terms in natural gift. I say natural gift because, though it is quite evident that Shakespere was a man of no small reading, his deficiencies in general education are too constantly recorded bytradition, and rendered too probable by internal evidence, to be ignored ordenied by any impartial critic. But it is difficult to mention a qualitypossessed by any of the school (as it is loosely called), from Marlowe toShirley, which he had not in greater measure; while the infinite qualitieswhich he had, and the others each in one way or another lacked, areevident. On only one subject--religion--is his mouth almost closed;certainly, as the few utterances that touch it show, from no incapacity ofdealing with it, and apparently from no other dislike than a dislike tomeddle with anything outside of the purely human province of which he feltthat he was universal master--in short from an infinite reverence. It will not be expected that in a book like the present--the whole space ofwhich might very well be occupied, without any of the undue dilation whichhas been more than once rebuked, in dealing with Shakespere alone--anyattempt should be made to criticise single plays, passages, and characters. It is the less of a loss that in reality, as the wisest commentators havealways either begun or ended by acknowledging, Shakespere is your onlycommentator on Shakespere. Even the passages which corrupt printing, or theinvolved fashion of speaking peculiar to the time, make somewhat obscure atfirst, will in almost every case yield to the unassisted cogitation of anyordinarily intelligent person; and the results so reached are far morelikely to be the true results than the elaborate emendations which delighta certain class of editors. A certain amount of mere glossary is of coursenecessary, but otherwise the fewer corks and bladders the swimmer takeswith him when he ventures into "the ocean which is Shakespere, " the better. There are, however, certain common errors, some of which have survived eventhe last century of Shakespere-study and Shakespere-worship, which mustperhaps be discussed. For in the case of the greatest writers, the businessof the critic is much more to shovel away the rubbish of his predecessorsthan to attempt any accumulation of his own. The chief of these errors--orrather that error which practically swallows up all the others and canproduce them again at any time--is that Shakespere was, if not exactly aninspired idiot, at any rate a mainly tentative if not purely unconsciousartist, much of whose work is only not bad as art, while most, if not allof it, was originally produced with a minimum of artistic consciousness anddesign. This enormous error, which is protean in form, has naturallyinduced the counter error of a too great insistence on the consciousnessand elaboration of Shakespere's art. The most elaborate theories of thisart have been framed--theories involving the construction of perhaps asmuch baseless fabric as anything else connected with the subject, which issaying a great deal. It appears to me in the highest degree improbable thatShakespere had before him consciously more than three purposes; but thesethree I think that he constantly had, and that he was completely successfulin achieving them. The first was to tell in every play a dramaticallycomplete story; the second was to work that story out by the means ofpurely human and probable characters; and the third was to give such formand ornaments to the working out as might please the playgoers of his day. In pursuing the first two he was the poet or dramatist of all time. Inpursuing the third he was the intelligent playwright. But (and here is thesource of the common error) it by no means follows that his attention, andhis successful attention, to his third purpose in any way interferes with, or degrades, his excellence as a pursuer of the first two. In the firstplace, it can escape no careful student that the merely playwright part ofShakespere's work is (as is the case with no other dramatic authorwhatever) singularly separable. No generation since his death has had theslightest difficulty in adapting by far the greater part of his plays touse and popularity in its own day, though the adaptation may have varied inliberty and in good taste with the standards of the time. At the presentday, while almost all other old dramatists have ceased to be acted at all, or are acted merely as curiosities, the adaptation of Shakespere has becomemore and more a process of simple omission (without the addition oralteration of anything) of parts which are either unsuited to modernmanners or too long for modern patience. With the two usual exceptions, _Pericles_ and _Titus Andronicus_ (which, despite the great beauty ofparts, are evidently less Shakesperian as wholes than any others), there isnot a single play of the whole number that could not be--there are not manythat have not been--acted with success in our time. It would be difficultto find a stronger differentia from the work of the mere playwright, whoinvariably thinks first of the temporary conditions of success, andaccordingly loses the success which is not temporary. But the second greatdifference of Shakespere is, that even what may be in comparison calledthe ephemeral and perishable parts of him have an extraordinary vitality, if not theatrical yet literary, of their own. The coarser scenes of_Measure for Measure_ and _The Comedy of Errors_, the satire on fleetingfollies in _Love's Labour Lost_, the uncomelier parts of _All's Well thatEnds Well_, the Doll Tear-sheet business of _Henry IV. _, the comic by-playof _Troilus and Cressida_, may seem mere wood, hay, and stubble incomparison with the nobler portions. Yet the fire of time has not consumedthem: they are as delightful as ever in the library if not on the stage. Little or nothing need be said in defence of Shakespere as an artist fromthe attacks of the older or Unity criticism. That maleficent giant can nowhardly grin at the pilgrims whom he once harassed. But there are manypersons who, not dreaming of the Unities, still object in language lessextravagant than Voltaire's or George the Third's, but with hardly lessdecision, to the "sad stuff, " the _fumier_ of Shakespere's admixture ofcomedy with tragedy, of his digressions and episodes, of his multifariousunderplots and minor groups, and ramifications of interest or intrigue. Thereply to this is not (as it might be, if any reply were not superfluous, inthe case of the Unity objection) a reply of demonstration. If any personexperienced in literature, and with an interest in it, experienced in lifeand with an interest in that, asserts that Caliban and Trinculo interferewith his enjoyment of Ferdinand and Miranda; that the almost tragedy ofHero is marred for him by the comedy of Beatrice and the farce of Dogberry;that he would have preferred _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ without thetedious brief effort of Quince and his companions; that the solemnity andpassion of _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ cause in him a revulsion against theporter and the gravedigger; that the Fool and Edgar are out of place in_Lear_, --it is impossible to prove to him by the methods of any Euclid orof any Aldrich that he is wrong. The thing is essentially, if not wholly, amatter of taste. It is possible, indeed, to point out, as in the case ofthe Unities, that the objectors, if they will maintain their objection, must deny the position that the dramatic art holds up the mirror to Nature, and that if they deny it, the burden--a burden never yet successfully takenup by any one--of framing a new definition rests upon them. But this isonly a partial and somewhat inconclusive argument, and the person whogenuinely dislikes these peculiarities of Shakespere is like a man whogenuinely dislikes wine or pictures or human faces, that seem delightfuland beautiful to others. I am not aware of any method whereby I can provethat the most perfect claret is better than zoedone in flavour, or that themost exquisite creation of Botticelli or Leonardo is more beautiful thanthe cuts on the sides of railway novels. Again, it is matter of taste. It will be seen that I am not for my part afraid to avow myself athoroughgoing Shakesperian, who accepts the weak points of his master aswell as the strong. It is often forgotten (indeed I do not know where Ihave seen it urged) that there is in Shakespere's case an excuse for thethousand lines that good Ben Jonson would have liked him to blot, --anexcuse which avails for no one else. No one else has his excuse ofuniversality; no one else has attempted to paint, much less has painted, the whole of life. It is because Shakespere has attempted this, and, in thejudgment of at least some, has succeeded in it, that the spots in his sunare so different from the spots in all other suns. I do not know anunnatural character or an unnatural scene in Shakespere, even among thosewhich have most evidently been written to the gallery. Everything in himpasses, in some mysterious way, under and into that "species of eternity"which transforms all the great works of art, which at once prevents themfrom being mere copies of Nature, and excuses whatever there is of Naturein them that is not beautiful or noble. If this touch is wanting anywhere(and it is wanting very seldom), that, I take it, is the best, indeed theonly, sign that that passage is not Shakespere's, --that he had either madeuse of some other man's work, or that some other man had made use of his. If such passages were of more frequent occurrence, this argument might becalled a circular one. But the proportion of such passages as I at leastshould exclude is so small, and the difference between them and the rest isso marked, that no improper begging of the question can be justly charged. The plays in the _Globe_ edition contain just a thousand closely-printedpages. I do not think that there are fifty in all, perhaps nottwenty--putting scraps and patches together--in which the Shakesperiantouch is wanting, and I do not think that that touch appears outside thecovers of the volume once in a thousand pages of all the rest of Englishliterature. The finest things of other men, --of Marlowe, of Fletcher, ofWebster (who no doubt comes nearest to the Shakesperian touch, infinitelyas he falls short of the Shakesperian range), --might conceivably be thework of others. But the famous passages of Shakespere, too numerous and toowell known to quote, could be no one else's. It is to this point thatæsthetic criticism of Shakespere is constantly coming round with an almostmonotonous repetition. As great as all others in their own points ofgreatness; holding points of greatness which no others even approach; suchis Shakespere. There is a certain difficulty--most easily to be appreciated by those whohave most carefully studied the literature of the period in question, andhave most fully perceived the mistakes which confusion of exact date hasinduced in the consideration of the very complex subject before us--inselecting dramatists to group with Shakespere. The obvious resource oftaking him by himself would frustrate the main purpose of this volume, which is to show the general movement at the same time as the individualdevelopments of the literature of 1560-1660. In one sense Shakespere mightbe included in any one of three out of the four chapters which we have heredevoted to the Elizabethan dramatists. His earliest known, and probablymuch of his unknown work coincides with the period of tentative; and hislatest work overlaps very much of that period of ripe and somewhatover-ripe performance, at the head of which it has here been thought goodto set Beaumont and Fletcher. But there is a group of four notable personswho appear to have especial rights to be classed with him, if not ingreatness, yet in character of work, and in the influences which played onthat work. They all, like him, took an independent part in the marvellouswit-combat of the last decade of Elizabeth, and they all like him survived, though for different lengths of time, to set an example to the thirdgeneration. They are all, even the meanest of them, distinctly great men, and free alike from the immaturity, visible even in Lyly and Marlowe, whichmarked some of their older contemporaries, and from the decadence, visibleeven in Fletcher and Massinger, which marred their younger followers. Furthermore, they were mixed up, as regards one another, in an inextricablebut not uninteresting series of broils and friendships, to some part ofwhich Shakespere himself may have been by no means a stranger. Thesereasons have seemed sufficient for separating them from the rest, andgrouping them round the captain. They are Benjamin Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas Dekker. The history of Ben Jonson (the literary history that is to say, for theknown facts of his life are simple enough) is curious and perhaps unique. Nothing is really known of his family; but as, at a time when Scotchmenwere not loved in England, he maintained his Annandale origin, there shouldbe, especially after Mr. Symonds's investigations as to his career, nodoubt that he at least believed himself to be of Border extraction, as wasalso, it may be remembered, his great disciple, panegyrist, slanderer, and(with the substitution of an easy for a rugged temper), analogue, JohnDryden. The fact of these two typical Englishmen being of half or wholeScotch descent will not surprise any one who does not still ignore theproper limits of England. Nobody doubts that his father (or ratherstepfather, for he was a posthumous child, born 1573, and his mothermarried again) was a bricklayer, or that he went to Westminster School; itseems much more dubious whether he had any claim to anything but anhonorary degree from either university, though he received that from both. Probably he worked at bricklaying, though the taunts of his rivals would, in face of the undoubted fact of his stepfather's profession, by no meanssuffice to prove it. Certainly he went through the chequered existence ofso many Elizabethan men of letters; was a soldier in Flanders, an actor, aduellist (killing his man, and escaping consequences only by benefit ofclergy), a convert to Romanism, a "revert" to the Anglican Church, amarried man, a dramatist. The great play of _Every Man in his Humour_, afterwards very much altered, was perhaps acted first at the Rose Theatrein 1596, and it established Jonson's reputation, though there is noreasonable doubt that he had written other things. His complicatedassociations and quarrels with Dekker, Marston, Chapman, and others, haveoccupied the time of a considerable number of persons; they lie quitebeyond our subject, and it may be observed without presumption that theirdirect connection, even with the literary work (_The Poetaster_, _Satiromastix_, and the rest) which is usually linked to them, will bebetter established when critics have left off being uncertain whether _A_was _B_, or _B_, _C_. Even the most famous story of all (the disgrace ofJonson with others for _Eastward Ho!_ as a libel against the Scots, forwhich he was imprisoned, and, being threatened with mutilation, was by hisRoman mother supplied with poison), though told by himself, does not reston any external evidence. What is certain is that Jonson was in great andgreater request, both as a writer of masks and other _divertissements_ forthe Court, and as a head and chief of literary conviviality at the"Mermaid, " and other famous taverns. Here, as he grew older, there grew upround him that "Tribe of Ben, " or admiring clique of young literary men, which included almost all the most remarkable poets, except Milton, of thelate Jacobean and early Caroline period, and which helped to spread hisfame for at least two generations, and (by Waller's influence onSaint-Evremond) to make him the first English man of letters who wasintroduced by a great critic of the Continent to continental attention as aworker in the English vernacular. At last he was made Poet Laureate, andin 1618 he took a journey to Scotland, and stayed there for some time withDrummond of Hawthornden. The celebrated conversations noted by the hosthave been the very centre battle-ground of all fights about Ben Jonson'scharacter. It is sufficient here to say that though Ben's chief defender, Gifford, may have been too hard on Drummond, it is difficult, if notimpossible, to think that the "Notes of Conversations" were made in afriendly spirit. They contain for their bulk an extraordinary amount ofinteresting matter, and much sound criticism; but which of us in moderndays would care to have such "notes" taken? A man thinks that there arefaults in a friend's work, and in the usual exaggeration of conversation hesays that it is "rubbish. " The Drummonds of this world note it down and itpasses as a deliberate judgment. He must be a fortunate man, or anexceptional recluse, who has not found some good-natured friend anticipateDrummond, and convey the crude expression (probably heightened inconveyance) direct to the person concerned. After this visit (which musthave been at the end of 1618) Jonson suffered the calamity of having hisstudy destroyed by fire, and lost much MS. Work. He lived many years longerand retained his literary primacy, but was unfortunate in money matters, and even in reception of his work by the public, though the literary men ofhis day made no mistake about him. He died in 1637, and the last of themany stories clustering round his name is the famous one of theinscription, "O rare Ben Jonson!" A year later, a _tombeau_, or collectionof funeral poems, entitled _Jonsonus Virbius_, showed the estimateentertained of him by the best and brightest wits of the time. His life was thus a life of struggle, for he was never rich, and lived forthe most part on the most unsatisfactory of all sources of income--casualbounties from the king and others. It is not improbable that his favourwith the Court and with Templar society (which was then very unpopular withthe middle classes), had something to do with the ill-reception of hislater plays. But his literary influence was very great, and with Donne hedetermined much of the course of English poetry for many years, andretained a great name even in the comparative eclipse of the "Giant Race"after the Restoration. It was only when the study of Shakespere became afavourite subject with persons of more industry than intelligence in theearly eighteenth century, that a singular fabric of myth grew up round BenJonson. He was pictured as an incarnation of envy, hatred, malice, and alluncharitableness, directed in the first place towards Shakespere, and thentowards all other literary craftsmen. William Gifford, his first competenteditor, set himself to work to destroy this, and undoubtedly succeeded. Butthe acrimony with which Gifford tinctured all his literary polemic perhapsrather injured his treatment of the case; even yet it may be doubtedwhether Ben Jonson has attained anything like his proper place in Englishliterary history. Putting aside the abiding influence of a good long-continued course ofmisrepresentation, it is still not difficult to discover the source of thisunder-estimate, without admitting the worst view or even any very bad viewof Ben Jonson's character, literary and personal. It may be granted that hewas rough and arrogant, a scholar who pushed scholarship to the verge ofpedantry, a critic who sometimes forgot that though a schoolmaster may be acritic, a critic should not be merely a schoolmaster. His work is saturatedwith that contempt of the _profanum vulgus_ which the _profanum vulgus_(humanly enough) seldom fails to return. Moreover, it is extremelyvoluminous, and it is by no means equal. Of his eighteen plays, threeonly--_Every Man in his Humour_, _The Alchemist_, and the charming fragmentof _The Sad Shepherd_--can be praised as wholes. His lovely _Masques_ areprobably unread by all but a few scores, if so many, in each generation. His noble sinewy prose is, for the most part, unattractive in subject. Hisminor poems, though not a few of them are known even to smatterers inliterature, are as a whole (or at least it would seem so) unknown. Yet hismerits are extraordinary. "Never" in his plays (save _The Sad Shepherd_)"tender, " and still more rarely "sublime, " he yet, in words much betterapplied to him than to his pupil Dryden, "wrestles with and conquers time. "Even his enemies admit his learning, his vigour, his astonishing power ofwork. What is less generally admitted, despite in one case at least thecelebrity of the facts that prove it, is his observation, his invention, and at times his anomalous and seemingly contradictory power of grace andsweetness. There is no more singular example of the proverb, "Out of theeater came forth meat, and out of the strong sweetness, " which has beenhappily applied to Victor Hugo, than the composition, by the rugged authorof _Sejanus_ and _Catiline_, of _The Devil is an Ass_ and _BartholomewFair_, of such things as "Here lies to each her parents ruth;" or the magnificent song, "Drink to me only with thine eyes;" or the crown and flower of all epitaphs, "Underneath this sable herse. "[33] [33] Ben is sometimes deprived of this, _me judice_, most irreligiously. But these three universally-known poems only express in quintessence aquality of Jonson's which is spread all about his minor pieces, whichappears again perfectly in _The Sad Shepherd_, and which he seems to havekept out of his plays proper rather from bravado than for any other reason. His prose will be noticed separately in the next chapter, but it may beobserved here that it is saturated with the same literary flavour whichpervades all his work. None of his dramatic fellows wrote anything that cancompare to it, just as none of them wrote anything that surpasses the songsand snatches in his plays, and the best things in his miscellaneous works. The one title which no competent criticism has ever grudged him is that ofbest epitaph-writer in the English language, and only those who have failedto consider the difficulties and the charm of that class of compositionwill consider this faint praise. Nevertheless, it was no doubt upon dramathat Jonson concentrated his powers, and the unfavourable judgments whichhave been delivered on him chiefly refer to this. A good deal of controversy has arisen out of the attribution to him, whichis at least as old as _The Return from Parnassus_, of being minded toclassicise the English drama. It is certain that he set a value on theUnities which no other English dramatist has set, and that in _TheAlchemist_ at least he has given something like a perfect example of them, which is at the same time an admirable play. Whether this attention is atall responsible for the defects which are certainly found in his work is avery large question. It cannot be denied that in that work, with perhapsthe single exception just mentioned, the reader (it is, except in the caseof _Every Man in his Humour_, generations since the playgoer had anyopportunity of judging) finds a certain absence of sympathetic attraction, as well as, for all the formal unity of the pieces, a lack of that fusingpoetic force which makes detail into a whole. The amazing strength ofJonson's genius, the power with which he has compelled all manner ofunlikely elements into his service, is evident enough, but the resultusually wants charm. The drawbacks are (always excepting _The Alchemist_)least perceptible in _Every Man in his Humour_, the first sprightlyrunnings (unless _The Case is Altered_ is older) of Jonson's fancy, thefreshest example of his sharp observation of "humours. " Later he sometimesoverdid this observation, or rather he failed to bring its resultssufficiently into poetic or dramatic form, and, therefore, is too much foran age and too little for all time. But _Every Man in his Humour_ is reallycharming. Bobadil, Master Stephen, and Kitely attain to the first rank ofdramatic characters, and others are not far behind them in this respect. The next play, _Every Man out of his Humour_, is a great contrast, being, as even the doughty Gifford admits, distinctly uninteresting as a whole, despite numerous fine passages. Perhaps a little of its want of attractionmust be set down to a pestilent habit of Jonson's, which he had at onetime thought of applying to _Every Man in his Humour_, the habit of givingforeign, chiefly Italian, appellations to his characters, describing, andas it were labelling them--Deliro, Macilente, and the like. This gives anair of unreality, a figurehead and type character. _Cynthia's Revels_ hasthe same defects, but is to some extent saved by its sharp raillery ofeuphuism. With _The Poetaster_ Jonson began to rise again. I think myselfthat the personages and machinery of the Augustan Court would be muchbetter away, and that the implied satire on contemporaries would be tediousif it could not, as it fortunately can, be altogether neglected. But inspite of these drawbacks, the piece is good. Of _Sejanus_ and Jonson'slater Roman play _Catiline_ I think, I confess, better than the majority ofcritics appear to think. That they have any very intense tragic interestwill, indeed, hardly be pretended, and the unfortunate but inevitablecomparison with _Coriolanus_ and _Julius Cæsar_ has done them great andvery unjust harm. Less human than Shakespere's "godlike Romans" (who are ashuman as they are godlike), Jonson's are undoubtedly more Roman, and this, if it is not entirely an attraction, is in its way a merit. But it was nottill after _Sejanus_ that the full power of Jonson appeared. His three nextplays, _Volpone_, _Epicene_, and _The Alchemist_, could not have beenwritten by any one but himself, and, had they not been written, would haveleft a gap in English which nothing from any other literature could supply. If his attitude had been a little less virtuous and a little moresarcastic, Jonson would in these three plays have anticipated Swift. Of thethree, I prefer the first and the last--the last being the best of all. _Epicene_ or the _Silent Woman_ was specially liked by the next generationbecause of its regularity, and of the skill with which the various humoursare all wrought into the main plot. Both these things are undeniable, andmany of the humours are in themselves amusing enough. But still there issomething wanting, which is supplied in _Volpone_ and _The Alchemist_. Ithas been asked whether that disregard of probability, which is one ofJonson's greatest faults, does not appear in the recklessness with which"The Fox" exposes himself to utter ruin, not so much to gratify any sensualdesire or obtain any material advantage, as simply to indulge his combinedhypocrisy and cynicism to the very utmost. The answer to this question willvery much depend on each reader's taste and experience. It is undeniablethat there have been examples of perverse indulgence in wickedness forwickedness' sake, which, rare as they are, go far to justify the creationof Volpone. But the unredeemed villany of the hero, with whom it isimpossible in any way to sympathise, and the sheer brutality of thefortune-hunting dupes who surround him, make it easier to admire than tolike the play. I have little doubt that Jonson was to some extent sensibleof this, for the comic episode or underplot of Sir Politick and LadyWould-be is very much more loosely connected with the centre interest (itis only by courtesy that it can be said to be connected at all), than isusual with him, and this is an argument in favour of its having beenintroduced as a makeweight. From the drawbacks of both these pieces _The Alchemist_ is wholly free. Jonson here escaped his usual pitfall of the unsympathetic, for the vicesand follies he satirises are not loathsome, only contemptible at worst, andnot always that. He found an opportunity of exercising his extraordinaryfaculty of concentration as he nowhere else did, and has given us in SirEpicure Mammon a really magnificent picture of concupiscence, of sensualappetite generally, sublimed by heat of imagination into something reallypoetic. The triumvirate of adventurers, Subtle, Dol and Face (for Dol hasvirile qualities), are not respectable, but one does not hate them; and thegulls are perfection. If any character could be spared it is the "AngryBoy, " a young person whose humours, as Jonson himself admits of anothercharacter elsewhere, are "more tedious than diverting. " _The Alchemist_ wasfollowed by _Catiline_, and _Catiline_ by _Bartholomew Fair_, a play inwhich singularly vivid and minute pictures of manners, very amusingsketches of character, and some capital satire on the Puritans, do notentirely redeem a profusion of the coarsest possible language and incident. _The Devil is an Ass_ comes next in time, and though no single character isthe equal of Zeal-of-the-land Busy in _Bartholomew Fair_, the play is evenmore amusing. The four last plays, _The Staple of News_, _The MagneticLady_, _The New Inn_, and _The Tale of a Tub_, which Jonson produced afterlong absence from the stage, were not successful, and were both unkindlyand unjustly called by Dryden "Ben's dotages. " As for the charming _SadShepherd_, it was never acted, and is now unfinished, though it is believedthat the poet completed it. It stands midway as a pastoral _Féerie_ betweenhis regular plays and the great collection of ingenious and gracefulmasques and entertainments, which are at the top of all such things inEngland (unless _Comus_ be called a masque), and which are worth comparingwith the ballets and spectacle pieces of Molière. Perhaps a complete surveyof Jonson's work indicates, as his greatest defect, the want of passion. Hecould be vigorous, he could be dignified, he could be broadly humorous, and, as has been said, he could combine with these the apparentlyincompatible, or, at least, not closely-connected faculty of grace. Ofpassion, of rapture, there is no trace in him, except in the singleinstance--in fire mingled with earth--of Sir Epicure Mammon. But the twofollowing passages--one from _Sejanus_, one from _The Sad Shepherd_--willshow his dignity and his pathos. No extract in brief could show hishumour:-- _Arr. _ "I would begin to study 'em, [34] if I thought They would secure me. May I pray to Jove In secret and be safe? ay, or aloud, With open wishes, so I do not mention Tiberius or Sejanus? Yes I must, If I speak out. 'Tis hard that. May I think And not be racked? What danger is't to dream, Talk in one's sleep or cough? Who knows the laws? May I shake my head without a comment? Say It rains, or it holds up, and not be thrown Upon the Gemonies? These now are things, Whereon men's fortune, yea, their fate depends. Nothing hath privilege 'gainst the violent ear. No place, no day, no hour, we see, is free, Not our religious and most sacred times From some one kind of cruelty: all matter, Nay, all occasion pleaseth. Madmen's rage, The idleness of drunkards, women's nothing, Jester's simplicity, all, all is good That can be catcht at. Nor is now the event Of any person, or for any crime To be expected; for 'tis always one: Death, with some little difference of place Or time. What's this? Prince Nero, guarded!" [34] To wit the "arts" of suffering and being silent, by which hisinterlocutor Lepidus has explained his own safety from delation. * * * * * _Æg. _ "A spring, now she is dead! of what? of thorns, Briars and brambles? thistles, burs and docks? Cold hemlock, yews? the mandrake, or the box? These may grow still: but what can spring beside? Did not the whole earth sicken when she died As if there since did fall one drop of dew, But what was wept for her! or any stalk Did bear a flower, or any branch a bloom, After her wreath was made! In faith, in faith, You do not fair to put these things upon me, Which can in no sort be: Earine Who had her very being and her name With the first knots or buddings of the spring, Born with the primrose and the violet Or earliest roses blown: when Cupid smiled And Venus led the Graces out to dance, And all the flowers and sweets in nature's lap Leaped out and made their solemn conjuration To last but while she lived! Do not I know How the vale withered the same day? how Dove, Dean, Eye, and Erwash, Idel, Snite and Soare Each broke his urn, and twenty waters more That swelled proud Trent, shrunk themselves dry, that since No sun or moon, or other cheerful star, Looked out of heaven, but all the cope was dark As it were hung so for her exequies! And not a voice or sound to ring her knell But of that dismal pair, the screeching owl And buzzing hornet! Hark! hark! hark! the foul Bird! how she flutters with her wicker wings! Peace! you shall hear her screech. _Cla. _ Good Karolin, sing, Help to divert this phant'sy. _Kar. _ All I can: _Sings while Æg. Reads the song. _ 'Though I am young and cannot tell Either what Death or Love is well, Yet I have heard they both bear darts And both do aim at human hearts: And then again, I have been told, Love wounds with heat, as Death with cold; So that I fear they do but bring Extremes to touch and mean one thing. 'As in a ruin we it call One thing to be blown up, or fall; Or to our end, like way may have, By a flash of lightning or a wave: So Love's inflamèd shaft or brand May kill as soon as Death's cold hand, Except Love's fires the virtue have To fright the frost out of the grave. '" Of no two contemporary men of letters in England can it be said that theywere, intellectually speaking, so near akin as Ben Jonson and GeorgeChapman. The translator of Homer was a good deal older than Jonson, andexceedingly little is known of his life. He was pretty certainly born nearHitchin in Hertfordshire, the striking situation of which points hisreference to it even in these railroad days. The date is uncertain--it mayhave been 1557, and was certainly not later than 1559--so that he was theoldest of the later Elizabethan school who survived into the Carolineperiod. He perhaps entered the University of Oxford in 1574. His firstknown work, _The Shadow of Night_, dates from 1594; and a reference ofMeres's shows that he was known for tragedy four years later. In 1613 he, Jonson (a constant friend of his whose mutual fidelity refutes of itselfthe silly calumnies as to Jonson's enviousness, for of Chapman only, amonghis colleagues, was he likely to be jealous), and Marston were partners inthe venture of _Eastward Ho!_ which, for some real or fancied slight onScotland, exposed the authors to danger of the law. He was certainly a_protégé_ of Prince Henry, the English Marcellus, and he seems to havereceived patronage from a much less blameless patron, Carr, Earl ofSomerset. His literary activity was continuous and equal, but it was in hislater days that he attempted and won the crown of the greatest of Englishtranslators. "Georgius Chapmannus, Homeri metaphrastes" the posy of hisportrait runs, and he himself seems to have quite sunk any expectation offame from his original work in the expectation of remembrance as atranslator of the Prince of Poets. Many other interesting traits suggest, rather than ascertain, themselves in reference to him, such as his possibleconnection with the early despatch of English troupes of players toGermany, and his adoption of contemporary French subjects for Englishtragedy. But of certain knowledge of him we have very little. What iscertain is that, like Drayton (also a friend of his), he seems to havelived remote and afar from the miserable quarrels and jealousies of histime; that, as has been already shown by dates, he was a kind of EnglishFontenelle in his overlapping of both ends of the great school of Englishpoets; and that absolutely no base personal gossip tarnishes his poeticalfame. The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to the influence which hiswork long had on those Englishmen who were unable to read Homer in theoriginal. A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne's has done, for the first time, justice to his general literary powers, and a very ingenious and, amongsuch hazardous things, unusually probable conjecture of Mr. Minto'sidentifies him with the "rival poet" of Shakespere's _Sonnets_. But theseare adventitious claims to fame. What is not subject to such deduction isthe assertion that Chapman was a great Englishman who, while exemplifyingthe traditional claim of great Englishmen to originality, independence, and versatility of work, escaped at once the English tendency to lack ofscholarship, and to ignorance of contemporary continental achievements, wasentirely free from the fatal Philistinism in taste and in politics, and inother matters, which has been the curse of our race, was a Royalist, alover, a scholar, and has left us at once one of the most voluminous andpeculiar collections of work that stand to the credit of any literary manof his country. It may be that his memory has gained by escaping the dangerof such revelations or scandals as the Jonson confessions to Drummond, andthat the lack of attraction to the ordinary reader in his work has savedhim from that comparison which (it has perhaps been urged _ad nauseam_) isthe bane of just literary judgment. To those who always strive to waive allsuch considerations, these things will make but little difference. The only complete edition of Chapman's works dates from our own days, andits three volumes correspond to a real division of subject. Although, incommon with all these writers, Chapman has had much uncertain and someimprobable work fathered on him, his certain dramas supply one of the mostinteresting studies in our period. As usual with everyone except Shakespereand (it is a fair reason for the relatively disproportionate estimate ofthese so long held) Beaumont and Fletcher, they are extremely unequal. Nota certain work of Chapman is void of interest. The famous _Eastward Ho!_(one of the liveliest comedies of the period dealing with London life) wasthe work of three great writers, and it is not easy to distribute itscollaboration. That it is not swamped with "humours" may prove thatJonson's learned sock was put on by others. That it is neither grosslyindecent nor extravagantly sanguinary, shows that Marston had not the chiefhand in it, and so we are left to Chapman. What he could do is not shown inthe list of his own certain plays till _All Fools_. _The Blind Beggar ofAlexandria_ (1596?) and _An Humorous Day's Mirth_ show that singularpromiscuousness--that heaping together of scenes without order orconnection--which we have noticed in the first dramatic period, not tomention that the way in which the characters speak of themselves, not as"I" but by their names in the third person, is also unmistakable. But _AllFools_ is a much more noteworthy piece, and though Mr. Swinburne may havepraised it rather highly, it would certainly take place in a collection ofthe score best comedies of the time not written by Shakespere. _TheGentleman Usher_ and _Monsieur d'Olive_ belong to the same school ofhumorous, not too pedantic comedy, and then we come to the strange seriesof Chapman's French tragedies, _Bussy d'Ambois_, _The Revenge of Bussyd'Ambois_, _Byron's Conspiracy_, _The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron_, and _The Tragedy of Philip Chabot, Admiral of France_. These singular playsstand by themselves. Whether the strong influence which Marlowe exercisedon Chapman led the later poet (who it must be remembered was not theyounger) to continue _The Massacre of Paris_, or what other cause begatthem, cannot now be asserted or even guessed without lost labour. A famouscriticism of Dryden's attests his attention to them, but does not, perhaps, to those who have studied Dryden deeply, quite express the influence whichChapman had on the leader of post-Restoration tragedy. As plays, the wholefive are models of what plays should not be; in parts, they are models ofwhat plays should be. Then Chapman returned to the humour-comedy andproduced two capital specimens of it in _May-Day_ and _The Widow's Tears_. _Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany_, which contains long passages of German, and _Revenge for Honour_, two tragedies which were not published till longafter Chapman's death, are to my mind very dubiously his. Mr. Swinburne, indealing with them, availed himself of the hypothesis of a mellowing, but atthe same time weakening of power by age. It may be so, and I have not theslightest intention of pronouncing decidedly on the subject. They bear tomy mind much more mark of the decadent period of Charles I. , when thesecret of blank verse was for a time lost, and when even men who had livedin personal friendship with their great predecessors lapsed into theslipshod stuff that we find in Davenant, in his followers, and among themeven in the earlier plays of Dryden. It is, of course, true that thisloosening and slackening of the standard betrays itself even before thedeath of Chapman, which happened in 1634. But I cannot believe that theauthor of _Bussy d'Ambois_ (where the verse is rude enough but never lax)and the contemporary or elder of Shakespere, Marlowe, and all the greatrace, could ever have been guilty of the slovenliness which, throughout, marks _Revenge for Honour_. The second part of Chapman's work, his original verse, is much inferior inbulk and in interest of matter to the first and third. Yet, is it notperhaps inferior to either in giving evidence of the author'speculiarities; while the very best thing he ever wrote (a magnificentpassage in _The Tears of Peace_) is contained in it. Its component partsare, however, sufficiently odd. It opens with a strange poem called _TheShadow of Night_, which Mr. Swinburne is not wrong in classing among theobscurest works in English. The mischievous fashion of enigmatic writing, already glanced at in the section on satire, was perhaps an offshoot ofeuphuism; and certainly Chapman, who never exhibits much taint of euphuismproper, here out-Herods Herod and out-Tourneurs Tourneur. It was followedby an equally singular attempt at the luscious school of which _Venus andAdonis_ is the most famous. _Ovid's Banquet of Sense_ has received highpraise from critics whom I esteem. For my own part I should say that it isthe most curious instance of a radically unpassionate nature, trying tolash itself into passion, that our language contains. Then Chapman tried aneven bolder flight in the same dialect--the continuation of Marlowe'sunfinished _Hero and Leander_. In this attempt, either by sheer force ofhis sinewy athletics, or by some inspiration derived from the "DeadShepherd, " his predecessor, he did not fail, curious as is the contrast ofthe two parts. _The Tears of Peace_, which contains his finest work, is inhonour of Prince Henry--a worthy work on a worthy subject, which wasfollowed up later by an epicedium on the prince's lamented death. Besidessome epigrams and sonnets, the chief other piece of this division is thedisastrous _Andromeda Liberata_, which unluckily celebrates thenuptials--stained with murder, adultery, and crime of all sorts--of FrancesHoward and Robert Carr. It is in Chapman's most allusive and thornieststyle, but is less interesting intrinsically than as having given occasionto an indignant prose vindication by the poet, which, considering hisself-evident honesty, is the most valuable document in existence forexplaining the apparently grovelling panegyric of the sixteenth andseventeenth century. It makes clear (what indeed an intelligent readermight gather for himself) that the traditional respect for rank andstation, uniting with the tendency to look for patterns and precedents inthe classics for almost everything, made of these panegyrics a kind ofschool exercise, in which the excellence of the subject was taken forgranted, and the utmost hyperbole of praise was only a "common form" ofcomposition, to which the poet imparted or added what grace of style orfancy he could, with hardly a notion of his ascriptions being takenliterally. But if Chapman's dramas have been greatly undervalued, and if his originalpoems are an invaluable help to the study of the time, there is no doubtthat it is as a translator that he made and kept the strongest hold on theEnglish mind. He himself spoke of his Homeric translations (which he beganas early as 1598, doing also Hesiod, some Juvenal, and some minorfragments, Pseudo-Virgilian, Petrarchian and others) as "the work that hewas born to do. " His version, with all its faults, outlived the popularityeven of Pope, was for more than two centuries the resort of all who, unableto read Greek, wished to know what the Greek was, and, despite the finicalscholarship of the present day, is likely to survive all the attempts madewith us. I speak with all humility, but as having learnt Homer from Homerhimself, and not from any translation, prose or verse. I am perfectly awareof Chapman's outrageous liberties, of his occasional unfaithfulness (for alibertine need not necessarily be unfaithful in translation), and of thecondescension to his own fancies and the fancies of his age, which obscuresnot more perhaps than some condescensions which nearness and contemporaryinfluences prevent some of us from seeing the character of the original. But at the same time, either I have no skill in criticism, and have beenreading Greek for fifty years to none effect, or Chapman is far nearerHomer than any modern translator in any modern language. He is nearer inthe Iliad than in the Odyssey--an advantage resulting from his choice ofvehicle. In the Odyssey he chose the heroic couplet, which never can givethe rise and fall of the hexameter. In the Iliad, after some hesitationbetween the two (he began as early as 1598), he preferred the fourteener, which, at its best, is the hexameter's nearest substitute. With Chapman itis not always at its best--very far from it. If he never quite relapsesinto the sheer doggerel of the First Period, he sometimes comes perilouslynear to it. But he constantly lifts his wings and soars in a quitedifferent measure which, when he keeps it up for a little, gives anarrative vehicle unsurpassed, and hardly equalled, in English poetry forvariation of movement and steady forward flow combined. The one point inwhich the Homeric hexameter is unmatched among metres is its combination ofsteady advance with innumerable ripples and eddies in its course, and it ishere that Chapman (though of course not fully) can partly match it. It is, however, one of the testimonies to the supreme merit of the Homeric poemsthat every age seems to try to imitate them in its own special mannerisms, and that, consequently, no age is satisfied with the attempts of another. It is a second, that those who know the original demur at all. The characteristics of Chapman, then, are very much those of Jonson with adifference. Both had the same incapacity of unlaboured and forceless art, the same insensibility to passion, the same inability to rise above merehumours and contemporary oddities into the region of universal poetry. Bothhad the same extensive learning, the same immense energy, the same (if itmust be said) arrogance and contempt of the vulgar. In casual strokes, though not in sustained grasp, Chapman was Jonson's superior; but unlikeJonson he had no lyric gift, and unlike Jonson he let his learning and hisambitious thought clog and obscure the flow of his English. Nor does heshow in any of his original work the creative force of his younger friend. With the highest opinion reasonably possible of Chapman's dramas, we cannotimagine him for a moment composing a _Volpone_ or an _Alchemist_--even a_Bartholomew Fair_; while he was equally, or still more, incapable ofJonson's triumphs in epigram and epitaph, in song and ode. A certainshapelessness is characteristic of everything that Chapman did--aninability, as Mr. Swinburne (to whom every one who now writes on Chapmanmust acknowledge indebtedness), has said, "to clear his mouth of pebbles, and his brow of fog. " His long literary life, which must have exceeded halfa century, and his great learning, forbid our setting this down as it maybe set in the case of many of his contemporaries, and especially in thecase of those two to whom we are now coming, as due to youth, to theimperfect state of surrounding culture, to want of time for perfecting hiswork, and so forth. He is the "Bègue de Vilaines, " the heroic Stammerer ofEnglish literature--a man who evidently had some congenital defect whichall his fire and force, all his care and curiosity, could not overcome. Yetare his doings great, and it is at least probable that if he had felt lessdifficulty in original work, he would not have been prompted to set aboutand finish the noble work of translation which is among the best productsof an unsatisfactory kind, and which will outlive the cavils of generationsof etymologists and aorist-grinders. He has been so little read that fourspecimens of his different manners--the early "tenebrous" style of _TheShadow of Night_, the famous passage from _Bussy d'Ambois_ which excitedLamb's enthusiasm, and a sample from both _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_--may begiven: "In this vast thicket (whose description's task The pens of fairies and of fiends would ask: So more than human-thoughted horrible) The souls of such as lived implausible, In happy empire of this goddess' glories, And scorned to crown her fanes with sacrifice, [35] Did ceaseless walk; exspiring fearful groans, Curses and threats for their confusions. Her darts, and arrows, some of them had slain: Others her dogs eat, painting her disdain, After she had transformed them into beasts: Others her monsters carried to their nests, Rent them in pieces, and their spirits sent To this blind shade, to wail their banishment. The huntsmen hearing (since they could not hear) Their hounds at fault, in eager chase drew near, Mounted on lions, unicorns, and boars, And saw their hounds lie licking of their sores Some yearning at the shroud, as if they chid Her stinging tongues, that did their chase forbid: By which they knew the game was that way gone. Then each man forced the beast he rode upon, T' assault the thicket; whose repulsive thorns So gall'd the lions, boars, and unicorns, Dragons and wolves, that half their courages Were spent in roars, and sounds of heaviness: Yet being the princeliest, and hardiest beasts, That gave chief fame to those Ortygian forests, And all their riders furious of their sport, A fresh assault they gave, in desperate sort: And with their falchions made their way in wounds, The thicket open'd, and let in the hounds. " [35] The rhyme, bad as it is, is not unprecedented. * * * * * _Bu. _ "What dismal change is here; the good old Friar Is murther'd, being made known to serve my love; And now his restless spirit would forewarn me Of some plot dangerous and imminent. Note what he wants? He wants his upper weed, He wants his life and body; which of these Should be the want he means, and may supply me With any fit forewarning? This strange vision (Together with the dark prediction Used by the Prince of Darkness that was raised By this embodied shadow) stir my thoughts With reminiscion of the spirit's promise, Who told me, that by any invocation I should have power to raise him, though it wanted The powerful words and decent rites of art; Never had my set brain such need of spirit T' instruct and cheer it; now, then, I will claim Performance of his free and gentle vow T' appear in greater light and make more plain His rugged oracle. I long to know How my dear mistress fares, and be inform'd What hand she now holds on the troubled blood Of her incensed lord. Methought the spirit (When he had utter'd his perplex'd presage) Threw his changed countenance headlong into clouds, His forehead bent, as it would hide his face, He knock'd his chin against his darken'd breast, And struck a churlish silence through his powers. Terror of darkness! O, thou king of flames! That with thy music-footed horse dost strike The clear light out of crystal on dark earth, And hurl'st instructive fire about the world, Wake, wake, the drowsy and enchanted night That sleeps with dead eyes in this heavy riddle; Or thou great prince of shades where never sun Sticks his far darted beams, whose eyes are made To shine in darkness, and see ever best Where sense is blindest: open now the heart Of thy abashed oracle, that for fear Of some ill it includes, would fain lie hid, And rise thou with it in thy greater light. " * * * * * "For Hector's glory still he stood, and ever went about To make him cast the fleet such fire, as never should go out; Heard Thetis' foul petition, and wished in any wise The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes. [36] From him yet the repulse was then to be on Troy conferred, The honour of it given the Greeks; which thinking on, he stirr'd With such addition of his spirit, the spirit Hector bore To burn the fleet, that of itself was hot enough before. But now he fared like Mars himself, so brandishing his lance As, through the deep shades of a wood, a raging fire should glance, Held up to all eyes by a hill; about his lips a foam Stood as when th' ocean is enraged; his eyes were overcome With fervour and resembled flames, set off by his dark brows, And from his temples his bright helm abhorrèd lightnings throws; For Jove, from forth the sphere of stars, to his state put his own And all the blaze of both the hosts confined in him alone. And all this was, since after this he had not long to live, This lightning flew before his death, which Pallas was to give (A small time thence, and now prepared) beneath the violence Of great Pelides. In meantime, his present eminence Thought all things under it; and he, still where he saw the stands Of greatest strength and bravest arm'd, there he would prove his hands, Or no where; offering to break through, but that passed all his power Although his will were past all theirs, they stood him like a tower Conjoined so firm, that as a rock, exceeding high and great, And standing near the hoary sea, bears many a boisterous threat Of high-voiced winds and billows huge, belched on it by the storms; So stood the Greeks great Hector's charge, nor stirred their battellous forms. " [36] This line alone would suffice to exhibit Chapman's own splendour athis best. * * * * * "This the Goddess told, And then the morning in her throne of gold Surveyed the vast world; by whose orient light The nymph adorn'd me with attires as bright, Her own hands putting on both shirt and weed Robes fine, and curious, and upon my head An ornament that glittered like a flame; Girt me in gold; and forth betimes I came Amongst my soldiers, roused them all from sleep, And bade them now no more observance keep Of ease, and feast, but straight a shipboard fall, For now the Goddess had inform'd me all. Their noble spirits agreed; nor yet so clear Could I bring all off, but Elpenor there His heedless life left. He was youngest man Of all my company, and one that wan Least fame for arms, as little for his brain; Who (too much steep'd in wine and so made fain To get refreshing by the cool of sleep, Apart his fellows plung'd in vapours deep, And they as high in tumult of their way) Suddenly waked and (quite out of the stay A sober mind had given him) would descend A huge long ladder, forward, and an end Fell from the very roof, full pitching on The dearest joint his head was placed upon, Which quite dissolved, let loose his soul to hell. " With regard to Marston (of whose little-known personality something hasbeen said in connection with his satires) I find myself somewhat unable toagree with the generality of critics, who seem to me to have been rathertaken in by his blood-and-thunder work, his transpontine declamationagainst tyrants, and his affectation of a gloomy or furious scorn againstmankind. The uncouthness, as well as the suspicion of insincerity, which wenoted in his satirical work, extend, as it seems to me, also to his dramas;and if we class him as a worker in horrors with Marlowe earlier, and withWebster and Ford later, the chief result will be to show his extremeinferiority to them. He is even below Tourneur in this respect, while, likeTourneur, he is exposed to the charge of utterly neglecting congruity andproportion. With him we relapse not merely from the luminous perfection ofShakespere, from the sane order of work which was continued throughFletcher, and the best of Fletcher's followers, but from the moreartificial unity of Jonson, back into the chaotic extravagances of theFirst Period. Marston, like the rest, is fond of laughing at _Jeronimo_, but his own tragic construction and some of his own tragic scenes arehardly less bombastic, and scarcely at all less promiscuous than thetangled horrors of that famous melodrama. Marston, it is true, has lucidintervals--even many of them. Hazlitt has succeeded in quoting manybeautiful passages, one of which was curiously echoed in the next age byNat. Lee, in whom, indeed, there was a strong vein of Elizabethanmelodrama. The sarcasm on philosophical study in _What You Will_ is one ofthe very best things of its own kind in the range of English drama, --light, sustained, not too long nor too short, in fact, thoroughly "hit off. " "_Delight_ my spaniel slept, whilst I baused[37] leaves, Tossed o'er the dunces, pored on the old print Of titled words, and still my spaniel slept. Whilst I wasted lamp oil, bated my flesh, Shrunk up my veins, and still my spaniel slept, And still I held converse with Zabarell, Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saws Of antique Donate: still my spaniel slept. Still on went I: first _an sit anima_, Then, an' 'twere mortal. O hold, hold! At that they are at brain buffets, fell by the ears, Amain [pell-mell] together--still my spaniel slept. Then whether 'twere corporeal, local, fixed, _Ex traduce_; but whether 't had free will Or no, hot philosophers Stood banding factions all so strongly propped, I staggered, knew not which was firmer part; But thought, quoted, read, observed and pried, Stuffed noting-books, and still my spaniel slept. At length he waked and yawned, and by yon sky For aught I know, he knew as much as I. " [37] Kissed. There is real pathos in _Antonio and Mellida_, and real satire in_Parasitaster_ and _The Malcontent_. Hazlitt (who had a very high opinionof Marston) admits that the remarkable inequalities of this last piece"seem to show want of interest in the subject. " This is an odd explanation, but I suspect it is really only an anticipation in more favourable words ofmy own theory, that Marston's tragic and satiric moods were not reallysincere; that he was a clever man who found a fashion of satire and afashion of blood-and-thunder tragedy prevailing, and threw himself intoboth without much or any heart in the matter. This is supported by thecurious fact that almost all his plays (at least those extant) wereproduced within a very few years, 1602-1607, though he lived some thirtyyears after the latter date, and quite twenty after his last datedappearances in literature, _The Insatiate Countess_, and _Eastward Ho!_That he was an ill-tempered person with considerable talents, whosucceeded, at any rate for a time, in mistaking his ill-temper for _sævaindignatio_, and his talents for genius, is not, I think, too harsh adescription of Marston. In the hotbed of the literary influences of thetime these conditions of his produced some remarkable fruit. But when thelate Professor Minto attributes to him "amazing and almost Titanic energy, "mentions "life" several times over as one of the chief characteristics ofhis personages (I should say that they had as much life as violently-movedmarionettes), and discovers "amiable and admirable characters" among them, I am compelled not, of course, to be positive that my own very differentestimate is right, but to wonder at the singularly different way in whichthe same things strike different persons, who are not as a rule likely tolook at them from very different points of view. Marston's plays, however, are both powerful enough and famous enough tocall for a somewhat more detailed notice. _Antonio and Mellida_, theearliest and if not the best as a whole, that which contains the finestscenes and fragments, is in two parts--the second being more properlycalled _The Revenge of Antonio_. The revenge itself is of the exaggeratedcharacter which was so popular with the Elizabethan dramatists, but inwhich (except in the famous Cornwall and Gloucester scene in _Lear_)Shakespere never indulged after his earliest days. The wicked tyrant'stongue is torn out, his murdered son's body is thrown down before him, andthen the conspirators, standing round, gibe, curse, and rant at him for acouple of pages before they plunge their swords into his body. This goodlyconclusion is led up to by a sufficient quantity of antecedent and casualcrimes, together with much not very excellent fooling by a court gull, Balurdo, who might be compared with Shakespere's fools of the same kind, tothe very great advantage of those who do not appreciate the latter. Thebeautiful descriptive and reflective passages which, in Lamb's _Extracts_, gave the play its reputation, chiefly occur towards the beginning, and thisis the best of them:-- _And. _ "Why man, I never was a Prince till now. 'Tis not the bared pate, the bended knees, Gilt tipstaves, Tyrian purple, chairs of state, Troops of pied butterflies, that flutter still In greatness summer, that confirm a prince: 'Tis not the unsavoury breath of multitudes, Shouting and clapping, with confused din; That makes a prince. No, Lucio, he's a king, A true right king, that dares do aught save wrong, Fears nothing mortal, but to be unjust, Who is not blown up with the flattering puffs Of spungy sycophants: who stands unmov'd Despite the jostling of opinion: Who can enjoy himself, maugre the throng That strive to press his quiet out of him: Who sits upon Jove's footstool as I do Adoring, not affecting majesty: Whose brow is wreathèd with the silver crown Of clear content: this, Lucio, is a king, And of this empire, every man's possessed That's worth his soul. " _Sophonisba_, which followed, is much less rambling, but as bloody andextravagant. The scene where the witch Erichtho plays Succubus to Syphax, instead of the heroine, and in her form, has touches which partly, but notwholly, redeem its extravagance, and the end is dignified and good. _WhatYou Will_, a comedy of intrigue, is necessarily free from Marston's worstfaults, and here the admirable passage quoted above occurs. But the mainplot--which turns not only on the courtship, by a mere fribble, of a ladywhose husband is supposed to be dead, and who has very complacentlyforgotten all about him, but on a ridiculous plot to foist a pretender offas the dead husband itself--is simply absurd. The lack of probability, which is the curse of the minor Elizabethan drama, hardly anywhere appearsmore glaringly. _Parasitaster_, or _The Fawn_, a satirical comedy, is muchbetter, but the jealous hatred of _The Dutch Courtesan_ is again not madeprobable. Then came Marston's completest work in drama, _The Malcontent_, an anticipation, after Elizabethan fashion, of _Le Misanthrope_ and _ThePlain Dealer_. Though not free from Marston's two chief vices of coarsenessand exaggerated cynicism, it is a play of great merit, and much the bestthing he has done, though the reconciliation, at the end, of such ahusband and such a wife as Piero and Aurelia, between whom there is a chasmof adultery and murder, again lacks verisimilitude. It is to be observedthat both in _The Fawn_ and _The Malcontent_ there are disguised dukes--afact not testifying any very great originality, even in borrowing. Of_Eastward Ho!_ we have already spoken, and it is by no means certain that_The Insatiate Countess_ is Marston's. His reputation would not lose muchwere it not. A _fabliau_-like underplot of the machinations of twolight-o'-love citizens' wives against their husbands is not unamusing, butthe main story of the Countess Isabella, a modern Messalina (except thatshe adds cruelty to the vices of Messalina) who alternately courts loversand induces their successors to assassinate them, is in the worst style ofthe whole time--the tragedy of lust that is not dignified by the slightestpassion, and of murder that is not excused by the slightest poetry ofmotive or treatment. Though the writing is not of the lowest order, itmight have been composed by any one of some thirty or forty writers. It wasactually attributed at the time to William Barksted, a minor poet of somepower, and I am inclined to think it not Marston's, though my own estimateof him is, as will have been seen, not so high as some other estimates. Itis because those estimates appear to me unduly high that I have ratheraccentuated the expression of my own lower one. For the last century, andperhaps longer, the language of hyperbole has been but too common about ourdramatists, and I have known more than one case in which the extravagantpraise bestowed upon them has, when students have come to the worksthemselves, had a very disastrous effect of disappointment. It is, therefore, all the more necessary to be candid in criticism where criticismseems to be required. As to the last of our good company, there is fortunately very little riskof difference of opinion. A hundred years ago Thomas Dekker was probablylittle more than a name to all but professed students of Elizabethanliterature, and he waited longer than any of his fellows for duerecognition by presentation of his work in a complete form. It was notuntil the year 1873 that his plays were collected; it was not till elevenyears later that his prose works had the same honour. Yet, since attentionwas directed to Dekker in any way, the best authorities have been unanimousin his praise. Lamb's famous outburst of enthusiasm, that he had "poetryenough for anything, " has been soberly endorsed by two full generations ofthe best judges, and whatever differences of detail there may be as to hiswork, it is becoming more and more the received, and correctly-receivedopinion, that, as his collaborator Webster came nearest to Shakespere inuniversalising certain types in the severer tragedy, so Dekker has the samehonour on the gently pathetic side. Yet this great honour is done to one ofthe most shadowy personalities in literature. We have four goodly volumesof his plays and five of his other works; yet of Thomas Dekker, the man, weknow absolutely less than of any one of his shadowy fellows. We do not knowwhen he was born, when he died, what he did other than writing in thecertainly long space between the two unknown dates. In 1637 he was by hisown words a man of threescore, which, as it has been justly remarked, maymean anything between fifty-five and seventy. He was in circumstances acomplete contrast to his fellow-victim in Jonson's satire, Marston. Marstonwas apparently a gentleman born and bred, well connected, well educated, possessed of some property, able to make testamentary dispositions, andprobably in the latter part of his life, when Dekker was still toiling atjournalism of various kinds, a beneficed clergyman in country retirement. Dekker was, it is to be feared, what the arrogance of certain members ofthe literary profession has called, and calls, a gutter-journalist--a manwho had no regular preparation for the literary career, and who neverproduced anything but hand-to-mouth work. Jonson went so far as to say thathe was a "rogue;" but Ben, though certainly not a rogue, was himself not tobe trusted when he spoke of people that he did not like; and if there wasany but innocent roguery in Dekker he has contrived to leave exactly theopposite impression stamped on every piece of his work. And it isparticularly interesting to note, that constantly as he wrote incollaboration, one invariable tone, and that the same as is to be found inhis undoubtedly independent work, appears alike in plays signed with him bypersons so different as Middleton and Webster, as Chettle and Ford. Whenthis is the case, the inference is certain, according to the strictestrules of logic. We can define Dekker's idiosyncrasy almost more certainlythan if he had never written a line except under his own name. Thatidiosyncrasy consists, first, of an exquisite lyrical faculty, which, inthe songs given in all collections of extracts, equals, or almost equals, that of Shakespere; secondly, of a faculty for poetical comedy, for thecomedy which transcends and plays with, rather than grasps and exposes, thevices and follies of men; thirdly, for a touch of pathos again to be evenedonly to Shakespere's; and lastly, for a knack of representing women'snature, for which, except in the master of all, we may look in vainthroughout the plentiful dramatic literature of the period, though touchesof it appear in Greene's Margaret of Fressingfield, in Heywood, inMiddleton, and in some of the anonymous plays which have been fatheredindifferently, and with indifferent hopelessness of identification, on someof the greatest of names of the period, on some of the meanest, and on anequal number of those that are neither great nor mean. Dekker's very interesting prose works we shall treat in the next chapter, together with the other tracts into whose class they fall, and some of hisplays may either go unnoticed, or, with those of the dramatists whocollaborated with him, and whose (notably in the case of _The RoaringGirl_) they pretty evidently were more than his. His own characteristicpieces, or those in which his touch shows most clearly, though they may notbe his entirely, are _The Shoemaker's Holiday_, _Old Fortunatus_, _Satiromastix_, _Patient Grissil_, _The Honest Whore_, _The Whore ofBabylon_, _If it be not Good the Devil is in it_, _The Virgin Martyr_, _Match me in London_, _The Son's Darling_, and _The Witch of Edmonton_. Ineveryone of these the same characteristics appear, but the strangelycomposite fashion of writing of the time makes them appear in differingmeasures. _The Shoemaker's Holiday_ is one of those innumerable and yetsingular pieces in which the taste of the time seems to have so muchdelighted, and which seem so odd to modern taste, --pieces in which a plotor underplot, as the case may be, of the purest comedy of manners, a merepicture of the life, generally the lower middle-class life of the time, isunited with hardly a thought of real dramatic conjunction to another plotof a romantic kind, in which noble and royal personages, with, it may be, adash of history, play their parts. The crowning instance of this isMiddleton's _Mayor of Queenborough_; but there are scores and hundreds ofothers, and Dekker specially affects it. _The Shoemaker's Holiday_ isprincipally distinguished by the directness and raciness of its citizensketches. _Satiromastix_ (the second title of which is "The Untrussing ofthe Humorous Poet") is Dekker's reply to _The Poetaster_, in which heendeavours to retort Jonson's own machinery upon him. With his customarydisregard of congruity, however, he has mixed up the personages of Horace, Crispinus, Demetrius, and Tucca, not with a Roman setting, but with apurely romantic story of William Rufus and Sir Walter Tyrrel, and theking's attempt upon the fidelity of Tyrrel's bride. This incongruousmixture gives one of the most charming scenes of his pen, the apparentpoisoning of Celestina by her father to save her honour. But as Lambhimself candidly confessed, the effect of this in the original is marred, if not ruined, by the farcical surroundings, and the more farcical upshotof the scene itself, --the poisoning being, like Juliet's, a mere trick, though very differently fortuned. In _Patient Grissil_ the two exquisitesongs, "Art thou poor" and "Golden slumbers kiss thine eyes, " and thesympathetic handling of Griselda's character (the one of all others toappeal to Dekker) mark his work. In all the other plays the same notesappear, and there is no doubt that Mr. Swinburne is wholly right insingling out from _The Witch of Edmonton_ the feminine characters of Susan, Winifred, and the witch herself, as showing Dekker's unmatched command ofthe colours in which to paint womanhood. In the great debate as to theauthorship of _The Virgin Martyr_, everything is so much conjecture that itis hard to pronounce authoritatively. Gifford's cool assumption thateverything bad in the play is Dekker's, and everything good Massinger's, will not hold for a moment; but, on the other side, it must be rememberedthat since Lamb there has been a distinct tendency to depreciate Massinger. All that can be said is, that the grace and tenderness of the Virgin's partare much more in accordance with what is certainly Dekker's than with whatis certainly Massinger's, and that either was quite capable of the Hirciusand Spungius passages which have excited so much disgust andindignation--disgust and indignation which perhaps overlook the fact thatthey were no doubt inserted with the express purpose of heightening, byhowever clumsily designed a contrast, the virgin purity of Dorothea thesaint. It will be seen that I have reserved _Old Fortunatus_ and _The HonestWhore_ for separate notice. They illustrate, respectively, the power whichDekker has in romantic poetry, and his command of vivid, tender, and subtleportraiture in the characters, especially, of women. Both, and especiallythe earlier play, exhibit also his rapid careless writing, and hisignorance of, or indifference to, the construction of a clear anddistinctly outlined plot. _Old Fortunatus_ tells the well-known story ofthe wishing cap and purse, with a kind of addition showing how these farein the hands of _Fortunatus's_ sons, and with a wild intermixture(according to the luckless habit above noted) of kings and lords, andpseudo-historical incidents. No example of the kind is more chaotic inmovement and action. But the interlude of Fortune with which it is usheredin is conceived in the highest romantic spirit, and told in verse ofwonderful effectiveness, not to mention two beautiful songs; and throughoutthe play the allegorical or supernatural passages show the same character. Nor are the more prosaic parts inferior, as, for instance, the prettydialogue of Orleans and Galloway, cited by Lamb, and the fine passage whereAndelocia says what he will do "to-morrow. " _Fort. _ "No more: curse on: your cries to me are music, And fill the sacred roundure of mine ears With tunes more sweet than moving of the spheres. Curse on: on our celestial brows do sit Unnumbered smiles, which then leap from their throne When they see peasants dance and monarchs groan. Behold you not this Globe, this golden bowl, This toy call'd world at our Imperial feet? This world is Fortune's ball wherewith she sports. Sometimes I strike it up into the air, And then create I Emperors and Kings. Sometimes I spurn it: at which spurn crawls out That wild beast multitude: curse on, you fools. 'Tis I that tumble Princes from their thrones, And gild false brows with glittering diadems. 'Tis I that tread on necks of conquerors, And when like semi-gods they have been drawn, In ivory chariots to the capitol, Circled about with wonder of all eyes The shouts of every tongue, love of all hearts Being swoll'n with their own greatness, I have prick'd The bladder of their pride, and made them die, As water bubbles, without memory. I thrust base cowards into honour's chair, Whilst the true spirited soldier stands by Bare headed, and all bare, whilst at his scars They scoff, that ne'er durst view the face of wars. I set an Idiot's cap on virtue's head, Turn learning out of doors, clothe wit in rags And paint ten thousand images of loam In gaudy silken colours: on the backs Of mules and asses I make asses ride Only for sport, to see the apish world Worship such beasts with sound idolatry. This Fortune does, and when this is done, She sits and smiles to hear some curse her name, And some with adoration crown her fame. * * * * * _And. _ "To-morrow? ay to-morrow thou shalt buy them. To-morrow tell the Princess I will love her, To-morrow tell the King I'll banquet him, To-morrow, Shadow, will I give thee gold, To-morrow pride goes bare, and lust a-cold. To-morrow will the rich man feed the poor, And vice to-morrow virtue will adore. To-morrow beggars shall be crownèd kings. This no-time, morrow's time, no sweetness sings. I pray thee hence: bear that to Agripyne. " The whole is, as a whole, to the last degree crude and undigested, but theill-matured power of the writer is almost the more apparent. _The Honest Whore_, in two parts, is, as far as general character goes, amixed comedy of intrigue and manners combining, or rather uniting (forthere is little combination of them), four themes--first, the love ofHippolito for the Princess Infelice, and his virtuous motions followed byrelapse; secondly, the conversion by him of the courtesan Bellafront, adamsel of good family, from her evil ways, and her marriage to her firstgallant, a hairbrained courtier named Matheo; thirdly, Matheo'sill-treatment of Bellafront, her constancy and her rejection of thetemptations of Hippolito, who from apostle has turned seducer, with thehumours of Orlando Friscobaldo, Bellafront's father, who, feigning never toforgive her, watches over her in disguise, and acts as guardian angel toher reckless and sometimes brutal husband; and lastly, the other humours ofa certain marvellously patient citizen who allows his wife to hector him, his customers to bully and cheat him, and who pushes his eccentric andunmanly patience to the point of enduring both madhouse and jail. Lamb, while ranking a single speech of Bellafront's very high, speaks with ratheroblique approval of the play, and Hazlitt, though enthusiastic for it, admires chiefly old Friscobaldo and the ne'er-do-well Matheo. My own reasonfor preferring it to almost all the non-tragical work of the time out ofShakespere, is the wonderful character of Bellafront, both in herunreclaimed and her reclaimed condition. In both she is a very woman--notas conventional satirists and conventional encomiasts praise or rail atwomen, but as women are. If her language in her unregenerate days issometimes coarser than is altogether pleasant, it does not disguise hernature, --the very nature of such a woman misled by giddiness, bycuriosity, by love of pleasure, by love of admiration, but in no thoroughsense depraved. Her selection of Matheo not as the instrument of her being"made an honest woman, " not apparently because she had any love for himleft, or had ever had much, but because he was her first seducer, isexactly what, after a sudden convincing of sin, such a woman would havedone; and if her patience under the long trial of her husband'sthoughtlessness and occasional brutality seem excessive, it will only seemso to one who has been unlucky in his experience. Matheo indeed is athorough good-for-nothing, and the natural man longs that Bellafront mighthave been better parted; but Dekker was a very moral person in his own way, and apparently he would not entirely let her--Imogen gone astray as sheis--off her penance. CHAPTER VI LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE One name so far dominates the prose literature of the last years ofElizabeth, and that of the whole reign of James, that it has probably alonesecured attention in the general memory, except such as may be given to thepurple patches (of the true Tyrian dye, but not extremely numerous) whichdecorate here and there the somewhat featureless expanse of Sir WalterRaleigh's _History of the World_. That name, it is scarcely necessary tosay, is the name of Francis Bacon. Bacon's eventful life, his much debatedcharacter, his philosophical and scientific position, are all mattersbeyond our subject. But as it is of the first importance in studying thatsubject to keep dates and circumstances generally, if not minutely, inview, it may be well to give a brief summary of his career. He was born in1561, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper; he went very young toCambridge, and though early put to the study of the law, discovered anequally early bent in another direction. He was unfortunate in notobtaining the patronage then necessary to all men not of independentfortune. Though Elizabeth was personally familiar with him, she gave himnothing of importance--whether owing to the jealousy of his uncle andcousin, Burleigh and Robert Cecil, is a point not quite certain. Thepatronage of Essex did him very little good, and drew him into the worstaction of his life. But after Elizabeth's death, and when a man of middleage, he at last began to mount the ladder, and came with some rapidity tothe summit of his profession, being made Lord Chancellor, and created BaronVerulam and Viscount St. Alban. The title Lord Bacon he never bore instrictness, but it has been consecrated by the use of many generations, andit is perhaps pedantry to object to it. Entangled as a courtier in therising hatred of the Court felt by the popular party, exposed by his owncarelessness, if not by actual venality in office, to the attacks of hisenemies, and weakly supported, if supported at all, by the favouriteBuckingham (who seems to have thought that Bacon took too much upon himselfin state affairs), he lost, in 1621, all his places and emoluments, and washeavily fined. The retirement of his last few years produced much literaryfruit, and he died (his death being caused or hastened by an injudiciousexperiment) in 1626. Great as is the place that Bacon occupies in English literature, heoccupies it, as it were, _malgré lui_. Unlike almost all the greatest menof his own and even of the preceding generation, he seems to have thoughtlittle of the capacities, and less of the chances of the English language. He held (and, unluckily for him, expressed his opinion in writing) that"these modern languages will at one time or the other play the bankruptwith books, " and even when he wrote in the despised vernacular he took careto translate his work, or have it translated, into Latin in order toforestall the oblivion he dreaded. Nor is this his only phrase of contempttowards his mother-tongue--the tongue which in his own lifetime served as avehicle to a literature compared with which the whole literary achievementof Latin antiquity is but a neat school exercise, and which in every pointbut accomplished precision of form may challenge comparison with Greekitself. This insensibility of Bacon's is characteristic enough, and might, if this were the place for any such subtlety, be connected with the otherdefects of his strangely blended character--his pusillanimity, his lack ofpassion (let any one read the Essay on Love, and remember that somepersons, not always inmates of lunatic asylums, have held that Bacon wrotethe plays of Shakespere), his love of empty pomp and display, and soforth. But the English language which he thus despised had a noble and worthyrevenge on Bacon. Of his Latin works hardly anything but the _NovumOrganum_ is now read even for scholastic purposes, and it is not certainthat, but for the saving influences of academical study and prescription, even that might not slip out of the knowledge of all but specialists. Butwith the wider and wider spread and study of English the _Essays_ and _TheAdvancement of Learning_ are read ever more and more, and the only reasonthat _The History of Henry VII. _, _The New Atlantis_, and the _SylvaSylvarum_ do not receive equal attention, lies in the comparativeobsoleteness of their matter, combined with the fact that the matter is thechief thing on which attention is bestowed in them. Even in the two worksnoted, the _Essays_ and _The Advancement_, which can go both together in asmall volume, Bacon shows himself at his very greatest in all respects, and(ignorant or careless as he was of the fact) as one of the greatest writersof English prose before the accession of Charles I. The characteristics of style in these two works are by no means the same;but between them they represent fairly enough the characteristics of allBacon's English prose. It might indeed be desirable in studying it to addto them the _Henry the Seventh_, which is a model of clear historicalnarration, not exactly picturesque, but never dull; and though not exactlyerudite, yet by no means wanting in erudition, and exhibiting conclusionswhich, after two centuries and a half of record-grubbing, have not beenseriously impugned or greatly altered by any modern historian. In thisbook, which was written late, Bacon had, of course, the advantage of hislong previous training in the actual politics of a school not very greatlyaltered since the time he was describing, but this does not diminish thecredit due to him for formal excellence. The _Essays_--which Bacon issued for the first time, to the number of ten, in 1597, when he was, comparatively speaking, a young man, which hereissued largely augmented in 1612, and yet again just before his death, intheir final and fullest condition--are not so much in the modern senseessays as collections of thoughts more or less connected. We have, indeed, the genesis of them in the very interesting commonplace book called the_Promus_ [butler or storekeeper] _of Elegancies_, the publication of which, as a whole, was for some reason or other not undertaken by Mr. Spedding, and is due to Mrs. Henry Pott. Here we have the quaint, but never merelyquaint, analogies, the apt quotations, the singular flashes of reflectionand illustration, which characterise Bacon, in their most unformed andnew-born condition. In the _Essays_ they are worked together, but stillsententiously, and evidently with no attempt at sustained and fluentconnection of style. That Montaigne must have had some influence on Baconis, of course, certain; though few things can be more unlike than the curtseverity of the scheme of the English essays and the interminablediffuseness of the French. Yet here and there are passages in Montaignewhich might almost be the work of a French Bacon, and in Bacon passageswhich might easily be the work of an English Montaigne. In both there isthe same odd mixture of dignity and familiarity--the familiaritypredominating in Montaigne, the dignity in Bacon--and in both there is theunion of a rich fancy and a profound interest in ethical questions, with acurious absence of passion and enthusiasm--a touch, as it may almost becalled, of Philistinism, which in Bacon's case contrasts most strangelywith his frequently gorgeous language, and the evident richness of hisimagination, or at least his fancy. The scheme and manner of these essays naturally induced a sententious andalmost undeveloped manner of writing. An extraordinary number of separatephrases and sentences, which have become the common property of all who usethe language, and are probably most often used without any clear idea oftheir author, may be disinterred from them, as well as many striking imagesand pregnant thoughts, which have had less general currency. But thecompression of them (which is often so great that they might be printedsentence by sentence like verses of the Bible) prevents the author fromdisplaying his command of a consecutive, elaborated, and harmonised style. What command he had of that style may be found, without looking far, in the_Henry the Seventh_, in the _Atlantis_, and in various minor works, someoriginally written in Latin and translated, such as the magnificent passagewhich Dean Church has selected as describing the purpose and crown of theBaconian system. In such passages the purely oratorical faculty which heundoubtedly had (though like all the earlier oratory of England, with rareexceptions, its examples remain a mere tradition, and hardly even that)displays itself; and one cannot help regretting that, instead of going intothe law, where he never attained to much technical excellence, and wherehis mere promotion was at first slow, and was no sooner quickened than itbrought him into difficulties and dangers, he had not sought the safer andcalmer haven of the Church, where he would have been more at leisure to"take all knowledge to be his province;" would have been less tempted toengage in the treacherous, and to him always but half-congenial, businessof politics, and would have forestalled, and perhaps excelled, JeremyTaylor as a sacred orator. If Bacon be Jeremy's inferior in exuberantgorgeousness, he is very much his superior in order and proportion, andquite his equal in sudden flashes of a quaint but illuminative rhetoric. For after all that has been said of Bacon and his philosophy, he was arhetorician rather than a philosopher. Half the puzzlement which has arisenin the efforts to get something exact out of the stately periods andsplendid promises of the _Novum Organum_ and its companions has arisen fromoversight of this eminently rhetorical character; and this character is thechief property of his style. It may seem presumptuous to extend the chargesof want of depth which were formulated by good authorities in law andphysics against Bacon in his own day, yet he is everywhere "not deep. " Heis stimulating beyond the recorded power of any other man except Socrates;he is inexhaustible in analogy and illustration, full of wise saws, and ofinstances as well ancient as modern. But he is by no means an accurateexpositor, still less a powerful reasoner, and his style is exactly suitedto his mental gifts; now luminously fluent, now pregnantly brief; here justobscure enough to kindle the reader's desire of penetrating the obscurity, there flashing with ornament which perhaps serves to conceal a flaw in thereasoning, but which certainly serves to allure and retain the attention ofthe student. All these characteristics are the characteristics rather ofthe great orator than of the great philosopher. His constant practice inevery kind of literary composition, and in the meditative thought whichconstant literary composition perhaps sometimes tempts its practitioners todispense with, enabled him to write on a vast variety of subjects, and inmany different styles. But of these it will always be found that two weremost familiar to him, the short sententious apothegm, parallel, or image, which suggests and stimulates even when it does not instruct, and thehalf-hortatory half-descriptive _discours d'ouverture_, where the writer isthe unwearied panegyrist of promised lands not perhaps to be identifiedwith great ease on any chart. [38] [38] Of Bacon in prose, as of Spenser, Shakespere, and Milton in verse, itdoes not seem necessary to give extracts, and for the same reason. A parallel in the Plutarchian manner between Bacon and Raleigh would inmany ways be pleasant, but only one point of it concerns us here, --thatboth had been happier and perhaps had done greater things had they beensimple men of letters. Unlike Bacon, who, though he wrote fair verse, showsno poetical bent, Raleigh was _homo utriusque linguæ_, and his works inverse, unequal as they are, occasionally touch the loftiest summits ofpoetry. It is very much the same in his prose. His minor books, mostlywritten hurriedly, and for a purpose, have hardly any share of the gracesof style; and his masterpiece, the famous _History of the World_, is madeup of short passages of the most extraordinary beauty, and long stretchesof monotonous narration and digression, showing not much grace of style, and absolutely no sense of proportion or skill in arrangement. Thecontrast is so strange that some have sought to see in the undoubted factsthat Raleigh, in his tedious prison labours, had assistants and helpers(Ben Jonson among others), a reason for the superior excellence of such setpieces as the Preface, the Epilogue, and others, which are scattered aboutthe course of the work. But independently of the other fact that excellenceof the most diverse kind meets us at every turn, though it also deserts usat every turn, in Raleigh's varied literary work, and that it would beabsurd to attribute all these passages to some "affable familiar ghost, "there is the additional difficulty that in none of his reported helpers'own work do the peculiar graces of the purple passages of the _History_occur. The immortal descant on mortality with which the book closes, andwhich is one of the highest achievements of English prose, is not in theleast like Jonson, not in the least like Selden, not in the least like anyone of whose connection with Raleigh there is record. Donne might havewritten it; but there is not the smallest reason for supposing that he did, and many for being certain that he did not. Therefore, it is only fair togive Raleigh himself the credit for this and all other passages of thekind. Their character and, at the same time, their comparative rarity areboth easily explicable. They are all obviously struck off in moments ofexcitement--moments when the writer's variable and fanciful temperament washeated to flashing-point and gave off almost spontaneously these lightningsof prose as it gave, on other occasions, such lightnings of poetry as _TheFaërie Queene_ sonnet, as "the Lie, " and as the other strange jewels (cats'eyes and opals, rather than pearls or diamonds), which are strung alongwith very many common pebbles on Raleigh's poetical necklace. In style theyanticipate Browne (who probably learnt not a little from them) more thanany other writer; and they cannot fairly be said to have been anticipatedby any Englishman. The low and stately music of their cadences is a thing, except in Browne, almost unique, and it is not easy to trace it to anypeculiar mannerism of vocabulary or of the arrangement of words. ButRaleigh's usual style differs very little from that of other men of hisday, who kept clear at once of euphuism and burlesque. Being chieflynarrative, it is rather plainer than Hooker, who has some few points ofresemblance with Raleigh, but considerably freer from the vices ofdesultoriness and awkward syntax, than most writers of the day exceptHooker. But its most interesting characteristic to the student ofliterature must always be the way in which it leads up to, without in theleast foretelling, the bursts of eloquence already referred to. EvenMilton's alternations of splendid imagery with dull and scurrilousinvective, are hardly so strange as Raleigh's changes from jog-trotcommonplace to almost inspired declamation, if only for the reason thatthey are much more intelligible. It must also be mentioned that Raleigh, like Milton, seems to have had little or no humour. The opening and closing passages of the _History_ are almost universallyknown; a quainter, less splendid, but equally characteristic one may begiven here though Mr. Arber has already extracted it:-- "The four complexions resemble the four elements; and the seven ages of man, the seven planets. Whereof our infancy is compared to the moon; in which we seem only to live and grow, as plants. "The second age, to Mercury; wherein we are taught and instructed. "Our third age, to Venus; the days of Love, Desire and Vanity. "The fourth, to the Sun; the strong, flourishing and beautiful age of man's life. "The fifth, to Mars; in which we seek honour and victory; and in which our thoughts travel to ambitious ends. "The sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter; in which we begin to take account of our times, judge of ourselves, and grow to the perfection of our understanding. "The last and seventh, to Saturn; wherein our days are sad and overcast; and in which we find by dear and lamentable experience, and by the loss which can never be repaired, that, of all our vain passions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth. Our attendants are sicknesses and variable infirmities: and by how much the more we are accompanied with plenty, by so much the more greedily is our end desired. Whom, when Time hath made unsociable to others, we become a burden to ourselves: being of no other use than to hold the riches we have from our successors. In this time it is, when we, for the most part (and never before) prepare for our Eternal Habitation, which we pass on unto with many sighs, groans and sad thoughts: and in the end (by the workmanship of Death) finish the sorrowful business of a wretched life. Towards which we always travel, both sleeping and waking. Neither have those beloved companions of honour and riches any power at all to hold us any one day by the glorious promise of entertainments: but by what crooked path soever we walk, the same leadeth on directly to the House of Death, whose doors lie open at all hours, and to all persons. " But great as are Bacon and Raleigh, they cannot approach, as writers ofprose, the company of scholarly divines who produced--what is probably thegreatest prose work in any language--the Authorised Version of the Bible inEnglish. Now that there is at any rate some fear of this masterpiececeasing to be what it has been for three centuries--the school and trainingground of every man and woman of English speech in the noblest uses ofEnglish tongue--every one who values that mother tongue is more especiallybound to put on record his own allegiance to it. The work of the Companyappears to have been loyally performed in common; and it is curious thatsuch an unmatched result should have been the result of labours thuscombined, and not, as far as is known, controlled by any one guidingspirit. Among the translators were many excellent writers, --an advantagewhich they possessed in a much higher degree than their revisers in thenineteenth century, of whom few would be mentioned among the best livingwriters of English by any competent authority. But, at the same time, noknown translator under James has left anything which at all equals instrictly literary merit the Authorised Version, as it still is and as longmay it be. The fact is, however, less mysterious after a little examinationthan it may seem at first sight. Putting aside all questions as to theintrinsic value of the subject-matter as out of our province, it will begenerally admitted that the translators had in the greater part of the OldTestament, in a large part of the Apocrypha, and in no small part of theNew Testament, matter as distinguished from form, of very high literaryvalue to begin with in their originals. In the second place, they had, inthe Septuagint and in the Vulgate, versions also of no small literarymerit to help them. In the third place, they had in the earlier Englishversions excellent quarries of suitable English terms, if not veryaccomplished models of style. These, however, were not in any wayadvantages peculiar to themselves. The advantages which, in a manner atleast, were peculiar to themselves may be divided into two classes. Theywere in the very centre of the great literary ferment of which in thisvolume I am striving to give a history as little inadequate as possible. They had in the air around them an English purged of archaisms anduncouthnesses, fully adapted to every literary purpose, and yet still racyof the soil, and free from that burden of hackneyed and outworn literaryplatitudes and commonplaces with which centuries of voluminous literaryproduction have vitiated and loaded the English of our own day. They werenot afraid of Latinising, but they had an ample stock of the purevernacular to draw on. These things may be classed together. On the otherside, but equally healthful, may be put the fact that the style andstructure of the originals and earlier versions, and especially that versedivision which has been now so unwisely abandoned, served as safeguardsagainst the besetting sin of all prose writers of their time, the habit ofindulging in long wandering sentences, in paragraphs destitute ofproportion and of grace, destitute even of ordinary manageableness andshape. The verses saved them from that once for all; while on the otherhand their own taste, and the help given by the structure of the originalin some cases, prevented them from losing sight of the wood for the trees, and omitting to consider the relation of verse to verse, as well as theantiphony of the clauses within the verse. Men without literary facultymight no doubt have gone wrong; but these were men of great literaryfaculty, whose chief liabilities to error were guarded against precisely bythe very conditions in which they found their work. The hour had comeexactly, and so for once had the men. The result of their labours is so universally known that it is notnecessary to say very much about it; but the mere fact of the universalknowledge carries with it a possibility of under-valuation. In anotherplace, dealing with the general subject of English prose style, I haveselected the sixth and seventh verses of the eighth chapter of Solomon'sSong as the best example known to me of absolutely perfect Englishprose--harmonious, modulated, yet in no sense trespassing the limits ofprose and becoming poetry. I have in the same place selected, as acompanion passage from a very different original, the Charity passage ofthe First Epistle to the Corinthians, which has been so miserably andwantonly mangled and spoilt by the bad taste and ignorance of the laterevisers. I am tempted to dwell on this because it is very germane to oursubject. One of the blunders which spoils this passage in the RevisedVersion is the pedantic substitution of "mirror" for "glass, " it havingapparently occurred to some wiseacre that glass was not known to theancients, or at least used for mirrors. Had this wiseacre had the slightestknowledge of English literature, a single title of Gascoigne's, "The SteelGlass, " would have dispensed him at once from any attempt at emendation;but this is ever and always the way of the sciolist. Fortunately such anational possession as the original Authorised Version, when oncemultiplied and dispersed by the press, is out of reach of vandalism. Theimproved version, constructed on very much the same principle as Davenant'sor Ravenscroft's improvements on Shakespere, may be ordered to be read inchurches, and substituted for purposes of taking oaths. But the original(as it may be called in no burlesque sense such as that of a famous story)will always be the text resorted to by scholars and men of letters forpurposes of reading, and will remain the authentic lexicon, the recognisedsource of English words and constructions of the best period. The days ofcreation; the narratives of Joseph and his brethren, of Ruth, of the finaldefeat of Ahab, of the discomfiture of the Assyrian host of Sennacherib;the moral discourses of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Book ofWisdom; the poems of the Psalms and the prophets; the visions of theRevelation, --a hundred other passages which it is unnecessary tocatalogue, --will always be the _ne plus ultra_ of English composition intheir several kinds, and the storehouse from which generation aftergeneration of writers, sometimes actually hostile to religion and oftenindifferent to it, will draw the materials, and not unfrequently the actualform of their most impassioned and elaborate passages. Revision afterrevision, constructed in corrupt following of the transient and embarrassedphantoms of ephemeral fashion in scholarship, may sink into the GreatMother of Dead Dogs after setting right a tense here, and theretransferring a rendering from text to margin or from margin to text. Butthe work of the unrevised version will remain unaffected by each of thesefutile exercitations. All the elements, all the circumstances of atranslation as perfect as can be accomplished in any circumstances and withany elements, were then present, and the workers were worthy of the work. The plays of Shakespere and the English Bible are, and will ever be, thetwin monuments not merely of their own period, but of the perfection ofEnglish, the complete expressions of the literary capacities of thelanguage, at the time when it had lost none of its pristine vigour, and hadput on enough but not too much of the adornments and the limitations ofwhat may be called literary civilisation. The boundary between the prose of this period and that which we shall treatlater as "Caroline" is not very clearly fixed. Some men, such as Hall andDonne, whose poetical work runs parallel to that in prose which we are nownoticing, come as prose writers rather under the later date; others whocontinued to write till long after Elizabeth's death, and even after thatof James, seem, by their general complexion, to belong chiefly to theearlier day. The first of these is Ben Jonson, whose high reputation inother ways has somewhat unduly damaged, or at least obscured, his merits asa prose writer. His two chief works in this kind are his _English Grammar_, in which a sound knowledge of the rules of English writing is discovered, and the quaintly named _Explorata_ or _Discoveries_ and _Timber_--acollection of notes varying from a mere aphorism to a respectable essay. In these latter a singular power of writing prose appears. The book was notpublished till after Ben's death, and is thought to have been in part atleast written during the last years of his life. But there can be nogreater contrast than exists between the prose style usual at that time--a_style tourmenté_, choked with quotation, twisted in every direction byallusion and conceit, and marred by perpetual confusions of English withclassical grammar--and the straightforward, vigorous English of these_Discoveries_. They come, in character as in time, midway between Hookerand Dryden, and they incline rather to the more than to the less modernform. Here is found the prose character of Shakespere which, if lessmagniloquent than that in verse, has a greater touch of sheer sincerity. Here, too, is an admirable short tractate on Style which exemplifies whatit preaches; and a large number of other excellent things. Some, it istrue, are set down in a shorthand fashion as if (which doubtless they were)they were commonplace-book notes for working up in due season. But othersand perhaps the majority (they all Baconian-wise have Latin titles, thoughonly one or two have the text in Latin) are written with complete attentionto literary presentment; seldom though sometimes relapsing into looseconstruction of sentences and paragraphs, the besetting sin of the day, andoften presenting, as in the following, a model of sententious but not dryform:-- "We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of difficulty. It is a false quarrel against nature that she helps understanding but in a few, when the most part of mankind are inclined by her thither, if they would take the pains; no less than birds to fly, horses to run, etc. , which if they lose it is through their own sluggishness, and by that means become her prodigies, not her children. I confess nature in children is more patient of labour in study than in age; for the sense of the pain, the judgment of the labour is absent, they do not measure what they have done. And it is the thought and consideration that affects us more than the weariness itself. Plato was not content with the learning that Athens could give him, but sailed into Italy, for Pythagoras' knowledge: and yet not thinking himself sufficiently informed, went into Egypt, to the priests, and learned their mysteries. He laboured, so must we. Many things may be learned together and performed in one point of time; as musicians exercise their memory, their voice, their fingers, and sometimes their head and feet at once. And so a preacher, in the invention of matter, election of words, composition of gesture, look, pronunciation, motion, useth all these faculties at once: and if we can express this variety together, why should not divers studies, at divers hours, delight, when the variety is able alone to refresh and repair us? As when a man is weary of writing, to read; and then again of reading, to write. Wherein, howsoever we do many things, yet are we (in a sort) still fresh to what we begin; we are recreated with change as the stomach is with meats. But some will say, this variety breeds confusion, and makes that either we lose all or hold no more than the last. Why do we not then persuade husbandmen that they should not till land, help it with marle, lime, and compost? plant hop gardens, prune trees, look to beehives, rear sheep, and all other cattle at once? It is easier to do many things and continue, than to do one thing long. " No other single writer until we come to the pamphleteers deserves separateor substantive mention; but in many divisions of literature there werepractitioners who, if they have not kept much notoriety as masters ofstyle, were well thought of even in that respect in their day, and werelong authorities in point of matter. The regular theological treatises ofthe time present nothing equal to Hooker, who in part overlapped it, thoughthe Jesuit Parsons has some name for vigorous writing. In history, Knolles, the historian of the Turks, and Sandys, the Eastern traveller and sacredpoet, bear the bell for style among their fellows, such as Hayward, Camden, Spelman, Speed, and Stow. Daniel the poet, a very good prose writer in hisway, was also a historian of England, but his chief prose work was his_Defence of Rhyme_. He had companions in the critical task; but it iscurious and by no means uninstructive to notice, that the immense creativeproduction of the time seems to have to a great extent smothered thetheoretic and critical tendency which, as yet not resulting in actualperformance, betrayed itself at the beginning of the period in Webbe andPuttenham, in Harvey and Sidney. The example of Eden in collecting andEnglishing travels and voyages was followed by several writers, of whomtwo, successively working and residing, the elder at Oxford, and theyounger at Cambridge, made the two greatest collections of the kind in thelanguage for interest of matter, if not for perfection of style. Thesewere Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, a venerable pair. The perhapsoverpraised, but still excellent Characters of the unfortunate Sir ThomasOverbury and the prose works, such as the _Counterblast_ and _Demonology_, of James I. , are books whose authors have made them more famous than theirintrinsic merits warrant, and in the various collections of "works" of theday, older and newer, we shall find examples nearly as miscellaneous asthose of the class of writers now to be noticed. Of all this miscellaneouswork it is impossible to give examples, but one critical passage fromDaniel, and one descriptive from Hakluyt may serve:-- "Methinks we should not so soon yield up our consents captive to the authority of antiquity, unless we saw more reason; all our understandings are not to be built by the square of Greece and Italy. We are the children of nature as well as they, we are not so placed out of the way of judgment but that the same sun of discretion shineth upon us; we have our portion of the same virtues, as well as of the same vices, et Catilinam quocunque in populo videas, quocunque sub axe. Time and the turn of things bring about these faculties according to the present estimation; and, res temporibus, non tempore rebus servire opportet. So that we must never rebel against use; quem penes arbitrium est, et vis et norma loquendi. It is not the observing of trochaics nor their iambics, that will make our writings aught the wiser: all their poesy and all their philosophy is nothing, unless we bring the discerning light of conceit with us to apply it to use. It is not books, but only that great book of the world, and the all-overspreading grace of Heaven that makes men truly judicial. Nor can it but touch of arrogant ignorance to hold this or that nation barbarous, these or those times gross, considering how this manifold creature man, wheresoever he stand in the world, hath always some disposition of worth, entertains the order of society, affects that which is most in use, and is eminent in some one thing or other that fits his humour or the times. The Grecians held all other nations barbarous but themselves; yet Pyrrhus, when he saw the well ordered marching of the Romans, which made them see their presumptuous error, could say it was no barbarous manner of proceeding. The Goths, Vandals, and Longobards, whose coming down like an inundation overwhelmed, as they say, all the glory of learning in Europe, have yet left us still their laws and customs, as the originals of most of the provincial constitutions of Christendom; which, well considered with their other courses of government, may serve to clear them from this imputation of ignorance. And though the vanquished never speak well of the conqueror, yet even through the unsound coverings of malediction appear these monuments of truth, as argue well their worth, and proves them not without judgment, though without Greek and Latin. " * * * * * "To speak somewhat of these islands, being called, in old time, _Insulæ fortunæ_, by the means of the flourishing thereof. The fruitfulness of them doth surely exceed far all other that I have heard of. For they make wine better then any in Spain: and they have grapes of such bigness that they may be compared to damsons, and in taste inferior to none. For sugar, suckets, raisons of the sun, and many other fruits, abundance: for rosin, and raw silk, there is great store. They want neither corn, pullets, cattle, nor yet wild fowl. "They have many camels also: which, being young, are eaten of the people for victuals; and being old, they are used for carriage of necessities. Whose property is, as he is taught, to kneel at the taking of his load, and the unlading again; of understanding very good, but of shape very deformed; with a little belly; long misshapen legs; and feet very broad of flesh, without a hoof, all whole saving the great toe; a back bearing up like a molehill, a large and thin neck, with a little head, with a bunch of hard flesh which Nature hath given him in his breast to lean upon. This beast liveth hardly, and is contented with straw and stubble; but of strong force, being well able to carry five hundredweight. "In one of these islands called Ferro, there is, by the reports of the inhabitants, a certain tree which raineth continually; by the dropping whereof the inhabitants and cattle are satisfied with water: for other water have they none in all the island. And it raineth in such abundance that it were incredible unto a man to believe such a virtue to be in a tree; but it is known to be a Divine matter, and a thing ordained by God: at Whose power therein, we ought not to marvel, seeing He did, by His Providence (as we read in the Scriptures) when the Children of Israel were going into the Land of Promise, feed them with manna from heaven, for the space of forty years. Of these trees aforesaid, we saw in Guinea many; being of great height, dropping continually; but not so abundantly as the other, because the leaves are narrower and are like the leaves of a pear tree. About these islands are certain flitting islands, which have been oftentimes seen; and when men approach near them, they vanished: as the like hath been of these now known (by the report of the inhabitants) which were not found but of a long time, one after the other; and, therefore, it should seem he is not yet born, to whom God hath appointed the finding of them. "In this island of Teneriff, there is a hill called the Pike, because it is piked; which is, in height, by their report, twenty leagues: having, both winter and summer, abundance of snow on the top of it. This Pike may be seen, in a clear day, fifty leagues off; but it sheweth as though it were a black cloud a great height in the element. I have heard of none to be compared with this in height; but in the Indies I have seen many, and, in my judgment, not inferior to the Pike: and so the Spaniards write. " One of the most remarkable developments of English prose at the time, andone which has until very recently been almost inaccessible, except in a fewexamples, to the student who has not the command of large libraries, whileeven by such students it has seldom been thoroughly examined, is theabundant and very miscellaneous collection of what are called, for want ofa better name, Pamphlets. The term is not too happy, but there is no other(except the still less happy Miscellany) which describes the thing. Itconsists of a vast mass of purely popular literature, seldom written withany other aim than that of the modern journalist. That is to say, it waswritten to meet a current demand, to deal with subjects for one reason orother interesting at the moment, and, as a matter of course, to bring insome profit to the writer. These pamphlets are thus as destitute of anylogical community of subject as the articles which compose a modernnewspaper--a production the absence of which they no doubt supplied, and ofwhich they were in a way the forerunners. Attempts to classify theirsubjects could only end in a hopeless cross division. They are religiousvery often; political very seldom (for the fate of the luckless Stubbes inhis dealings with the French marriage was not suited to attract);politico-religious in at least the instance of one famous group, theso-called Martin Marprelate Controversy; moral constantly; in very many, especially the earlier instances, narrative, and following to a largeextent in the steps of Lyly and Sidney; besides a large class of curioustracts dealing with the manners, and usually the bad side of the manners, of the town. Of the vast miscellaneous mass of these works by singleunimportant or unknown authors it is almost impossible to give any accounthere, though valuable instances will be found of them in Mr. Arber's_English Garner_. But the works of the six most important individualwriters of them--Greene, Nash, Harvey, Dekker, Lodge, Breton (to whommight be added the verse-pamphleteer, but in no sense poet, Rowlands)--areluckily now accessible as wholes, Lodge and Rowlands having been published, or at least privately printed for subscribers, by the Hunterian Club ofGlasgow, and the other five by the prolific industry of Dr. Grosart. Thereprints of Petheram and of Mr. Arber, with new editions of Lyly andothers, have made most of the Marprelate tracts accessible. Some notice ofthese collections will not only give a fair idea of the entiremiscellaneous prose of the Elizabethan period, but will also fill adistinct gap in most histories of it. It will not be necessary to enterinto much personal detail about their authors, for most of them have beennoticed already in other capacities, and of Breton and Rowlands very littleindeed is known. Greene and Lodge stand apart from their fellows in thisrespect, that their work is, in some respects at any rate, much more likeliterature and less like journalism, though by an odd and apparentlyperverse chance, this difference has rather hurt than saved it in theestimation of posterity. For the kind of literature which both wrote inthis way has gone out of fashion, and its purely literary graces are barelysufficient to save it from the point of view of form; while the bitterpersonalities of Nash, and the quaint adaptations of bygone satire tocontemporary London life in which Dekker excelled, have a certain lastinginterest of matter. On the other hand, the two companions of Marlowe havethe advantage (which they little anticipated, and would perhaps less haverelished) of surviving as illustrations of Shakespere, of the Shakescenewho, decking himself out in their feathers, has by that act rescued_Pandosto_ and _Euphues' Golden Legacy_ from oblivion by associating themwith the immortality of _As You Like It_ and _The Winter's Tale_. Owing to the different forms in which this fleeting and unequal work hasbeen reprinted, it is not very easy to decide off-hand on the relative bulkof the authors' works. But the palm in this respect must be divided betweenRobert Greene and Nicholas Breton, the former of whom fills eleven volumesof loosely-printed crown octavo, and the latter (in prose only) a thickquarto of very small and closely-printed double columns. Greene, who beganhis work early under the immediate inspiration first of his travels andthen of Lyly's _Euphues_, started, as early as 1583, with _Mamillia, aLooking-Glass for the Ladies of England_, which, both in general characterand in peculiarities of style, is an obvious copy of _Euphues_. _The Mirrorof Modesty_ is more of a lay sermon, based on the story of Susanna. _TheTritameron of Love_ is a dialogue without action, but _Arbasto, or theAnatomie of Fortune_ returns to the novel form, as does _The Card ofFancy_. _Planetomachia_ is a collection of stories, illustrating thepopular astrological notions, with an introduction on astrology generally. _Penelope's Web_ is another collection of stories, but _The SpanishMasquerado_ is one of the most interesting of the series. Written just atthe time of the Armada, it is pure journalism--a _livre de circonstance_composed to catch the popular temper with aid of a certain actualknowledge, and a fair amount of reading. Then Greene returned to euphuismin _Menaphon_, and in _Euphues, his Censure to Philautus_; nor are_Perimedes the Blacksmith_ and _Tully's Love_ much out of the same line. _The Royal Exchange_ again deviates, being a very quaint collection, quaintly arranged, of moral maxims, apophthegms, short stories, etc. , forthe use of the citizens. Next, the author began the curious series, atfirst perhaps not very sincere, but certainly becoming so at last, ofhalf-personal reminiscences and regrets, less pointed and well arrangedthan Villon's, but remarkably similar. The first and longest of these was_Greene's Never too Late_, with its second part _Francesco's Fortunes_. _Greene's Metamorphosis_ is Euphuist once more, and _Greene's MourningGarment_ and _Greene's Farewell to Folly_ are the same, with a touch ofpersonality. Then he diverged into the still more curious series on"conny-catching"--rooking, gulling, cheating, as we should call it. Thereare five or six of these tracts, and though there is not a littlebookmaking in them, they are unquestionably full of instruction as to theways of the time. _Philomela_ returns once more to euphuism, but Greene issoon back again with _A Quip for an Upstart Courtier_, a piece of socialsatire, flying rather higher than his previous attempts. The zigzag is keptup in _Orpharion_, the last printed (at least in the only edition nowknown) of the author's works during his lifetime. Not till after his deathdid the best known and most personal of all his works appear, the famous_Groat's Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance_, in which the"Shakescene" passage and the exhortation to his friends to repentanceoccur. Two more tracts in something the same style--_Greene's Repentance_and _Greene's Vision_--followed. Their genuineness has been questioned, butseems to be fairly certain. This full list--to which must be added the already mentioned _Pandosto, theTriumph of Time_, or _Dorastus and Fawnia_, and the translated _Debatebetween Folly and Love_--of a certainly not scanty life-work (Greene diedwhen he was quite a young man, and wrote plays besides) has been given, because it is not only the earliest, but perhaps the most characteristic ofthe whole. Despite the apparently unsuitable forms, it is evident that thewriter is striving, without knowing it, at what we call journalism. Butfashion and the absence of models cramp and distort his work. Its mainfeatures are to be found in the personal and satirical pieces, in the vividand direct humanity of some touches in the euphuist tract-romances, in thedelightful snatches of verse which intersperse and relieve theheterogeneous erudition, the clumsy dialogue, and the rococo style. The twofollowing extracts give, the first a specimen of Greene's ornate andEuphuist style from _Orpharion_, the second a passage from hisautobiographical or semi-autobiographical confessions in the _Groat'sWorth_:-- "I am Lydia that renowned Princess, whose never matched beauty seemed like the gorgeous pomp of Phoebus, too bright for the day: rung so strongly out of the trump of Fame as it filled every ear with wonder: Daughter to Astolpho, the King of Lydia: who thought himself not so fortunate for his diadem, sith other kings could boast of crowns, nor for his great possessions, although endued with large territories, as happy that he had a daughter whose excellency in favour stained Venus, whose austere chastity set Diana to silence with a blush. Know whatsoever thou art that standest attentive to my tale, that the ruddiest rose in all Damasco, the whitest lilies in the creeks of Danuby, might not if they had united their native colours, but have bashed at the vermilion stain, flourish'd upon the pure crystal of my face: the Marguerites of the western Indies, counted more bright and rich than that which Cleopatra quaffed to Anthony, the coral highest in his pride upon the Afric shores, might well be graced to resemble my teeth and lips, but never honoured to overreach my pureness. Remaining thus the mirror of the world, and nature's strangest miracle, there arrived in our Court a Thracian knight, of personage tall, proportioned in most exquisite form, his face but too fair for his qualities, for he was a brave and a resolute soldier. This cavalier coming amongst divers others to see the royalty of the state of Lydia, no sooner had a glance of my beauty, but he set down his staff, resolving either to perish in so sweet a labyrinth, or in time happily to stumble out with Theseus. He had not stayed long in my father's court, but he shewed such knightly deeds of chivalry amongst the nobility, lightened with the extraordinary sparks of a courageous mind, that not only he was liked and loved of all the chief peers of the realms, but the report of his valour coming to my father's ears, he was highly honoured of him, and placed in short time as General of his warlike forces by land. Resting in this estimation with the king, preferment was no means to quiet his mind, for love had wounded so deep, as honour by no means might remedy, that as the elephants can hardly be haled from the sight of the waste, or the roe buck from gazing at red cloth, so there was no object that could so much allure the wavering eyes of this Thracian called Acestes, as the surpassing beauty of the Princess Lydia, yea, so deeply he doted, that as the Chameleon gorgeth herself with gazing into the air, so he fed his fancy with staring on the heavenly face of his Goddess, so long dallying in the flame, that he scorched his wings and in time consumed his whole body. Being thus passionate, having none so familiar as he durst make his confidant he fell thus to debate with himself. " * * * * * "On the other side of the hedge sat one that heard his sorrow, who getting over, came towards him, and brake off his passion. When he approached, he saluted Roberto in this sort: Gentleman, quoth he (for so you seem) I have by chance heard you discourse some part of your grief; which appeareth to be more than you will discover, or I can conceit. But if you vouchsafe such simple comfort as my ability will yield, assure yourself, that I will endeavour to do the best, that either may procure your profit, or bring you pleasure: the rather, for that I suppose you are a scholar, and pity it is men of learning should live in lack. "Roberto wondering to hear such good words, for that this iron age affords few that esteem of virtue; returned him thankful gratulations and (urged by necessity) uttered his present grief, beseeching his advice how he might be employed. 'Why, easily, ' quoth he, 'and greatly to your benefit: for men of my profession get by scholars their whole living. ' 'What is your profession?' said Roberto. 'Truly, sir, ' said he, 'I am a player. ' 'A player!' quoth Roberto. 'I took you rather for a gentleman of great living, for if by outward habit men should be censured, I tell you, you would be taken for a substantial man. ' 'So am I, where I dwell' (quoth the player) 'reputed able, at my proper cost, to build a windmill. What though the world once went hard with me, when I was fain to carry my playing fardel a foot-back; _Tempora mutantur_, I know you know the meaning of it better than I, but I thus construe it; it is otherwise now; for my very share in playing apparel will not be sold for two hundred pounds. ' 'Truly' (said Roberto) 'it is strange that you should so prosper in that vain practise, for that it seems to me your voice is nothing gracious. ' 'Nay, then, ' said the player, 'I mislike your judgment: why, I am as famous for Delphrigas, and the King of Fairies, as ever was any of my time. The twelve labours of Hercules have I terribly thundered on the stage, and placed three scenes of the devil on the highway to heaven. ' 'Have ye so?' (said Roberto) 'then I pray you, pardon me. ' 'Nay more' (quoth the player) 'I can serve to make a pretty speech, for I was a country author, passing at a moral, for it was I that penn'd the moral of man's wit, the Dialogue of Dives, and for seven years' space was absolute interpreter of the puppets. But now my Almanach is out of date. The people make no estimation Of morals teaching education. Was not this pretty for a plain rhyme extempore? if ye will ye shall have more. ' 'Nay, it is enough, ' said Roberto, 'but how mean you to use me?' 'Why, sir, in making plays, ' said the other, 'for which you shall be well paid, if you will take the pains. '" These same characteristics, though without the prevailing and in partobviously sincere melancholy which marks Greene's regrets, also distinguishLodge's prose work to such an extent that remarks on the two mightsometimes be made simply interchangeable. But fortune was kinder to Lodgethan to his friend and collaborator. Nor does he seem to have had anyoccasion to "tread the burning marl" in company with conny-catchers andtheir associates. Lodge began with critical and polemical work--an academicif not very urbane reply to Stephen Gosson's _School of Abuse_; but in the_Alarum against Usurers_, which resembles and even preceded Greene'ssimilar work, he took to the satirical-story-form. Indeed, the connectionbetween Lodge and Greene was so close, and the difficulty of ascertainingthe exact dates of their compositions is so great, that it is impossible tobe sure which was the precise forerunner. Certainly if Lodge set Greene anexample in the _Alarum against Usurers_, he followed Greene's lead in_Forbonius and Prisceria_ some years afterwards, having written it onshipboard in a venture against the Spaniards. Lodge produced much the mostfamous book of the euphuist school, next to _Euphues_ itself, as well asthe best known of this pamphlet series, in _Rosalynde_ or _Euphues' GoldenLegacy_, from which Shakespere took the story of _As You Like It_, and ofwhich an example follows:-- "'Ah Phoebe, ' quoth he, 'whereof art thou made, that thou regardest not thy malady? Am I so hateful an object, that thine eyes condemn me for an abject? or so base, that thy desires cannot stoop so low as to lend me a gracious look? My passions are many, my loves more, my thoughts loyalty, and my fancy faith: all devoted in humble devoir to the service of Phoebe; and shall I reap no reward for such fealties? The swain's daily labours is quit with the evening's hire, the ploughman's toil is eased with the hope of corn, what the ox sweats out at the plough he fatteneth at the crib: but unfortunate Montanus[39] hath no salve for his sorrows, nor any hope of recompense for the hazard of his perplexed passions. If Phoebe, time may plead the proof of my truth, twice seven winters have I loved fair Phoebe: if constancy be a cause to further my suit, Montanus' thoughts have been sealed in the sweet of Phoebe's excellence, as far from change as she from love: if outward passions may discover inward affections, the furrows in my face may discover the sorrows of my heart, and the map of my looks the grief of my mind. Thou seest (Phoebe) the tears of despair have made my cheeks full of wrinkles, and my scalding sighs have made the air echo her pity conceived in my plaints; Philomel hearing my passions, hath left her mournful tunes to listen to the discourse of miseries. I have portrayed in every tree the beauty of my mistress, and the despair of my loves. What is it in the woods cannot witness my woes? and who is it would not pity my plaints? only Phoebe. And why? Because I am Montanus, and she Phoebe: I a worthless swain, and she the most excellent of all fairies. Beautiful Phoebe! oh might I say pitiful, then happy were I though I tasted but one minute of that good hap. Measure Montanus, not by his fortunes, but by his loves, and balance not his wealth but his desires, and lend but one gracious look to cure a heap of disquieted cares: if not, ah if Phoebe cannot love, let a storm of frowns end the discontent of my thoughts, and so let me perish in my desires, because they are above my deserts: only at my death this favour cannot be denied me, that all shall say Montanus died for love of hard hearted Phoebe. ' At these words she filled her face full of frowns and made him this short and sharp reply. "'Importunate shepherd, whose loves are lawless because restless: are thy passions so extreme, that thou canst not conceal them with patience? or art thou so folly-sick, that thou must needs be fancy-sick, and in thy affection tied to such an exigent as none serves but Phoebe? Well, sir, if your market can be made nowhere else, home again, for your mart is at the fairest. Phoebe is no lettuce for your lips, and her grapes hang so high, that gaze at them you may, but touch them you cannot. Yet Montanus I speak not this in pride, but in disdain: not that I scorn thee, but that I hate love: for I count it as great honour to triumph over fancy as over fortune. Rest thee content therefore Montanus, cease from thy loves, and bridle thy looks, quench the sparkles before they grow to a farther flame; for in loving me, thou shalt but live by loss, and what thou utterest in words are all written in the wind. Wert thou (Montanus) as fair as Paris, as hardy as Hector, as constant as Troilus, as loving as Leander, Phoebe could not love, because she cannot love at all: and therefore if thou pursue me with Phoebus, I must flie with Daphne. '" [39] The Silvius, it may be just necessary to observe, of _As You Like It_. This book seems to have been very successful, and Lodge began to writepamphlets vigorously, sometimes taking up the social satire, sometimes themoral treatise, sometimes (and then most happily) the euphuist romance, salted with charming poems. His last prose work in this kind (he wroteother things later) was the pretty and prettily-named _Margarite ofAmerica_, in 1596. The names of Nash and Harvey are intertwined even more closely than thoseof Greene and Lodge; but the conjunction is not a grasp of friendship but agrip of hatred--a wrestle, not an embrace. The fact of the quarrel hasattracted rather disproportionate attention from the days of Isaac Disraelionwards; and its original cause is still extremely obscure and veryunimportant. By some it is connected, causally as well as accidentally, with the Martin Marprelate business; by some with the fact that Harveybelonged to the inner Sidneian clique, Nash to the outer ring ofprofessional journalists and Bohemians. It at any rate produced someremarkable varieties of the pamphlet, and demonstrated the keen interestwhich the world takes in the proceedings of any couple of literary men whochoose to abuse and befoul one another. Harvey, though no mean scholar, was in mere writing no match for Nash; and his chief answer to the latter, _Pierce's Supererogation_, is about as rambling, incoherent, andineffective a combination of pedantry and insolence as need be wished for. It has some not uninteresting, though usually very obscure, hints onliterary matters. Besides this, Harvey wrote letters to Spenser with theirwell-known criticism and recommendation of classical forms, and _FoureLetters Touching Robert Greene and Others: with the Trimming of ThomasNash, Gentleman_. A sample of him, not in his abusive-dull, but in hisscholarly-dull manner, may be given:-- "Mine own rules and precepts of art, I believe will fall out not greatly repugnant, though peradventure somewhat different: and yet I am not so resolute, but I can be content to reserve the copying out and publishing thereof, until I have a little better consulted with my pillow, and taken some further advice of Madame Sperienza. In the mean time, take this for a general caveat, and say I have revealed one great mystery unto you: I am of opinion, there is no one more regular and justifiable direction, either for the assured and infallible certainty of our English artificial prosody particularly, or generally to bring our language into art, and to frame a grammar or rhetoric thereof; than first of all universally to agree upon one and the same orthography in all points conformable and proportionate to our common natural prosody: whether Sir Thomas Smithies in that respect be the most perfit, as surely it must needs be very good; or else some other of profounder learning and longer experience, than Sir Thomas was, shewing by necessary demonstration, wherein he is defective, will undertake shortly to supply his wants and make him more absolute. Myself dare not hope to hop after him, till I see something or other, to or fro, publicly and authentically established, as it were by a general council, or Act of Parliament: and then peradventure, standing upon firmer ground, for company sake, I may adventure to do as others do. _Interim_, credit me, I dare give no precepts, nor set down any certain general art: and yet see my boldness, I am not greatly squeamish of my _Particular Examples_, whereas he that can but reasonably skill of the one, will give easily a shrewd guess at the other: considering that the one fetcheth his original and offspring from the other. In which respect, to say troth, we beginners have the start, and advantage of our followers, who are to frame and conform both their examples and precepts, according to precedent which they have of us: as no doubt Homer or some other in Greek, and Ennius, or I know not who else in Latin, did prejudice, and overrule those that followed them, as well for the quantities of syllables, as number of feet, and the like: their only examples going for current payment, and standing instead of laws, and rules with the posterity. " In Harvey, more perhaps than anywhere else in prose, appears the abusiveexaggeration, not humorous or Rabelaisian, but simply rancorous and dull, which mars so much Elizabethan work. In order not to fall into the sameerror ourselves, we must abstain from repeating the very strong languagewhich has sometimes been applied to his treatment of dead men, and suchdead men as Greene and Marlowe, for apparently no other fault than theirbeing friends of his enemy Nash. It is sufficient to say that Harvey hadall the worst traits of "donnishness, " without having apparently any notionof that dignity which sometimes half excuses the don. He was emphaticallyof Mr. Carlyle's "acrid-quack" genus. Thomas Nash will himself hardly escape the charge of acridity, but onlyinjustice or want of discernment will call him a quack. Unlike Harvey, butlike Greene and Lodge, he was a verse as well as a prose writer. But hisverse is in comparison unimportant. Nor was he tempted to interspersespecimens of it in his prose work. The absolutely best part of thatwork--the Anti-Martinist pamphlets to be noticed presently--is onlyattributed to him conjecturally, though the grounds of attribution are verystrong. But his characteristics are fully evident in his undoubtedproductions. The first of these in pamphlet form is the very odd thingcalled _Pierce Penniless_ [the name by which Nash became known], _hisSupplication to the Devil_. It is a kind of rambling condemnation ofluxury, for the most part delivered in the form of burlesque exhortation, which the mediæval _sermons joyeux_ had made familiar in all Europeancountries. Probably some allusions in this refer to Harvey, whosepragmatical pedantry may have in many ways annoyed Nash, a Cambridge manlike himself. At any rate the two soon plunged into a regular battle, thedocuments of which on Nash's side are, first a prognostication, somethingin the style of Rabelais, then a formal confutation of the _Four Letters_, and then the famous lampoon entitled _Have with you to Saffron Walden_[Harvey's birthplace], of which here is a specimen:-- "His father he undid to furnish him to the Court once more, where presenting himself in all the colours of the rainbow, and a pair of moustaches like a black horse tail tied up in a knot, with two tufts sticking out on each side, he was asked by no mean personage, _Unde hæc insania_? whence proceedeth this folly or madness? and he replied with that weather-beaten piece of a verse out of the Grammar, _Semel insanivimus omnes_, once in our days there is none of us but have played the idiots; and so was he counted and bade stand by for a Nodgscomb. He that most patronized him, prying more searchingly into him, and finding that he was more meet to make sport with than any way deeply to be employed, with fair words shook him off, and told him he was fitter for the University, than for the Court or his turn, and so bade God prosper his studies, and sent for another Secretary to Oxford. "Readers, be merry; for in me there shall want nothing I can do to make you merry. You see I have brought the Doctor out of request at Court, and it shall cost me a fall, but I will get him hooted out of the University too, ere I give him over. What will you give me when I bring him upon the Stage in one of the principalest Colleges in Cambridge? Lay any wager with me, and I will; or if you lay no wager at all, I'll fetch him aloft in Pedantius, that exquisite Comedy in Trinity College; where under the chief part, from which it took his name, as namely the concise and firking finicaldo fine School master, he was full drawn and delineated from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. The just manner of his phrase in his Orations and Disputations they stuffed his mouth with, and no Buffianism throughout his whole books, but they bolstered out his part with; as those ragged remnants in his four familiar epistles 'twixt him and _Senior Immerito, raptim scripta, noste manum et stylum_, with innumerable other of his rabble-routs: and scoffing his _Musarum Lachrymæ_ with _Flebo amorem meum etiam musarum lachrymis_; which, to give it his due, was a more collachrymate wretched Treatise than my _Piers Penniless_, being the pitifulest pangs that ever any man's Muse breathed forth. I leave out half; not the carrying up of his gown, his nice gait on his pantoffles, or the affected accent of his speech, but they personated. And if I should reveal all, I think they borrowed his gown to play the part in, the more to flout him. Let him deny this (and not damn himself) for his life if he can. Let him deny that there was a Shew made at Clare Hall of him and his two brothers, called, "_Tarra, rantantara turba tumultuosa Trigonum Tri-Harveyorum Tri-harmonia_ Let him deny that there was another Shew made of the little Minnow his brother, _Dodrans Dick_, at Peter-house called, "_Duns furens. _ Dick Harvey in a frensy. Whereupon Dick came and broke the College glass windows; and Doctor Perne (being then either for himself or deputy Vice-Chancellor) caused him to be fetched in, and set in the Stocks till the Shew was ended, and a great part of the night after. " _The Terrors of the Night_, a discourse of apparitions, for once, amongthese oddly-named pieces, tells a plain story. Its successor, _Christ'sTears over Jerusalem_, Nash's longest book, is one of those ratherenigmatical expressions of repentance for loose life which were so commonat the time, and which, according to the charity of the reader, may beattributed to real feeling, to a temporary access of _Katzen-jammer_, or todownright hypocrisy, bent only on manufacturing profitable "copy, " andvarying its style to catch different tastes. The most unfavourablehypothesis is probably unjust, and a certain tone of sincerity also runsthrough the next book, _The Unfortunate Traveller_, in which Nash, likemany others, inveighs against the practice of sending young Englishmen tobe corrupted abroad. It is noteworthy that this (the place of which in thehistory of the novel has been rather exaggerated) is the oldest authorityfor the romance of Surrey and Geraldine; but it is uncertain whether thiswas pure invention on Nash's part or not. Nash's _Lenten Stuff_ is veryinteresting, being a panegyric on Great Yarmouth and its famous staplecommodity (though Nash was actually born at Lowestoft). In Nash's work we find a style both of treatment and language entirelydifferent from anything of Greene's or Lodge's. He has no euphuism, hisforte being either extravagant burlesque (in which the influence ofRabelais is pretty directly perceptible, while he himself acknowledgesindebtedness to some other sources, such as Bullen or Bullein, a dialoguewriter of the preceding generation), or else personal attack, boisterousand unscrupulous, but often most vigorous and effective. Diffuseness andwant of keeping to the point too frequently mar Nash's work; but when heshakes himself free from them, and goes straight for his enemy or hissubject, he is a singularly forcible writer. In his case more than in anyof the others, the journalist born out of due time is perceptible. He hadperhaps not much original message for the world. But he had eminently thetrick both of damaging controversial argument made light to catch thepopular taste, and of easy discussion or narrative. The chief defects ofhis work would probably have disappeared of themselves if he had had towrite not pamphlets, but articles. He did, however, what he could; and heis worthy of a place in the history of literature if only for the sake of_Have with you to Saffron Walden_--the best example of its own kind to befound before the end of the seventeenth century, if not the beginning ofthe eighteenth. Thomas Dekker was much less of a born prose writer than his half-namesake, Nash. His best work, unlike Nash's, was done in verse, and, while he wasfar Nash's superior, not merely in poetical expression but in creativegrasp of character, he was entirely destitute of Nash's incisive and directfaculty of invective. Nevertheless his work, too, is memorable among theprose work of the time, and for special reasons. His first pamphlet(according to the peculiarity already noted in Rowlands's case) is notprose at all, but verse--yet not the verse of which Dekker had realmastery, being a very lamentable ballad of the destruction of Jerusalem, entitled _Canaan's Calamity_ (1598). The next, _The Wonderful Year_, is theaccount of London in plague time, and has at least the interest of beingcomparable with, and perhaps that of having to some extent inspired, Defoe's famous performance. Then, and of the same date, follows a verycurious piece, the foreign origin of which has not been so generallynoticed as that of Dekker's most famous prose production. _The Bachelor'sBanquet_ is in effect only a free rendering of the immortal fifteenthcentury satire, assigned on no very solid evidence to Antoine de la Salle, the _Quinze Joyes de Mariage_, the resemblance being kept down to therecurrence at the end of each section of the same phrase, "in Lob'spound, " which reproduces the less grotesque "dans la nasse" of theoriginal. But here, as later, the skill with which Dekker adapts and bringsin telling circumstances appropriate to his own day deserves everyacknowledgment. _Dekker's Dreame_ is chiefly verse and chiefly pious; andthen at a date somewhat later than that of our present period, butconnected with it by the fact of authorship, begins a very interestingseries of pieces, more vivid if somewhat less well written than Greene's, and connected with his "conny-catching" course. _The Bellman of London_, _Lanthorn and Candlelight_, _A Strange Horse-Race_, _The Seven Deadly Sinsof London_, _News from Hell_, _The Double P. P. _, and _The Gull's Hornbook_, are all pamphlets of this class; the chief interest resting in _News fromHell_ (which, according to the author's scheme, connects itself with Nash's_Pierce Penniless_, and is the devil's answer thereto) and _The Gull'sHornbook_ (1609). This last, the best known of Dekker's work, is anEnglishing of the no less famous _Grobianus_ of Frederick Dedekind, and thesame skill of adaptation which was noticed in _The Bachelor's Banquet_ isobservable here. The spirit of these works seems to have been so popularthat Dekker kept it up in _The Dead Term_ [long vacation], _Work forArmourers_ (which, however, is less particular and connects itself withNash's sententious work), _The Raven's Almanack_, and _A Rod for Runaways_(1625). _The Four Birds of Noah's Ark_, which Dr. Grosart prints last, isof a totally different character, being purely a book of piety. It is thusinferior in interest to the series dealing with the low life of London, which contains most curious studies of the ancient order of ragamuffins (asa modern satirist has pleasantly called them), and bears altogether marksof greater sincerity than the parallel studies of other writers. For aboutDekker, hack and penny-a-liner as he undoubtedly was, there was asimplicity, a truth to nature, and at the same time a faculty of dramaticpresentation in which Greene, Lodge, and Nash were wholly wanting; and hisprose pamphlets smack of these good gifts in their measure as much as _TheHonest Whore_. Indeed, on the whole, he seems to be the most trustworthyof these chroniclers of the English picaroons; and one feels disposed tobelieve that if the things which he tells did not actually happen, something very like them was probably happening every day in London duringthe time of "Eliza and our James. " For the time of Eliza and our James wasby no means a wholly heroic period, and it only loses, not gains, by thefiction that every man of letters was a Spenser and every man of affairs aSidney or even a Raleigh. Extracts from _The Seven Deadly Sins_ and _TheGull's Hornbook_ may be given:-- "O Candle-light! and art thou one of the cursed crew? hast thou been set at the table of Princes and Noblemen? have all sorts of people done reverence unto thee, and stood bare so soon as ever they have seen thee? have thieves, traitors, and murderers been afraid to come in thy presence, because they knew thee just, and that thou wouldest discover them? And art thou now a harbourer of all kinds of vices? nay, dost thou play the capital Vice thyself? Hast thou had so many learned Lectures read before thee, and is the light of thy understanding now clean put out, and have so many profound scholars profited by thee? hast thou done such good to Universities, been such a guide to the lame, and seen the doing of so many good works, yet dost thou now look dimly, and with a dull eye, upon all goodness? What comfort have sick men taken (in weary and irksome nights) but only in thee? thou hast been their physician and apothecary, and when the relish of nothing could please them, the very shadow of thee hath been to them a restorative consolation. The nurse hath stilled her wayward infant, shewing it but to thee: What gladness hast thou put into mariners' bosoms when thou hast met them on the sea! What joy into the faint and benighted traveller when he has met thee on the land! How many poor handicraftsmen by thee have earned the best part of their living! And art thou now become a companion for drunkards, for leachers, and for prodigals? Art thou turned reprobate? thou wilt burn for it in hell. And so odious is this thy apostasy, and hiding thyself from the light of the truth, that at thy death and going out of the world, even they that love thee best will tread thee under their feet: yea, I that have thus played the herald, and proclaimed thy good parts, will now play the crier and call thee into open court, to arraign thee for thy misdemeanours. " * * * * * "For do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an hour's slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that though a man lie with an Empress, his heart cannot be at quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other: yea, so greatly indebted are we to this kinsman of death, that we owe the better tributary, half of our life to him: and there is good cause why we should do so: for sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want? of wounds? of cares? of great men's oppressions? of captivity? whilst he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as kings: can we therefore surfeit on this delicate Ambrosia? can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no, look upon Endymion, the moon's minion, who slept three score and fifteen years, and was not a hair the worse for it. Can lying abed till noon (being not the three score and fifteenth thousand part of his nap) be hurtful? "Besides, by the opinion of all philosophers and physicians, it is not good to trust the air with our bodies till the sun with his flame-coloured wings hath fanned away the misty smoke of the morning, and refined that thick tobacco-breath which the rheumatic night throws abroad of purpose to put out the eye of the element: which work questionless cannot be perfectly finished till the sun's car-horses stand prancing on the very top of highest noon: so that then (and not till then) is the most healthful hour to be stirring. Do you require examples to persuade you? At what time do Lords and Ladies use to rise but then? Your simpering merchants' wives are the fairest lyers in the world: and is not eleven o'clock their common hour? they find (no doubt) unspeakable sweetness in such lying, else they would not day by day put it so in practice. In a word, mid-day slumbers are golden; they make the body fat, the skin fair, the flesh plump, delicate and tender; they set a russet colour on the cheeks of young women, and make lusty courage to rise up in men; they make us thrifty, both in sparing victuals (for breakfasts thereby are saved from the hell-mouth of the belly) and in preserving apparel; for while we warm us in our beds our clothes are not worn. "The casements of thine eyes being then at this commendable time of the day newly set open, choose rather to have thy wind-pipe cut in pieces than to salute any man. Bid not good-morrow so much as to thy father, though he be an emperor. An idle ceremony it is and can do him little good; to thyself it may bring much harm: for if he be a wise man that knows how to hold his peace, of necessity must he be counted a fool that cannot keep his tongue. " The voluminous work in pamphlet kind of Nicholas Breton, still more theverse efforts closely akin to it of Samuel Rowlands, John Davies ofHereford and some others, must be passed over with very brief notice. Dr. Grosart's elaborate edition of the first-named has given a vast mass ofmatter very interesting to the student of literature, but which cannot behonestly recommended to the general reader. Breton, whose long life andperpetual literary activity fill up great part of our whole period, was anEssex gentleman of a good family (a fact which he never forgot), andapparently for some time a dependent of the well-known Countess ofPembroke, Sidney's sister. A much older man than most of the great wits ofElizabeth's reign, he also survived most of them, and his publications, ifnot his composition, cover a full half century, though he was _nel mezzodel cammin_ at the date of the earliest. He was probably born some yearsbefore the middle of the sixteenth century, and certainly did not diebefore the first year of Charles I. If we could take as his the charminglullaby of _The Arbour of Amorous Devices_ he would stand (if only as akind of "single-speech") high as a poet. But I fear that Dr. Grosart'sattribution of it to him is based on little external and refuted by allinternal evidence. His best certain thing is the pretty "Phillida andCorydon" idyll, which may be found in _England's Helicon_ or in Mr. Ward's_Poets_. But I own that I can never read this latter without thinking oftwo lines of Fulke Greville's in the same metre and on no very differenttheme-- "O'er enamelled meads they went, Quiet she, he passion-rent, " which are simply worth all the works of Breton, prose and verse, unless wecount the _Lullaby_, put together. In the _mots rayonnants_, the _mots delumière_, he is sadly deficient. But his work (which is nearly as plentifulin verse as in prose) is, as has been said, very interesting to theliterary student, because it shows better perhaps than anything else thestyle of literature which a man, disdaining to condescend to burlesque orbawdry, not gifted with any extraordinary talent, either at prose or verse, but possessed of a certain literary faculty, could then produce with a fairchance of being published and bought. It cannot be said that the resultshows great daintiness in Breton's public. The verse, with an improvementin sweetness and fluency, is very much of the doggerel style which wasprevalent before Spenser; and the prose, though showing considerablefaculty, if not of invention, yet of adroit imitation of previouslyinvented styles, is devoid of distinction and point. There are, however, exercises after Breton's own fashion in almost every popular style of thetime--euphuist romances, moral treatises, packets of letters, collectionsof jests and short tales, purely religious tractates, characters (after thestyle later illustrated by Overbury and Earle), dialogues, maxims, picturesof manners, collections of notes about foreign countries, --in fact, thewhole farrago of the modern periodical. The pervading characteristics areBreton's invariable modesty, his pious and, if I may be permitted to usethe word, gentlemanly spirit, and a fashion of writing which, if not verypointed, picturesque, or epigrammatic, is clear, easy, and on the wholerather superior, in observance of the laws of grammar and arrangement, tothe work of men of much greater note in his day. The verse pamphlets of Rowlands (whom I have not studied as thoroughly asmost others), Davies, and many less voluminous men, are placed here withall due apology for the liberty. They are seldom or never of much formalmerit, but they are interesting, first, because they testify to the holdwhich the mediæval conception of verse, as a general literary medium assuitable as prose and more attractive, had upon men even at this late time;and secondly, because, like the purely prose pamphlets, they are full ofinformation as to the manners of the time. For Rowlands I may refer to Mr. Gosse's essay. John Davies of Hereford, the writing-master, though he hasbeen carefully edited for students, and is by no means unworthy of study, has had less benefit of exposition to the general reader. He was not agenius, but he is a good example of the rather dull man who, despite thedisfavour of circumstance, contrives by much assiduity and ingeniousfollowing of models to attain a certain position in literature. There areJohn Davieses of Hereford in every age, but since the invention and filingof newspapers their individuality has been not a little merged. Theanonymous journalist of our days is simply to the historian such and sucha paper, volume so-and-so, page so much, column this or that. The good JohnDavies, living in another age, still stands as _nominis umbra_, but with anot inconsiderable body of work to throw the shadow. One of the most remarkable, and certainly one of not the least interestingdevelopments of the Elizabethan pamphlet remains to be noticed. This is thecelebrated series of "Martin Marprelate" tracts, with the replies whichthey called forth. Indeed the popularity of this series may be said to havegiven a great impulse to the whole pamphleteering system. It is somewhatunfortunate that this interesting subject has never been taken up in fullby a dispassionate historian of literature, sufficiently versed in politicsand in theology. In mid-nineteenth century most, but by no means all of themore notable tracts were reprinted by John Petheram, a London bookseller, whose productions have since been issued under the well-known imprint ofJohn Russell Smith, the publisher of the _Library of Old Authors_. Thisgave occasion to a review in _The Christian Remembrancer_, afterwardsenlarged and printed as a book by Mr. Maskell, a High Churchman whosubsequently seceded to the Church of Rome. This latter accident has ratherunfavourably and unfairly affected later judgments of his work, which, however, is certainly not free from party bias. It has scarcely been lessunlucky that the chief recent dealers with the matter, Professor Arber (whoprojected a valuable reprint of the whole series in his _English Scholars'Library_, and who prefaced it with a quite invaluable introductory sketch), and Dr. Grosart, who also included divers Anti-Martinist tracts in hisprivately printed _Works of Nashe_, are very strongly prejudiced on thePuritan side. [40] Between these authorities the dispassionate inquirer whoattacks the texts for himself is likely to feel somewhat in the position ofa man who exposes himself to a cross fire. The Martin Marprelatecontroversy, looked at without prejudice but with sufficient information, shows itself as a very early example of the reckless violence of privatecrotcheteers on the one hand, and of the rather considerable unwisdom ofthe official defenders of order on the other. "Martin's" method was to acertain extent an anticipation of the famous move by which Pascal, fiftyyears later, "took theology out of the schools into drawing-rooms, " exceptthat Martin and his adversaries transferred the venue rather to thetap-room than to the drawing-room. The controversy between the framers ofthe Church of England in its present state, and the hot gospellers who, with Thomas Cartwright at their head, denied the proposition (not deniableor denied now by any sane and scholarly disputant) that church disciplineand government are points left to a great extent undefined in theScriptures, had gone on for years before Martin appeared. Cartwright andWhitgift had fought, with a certain advantage of warmth and eloquence onCartwright's side, and with an immense preponderance of logical cogency onWhitgift's. Many minor persons had joined in the struggle, and at last adivine, more worthy than wise, John Bridges, Dean of Salisbury, hadproduced on the orthodox side one of those enormous treatises (it had somefifteen hundred quarto pages) which are usually left unread by the sidethey favour, and which exasperate the side they oppose. The ordinary law ofthe time, moreover, which placed large powers in the hands of the bishops, and especially entrusted them with a rigid and complete censorship of thepress, had begun to be put in force severely against the more outspokenpartisans. Any one who will take the trouble to read the examination ofHenry Barrow, which Mr. Arber has reprinted, [41] or even the "moderate"tracts of Nicholas Udall, which in a manner ushered in the Marprelatecontroversy, will probably be more surprised at the long-suffering of thejudges than at the sufferings of their prisoners. Barrow, in a long andpatient examination before the council, of which the Bishop of London andthe Archbishop of Canterbury were members, called them to their faces theone a "wolf, " a "bloody persecutor, " and an "apostate, " the other "amonster" and "the second beast that is spoken of in the Revelations. " The"moderate" Udall, after publishing a dialogue (in which an Anglican bishopcalled Diotrephes is represented, among other things, as planning measuresagainst the Puritans in consort with a papist and an usurer), furthercomposed a _Demonstration of Discipline_ in which, writing, according toMr. Arber, "without any satire or invective, " he calls the bishops merely_qua_ bishops, "the wretched fathers of a filthy mother, " with abundantepithets to match, and rains down on every practice of the existing churchgovernment such terms as "blasphemous, " "damnable, " "hellish, " and thelike. To the modern reader who looks at these things with the eyes of thepresent day, it may of course seem that it would have been wiser to let thedogs bark. But that was not the principle of the time: and as Mr. Arbermost frankly admits, it was certainly not the principle of the dogsthemselves. The Puritans claimed for themselves a not less absolute rightto call in the secular arm if they could, and a much more absolutecertainty and righteousness for their tenets than the very hottest of theiradversaries. [40] This prejudice is naturally still stronger in some American writers, notably Dr. Dexter. [41] Arber, _Introductory Sketch_. P. 40 _sqq. _ All the quotations andreferences which follow will be found in Arber's and Petheram's reprints orin Grosart's _Nash_, vol. 1. If the works cited are not given as wholes inthem, the fact will be noted. (See also Mr. Bond's _Lyly_. ) Udall was directly, as well as indirectly, the begetter of the MartinMarprelate controversy: though after he got into trouble in connection withit, he made a sufficiently distinct expression of disapproval of theMartinist methods, and it seems to have been due more to accident and hisown obstinacy than anything else that he died in prison instead of beingobliged with the honourable banishment of a Guinea chaplaincy. His printer, Waldegrave, had had his press seized and his license withdrawn for_Diotrephes_, and resentment at this threw what, in the existingarrangements of censorship and the Stationers' monopoly, was a verydifficult thing to obtain--command of a practical printer--into the handsof the malcontents. Chief among these malcontents was a certain ReverendJohn Penry, a Welshman by birth, a member, as was then not uncommon, ofboth universities, and the author, among other more dubious publications, of a plea, intemperately stated in parts, but very sober and sensible atbottom, for a change in the system of allotting and administering thebenefices of the church in Wales. Which plea, be it observed in passing, had it been attended to, it would have been better for both the church andstate of England at this day. The pamphlet[42] contained, however, adistinct insinuation against the Queen, of designedly keeping Wales inignorance and subjection--an insinuation which, in those days, wasequivalent to high treason. The book was seized, and the author imprisoned(1587). Now when, about a year after, and in the very height of the dangerfrom the Armada, Waldegrave's livelihood was threatened by the proceedingsabove referred to, it would appear that he obtained from the Continent, orhad previously secreted from his confiscated stock, printing tools, andthat he and Penry, at the house of Mistress Crane, at East Molesey, inSurrey, printed a certain tract, called, for shortness, "The Epistle. "[43]This tract, of the authorship and character of which more presently, created a great sensation. It was immediately followed, the press beingshifted for safety to the houses of divers Puritan country gentlemen, bythe promised _Epitome_. So great was the stir, that a formal answer ofgreat length was put forth by "T. C. " (well known to be Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester), entitled, _An Admonition to the People of England_. The Martinists, from their invisible and shifting citadel, replied withperhaps the cleverest tract of the whole controversy, named, withdeliberate quaintness, _Hay any Work for Cooper?_[44] ("Have You any Workfor the Cooper?" said to be an actual trade London cry). Thenceforward the_mêlée_ of pamphlets, answers, "replies, duplies, quadruplies, " became insmall space indescribable. Petheram's prospectus of reprints (onlypartially carried out) enumerates twenty-six, almost all printed in thethree years 1588-1590; Mr. Arber, including preliminary works, counts somethirty. The perambulating press was once seized (at Newton Lane, nearManchester), but Martin was not silenced. It is certain (though there areno remnants extant of the matter concerned) that Martin was brought on thestage in some form or other, and though the duration of the controversy wasas short as its character was hot, it was rather suppressed thanextinguished by the death of Udall in prison, and the execution of Penryand Barrow in 1593. [42] Large extracts from it are given by Arber. [43] As the titles of these productions are highly characteristic of thestyle of the controversy, and, indeed, are sometimes considerably morepoignant than the text, it may be well to give some of them in full asfollows:-- _The Epistle. _--Oh read over D. John Bridges, for it is a worthy work: Oran Epitome of the first book of that right worshipful volume, writtenagainst the Puritans, in the defence of the noble Clergy, by as worshipfula Priest, John Bridges, Presbyter, Priest or Elder, Doctor of Divillity[_sic_], and Dean of Sarum, Wherein the arguments of the Puritans arewisely presented, that when they come to answer M. Doctor, they must needssay something that hath been spoken. Compiled for the behoof and overthrowof the Parsons Fyckers and Currats [_sic_] that have learnt theircatechisms, and are past grace: by the reverend and worthy MartinMarprelate, gentleman, and dedicated to the Confocation [_sic_] house. TheEpitome is not yet published, but it shall be when the Bishops are atconvenient leisure to view the same. In the mean time let them be contentwith this learned Epistle. Printed, oversea, in Europe, within two furlongsof a Bouncing Priest, at the cost and charges of M. Marprelate, gentleman. [44] Hay any work for Cooper, or a brief pistle directed by way of anhublication [_sic_] to the reverend bishops, counselling them if they willneeds be barrelled up for fear of smelling in the nostrils of her Majestyand the State, that they would use the advice of Reverend Martin for theproviding of their Cooper; because the Reverend T. C. (by which mysticalletters is understood either the bouncing parson of East Meon or Tom Cokeshis chaplain), hath shewed himself in his late admonition to the people ofEngland to be an unskilful and beceitful [_sic_] tub-trimmer. Whereinworthy Martin quits him like a man, I warrant you in the modest defence ofhis self and his learned pistles, and makes the Cooper's hoops to fly off, and the bishops' tubs to leak out of all cry. Penned and compiled by Martinthe metropolitan. Printed in Europe, not far from some of the bouncingpriests. The actual authorship of the Martinist Tracts is still purely a matter ofhypothesis. Penry has been the general favourite, and perhaps the argumentfrom the difference of style in his known works is not quite convincing. The American writer Dr. Dexter, a fervent admirer, as stated above, of thePuritans, is for Barrow. Mr. Arber thinks that a gentleman of good birthnamed Job Throckmorton, who was certainly concerned in the affair, wasprobably the author of the more characteristic passages. Fantasticsuggestions of Jesuit attempts to distract the Anglican Church have alsobeen made, --attempts sufficiently refuted by the improbability of thepersons known to be concerned lending themselves to such an intrigue, for, hotheads as Penry and the rest were, they were transparently honest. On theside of the defence, authorship is a little better ascertained. Of Cooper'swork there is no doubt, and some purely secular men of letters were oddlymixed up in the affair. It is all but certain that John Lyly wrote theso-called _Pap with a Hatchet_, [45] which in deliberate oddity of phrase, scurrility of language, and desultoriness of method outvies the wildestMartinist outbursts. The later tract, _An Almond for a Parrot_, [46] whichdeserves a very similar description, may not improbably be the sameauthor's; and Dr. Grosart has reasonably attributed four anti-Martinisttracts (_A Countercuff to Martin Junior_ [_Martin Junior_ was one of theMarprelate treatises], _Pasquil's Return_, _Martin's Month's Mind_, and_Pasquil's Apology_), to Nash. But the discussion of such questions comesbut ill within the limits of such a book as the present. [45] Pap with a Hatchet, alias A fig for my godson! or Crack me this nut, or A country cuff that is a sound box of the ear for the idiot Martin forto hold his peace, seeing the patch will take no warning. Written by onethat dares call a dog a dog, and made to prevent Martin's dog-days. Imprinted by John-a-noke and John-a-stile for the baylive [_sic_] ofWithernam, _cum privilegio perennitatis_; and are to be sold at the sign ofthe crab-tree-cudgel in Thwackcoat Lane. A sentence. Martin hangs fit formy mowing. [46] An Almond for a Parrot, or Cuthbert Curryknaves alms. Fit for theknave Martin, and the rest of those impudent beggars that cannot be contentto stay their stomachs with a benefice, but they will needs break theirfasts with our bishops. _Rimarum sum plenus. _ Therefore beware, gentlereader, you catch not the hicket with laughing. Imprinted at a place, notfar from a place, by the assigns of Signior Somebody, and are to be sold athis shop in Troubleknave Street at the sign of the Standish. The discussion of the characteristics of the actual tracts, as theypresent themselves and whosoever wrote them, is, on the other hand, entirely within our competence. On the whole the literary merit of thetreatises has, I think, been overrated. The admirers of Martin have evengone so far as to traverse Penry's perfectly true statement that in usinglight, not to say ribald, treatment of a serious subject, he was onlyfollowing [Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde and] other Protestant writers, andhave attributed to him an almost entire originality of method, owing atmost something to the popular "gags" of the actor Richard Tarleton, thenrecently dead. This is quite uncritical. An exceedingly free treatment ofsacred and serious affairs had been characteristic of the Reformers fromLuther downward, and the new Martin only introduced the variety of stylewhich any writer of considerable talents is sure to show. His method, atany rate for a time, is no doubt sufficiently amusing, though it is hardlyeffective. Serious arguments are mixed up with the wildest buffoonery, andunconscious absurdities (such as a solemn charge against the unlucky BishopAylmer because he used the phrase "by my faith, " and enjoyed a game atbowls) with the most venomous assertion or insinuation of really odiousoffences. The official answer to the _Epistle_ and the _Epitome_ has beenpraised by no less a person than Bacon[47] for its gravity of tone. Unluckily Dr. Cooper was entirely destitute of the faculty of relievingargument with humour. He attacks the theology of the Martinists withlearning and logic that leave nothing to desire; but unluckily he proceedsin precisely the same style to deal laboriously with the quips assigned byMartin to Mistress Margaret Lawson (a noted Puritan shrew of the day), andwith mere idle things like the assertion that Whitgift "carried Dr. Perne'scloakbag. " The result is that, as has been said, the rejoinder _Hay anyWork for Cooper_ shows Martin, at least at the beginning, at his very best. The artificial simplicity of his distortions of Cooper's really simplestatements is not unworthy of Swift, or of the best of the more recentpractitioners of the grave and polite kind of political irony. But this isat the beginning, and soon afterwards Martin relapses for the most partinto the alternation between serious argument which will not hold water andgrotesque buffoonery which has little to do with the matter. A passage fromthe _Epistle_ lampooning Aylmer, Bishop of London, and a sample each of_Pap with a Hatchet_ and the _Almond_, will show the general style. But themost characteristic pieces of all are generally too coarse and tooirreverent to be quotable:-- [47] In his _Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church ofEngland_ (Works. Folio, 1753, ii. P. 375). [Sidenote: _I'll make you weary of it dumb John, except you leave persecuting. _] "Well now to mine eloquence, for I can do it I tell you. Who made the porter of his gate a dumb minister? Dumb John of London. Who abuseth her Majesty's subjects, in urging them to subscribe contrary to law? John of London. Who abuseth the high commission, as much as any? John London (and D. Stanhope too). Who bound an Essex minister, in 200_l. _ to wear the surplice on Easter Day last? John London. Who hath cut down the elms at Fulham? John London. Who is a carnal defender of the breach of the Sabbath in all the places of his abode? John London. Who forbiddeth men to humble themselves in fasting and prayer before the Lord, and then can say unto the preachers, now you were best to tell the people that we forbid fasts? John London. Who goeth to bowls upon the Sabbath? Dumb Dunstical John of good London hath done all this. I will for this time leave this figure, and tell your venerable masterdoms a tale worth the hearing: I had it at the second hand: if he that told it me added anything, I do not commend him, but I forgive him: The matter is this. A man dying in Fulham, made one of the Bishop of London's men his executor. The man had bequeathed certain legacies unto a poor shepherd in the town. The shepherd could get nothing of the Bishop's man, and therefore made his moan unto a gentleman of Fulham, that belongeth to the court of requests. The gentleman's name is M. Madox. The poor man's case came to be tried in the Court of Requests. The B. Man desired his master's help: Dumb John wrote to the masters of requests to this effect, and I think these were his words: "'My masters of the requests, the bearer hereof being my man, hath a cause before you: inasmuch as I understand how the matter standeth, I pray you let my man be discharged the court, and I will see an agreement made. Fare you well. ' The letter came to M. D. Dale, he answered it in this sort: "'My Lord of London, this man delivered your letter, I pray you give him his dinner on Christmas Day for his labour, and fare you well. ' "Dumb John not speeding this way, sent for the said M. Madox: he came, some rough words passed on both sides, Presbyter John said, Master Madox was very saucy, especially seeing he knew before whom he spake: namely, the Lord of Fulham. Whereunto the gentleman answered that he had been a poor freeholder in Fulham, before Don John came to be L. There, hoping also to be so, when he and all his brood (my Lady his daughter and all) should be gone. At the hearing of this speech, the wasp got my brother by the nose, which made him in his rage to affirm, that he would be L. Of Fulham as long as he lived in despite of all England. Nay, soft there, quoth M. Madox, except her Majesty. I pray you, that is my meaning, call dumb John, and I tell thee Madox that thou art but a Jack to use me so: Master Madox replying, said that indeed his name was John, and if every John were a Jack, he was content to be a Jack (there he hit my L. Over the thumbs). The B. Growing in choler, said that Master Madox his name did shew what he was, for saith he, thy name is mad ox, which declareth thee to be an unruly and mad beast. M. Madox answered again, that the B. Name, if it were descanted upon, did most significantly shew his qualities. For said he, you are called Elmar, but you may be better called marelm, for you have marred all the elms in Fulham: having cut them all down. This far is my worthy story, as worthy to be printed, as any part of Dean John's book, I am sure. " * * * * * "To the Father and the two Sons, HUFF, RUFF, and SNUFF, [48] the three tame ruffians of the Church, which take pepper in the nose, because they cannot mar Prelates: greeting. "Room for a royster; so that's well said. Ach, a little farther for a good fellow. Now have at you all my gaffers of the railing religion, 'tis I that must take you a peg lower. I am sure you look for more work, you shall have wood enough to cleave, make your tongue the wedge, and your head the beetle. I'll make such a splinter run into your wits, as shall make them rankle till you become fools. Nay, if you shoot books like fools' bolts, I'll be so bold as to make your judgments quiver with my thunderbolts. If you mean to gather clouds in the Commonwealth, to threaten tempests, for your flakes of snow, we'll pay you with stones of hail; if with an easterly wind you bring caterpillers into the Church, with a northern wind we'll drive barrens into your wits. "We care not for a Scottish mist, though it wet us to the skin, you shall be sure your cockscombs shall not be missed, but pierced to the skulls. I profess railing, and think it as good a cudgel for a martin, as a stone for a dog, or a whip for an ape, or poison for a rat. "Yet find fault with no broad terms, for I have measured yours with mine, and I find yours broader just by the list. Say not my speeches are light, for I have weighed yours and mine, and I find yours lighter by twenty grains than the allowance. For number you exceed, for you have thirty ribald words for my one, and yet you bear a good spirit. I was loth so to write as I have done, but that I learned, that he that drinks with cutters, must not be without his ale daggers; nor he that buckles with Martin, without his lavish terms. "Who would curry an ass with an ivory comb? Give the beast thistles for provender. I do but yet angle with a silken fly, to see whether martins will nibble; and if I see that, why then I have worms for the nonce, and will give them line enough like a trout, till they swallow both hook and line, and then, Martin, beware your gills, for I'll make you dance at the pole's end. "I know Martin will with a trice bestride my shoulders. Well, if he ride me, let the fool sit fast, for my wit is very hickish: which if he spur with his copper reply, when it bleeds, it will all to besmear their consciences. "If a martin can play at chess, as well as his nephew the ape, he shall know what it is for a scaddle pawn to cross a Bishop in his own walk. Such diedappers must be taken up, else they'll not stick to check the king. Rip up my life, discipher my name, fill thy answer as full of lies as of lines, swell like a toad, hiss like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen is prepared and my mind; and if ye chance to find any worse words than you brought, let them be put in your dad's dictionary. And so farewell, and be hanged, and I pray God ye fare no worse. "Yours at an hour's warning, "DOUBLE V. " [48] Well-known stage characters in Preston's _Cambyses_. * * * * * "By this time I think, good-man Puritan, that thou art persuaded, that I know as well as thy own conscience thee, namely Martin Makebate of England, to be a most scurvy and beggarly benefactor to obedience, and _per consequens_, to fear neither men, nor that God Who can cast both body and soul into unquenchable fire. In which respect I neither account you of the Church, nor esteem of your blood, otherwise than the blood of Infidels. Talk as long as you will of the joys of heaven, or pains of hell, and turn from yourselves the terror of that judgment how you will, which shall bereave blushing iniquity of the fig-leaves of hypocrisy, yet will the eye of immortality discern of your painted pollutions, as the ever-living food of perdition. The humours of my eyes are the habitations of fountains, and the circumference of my heart the enclosure of fearful contrition, when I think how many souls at that moment shall carry the name of Martin on their foreheads to the vale of confusion, in whose innocent blood thou swimming to hell, shalt have the torments of ten thousand thousand sinners at once, inflicted upon thee. There will envy, malice, and dissimulation be ever calling for vengeance against thee, and incite whole legions of devils to thy deathless lamentation. Mercy will say unto thee, I know thee not, and Repentance, what have I to do with thee? All hopes shall shake the head at thee, and say: there goes the poison of purity, the perfection of impiety, the serpentine seducer of simplicity. Zeal herself will cry out upon thee, and curse the time that ever she was mashed by thy malice, who like a blind leader of the blind, sufferedst her to stumble at every step in Religion, and madest her seek in the dimness of her sight, to murder her mother the Church, from whose paps thou like an envious dog but yesterday pluckedst her. However, proud scorner, thy whorish impudency may happen hereafter to insist in the derision of these fearful denunciations, and sport thy jester's pen at the speech of my soul, yet take heed least despair be predominant in the day of thy death, and thou instead of calling for mercy to thy Jesus, repeat more oftener to thyself, _Sic morior damnatus ut Judas_! And thus much, Martin, in the way of compassion, have I spoke for thy edification, moved thereto by a brotherly commiseration, which if thou be not too desperate in thy devilish attempts, may reform thy heart to remorse, and thy pamphlets to some more profitable theme of repentance. " If Martin Marprelate is compared with the _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_earlier, or the _Satire Menippée_ very little later, the want of polish anddirectness about contemporary English satire will be strikingly apparent. At the same time he does not compare badly with his own antagonists. Thedivines like Cooper are, as has been said, too serious. The men of letterslike Lyly and Nash are not nearly serious enough, though some exception maybe made for Nash, especially if _Pasquil's Apology_ be his. They out-MartinMartin himself in mere abusiveness, in deliberate quaintness of phrase, infantastic vapourings and promises of the dreadful things that are going tobe done to the enemy. They deal some shrewd hits at the glaring faults oftheir subject, his outrageous abuse of authorities, his profanity, hisribaldry, his irrelevance; but in point of the three last qualities thereis not much to choose between him and them. One line of counter attack theydid indeed hit upon, which was followed up for generations with no smallsuccess against the Nonconformists, and that is the charge of hypocriticalabuse of the influence which the Nonconformist teachers early acquired overwomen. The germs of the unmatched passages to this effect in _The Tale of aTub_ may be found in the rough horseplay of _Pap with a Hatchet_ and _AnAlmond for a Parrot_. But the spirit of the whole controversy is in fact aspirit of horseplay. Abuse takes the place of sarcasm, Rabelaisianluxuriance of words the place of the plain hard hitting, with no flourishesor capers, but with every blow given straight from the shoulder, whichDryden and Halifax, Swift and Bentley, were to introduce into Englishcontroversy a hundred years later. The peculiar exuberance of Elizabethanliterature, evident in all its departments, is nowhere more evident than inthis department of the prose pamphlet, and in no section of that departmentis it more evident than in the Tracts of the Martin Marprelate Controversy. Never perhaps were more wild and whirling words used about any exceedinglyserious and highly technical matter of discussion; and probably mostreaders who have ventured into the midst of the tussle will sympathise withthe adjuration of _Plain Percivall the Peacemaker of England_ (supposed tobe Richard Harvey, brother of Gabriel, who was himself not entirely freefrom suspicion of concernment in the matter), "My masters, that strive forthis supernatural art of wrangling, let all be husht and quiet a-God'sname. " It is needless to say that the disputants did not comply with PlainPercivall's request. Indeed they bestowed some of their choicest abuse onhim in return for his advice. Not even by the casting of the mostpeacemaking of all dust, that of years and the grave, can it be said thatthese jars at last _compacta quiescunt_. For it is difficult to find anyaccount of the transaction which does not break out sooner or later intostrong language. CHAPTER VII THE THIRD DRAMATIC PERIOD I have chosen, to fill the third division of our dramatic chapters, sevenchief writers of distinguished individuality, reserving a certain fringe ofanonymous plays and of less famous personalities for the fourth and last. The seven exceptional persons are Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Heywood, Tourneur, and Day. It would be perhaps lost labour toattempt to make out a severe definition, shutting these off on the one handfrom their predecessors, on the other from those that followed them. Wemust be satisfied in such cases with an approach to exactness, and it iscertain that while most of the men just named had made some appearance inthe latest years of Elizabeth, and while one or two of them lasted into theearliest years of Charles, they all represent, in their period offlourishing and in the character of their work, the Jacobean age. In someof them, as in Middleton and Day, the Elizabethan type prevails; in others, as in Fletcher, a distinctly new flavour--a flavour not perceptible inShakespere, much less in Marlowe--appears. But in none of them is thatother flavour of pronounced decadence, which appears in the work of men sogreat as Massinger and Ford, at all perceptible. We are still in thecreative period, and in some of the work to be now noticed we are in acomparatively unformed stage of it. It has been said, and not unjustlysaid, that the work of Beaumont and Fletcher belongs, when looked at onone side, not to the days of Elizabeth at all, but to the later seventeenthcentury; and this is true to the extent that the post-Restorationdramatists copied Fletcher and followed Fletcher very much more thanShakespere. But not only dates but other characteristics refer the work ofBeaumont and Fletcher to a distinctly earlier period than the work oftheir, in some sense, successors Massinger and Ford. It will have been observed that I cleave to the old-fashioned nomenclature, and speak of "Beaumont and Fletcher. " Until very recently, when two neweditions have made their appearance, there was for a time a certaintendency to bring Fletcher into greater prominence than his partner, but atthe same time and on the whole to depreciate both. I am in all things butill-disposed to admit innovation without the clearest and most cogentproofs; and although the comparatively short life of Beaumont makes itimpossible that he should have taken part in some of the fifty-two playstraditionally assigned to the partnership (we may perhaps add Mr. Bullen'sremarkable discovery of _Sir John Barneveldt_, in which Massinger probablytook Beaumont's place), I see no reason to dispute the well-establishedtheory that Beaumont contributed at least criticism, and probably originalwork, to a large number of these plays; and that his influence probablysurvived himself in conditioning his partner's work. And I am also disposedto think that the plays attributed to the pair have scarcely had fairmeasure in comparison with the work of their contemporaries, which was solong neglected. Beaumont and Fletcher kept the stage--kept it constantlyand triumphantly--till almost, if not quite, within living memory; whilesince the seventeenth century, and since its earlier part, I believe thatvery few plays of Dekker's or Middleton's, of Webster's or of Ford's, havebeen presented to an English audience. This of itself constituted at thegreat revival of interest in Elizabethan literature something of aprejudice in favour of _les oubliés et les dédaignés_, and this prejudicehas naturally grown stronger since all alike have been banished from thestage. The Copper Captain and the Humorous Lieutenant, Bessus and MonsieurThomas, are no longer on the boards to plead for their authors. Thecomparative depreciation of Lamb and others is still on the shelves tosupport their rivals. Although we still know but little about either Beaumont or Fletcherpersonally, they differ from most of their great contemporaries by havingcome of "kenned folk, " and by having to all appearance, industrious as theywere, had no inducement to write for money. Francis Beaumont was born atGracedieu, in Leicestershire in 1584. He was the son of a chief-justice;his family had for generations been eminent, chiefly in the law; hisbrother, Sir John Beaumont, was not only a poet of some merit, but a man ofposition, and Francis himself, two years before his death in 1616, marrieda Kentish heiress. He was educated at Broadgates Hall (now PembrokeCollege), Oxford, and seems to have made acquaintance with John Fletchersoon after quitting the University. Fletcher was five years older than hisfriend, and of a clerical family, his father being Bishop of London, andhis uncle, Giles Fletcher (the author of _Licia_), a dignitary of theChurch. The younger Giles Fletcher and his brother Phineas were thuscousins of the dramatist. Fletcher was a Cambridge man, having beeneducated at Benet College (at present and indeed originally known as CorpusChristi). Little else is known of him except that he died of the plague in1625, nine years after Beaumont's death, as he had been born five yearsbefore him. These two men, however, one of whom was but thirty and theother not fifty when he died, have left by far the largest collection ofprinted plays attributed to any English author. A good deal of dispute hasbeen indulged in as to their probable shares, --the most likely opinionbeing that Fletcher was the creator and Beaumont (whose abilities incriticism were recognised by such a judge as Ben Jonson) the critical andrevising spirit. About a third of the whole number have been supposed torepresent Beaumont's influence more or less directly. These include the twofinest, _The Maid's Tragedy_ and _Philaster_; while as to the third play, which may be put on the same level, _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, earlyassertion, confirmed by a constant catena of the best critical authority, maintains that Beaumont's place was taken by no less a collaborator thanShakespere. Fletcher, as has been said, wrote in conjunction with Massinger(we know this for certain from Sir Aston Cokain), and with Rowley andothers, while Shirley seems to have finished some of his plays. Some moderncriticism has manifested a desire to apply the always uncertain and usuallyunprofitable tests of separation to the great mass of his work. With thiswe need not busy ourselves. The received collection has quite sufficientidiosyncrasy of its own as a whole to make it superfluous for any one, except as a matter of amusement, to try to split it up. Its characteristics are, as has been said, sufficiently marked, both indefects and in merits. The comparative depreciation which has come uponBeaumont and Fletcher naturally fixes on the defects. There is in the workof the pair, and especially in Fletcher's work when he wrought alone, acertain loose fluency, an ungirt and relaxed air, which contrasts verystrongly with the strenuous ways of the elder playwrights. This exhibitsitself not in plotting or playwork proper, but in style and inversification (the redundant syllable predominating, and every now and thenthe verse slipping away altogether into the strange medley between verseand prose, which we shall find so frequent in the next and last period), and also in the characters. We quit indeed the monstrous types of cruelty, of lust, of revenge, in which many of the Elizabethans proper and ofFletcher's own contemporaries delighted. But at the same time we find adecidedly lowered standard of general morality--a distinct approach towardsthe _fay ce que voudras_ of the Restoration. We are also nearer to theregion of the commonplace. Nowhere appears that attempt to grapple with theimpossible, that wrestle with the hardest problems, which Marlowe began, and which he taught to some at least of his followers. And lastly--despiteinnumerable touches of tender and not a few of heroic poetry--the actualpoetical value of the dramas at their best is below that of the best workof the preceding time, and of such contemporaries as Webster and Dekker. Beaumont and Fletcher constantly delight, but they do not very oftentransport, and even when they do, it is with a less strange rapture thanthat which communicates itself to the reader of Shakespere _passim_, and tothe readers of many of Shakespere's fellows here and there. This, I think, is a fair allowance. But, when it is made, a goodly capitalwhereon to draw still remains to our poets. In the first place, no soundcriticism can possibly overlook the astonishing volume and variety of theirwork. No doubt they did not often (if they ever did) invent their fables. But they have never failed to treat them in such a way as to make themoriginal, and this of itself shows a wonderful faculty of invention andconstitutes an inexhaustible source of pleasure. This pleasure is all themore pleasurable because the matter is always presented in a thoroughlyworkmanlike form. The shapelessness, the incoherence, the necessity forendless annotation and patching together, which mar so many even of thefinest Elizabethan plays, have no place in Beaumont and Fletcher. Theirdramatic construction is almost narrative in its clear and easy flow, inits absence of puzzles and piecings. Again, their stories are alwaysinteresting, and their characters (especially the lighter ones) always moreor less attractive. It used to be fashionable to praise their "young men, "probably because of the agreeable contrast which they present with thebrutality of the Restoration hero; but their girls are more to my fancy. They were not straightlaced, and have left some sufficiently ugly and (letit be added) not too natural types of sheer impudence, such as the Megra of_Philaster_. Nor could they ever attain to the romantic perfection ofImogen in one kind, of Rosalind in another, of Juliet in a third. But forportraits of pleasant English girls not too squeamish, not at all afraid oflove-making, quite convinced of the hackneyed assertion of the mythologiststhat jests and jokes go in the train of Venus, but true-hearted, affectionate, and of a sound, if not a very nice morality, commend me toFletcher's Dorotheas, and Marys, and Celias. Add to this the excellence oftheir comedy (there is little better comedy of its kind anywhere than thatof _A King and no King_, of the _Humorous Lieutenant_, of _Rule a Wife andhave a Wife_), their generally high standard of dialogue verse, theircharming songs, and it will be seen that if they have not the daemonicvirtue of a few great dramatic poets, they have at any rate very good, solid, pleasant, and plentiful substitutes for it. It is no light matter to criticise more than fifty plays in not many timesfifty lines; yet something must be said about some of them at any rate. Theplay which usually opens the series, _The Maid's Tragedy_, is perhaps thefinest of all on the purely tragic side, though its plot is a littleimprobable, and to modern notions not very agreeable. Hazlitt disliked itmuch; and though this is chiefly to be accounted for by the monarchicaltone of it, it is certainly faulty in parts. It shows, in the first place, the authors' greatest dramatic weakness--a weakness common indeed to alltheir tribe except Shakespere--the representation of sudden and quiteinsufficiently motived moral revolutions; and, secondly, another fault oftheirs in the representation of helpless and rather nerveless virtuepunished without fault of its own indeed, but also without any effort. TheAspatia of _The Maid's Tragedy_ and the Bellario of _Philaster_, patheticas they are, are also slightly irritating. Still the pathos is great, andthe quarrel or threatened quarrel of the friends Amintor and Melantius, thehorrible trial put upon Amintor by his sovereign and the abandoned Evadne, as well as the whole part of Evadne herself when she has once been (ratherimprobably) converted, are excellent. A passage of some length from thelatter part of the play may supply as well as another the sufficientrequirement of an illustrative extract:-- _Evad. _ "O my lord! _Amin. _ How now? _Evad. _ My much abused Lord! (_Kneels. _) _Amin. _ This cannot be. _Evad. _ I do not kneel to live, I dare not hope it; The wrongs I did are greater: look upon me Though I appear with all my faults. _Amin. _ Stand up. This is a new way to beget more sorrow. Heav'n knows, I have too many; do not mock me; Though I am tame and bred up with my wrongs Which are my foster-brothers, I may leap Like a hand-wolf into my natural wildness And do an outrage: pray thee, do not mock me. _Evad. _ My whole life is so leprous, it infects All my repentance: I would buy your pardon Though at the highest set, even with my life: That slight contrition, that's no sacrifice For what I have committed. _Amin. _ Sure I dazzle. There cannot be a Faith in that foul woman That knows no God more mighty than her mischiefs: Thou dost still worse, still number on thy faults To press my poor heart thus. Can I believe There's any seed of virtue in that woman Left to shoot up, that dares go on in sin Known, and so known as thine is? O Evadne! 'Would, there were any safety in thy sex, That I might put a thousand sorrows off, And credit thy repentance! But I must not; Thou'st brought me to that dull calamity, To that strange misbelief of all the world And all things that are in it; that, I fear I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave, Only remembering that I grieve. _Evad. _ My lord, Give me your griefs: you are an innocent, A soul as white as Heav'n. Let not my sins Perish your noble youth: I do not fall here To shadows by dissembling with my tears (As, all say, women can) or to make less What my hot will hath done, which Heav'n and you Knows to be tougher than the hand of time Can cut from man's remembrance; no, I do not; I do appear the same, the same Evadne Drest in the shames I liv'd in; the same monster: But these are names of honour, to what I am; I do present myself the foulest creature Most pois'nous, dang'rous, and despis'd of men, Lerna e'er bred, or Nilus: I am hell, Till you, my dear lord, shoot your light into me The beams of your forgiveness: I am soul-sick; And wither with the fear of one condemn'd, Till I have got your pardon. _Amin. _ Rise, Evadne. Those heavenly Powers, that put this good into thee, Grant a continuance of it: I forgive thee; Make thyself worthy of it, and take heed, Take heed, Evadne, this be serious; Mock not the Pow'rs above, that can and dare Give thee a great example of their justice To all ensuing eyes, if that thou playest With thy repentance, the best sacrifice. _Evad. _ I have done nothing good to win belief, My life hath been so faithless; all the creatures Made for Heav'n's honours, have their ends, and good ones, All but the cozening crocodiles, false women; They reign here like those plagues, those killing sores, Men pray against; and when they die, like tales Ill told, and unbeliev'd they pass away And go to dust forgotten: But, my lord, Those short days I shall number to my rest, (As many must not see me) shall, though late (Though in my evening, yet perceive a will, ) Since I can do no good, because a woman, Reach constantly at something that is near it; I will redeem one minute of my age, Or, like another Niobe, I'll weep Till I am water. _Amin. _ I am now dissolv'd. My frozen soul melts: may each sin thou hast Find a new mercy! rise, I am at peace: Hadst thou been thus, thus excellently good, Before that devil king tempted thy frailty, Sure, thou hadst made a star. Give me thy hand; From this time I will know thee, and as far As honour gives me leave, be thy Amintor. When we meet next, I will salute thee fairly And pray the gods to give thee happy days. My charity shall go along with thee Though my embraces must be far from thee. I should ha' kill'd thee, but this sweet repentance Locks up my vengeance, for which thus I kiss thee, The last kiss we must take. " The beautiful play of _Philaster_ has already been glanced at; it issufficient to add that its detached passages are deservedly the most famousof all. The insufficiency of the reasons of Philaster's jealousy may beconsidered by different persons as affecting to a different extent themerit of the piece. In these two pieces tragedy, or at least tragi-comedy, has the upper hand; it is in the next pair as usually arranged (for thechronological order of these plays is hitherto unsolved) that Fletcher'ssingular _vis comica_ appears. _A King and no King_ has a very seriousplot; and the loves of Arbaces and Panthea are most lofty, insolent, andpassionate. But the comedy of Bessus and his two swordsmen, which is freshand vivid even after Bobadil and Parolles (I do not say Falstaff, because Ihold it a vulgar error to consider Falstaff as really a coward at all), isperhaps more generally interesting. As for _The Scornful Lady_ it is comedypure and simple, and very excellent comedy too. The callousness of theyounger Loveless--an ugly forerunner of Restoration manners--injures it alittle, and the instantaneous and quite unreasonable conversion of theusurer Morecraft a little more. But the humours of the Lady herself (a mostMolièresque personage), and those of Roger and Abigail, with many minortouches, more than redeem it. The plays which follow [49] are all comicaland mostly farcical. The situations, rather than the expressions of _TheCustom of the Country_, bring it under the ban of a rather unfaircondemnation of Dryden's, pronounced when he was quite unsuccessfullytrying to free the drama of himself and his contemporaries from Collier'sdamning charges. But there are many lively traits in it. _The ElderBrother_ is one of those many variations on _cedant arma togæ_ which men ofletters have always been somewhat prone to overvalue; but the excellentcomedy of _The Spanish Curate_ is not impaired by the fact that Drydenchose to adapt it after his own fashion in The _Spanish Friar_. In _WitWithout Money_, though it is as usual amusing, the stage preference for a"roaring boy, " a senseless crack-brained spendthrift, appears perhaps alittle too strongly. _The Beggar's Bush_ is interesting because of itsearly indications of cant language, connecting it with Brome's _JovialCrew_, and with Dekker's thieves' Latin pamphlets. But the faults and themerits of Fletcher have scarcely found better expression anywhere than in_The Humorous Lieutenant_. Celia is his masterpiece in the delineation ofthe type of girl outlined above, and awkward as her double courtship byDemetrius and his father Antigonus is, one somehow forgives it, despite thenauseous crew of go-betweens of both sexes whom Fletcher here as elsewhereseems to take a pleasure in introducing. As for the Lieutenant he is quitecharming; and even the ultra-farcical episode of his falling in love withthe king owing to a philtre is well carried off. Then follows thedelightful pastoral of _The Faithful Shepherdess_, which ranks withJonson's _Sad Shepherd_ and with _Comus_, as the three chiefs of its stylein English. _The Loyal Subject_ falls a little behind, as also does _TheMad Lover_; but _Rule a Wife and have a Wife_ again rises to the firstclass. Inferior to Shakespere in the power of transcending withouttravestying human affairs, to Jonson in sharply presented humours, toCongreve and Sheridan in rattling fire of dialogue, our authors have nosuperior in half-farcical, half-pathetic comedy of a certain kind, and theyhave perhaps nowhere shown their power better than in the picture of theCopper Captain and his Wife. The flagrant absurdity of _The Laws of Candy_(which put the penalty of death on ingratitude, and apparently fix nocriterion of what ingratitude is, except the decision of the person whothinks himself ungratefully treated), spoils a play which is not worsewritten than the rest. But in _The False One_, based on Egyptian historyjust after Pompey's death, and _Valentinian_, which follows with a littlepoetical license the crimes and punishment of that Emperor, a return ismade to pure tragedy--in both cases with great success. The magnificentpassage which Hazlitt singled out from _The False One_ is perhaps theauthor's or authors' highest attempt in tragic declamation, and may beconsidered to have stopped not far short of the highest tragic poetry. [49] It may perhaps be well to mention that the references to "volumes" areto the ten-volume edition of 1750, by Theobald, Seward, and others. "'Oh thou conqueror, Thou glory of the world once, now the pity: Thou awe of nations, wherefore didst thou fall thus? What poor fate followed thee, and plucked thee on To trust thy sacred life to an Egyptian? The life and light of Rome to a blind stranger, That honourable war ne'er taught a nobleness Nor worthy circumstance show'd what a man was? That never heard thy name sung but in banquets And loose lascivious pleasures? to a boy That had no faith to comprehend thy greatness No study of thy life to know thy goodness?... Egyptians, dare you think your high pyramides Built to out-dure the sun, as you suppose, Where your unworthy kings lie rak'd in ashes, Are monuments fit for him! No, brood of Nilus, Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven; No pyramid set off his memories, But the eternal substance of his greatness, To which I leave him. '" The chief fault of _Valentinian_ is that the character of Maximus is veryindistinctly drawn, and that of Eudoxia nearly unintelligible. These twopure tragedies are contrasted with two comedies, _The Little French Lawyer_and _Monsieur Thomas_, which deserve high praise. The fabliau-motive of thefirst is happily contrasted with the character of Lamira and the friendshipof Clerimont and Dinant; while no play has so many of Fletcher's agreeableyoung women as _Monsieur Thomas_. _The Bloody Brother_, which its titlespeaks as sufficiently tragical, comes between two excellent comedies, _TheChances_ and _The Wild Goose Chase_, which might serve as well as anyothers for samples of the whole work on its comic side. In _The Chances_the portrait of the hare-brained Don John is the chief thing; in _The WildGoose Chase_, as in _Monsieur Thomas_, a whole bevy of lively characters, male and female, dispute the reader's attention and divide his preference. _A Wife for a Month_ sounds comic, but is not a little alloyed withtragedy; and despite the pathos of its central situation, is marred by someof Fletcher's ugliest characters--the characters which Shakespere inPandarus and the nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ took care to touch with hislightest finger. _The Lover's Progress_, a doubtful tragedy, and _ThePilgrim_, a good comedy (revived at the end of the century, as was _TheProphetess_ with certain help from Dryden), do not require any specialnotice. Between these two last comes _The Captain_, a comedy neither of thebest nor yet of the worst. The tragi-comic _Queen of Corinth_ is a littleheavy; but in _Bonduca_ we have one of the very best of the author'stragedies, the scenes with Caratach and his nephew, the boy Hengo, beingfull of touches not wholly unworthy of Shakespere. _The Knight of theBurning Pestle_ (where Fletcher, forsaking his usual fantastic grounds of aFrance that is scarcely French, and an Italy that is extremely un-Italian, comes to simple pictures of London middle-class life, such as those ofJonson or Middleton) is a very happy piece of work indeed, despite thedifficulty of working out its double presentment of burlesqueknight-errantry and straightforward comedy of manners. In _Love'sPilgrimage_, with a Spanish subject and something of a Spanish style, thereis not enough central interest, and the fortunes by land and sea of _TheDouble Marriage_ do not make it one of Fletcher's most interesting plays. But _The Maid in the Mill_ and _The Martial Maid_ are good farce, whichalmost deserves the name of comedy; and _The Knight of Malta_ is a romanticdrama of merit. In _Women Pleased_ the humours of avarice and hungryservility are ingeniously treated, and one of the starveling Penurio'sspeeches is among the best-known passages of all the plays, while theanti-Puritan satire of Hope-on-High Bomby is also noteworthy. The next fourplays are less noticeable, and indeed for two volumes, of the editionreferred to, we come to fewer plays that are specially good. _The NightWalker_; or, _The Little Thief_, though not very probable in its incidents, has a great deal of lively business, and is particularly noteworthy assupplying proof of the singular popularity of bell-ringing with all classesof the population in the seventeenth century, --a popularity which probablyprotected many old bells in the mania for church desecration. Not much canbe said for _The Woman's Prize_, or, _The Tamer Tamed_, an avowed sequel, and so to speak, antidote to _The Taming of the Shrew_, which chieflyproves that it is wise to let Shakespere alone. The authors have drawn tosome extent on the _Lysistrata_ to aid them, but have fallen as far shortof the fun as of the indecency of that memorable play. With _The IslandPrincess_ we return to a fair, though not more than a fair level ofromantic tragi-comedy, but _The Noble Gentleman_ is the worst play everattributed (even falsely) to authors of genius. The subject is perfectlyuninteresting, the characters are all fools or knaves, and the meansadopted to gull the hero through successive promotions to rank, andsuccessive deprivations of them (the genuineness of neither of which hetakes the least trouble to ascertain), are preposterous. _The Coronation_is much better, and _The Sea Voyage_, with a kind of Amazon story graftedupon a hint of _The Tempest_, is a capital play of its kind. Better still, despite a certain looseness both of plot and moral, is _The Coxcomb_, wherethe heroine Viola is a very touching figure. The extravagant absurdity ofthe traveller Antonio is made more probable than is sometimes the case withour authors, and the situations of the whole join neatly, and passtrippingly. _Wit at Several Weapons_ deserves a somewhat similardescription, and so does _The Fair Maid of the Inn_; while _Cupid'sRevenge_, though it shocked the editors of 1750 as a pagan kind of play, has a fine tragical zest, and is quite true to classical belief in itsdelineation of the ruthlessness of the offended Deity. Undoubtedly, however, the last volume of this edition supplies the most interestingmaterial of any except the first. Here is _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, a playfounded on the story of Palamon and Arcite, and containing what I thinkirrefragable proofs of Shakespere's writing and versification, though I amunable to discern anything very Shakesperian either in plot or character. Then comes the fine, though horrible tragedy of _Thierry and Theodoret_, inwhich the misdeeds of Queen Brunehault find chroniclers who are neithersqueamish nor feeble. The beautiful part of Ordella in this play, thoughsomewhat sentimental and improbable (as is always the case with Fletcher'svery virtuous characters) ranks at the head of its kind, and is muchsuperior to that of Aspatia in _The Maid's Tragedy_. _The Woman Hater_, said to be Fletcher's earliest play, has a character of rare comic, or atleast farcical virtue in the smell-feast Lazarillo with his Odyssey inchase of the Umbrana's head (a delicacy which is perpetually escaping him);and _The Nice Valour_ contains, in Chamont and his brother, the mostsuccessful attempts of the English stage at the delineation of the point ofhonour gone mad. Not so much, perhaps, can be said for _An Honest Man'sFortune_, which, with a mask and a clumsy, though in part beautiful, pieceentitled _Four Plays in One_, makes up the tale. But whosoever has gonethrough that tale will, if he has any taste for the subject, admit thatsuch a total of work, so varied in character, and so full of excellences inall its variety, has not been set to the credit of any name or names inEnglish literature, if we except only Shakespere. Of the highest and mostterrible graces, as of the sweetest and most poetical, Beaumont andFletcher may have little to set beside the masterpieces of some other men;for accomplished, varied, and fertile production, they need not fear anycompetition. It has not been usual to put Thomas Middleton in the front rank among thedramatists immediately second to Shakespere; but I have myself nohesitation in doing so. If he is not such a poet as Webster, he is even abetter, and certainly a more versatile, dramatist; and if his plays areinferior as plays to those of Fletcher and Massinger, he has a mastery ofthe very highest tragedy, which neither of them could attain. Except thebest scenes of _The White Devil_, and _The Duchess of Malfi_, there isnothing out of Shakespere that can match the best scenes of _TheChangeling_; while Middleton had a comic faculty, in which, to allappearance, Webster was entirely lacking. A little more is known aboutMiddleton than about most of his fellows. He was the son of a gentleman, and was pretty certainly born in London about 1570. It does not appear thathe was a university man, but he seems to have been at Gray's Inn. Hisearliest known work was not dramatic, and was exceedingly bad. In 1597 hepublished a verse paraphrase of the _Wisdom of Solomon_, which makes eventhat admirable book unreadable; and if, as seems pretty certain, the_Microcynicon_ of two years later is his, he is responsible for one of theworst and feeblest exercises in the school--never a very strong one--ofHall and Marston. Some prose tracts of the usual kind are not better; buteither at the extreme end of the sixteenth century, or in the very earliestyears of the next, Middleton turned his attention to the then all absorbingdrama, and for many years was (chiefly in collaboration) a busy playwright. We have some score of plays which are either his alone, or in greatest parthis. The order of their composition is very uncertain, and as with most ofthe dramatists of the period, not a few of them never appeared in printtill long after the author's death. He was frequently employed in composingpageants for the City of London, and in 1620 was appointed citychronologer. In 1624 Middleton got into trouble. His play, _The Game ofChess_, which was a direct attack on Spain and Rome, and a personal satireon Gondomar, was immensely popular, but its nine days' run was abruptlystopped on the complaint of the Spanish ambassador; the poet's son, itwould seem, had to appear before the Council, and Middleton himself was(according to tradition) imprisoned for some time. In this same year he wasliving at Newington Butts. He died there in the summer of 1627, and wassucceeded as chronologer by Ben Jonson. His widow, Magdalen, received agratuity from the Common Council, but seems to have followed her husband ina little over a year. Middleton's acknowledged, or at least accepted, habit of collaboration inmost of the work usually attributed to him, and the strong suspicion, ifnot more than suspicion, that he collaborated in other plays, affordendless opportunity for the exercise of a certain kind of criticism. Byemploying another kind we can discern quite sufficiently a strongindividuality in the work that is certainly, in part or in whole, his; andwe need not go farther. He seems to have had three different kinds ofdramatic aptitude, in all of which he excelled. The larger number of hisplays consist of examples of the rattling comedy of intrigue and manners, often openly representing London life as it was, sometimes transplantingwhat is an evident picture of home manners to some foreign scene apparentlyfor no other object than to make it more attractive to the spectators. Toany one at all acquainted with the Elizabethan drama their very titlesspeak them. These titles are _Blurt Master Constable_, _Michaelmas Term_, _A Trick to Catch the Old One_, _The Family of Love_ [a sharp satire on thePuritans], _A Mad World, my Masters_, _No Wit no Help Like a Woman's_, _AChaste Maid in Cheapside_, _Anything for a Quiet Life_, _More Dissemblersbesides Women_. As with all the humour-comedies of the time, the incidentsare not unfrequently very improbable, and the action is conducted with suchintricacy and want of clearly indicated lines, that it is sometimes verydifficult to follow. At the same time, Middleton has a faculty almostpeculiar to himself of carrying, it might almost be said of hustling, thereader or spectator along, so that he has no time to stop and considerdefects. His characters are extremely human and lively, his dialogue seldomlags, his catastrophes, if not his plots, are often ingenious, and he isnever heavy. The moral atmosphere of his plays is not very refined, --bywhich I do not at all mean merely that he indulges in loose situations andloose language. All the dramatists from Shakespere downwards do that; andMiddleton is neither better nor worse than the average. But in strikingcontrast to Shakespere and to others, Middleton has no kind of poeticalmorality in the sense in which the term poetical justice is better known. He is not too careful that the rogues shall not have the best of it; hemakes his most virtuous and his vilest characters hobnob together verycontentedly; and he is, in short, though never brutal, like thepost-Restoration school, never very delicate. The style, however, of theseworks of his did not easily admit of such delicacy, except in the infusionof a strong romantic element such as that which Shakespere almost alwaysinfuses. Middleton has hardly done it more than once--in the charmingcomedy of _The Spanish Gipsy_, --and the result there is so agreeable thatthe reader only wishes he had done it oftener. Usually, however, when his thoughts took a turn of less levity than inthese careless humorous studies of contemporary life, he devoted himselfnot to the higher comedy, but to tragedy of a very serious class, and whenhe did this an odd phenomenon generally manifested itself. In Middleton'sidea of tragedy, as in that of most of the playwrights, and probably allthe playgoers of his day, a comic underplot was a necessity; and, as wehave seen, he was himself undoubtedly able enough to furnish such a plot. But either because he disliked mixing his tragic and comic veins, or forsome unknown reason, he seems usually to have called in on such occasionsthe aid of Rowley, a vigorous writer of farce, who had sometimes beenjoined with him even in his comic work. Now, not only was Rowley littlemore than a farce writer, but he seems to have been either unable to make, or quite careless of making, his farce connect itself in any tolerablefashion with the tragedy of which it formed a nominal part. The result isseen in its most perfect imperfection in the two plays of _The Mayor ofQueenborough_ and _The Changeling_, both named from their comic features, and yet containing tragic scenes, the first of a very high order, thesecond of an order only overtopped by Shakespere at his best. The humoursof the cobbler Mayor of Queenborough in the one case, of the lunatic asylumand the courting of its keeper's wife in the other, are such very meanthings that they can scarcely be criticised. But the desperate love ofVortiger for Rowena in _The Mayor_, and the villainous plots against hischaste wife, Castiza, are real tragedy. Even these, however, fall far belowthe terrible loves, if loves they are to be called, of Beatrice-Joanna, theheroine of _The Changeling_, and her servant, instrument, and murderer, DeFlores. The plot of the tragic part of this play is intricate and notwholly savoury. It is sufficient to say that Beatrice having enticed DeFlores to murder a lover whom she does not love, that so she may marry alover whom she does love, is suddenly met by the murderer's demand of herhonour as the price of his services. She submits, and afterwards has topurchase fresh aid of murder from him by a continuance of her favours thatshe may escape detection by her husband. Thus, roughly described, the thememay look like the undigested horrors of _Lust's Dominion_, of _TheInsatiate Countess_, and of _The Revenger's Tragedy_. It is, however, polesasunder from them. The girl, with her southern recklessness of anything buther immediate desires, and her southern indifference to deceiving the veryman she loves, is sufficiently remarkable, as she stands out of the canvas. But De Flores, --the broken gentleman, reduced to the position of a meredependant, the libertine whose want of personal comeliness increases hismistress's contempt for him, the murderer double and treble dyed, asaudacious as he is treacherous, and as cool and ready as he is fiery inpassion, --is a study worthy to be classed at once with Iago, and inferioronly to Iago in their class. The several touches with which these twocharacters and their situations are brought out are as Shakesperian astheir conception, and the whole of that part of the play in which theyfigure is one of the most wonderful triumphs of English or of any drama. Even the change of manners and a bold word or two here and there, may notprevent me from giving the latter part of the central scene:-- _Beat. _ "Why 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked, Or shelter such a cunning cruelty, To make his death the murderer of my honour! Thy language is so bold and vicious, I cannot see which way I can forgive it With any modesty. _De F. _ Pish![50] you forget yourself: A woman dipped in blood, and talk of modesty! _Beat. _ O misery of sin! would I'd been bound Perpetually unto my living hate In that Pisacquo, than to hear[51] these words. Think but upon the distance that creation Set 'twixt thy blood and mine, and keep thee there. _De F. _ Look but unto your conscience, read me _there_; 'Tis a true book, you'll find me there your equal: Pish! fly not to your birth, but settle you In what the act has made you; you're no more now. You must forget your parentage to me; You are the deed's creature;[52] by that name You lost your first condition, and I shall urge[53] you As peace and innocency has turn'd you out, And made you one with me. _Beat. _ With thee, foul villain! _De F. _ Yes, my fair murderess: do _you_ urge _me_? Though thou writ'st maid, thou whore in thine affection! 'Twas changed from thy first love, and that's a kind Of whoredom in thy heart: and he's changed now To bring thy second on, thy Alsemero, Whom by all sweets that ever darkness tasted If I enjoy thee not, thou ne'er enjoyest! I'll blast the hopes and joys of marriage, I'll confess all; my life I rate at nothing. _Beat. _ De Flores! _De F. _ I shall rest from all (lover's)[54] plagues then, I live in pain now; that [love] shooting eye Will burn my heart to cinders. _Beat. _ O sir, hear me! _De F. _ She that in life and love refuses me, In death and shame my partner she shall be. _Beat. _ (_kneeling_). Stay, hear me once for all: I make thee master Of all the wealth I have in gold and jewels; Let me go poor unto my bed with honour And I am rich in all things. _De F. _ Let this silence thee; The wealth of all Valencia shall not buy My pleasure from me. Can you weep Fate from its determined purpose? So soon may you weep me. _Beat. _ Vengeance begins; Murder, I see, is followed by more sins: Was my creation in the womb so curst It must engender with a viper first? _De F. _ (_raising her_). Come, rise and shroud your blushes in my bosom, Silence is one of pleasure's best receipts. Thy peace is wrought for ever in this yielding. 'Las, how the turtle pants! thou'lt love anon What thou so fear'st and faint'st to venture on. " [50] In orig. "Push, " cf. "Tush. " [51] Rather than hear. [52] A trisyllable, as in strictness it ought to be. [53] = "claim. " [54] This omission and the substitution in the next line are due to Dyce, and may be called _certissima emendatio_. Two other remarkable plays of Middleton's fall with some differences underthe same second division of his works. These are _The Witch_ and _WomenBeware Women_. Except for the inevitable and rather attractive comparisonwith _Macbeth_, _The Witch_ is hardly interesting. It consists of threedifferent sets of scenes most inartistically blended, --an awkward andineffective variation on the story of Alboin, Rosmunda and the skull for aserious main plot, some clumsy and rather unsavoury comic or tragi-comicinterludes, and the witch scenes. The two first are very nearly worthless;the third is intrinsically, though far below _Macbeth_, interesting enoughand indirectly more interesting because of the questions which have beenstarted, as to the indebtedness of the two poets to each other. The bestopinion seems to be that Shakespere most certainly did not copy Middleton, nor (a strange fancy of some) did he collaborate with Middleton, and thatthe most probable thing is that both borrowed their names, and some detailsfrom Reginald Scot's _Discovery of Witchcraft_. _Women Beware Women_ on theother hand is one of Middleton's finest works, inferior only to _TheChangeling_ in parts, and far superior to it as a whole. The temptation ofBianca, the newly-married wife, by the duke's instrument, a cunning andshameless woman, is the title-theme, and in this part again Middleton'sShakesperian verisimilitude and certainty of touch appear. The end of theplay is something marred by a slaughter more wholesale even than that of_Hamlet_, and by no means so well justified. Lastly, _A Fair Quarrel_ mustbe mentioned, because of the very high praise which it has received fromLamb and others. This praise has been directed chiefly to the situation ofthe quarrel between Captain Ager and his friend, turning on a question (thepoint of family honour), finely but perhaps a little tediously argued. Thecomic scenes, however, which are probably Rowley's, are in his best vein ofbustling swagger. I have said that Middleton, as it seems to me, has not been fullyestimated. It is fortunately impossible to say the same of Webster, and thereasons of the difference are instructive. Middleton's great fault is thathe never took trouble enough about his work. A little trouble would havemade _The Changeling_ or _Women Beware Women_, or even _The Spanish Gipsy_, worthy to rank with all but Shakespere's very masterpieces. Webster alsowas a collaborator, apparently an industrious one; but he never seems tohave taken his work lightly. He had, moreover, that incommunicable gift ofthe highest poetry in scattered phrases which, as far as we can see, Middleton had not. Next to nothing is known of him. He may have been parishclerk of St. Andrew's, Holborn; but the authority is very late, and thecommentators seemed to have jumped at it to explain Webster's fancy fordetails of death and burial--a cause and effect not sufficientlyproportioned. Mr. Dyce has spent much trouble in proving that he could nothave been the author of some Puritan tracts published a full generationafter the date of his masterpieces. Heywood tells us that he was generallycalled "Jack, " a not uncommon thing when men are christened John. Hehimself has left us a few very sententiously worded prefaces which do notargue great critical taste. We know from the usual sources (Henslowe'sDiaries) that he was a working furnisher of plays, and from many ratherdubious title-pages we suppose or know some of the plays he worked at. _Northward Ho! Westward Ho!_ and _Sir John Wyatt_ are pieces of dramaticjournalism in which he seems to have helped Dekker. He adapted, withadditions, Marston's _Malcontent_, which is, in a crude way, very much inhis own vein: he contributed (according to rather late authority) somecharming scenes (elegantly extracted, on a hint of Mr. Gosse's, by a recenteditor) to _A Cure for a Cuckold_, one of Rowley's characteristic and notungenial botches of humour-comedy; he wrote a bad pageant or two, and somemiscellaneous verses. But we know nothing of his life or death, and hisfame rests on four plays, in which no other writer is either known or evenhinted to have had a hand, and which are in different ways of the firstorder of interest, if not invariably of the first order of merit. These are_The Duchess of Malfi_, _The White Devil_, _The Devil's Law Case_, and_Appius and Virginia_. Of _Appius and Virginia_ the best thing to be said is to borrowSainte-Beuve's happy description of Molière's _Don Garcie de Navarre_, andto call it an _essai pale et noble_. Webster is sometimes very close toShakespere; but to read _Appius and Virginia_, and then to read _JuliusCæsar_ or _Coriolanus_, is to appreciate, in perhaps the most striking waypossible, the universality which all good judges from Dryden downwards haverecognised in the prince of literature. Webster, though he was evidently agood scholar, and even makes some parade of scholarship, was a Romantic tothe core, and was all abroad in these classical measures. _The Devil's LawCase_ sins in the opposite way, being hopelessly undigested, destitute ofany central interest, and, despite fine passages, a mere "salmagundi. "There remain the two famous plays of _The White Devil_ or _VittoriaCorombona_ and _The Duchess of Malfi_--plays which were rarely, if ever, acted after their author's days, and of which the earlier and, to myjudgment, better was not a success even then, but which the judgment ofthree generations has placed at the very head of all their class, and whichcontain magnificent poetry. I have said that in my judgment _The White Devil_ is the better of the two;I shall add that it seems to me very far the better. Webster's plays arecomparatively well known, and there is no space here to tell their ratherintricate arguments. It need only be said that the contrast of the two isstriking and unmistakable; and that Webster evidently meant in the one toindicate the punishment of female vice, in the other to draw pity andterror by the exhibition of the unprevented but not unavenged sufferings offemale virtue. Certainly both are excellent subjects, and if the latterseem the harder, we have Imogen and Bellafront to show, in the most diversematerial, and with the most diverse setting possible, how genius can manageit. With regard to _The White Devil_, it has been suggested with someplausibility that it wants expansion. Certainly the action is rathercrowded, and the recourse to dumb show (which, however, Webster againpermitted himself in _The Duchess_) looks like a kind of shorthandindication of scenes that might have been worked out. Even as it is, however, the sequence of events is intelligible, and the presentation ofcharacter is complete. Indeed, if there is any fault to find with it, itseems to me that Webster has sinned rather by too much detail than by toolittle. We could spare several of the minor characters, though none areperhaps quite so otiose as Delio, Julio, and others in _The Duchess ofMalfi_. We feel (or at least I feel) that Vittoria's villainous brotherFlamineo is not as Iago and Aaron and De Flores are each in his way, athoroughly live creature. We ask ourselves (or I ask myself) what is thegood of the repulsive and not in the least effective presentment of theMoor Zanche. Cardinal Monticelso is incontinent of tongue and singularlyfeeble in deed, --for no rational man would, after describing Vittoria as akind of pest to mankind, have condemned her to a punishment which wasapparently little more than residence in a rather disreputable but by nomeans constrained boarding-house, and no omnipotent pope would have letLudivico loose with a clear inkling of his murderous designs. But whenthese criticisms and others are made, _The White Devil_ remains one of themost glorious works of the period. Vittoria is perfect throughout; and inthe justly-lauded trial scene she has no superior on any stage. Brachianois a thoroughly lifelike portrait of the man who is completely besottedwith an evil woman. Flamineo I have spoken of, and not favourably; yet inliterature, if not in life, he is a triumph; and above all the absorbingtragic interest of the play, which it is impossible to take up withoutfinishing, has to be counted in. But the real charm of _The White Devil_ isthe wholly miraculous poetry in phrases and short passages which itcontains. Vittoria's dream of the yew-tree, almost all the speeches of theunfortunate Isabella, and most of her rival's, have this merit. But themost wonderful flashes of poetry are put in the mouth of the scoundrelFlamineo, where they have a singular effect. The famous dirge whichCornelia sings can hardly be spoken of now, except in Lamb's artfullysimple phrase "I never saw anything like it, " and the final speeches ofFlamineo and his sister deserve the same endorsement. Nor is even the proudfarewell of the Moor Zanche unworthy. It is impossible to describe the"whirl of spirits" (as the good old-fashioned phrase has it) into which thereading of this play sets the reader, except by saying that the cause ofthat whirl is the secret of the best Elizabethan writers, and that it isnowhere, out of Shakespere, better exemplified than in the scene partlyextracted from Middleton, and in such passages of _Vittoria Corombona_ asthe following:-- _Cor. _ "Will you make me such a fool? here's a white hand: Can blood so soon be wash'd out? let me see; When screech-owls croak upon the chimney-tops And the strange cricket i' the oven sings and hops, When yellow spots do on your hands appear, Be certain then you of a corse shall hear. Out upon 't, how 'tis speckled! 'h'as handled a toad, sure. Cowslip-water is good for the memory: Pray, buy me three ounces of 't. _Flam. _ I would I were from hence. _Cor. _ Do you hear, sir? I'll give you a saying which my grand-mother Was wont, when she heard the bell toll, to sing o'er Unto her lute. _Flam. _ Do, an' you will, do. _Cor. _ 'Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren, [_Cornelia doth this in several forms of distraction. _ Since o'er shady groves they hover, And with leaves and flowers do cover The friendless bodies of unburied men. Call unto his funeral dole The ant, the field mouse, and the mole, To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm, But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men, For with his nails he'll dig them up again. ' They would not bury him 'cause he died in a quarrel; But I have an answer for them: 'Let holy Church receive him duly Since he paid the church-tithes truly. ' His wealth is summ'd, and this is all his store. This poor men get, and great men get no more. Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop. Bless you, all good people. [_Exeunt_ CORNELIA, ZANCHE, _and_ LADIES. _Flam. _ I have a strange thing in me, to the which I cannot give a name, without it be Compassion. I pray, leave me. [_Exit_ FRANCISCO DE MEDICIS. This night I'll know the utmost of my fate; I'll be resolved what my rich sister means To assign me for my service. I have liv'd Riotously ill, like some that live in court, And sometimes when my face was full of smiles Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast. Oft gay and honoured robes those tortures try: We think cag'd birds sing when indeed they cry. [_Enter Brachiano's ghost, in his leather cassock and_ _breeches, and boots; with a cowl; in his hand a pot_ _of lily flowers, with a skull in't. _ Ha! I can stand thee: nearer, nearer it. What a mockery hath death made thee! thou look'st sad. In what place art thou? in yon starry gallery? Or in the cursèd dungeon?--No? not speak? Pray, sir, resolve me, what religion's best For a man to die in? or is it in your knowledge To answer me how long I have to live? That's the most necessary question. Not answer? are you still like some great men That only walk like shadows up and down, And to no purpose? Say:-- [_The Ghost throws earth upon him and shows him the skull. _ What's that? O, fatal! he throws earth upon me! A dead man's skull beneath the roots of flowers!-- I pray [you], speak, sir: our Italian Church-men Make us believe dead men hold conference With their familiars, and many times Will come to bed to them, and eat with them. [_Exit_ GHOST. He's gone; and see, the skull and earth are vanished. This is beyond melancholy. I do dare my fate To do its worst. Now to my sister's lodging And sum up all these horrors: the disgrace The prince threw on me; next the piteous sight Of my dead brother; and my mother's dotage; And last this terrible vision: all these Shall with Vittoria's bounty turn to good, Or I will drown this weapon in her blood. " [_Exit. _ _The Duchess of Malfi_ is to my thinking very inferior--full of beauties asit is. In the first place, we cannot sympathise with the duchess, despiteher misfortunes, as we do with the "White Devil. " She is neither quite avirtuous woman (for in that case she would not have resorted to so muchconcealment) nor a frank professor of "All for Love. " Antonio, herso-called husband, is an unromantic and even questionable figure. Many ofthe minor characters, as already hinted, would be much better away. Of thetwo brothers the Cardinal is a cold-blooded and uninteresting debauchee andmurderer, who sacrifices sisters and mistresses without any reasonableexcuse. Ferdinand, the other, is no doubt mad enough, but not interestinglymad, and no attempt is made to account in any way satisfactorily for thedelay of his vengeance. By common consent, even of the greatest admirers ofthe play, the fifth act is a kind of gratuitous appendix of horrors stuckon without art or reason. But the extraordinary force and beauty of thescene where the duchess is murdered; the touches of poetry, pure andsimple, which, as in the _The White Devil_, are scattered all over theplay; the fantastic accumulation of terrors before the climax; and theremarkable character of Bosola, --justify the high place generally assignedto the work. True, Bosola wants the last touches, the touches whichShakespere would have given. He is not wholly conceivable as he is. But asa "Plain Dealer" gone wrong, a "Malcontent" (Webster's work on that playvery likely suggested him), turned villain, a man whom ill-luck andfruitless following of courts have changed from a cynic to a scoundrel, heis a strangely original and successful study. The dramatic flashes in theplay would of themselves save it. "I am Duchess of Malfi still, " and theother famous one "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young, " oftenas they have been quoted, can only be quoted again. They are of the firstorder of their kind, and, except the "already _my_ De Flores!" of _TheChangeling_, there is nothing in the Elizabethan drama out of Shakespere tomatch them. There is no doubt that some harm has been done to Thomas Heywood by theenthusiastic phrase in which Lamb described him as "a prose Shakespere. "The phrase itself is in the original quite carefully and sufficientlyexplained and qualified. But unluckily a telling description of the kind issure to go far, while its qualifications remain behind; and (especiallysince a reprint by Pearson in the year 1874 made the plays of Heywood, towhich one or two have since been added more or less conjecturally by theindustry of Mr. Bullen, accessible as a whole) a certain revolt has beenmanifested against the encomium. This revolt is the effect of haste. "Aprose Shakespere" suggests to incautious readers something like Swift, likeTaylor, like Carlyle, --something approaching in prose the supremacy ofShakespere in verse. But obviously that is not what Lamb meant. Indeed whenone remembers that if Shakespere is anything, he is a poet, the phrase mayrun the risk of receiving an under--not an over--valuation. It is evident, however, to any one who reads Lamb's remarks in full and carefully--it isstill more evident to any one who without much caring what Lamb or any oneelse has said, reads Heywood for himself--what he did mean. He was lookingonly at one or two sides of the myriad-sided one, and he justly saw thatHeywood touched Shakespere on these sides, if only in an incomplete andunpoetic manner. What Heywood has in common with Shakespere, though hisprosaic rather than poetic treatment brings it out in a much less brilliantway, is his sympathy with ordinary and domestic character, his aversionfrom the fantastic vices which many of his fellows were prone to attributeto their characters, his humanity, his kindness. The reckless tragedy ofblood and massacre, the reckless comedy of revelry and intrigue, werealways repulsive to him, as far as we can judge from the comparativelyscanty remnant of the hundreds of plays in which he boasted that he had hada hand, if not a chief hand. Besides these plays (he confesses toauthorship or collaboration in two hundred and twenty) he was a voluminouswriter in prose and verse, though I do not myself pretend to much knowledgeof his non-dramatic work. Its most interesting part would have been a_Lives of the Poets_, which we know that he intended, and which couldhardly have failed to give much information about his famouscontemporaries. As it is, his most remarkable and best-known work, notcontained in one of his dramas, is the curious and constantly quotedpassage half complaining that all the chief dramatists of his day wereknown by abbreviations of their names, but characteristically andgood-humouredly ending with the license-- "I hold he loves me best who calls me Tom. " We have unfortunately no knowledge which enables us to call him many namesexcept such as are derived from critical examination of his works. Little, except that he is said to have been a Lincolnshire man and a Fellow ofPeterhouse, is known of his history. His masterpiece, _The Woman killedwith Kindness_ (in which a deceived husband, coming to the knowledge of hisshame, drives his rival to repentance, and his wife to repentance anddeath, by his charity), is not wholly admirable. Shakespere would havefelt, more fully than Heywood, the danger of presenting his hero somethingof a wittol without sufficient passion of religion or affection to justifyhis tolerance. But the pathos is so great, the sense of "the pity of it" isso simply and unaffectedly rendered, that it is impossible not to rankHeywood very high. The most famous "beauties" are in the followingpassage:-- _Anne. _ "O with what face of brass, what brow of steel, Can you unblushing speak this to the face Of the espoused wife of so dear a friend? It is my husband that maintains your state, Will you dishonour him that in your power Hath left his whole affairs? I am his wife, Is it to _me_ you speak? _Wendoll. _ "O speak no more: For more than this I know and have recorded Within the red-leaved table of my heart. Fair and of all beloved, I was not fearful Bluntly to give my life unto your hand, And at one hazard all my worldly means. Go, tell your husband; he will turn me off And I am then undone: I care not, I, 'Twas for your sake. Perchance in rage he'll kill me; I care not, 'twas for you. Say I incur The general name of villain through the world, Of traitor to my friend. I care not, I. Beggary, shame, death, scandal and reproach For you I'll hazard all--why, what care I? For you I'll live and in your love I'll die. " Anne capitulates with a suddenness which has been generally and rightlypronounced a blot on the play; but her husband is informed by a servant andresolves to discover the pair. The action is prolonged somewhat too much, and the somewhat unmanly strain of weakness in Frankford is tooperceptible; but these scenes are full of fine passages, as this:-- _Fr. _ "A general silence hath surprised the house, And this is the last door. Astonishment, Fear and amazement beat[55] upon my heart Even as a madman beats upon a drum. O keep my eyes, you heavens, before I enter, From any sight that may transfix my soul: Or if there be so black a spectacle, O strike mine eyes stark blind! Or if not so, Lend me such patience to digest my grief That I may keep this white and virgin hand From any violent outrage, or red murder, And with that prayer I enter. " [55] First ed. "Play, " which I am half inclined to prefer. A subsequent speech of his-- "O God, O God that it were possible To undo things done, " hardly comes short of the touch which would have given us instead of aprose Shakespere a Shakespere indeed; and all the rest of the play, as faras the main plot is concerned, is full of pathos. In the great number of other pieces attributed to him, written in all thepopular styles, except the two above referred to, merits and defects aremixed up in a very curious fashion. Never sinking to the lowest depth ofthe Elizabethan playwright, including some great ones, Heywood never risesto anything like the highest height. His chronicle plays are very weak, showing no grasp of heroic character, and a most lamentable slovenliness ofrhythm. Few things are more curious than to contrast with _Henry VI. _ (towhich some critics will allow little of Shakespere's work) and _RichardIII. _ the two parts of _Edward IV. _, in which Heywood, after a manner, fills the gap. There are good lines here and there, and touching traits;but the whole, as a whole, is quite ludicrously bad, and "written to thegallery, " the City gallery, in the most innocent fashion. _If You Know NotMe You Know Nobody_, or _The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth_, also in twoparts, has the same curious innocence, the same prosaic character, buthardly as many redeeming flashes. Its first part deals with Elizabeth'sreal "troubles, " in her sister's days; its second with the Armada periodand the founding of the Royal Exchange. For Heywood, unlike most of thedramatists, was always true to the City, even to the eccentric extent ofmaking, in _The Four Prentices of London_, Godfrey of Bouillon and hisbrethren members of the prentice-brotherhood. His classical and allegoricalpieces, such as _The Golden Age_ and its fellows, are most tedious and notat all brief. The four of them (_The Iron Age_ has two parts) occupy awhole volume of the reprint, or more than four hundred closely printedpages; and their clumsy dramatisation of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, with anyother classical learning that Heywood could think of thrust in, presents(together with various minor pieces of a somewhat similar kind) as strikinga contrast with _Troilus and Cressida_, as _Edward IV. _ does with _HenryVI. _ His spectacles and pageants, chiefly in honour of London (_London'sJus Honorarium_, with other metaphorical Latin titles of the samedescription) are heavy, the weakness of his versification being especiallyfelt in such pieces. His strength lies in the domestic and contemporarydrama, where his pathos had free play, unrestrained by the necessity oftrying to make it rise to chivalrous or heroic height, and where his keenobservation of his fellow-men made him true to mankind in general, at thesame time that he gave a vivid picture of contemporary manners. Of thisclass of his plays _A Woman killed with Kindness_ is undoubtedly the chief, but it has not a few companions, and those in a sufficiently wide andvaried class of subject. _The Fair Maid of the Exchange_ is, perhaps, notnow found to be so very delectable and full of mirth as it is asserted tobe on its title-page, because it is full of that improbability and neglectof verisimilitude which has been noted as the curse of the minorElizabethan drama. The "Cripple of Fenchurch, " the real hero of the piece, is a very unlikely cripple; the heroines chop and change their affectionsin the most surprising manner; and the characters generally indulge in thatcurious self-description and soliloquising in dialogue which is neverfound in Shakespere, and is found everywhere else. But it is still a livelypicture of contemporary manners. We should be sorry to lose _The Fair Maidof the West_ with its picture of Devonshire sailors, foreign merchants, kings of Fez, Bashaws of various parts, Italian dukes, and what not. Thetwo parts make anything but a good play, but they are decidedlyinteresting, and their tone supports Mr. Bullen's conjecture that we owe toHeywood the, in parts, admirable play of _Dick of Devonshire_, adramatisation of the quarter-staff feats in Spain of Richard Peake ofTavistock. _The English Traveller_ may rank with _A Woman killed withKindness_ as Heywood's best plays (there is, indeed, a certain community ofsubject between them), but _A Maidenhead well Lost_, and _The Witches ofLancashire_, are not far behind it; nor is _A Challenge for Beauty_. We canhardly say so much for _Love's Mistress_, which dramatises the story of_Cupid and Psyche_, or for _The Wise Woman of Hogsdon_ (Hoxton), a playrather of Middleton's type. But in _The Royal King and Loyal Subject_, andin _Fortune by Land and Sea_, the author shows again the sympathy withchivalrous character and adventure which (if he never can be said to befully up to its level in the matter of poetic expression) was evidently afavourite and constant motive with him. In short, Heywood, even at hisworst, is a writer whom it is impossible not to like. His very considerabletalent, though it stopped short of genius, was united with a pleasant andgenial temper, and little as we know of his life, his dedications andprefaces make us better acquainted with his personality than we are withthat of much more famous men. No greater contrast is possible than that between our last two names--Dayand Tourneur. Little is known of them: Day was at Cambridge in 1592-3;Tourneur shared in the Cadiz voyage of 1625 and died on its return. Both, it is pretty certain, were young men at the end of Elizabeth's reign, andwere influenced strongly by the literary fashions set by greater men thanthemselves. But whereas Day took to the graceful fantasticalities of Lylyand to the not very savage social satire of Greene, Tourneur (or Turner)addressed himself to the most ferocious school of sub-Marlovian tragedy, and to the rugged and almost unintelligible satire of Marston. Somethinghas been said of his effort in the latter vein, the _TransformedMetamorphosis_. His two tragedies, _The Atheist's Tragedy_ and _TheRevenger's Tragedy_, have been rather variously judged. The concentrationof gloomy and almost insane vigour in _The Revenger's Tragedy_, thesplendid poetry of a few passages which have long ago found a home in theextract books, and the less separable but equally distinct poetic value ofscattered lines and phrases, cannot escape any competent reader. But, atthe same time, I find it almost impossible to say anything for either playas a whole, and here only I come a long way behind Mr. Swinburne in hisadmiration of our dramatists. The _Atheist's Tragedy_ is an inextricableimbroglio of tragic and comic scenes and characters, in which it is hardlypossible to see or follow any clue; while the low extravagance of all thecomedy and the frantic rant of not a little of the tragedy combine tostifle the real pathos of some of the characters. _The Revenger's Tragedy_is on a distinctly higher level; the determination of Vindice to revengehis wrongs, and the noble and hapless figure of Castiza, could not havebeen presented as they are presented except by a man with a distinct strainof genius, both in conception and execution. But the effect, as a whole, ismarred by a profusion of almost all the worst faults of the drama of thewhole period from Peele to Davenant. The incoherence and improbability ofthe action, the reckless, inartistic, butcherly prodigality of blood andhorrors, and the absence of any kind of redeeming interest of contrastinglight to all the shade, though very characteristic of a class, and that nosmall one, of Elizabethan drama, cannot be said to be otherwise thancharacteristic of its faults. As the best example (others are _TheInsatiate Countess_, Chettle's _Hoffmann_, _Lust's Dominion_, and thesingular production which Mr. Bullen has printed as _The DistractedEmperor_) it is very well worth reading, and contrasting with the reallygreat plays of the same class, such as _The Jew of Malta_ and _TitusAndronicus_, where, though the horrors are still overdone, yet genius hasgiven them a kind of passport. But intrinsically it is mere nightmare. Of a very different temper and complexion is the work of John Day, who mayhave been a Cambridge graduate, and was certainly a student of Gonville andCaius, as he describes himself on the title-page of some of his plays andof a prose tract printed by Mr. Bullen. He appears to have been dead in1640, and the chief thing positively known about him is that between thebeginning of 1598 and 1608 he collaborated in the surprising number oftwenty-one plays (all but _The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_ unprinted)with Haughton, Chettle, Dekker, and others. _The Parliament of Bees_, hismost famous and last printed work, is of a very uncommon kind inEnglish--being a sort of dramatic allegory, touched with a singularlygraceful and fanciful spirit. It is indeed rather a masque than a play, andconsists, after the opening Parliament held by the Master, or Viceroy Bee(quaintly appearing in the original, which may have been printed in 1607, though no copy seems now discoverable earlier than 1641, as "Mr. Bee"), ofa series of characters or sketches of Bee-vices and virtues, which are veryhuman. The termination, which contains much the best poetry in the piece, and much the best that Day ever wrote, introduces King Oberon givingjudgment on the Bees from "Mr. Bee" downwards and banishing offenders. Hereoccurs the often-quoted passage, beginning-- "And whither must these flies be sent?" and including the fine speech of Oberon-- "You should have cried so in your youth. " It should be observed that both in this play and elsewhere passages occurin Day which seem to have been borrowed or stolen from or by other writers, such as Dekker and Samuel Rowley; but a charitable and not improbableexplanation of this has been found in the known fact of his extensive andintricate collaboration. _The Isle of Gulls_, suggested in a way by the_Arcadia_, though in general plan also fantastic and, to use a much abusedbut decidedly convenient word, pastoral, has a certain flavour of thecomedy of manners and of contemporary satire. Then we have the quaint pieceof _Humour out of Breath_, a kind of study in the for once conjoinedschools of Shakespere and Jonson--an attempt at a combination of humorousand romantic comedy with some pathetic writing, as here:-- "[O] Early sorrow art got up so soon? What, ere the sun ascendeth in the east? O what an early waker art thou grown! But cease discourse and close unto thy work. Under this drooping myrtle will I sit, And work awhile upon my corded net; And as I work, record my sorrows past, Asking old Time how long my woes shall last. And first--but stay! alas! what do I see? Moist gum-like tears drop from this mournful tree; And see, it sticks like birdlime; 'twill not part, Sorrow is even such birdlime at my heart. Alas! poor tree, dost thou want company? Thou dost, I see't, and I will weep with thee; Thy sorrows make me dumb, and so shall mine, It shall be tongueless, and so seem like thine. Thus will I rest my head unto thy bark, Whilst my sighs ease my sorrows. " Something the same may be said of _Law Tricks_, or _Who would have Thoughtit?_ which has, however, in the character of the Count Horatio, a touch oftragedy. Another piece of Day's is in quite a different vein, being anaccount in dramatised form of the adventures of the three brothersShirley--a kind of play which, from _Sir Thomas Stukeley_ downwards, appears to have been a very favourite one with Elizabethan audiences, though (as might indeed be expected) it was seldom executed in a verysuccessful manner. Lastly, or first, if chronological order is taken, comes_The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_, written by Day in conjunction withChettle, and ranging itself with the half historical, half romantic playswhich were, as has been pointed out above, favourites with the first schoolof dramatists. It seems to have been very popular, and had a second andthird part, not now extant, but is by no means as much to modern taste assome of the others. Indeed both Day and Tourneur, despite the dates oftheir pieces, which, as far as known, are later, belong in more ways thanone to the early school, and show how its traditions survived alongside ofthe more perfect work of the greater masters. Day himself is certainly nota great master--indeed masterpieces would have been impossible, if theywould not have been superfluous, in the brisk purveying of theatricalmatter which, from Henslowe's accounts, we see that he kept up. He hadfancy, a good deal of wit, considerable versatility, and something of thesame sunshiny temper, with less of the pathos, that has been noticed inHeywood. If he wrote _The Maid's Metamorphosis_ (also ascribedconjecturally to Lyly), he did something less dramatically good, butperhaps poetically better, than his other work; and if, as has sometimesbeen thought, [56] _The Return from Parnassus_ is his, he is richer still. But even without these, his existing poetical baggage (the least part ofthe work which we know he accomplished) is more than respectable, and showsmore perhaps than that of any other distinctly minor writer the vast amountof loose talent--of miscellaneous inspiration--which was afloat in the airof his time. [56] I agree with Professor Hales in thinking it very improbable. CHAPTER VIII THE SCHOOL OF SPENSER AND THE TRIBE OF BEN The reign of James I. Is not, in mere poetry, quite such a brilliant periodas it is in drama. The full influence of Donne and of Jonson, whichcombined to produce the exquisite if not extraordinarily strong school ofCaroline poets, did not work in it. Of its own bards the best, such asJonson himself and Drayton, were survivals of the Elizabethan school, andhave accordingly been anticipated here. Nevertheless, there were not a fewverse-writers of mark who may be most conveniently assigned to this time, though, as was the case with so many of their contemporaries, they hadsometimes produced work of note before the accession of the BritishSolomon, and sometimes continued to produce it until far into the reign ofhis son. Especially there are some of much mark who fall to be noticedhere, because their work is not, strictly speaking, of the schools thatflourished under Elizabeth, or of the schools that flourished underCharles. We shall not find anything of the first interest in them; yet inone way or in another there were few of them who were unworthy to becontemporaries of Shakespere. Joshua Sylvester is one of those men of letters whom accident rather thanproperty seems to have made absurd. He has existed in English literaturechiefly as an Englisher of the Frenchman Du Bartas, whom an even greaterignorance has chosen to regard as something grotesque. Du Bartas is one ofthe grandest, if also one of the most unequal, poets of Europe, and JoshuaSylvester, his translator, succeeded in keeping some of his grandeur if heeven added to his inequality. His original work is insignificant comparedwith his translation; but it is penetrated with the same qualities. Heseems to have been a little deficient in humour, and his portrait--crownedwith a singularly stiff laurel, throated with a stiffer ruff, and clothed, as to the bust, with a doublet so stiff that it looks like textilearmour--is not calculated to diminish the popular ridicule. Yet isSylvester not at all ridiculous. He was certainly a Kentish man, andprobably the son of a London clothier. His birth is guessed, on goodgrounds, at 1563; and he was educated at Southampton under the famousrefugee, Saravia, to whom he owed that proficiency in French which made orhelped his fame. He did not, despite his wishes, go to either university, and was put to trade. In this he does not seem to have been prosperous;perhaps he gave too much time to translation. He was probably patronised byJames, and by Prince Henry certainly. In the last years of his life he wasresident secretary to the English company of Merchant Venturers atMiddleburgh, where he died on the 28th September 1618. He was not afortunate man, but his descendants seem to have flourished both in England, the West Indies and America. As for his literary work, it requires no doubta certain amount of good will to read it. It is voluminous, even in theoriginal part not very original, and constantly marred by that loquacitywhich, especially in times of great inspiration, comes upon the uninspiredor not very strongly inspired. The point about Sylvester, as about so manyothers of his time, is that, unlike the minor poets of our day and of someothers, he has constant flashes--constant hardly separable, but quiteperceivable, scraps, which show how genially heated the brain of the nationwas. Nor should it be forgotten that his Du Bartas had a great effect forgenerations. The man of pure science may regret that generations shouldhave busied themselves about anything so thoroughly unscientific; but withthat point of view we are unconcerned. The important thing is that thegenerations in question learnt from Sylvester to take a poetical interestin the natural world. John Davies of Hereford, who must have been born at about the same time asSylvester, and who certainly died in the same year, is another curiosity ofliterature. He was only a writing-master, --a professor of the curious, elaborate penmanship which is now quite dead, --and he seems at no time tohave been a man of wealth. But he was, in his vocation or otherwise, familiar with very interesting people, both of the fashionable and theliterary class. He succeeded, poor as he was, in getting thrice married toladies born; and, though he seems to have been something of a coxcomb, hewas apparently as little of a fool as coxcombry will consist with. His work(of the most miscellaneous character and wholly in verse, though in subjectas well as treatment often better suiting prose) is voluminous, and hemight have been wholly treated (as he has already been referred to) withthe verse pamphleteers, especially Rowlands, of an earlier chapter. Butfluent and unequal as his verse is--obviously the production of a man whohad little better to offer than journalism, but for whom the times did notprovide the opening of a journalist--there is a certain salt of wit in itwhich puts him above the mere pamphleteers. His epigrams (most of which arecontained in _The Scourge of Folly_, undated, like others of his books) areby no means despicable; the Welsh ancestors, whom he did not fail tocommemorate, seem to have endowed him with some of that faculty forlampooning and "flyting" which distinguished the Celtic race. That they arefrequently lacking in point ought hardly to be objected to him; for the agehad construed the miscellaneous examples of Martial indulgently, and Jonsonin his own generation, and Herrick after him (two men with whom Daviescannot compare for a moment in general power), are in their epigramsfrequently as pointless and a good deal coarser. His variations on Englishproverbs are also remarkable. He had a respectable vein of religiousmoralising, as the following sonnet from _Wit's Pilgrimage_ will show:-- "When Will doth long to effect her own desires, She makes the Wit, as vassal to the will, To do what she, howe'er unright, requires, Which wit doth, though repiningly, fulfil. Yet, as well pleased (O languishing wit!) He seems to effect her pleasure willingly, And all his reasons to her reach doth fit; So like the world, gets love by flattery. That this is true a thousand witnesses, Impartial conscience, will directly prove; Then if we would not willingly transgress, Our will should swayed be by rules of love, Which holds the multitude of sins because Her sin morally to him his servants draws. " The defect of Davies, as of not a few of his contemporaries, is that, having the power of saying things rememberable enough, he set himself towrap them up and merge them in vast heaps of things altogetherunrememberable. His successors have too often resembled him only in thelatter part of his gift. His longer works (_Mirum in Modum_, _SummaTotalis_, _Microcosmus_, _The Holy Rood_, _Humours Heaven on Earth_, aresome of their eccentric titles) might move simple wonder if a century whichhas welcomed _The Course of Time_, and _Yesterday, To-day, and For Ever_, not to mention examples even more recent than these, had any great reasonto throw stones at its forerunners. But to deal with writers like Davies isa little difficult in a book which aims both at being nothing if notcritical, and at doing justice to the minor as well as to the majorluminaries of the time: while the difficulty is complicated by thenecessity of _not_ saying ditto to the invaluable labourers who havereintroduced him and others like him to readers. I am myself full of themost unfeigned gratitude to my friend Dr. Grosart, to Professor Arber, andto others, for sparing students, whose time is the least disposable thingthey have, visits to public libraries or begging at rich men's doors forthe sight of books. I should be very sorry both as a student and as a loverof literature not to possess Davies, Breton, Sylvester, Quarles, and therest, and not to read them from time to time. But I cannot help warningthose who are not professed students of the subject that in such writersthey have little good to seek; I cannot help noting the difference betweenthem and other writers of a very different order, and above all I cannothelp raising a mild protest against the encomiums which are sometimespassed on them. Southey, in that nearly best of modern books unclassified, _The Doctor_, has a story of a glover who kept no gloves that were not"Best. " But when the facts came to be narrowly inquired into, it was foundthat the ingenious tradesman had no less than five qualities--"Best, ""Better than Best, " "Better than better than Best, " "Best of All, " and the"Real Best. " Such language is a little delusive, and when I read theepithets of praise which are sometimes lavished, not by the same persons, on Breton and Watson, I ask myself what we are to say of Spenser andShakespere. Davies has no doubt also suffered from the fact that he had a contemporaryof the same name and surname, who was not only of higher rank, but ofconsiderably greater powers. Sir John Davies was a Wiltshire man of goodfamily: his mother, Mary Bennet of Pyt-house, being still represented bythe Benett-Stanfords of Dorsetshire and Brighton. Born about 1569, he was amember of the University of Oxford, and a Templar; but appears to have beenanything but a docile youth, so that both at Oxford and the Temple he cameto blows with the authorities. He seems, however, to have gone back toOxford, and to have resided there till close of middle life; some if notmost of his poems dating thence. He entered Parliament in 1601, and afterfiguring in the Opposition during Elizabeth's last years, was taken intofavour, like others in similar circumstances, by James. Immediately afterthe latter's accession Davies became a law officer for Ireland, and didgood and not unperilous service there. He was mainly resident in Irelandfor some thirteen years, producing during the time a valuable "Discovery ofthe Causes of the Irish Discontent. " For the last ten years of his life heseems to have practised as serjeant-at-law in England, frequently servingas judge or commissioner of assize, and he died in 1626. His poetical workconsists chiefly of three things, all written before 1600. These are _NosceTeipsum_, or the immortality of the soul, in quatrains, and as light as theunsuitableness of the subject to verse will allow; a singularly clevercollection of acrostics called _Astraea_, all making the name of ElizabethaRegina; and the _Orchestra_, or poem on dancing, which has made his fame. Founded as it is on a mere conceit--the reduction of all natural phenomenato a grave and regulated motion which the author calls dancing--it is oneof the very best poems of the school of Spenser, and in harmony of metre(the seven-lined stanza) and grace of illustration is sometimes not too farbehind Spenser himself. An extract from it may be fitly followed by one ofthe acrostics of _Astraea_:-- "As the victorious twins of Leda and Jove, (That taught the Spartans dancing on the sands Of swift Eurotas) dance in heaven above, Knit and united with eternal bands; Among the stars, their double image stands, Where both are carried with an equal pace, Together jumping in their turning race. "This is the net, wherein the sun's bright eye, Venus and Mars entangled did behold; For in this dance, their arms they so imply, As each doth seem the other to enfold. What if lewd wits another tale have told Of jealous Vulcan, and of iron chains! Yet this true sense that forgèd lie contains. "These various forms of dancing Love did frame, And besides these, a hundred millions more; And as he did invent, he taught the same: With goodly gesture, and with comely show, Now keeping state, now humbly honouring low. And ever for the persons and the place He taught most fit, and best according grace. " * * * * * "Each day of thine, sweet month of May, Love makes a solemn Holy Day. I will perform like duty; Since thou resemblest every way Astraea, Queen of Beauty. Both you, fresh beauties do partake, Either's aspect, doth summer make. Thoughts of young Love awaking, Hearts you both do cause to ache; And yet be pleased with aching. Right dear art thou, and so is She, Even like attractive sympathy Gains unto both, like dearness. I ween this made antiquity Name thee, sweet May of majesty, As being both like in clearness. " The chief direct followers of Spenser were, however, Giles and PhineasFletcher, and William Browne. The two first were, as has been said, thecousins of John Fletcher the dramatist, and the sons of Dr. Giles Fletcher, the author of _Licia_. The exact dates and circumstances of their lives arelittle known. Both were probably born between 1580 and 1590. Giles, thoughthe younger (?), died vicar of Alderton in Suffolk in 1623: Phineas, theelder (?), who was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge (Gileswas a member of Trinity College in the same university), also took orders, and was for nearly thirty years incumbent of Hilgay-in-the-Fens, dying in1650. Giles's extant work is a poem in four cantos or parts, generally entitled_Christ's Victory and Triumph_. He chose a curious and rather infelicitousvariation on the Spenserian stanza _ababbccc_, keeping the Alexandrine butmissing the seventh line, with a lyrical interlude here and there. Thewhole treatment is highly allegorical, and the lusciousness of Spenser isimitated and overdone. Nevertheless the versification and imagery are oftenvery beautiful, as samples of the two kinds will show:-- "The garden like a lady fair was cut That lay as if she slumber'd in delight, And to the open skies her eyes did shut; The azure fields of Heav'n were 'sembled right In a large round, set with the flow'rs of light: The flow'rs-de-luce, and the round sparks of dew, That hung upon their azure leaves did shew Like twinkling stars, that sparkle in the evening blue. "Upon a hilly bank her head she cast, On which the bower of Vain-delight was built, White and red roses for her face were placed, And for her tresses marigolds were spilt: Them broadly she displayed like flaming gilt, Till in the ocean the glad day were drowned: Then up again her yellow locks she wound, And with green fillets in their pretty cauls them bound. "What should I here depaint her lily hand, Her veins of violets, her ermine breast, Which there in orient colours living stand: Or how her gown with living leaves is drest, Or how her watchman, armed with boughy crest, A wall of prim hid in his bushes bears Shaking at every wind their leafy spears While she supinely sleeps, nor to be wakèd fears. " * * * * * "See, see the flowers that below, Now as fresh as morning blow, And of all the virgin rose, That as bright Aurora shows: How they all unleavèd die, Losing their virginity; Like unto a summer shade, But now born and now they fade. Everything doth pass away, There is danger in delay. Come, come gather then the rose, Gather it, or it you lose. All the sand of Tagus' shore Into my bosom casts his ore: All the valleys' swimming corn To my house is yearly borne: Every grape of every vine Is gladly bruis'd to make me wine, While ten thousand kings, as proud, To carry up my train have bow'd, And a world of ladies send me In my chambers to attend me. All the stars in Heaven that shine, And ten thousand more, are mine: Only bend thy knee to me, Thy wooing shall thy winning be. " _The Purple Island_, Phineas Fletcher's chief work, is an allegorical poemof the human body, written in a stanza different only from that of_Christ's Victory_ in being of seven lines only, the quintet of Giles beingcut down to a regular elegiac quatrain. This is still far below theSpenserian stanza, and the colour is inferior to that of Giles. Phineasfollows Spenser's manner, or rather his mannerisms, very closely indeed, and in detached passages not unsuccessfully, as here, where the transitionfrom Spenser to Milton is marked:-- "The early morn lets out the peeping day, And strew'd his path with golden marigolds: The Moon grows wan, and stars fly all away. Whom Lucifer locks up in wonted folds Till light is quench'd, and Heaven in seas hath flung The headlong day: to th' hill the shepherds throng And Thirsil now began to end his task and song: "'Who now, alas! shall teach my humble vein, That never yet durst peep from covert glade, But softly learnt for fear to sigh and plain And vent her griefs to silent myrtle's shade? Who now shall teach to change my oaten quill For trumpet 'larms, or humble verses fill With graceful majesty, and lofty rising skill? "'Ah, thou dread Spirit! shed thy holy fire, Thy holy flame, into my frozen heart; Teach thou my creeping measures to aspire And swell in bigger notes, and higher art: Teach my low Muse thy fierce alarms to ring, And raise my soft strain to high thundering, Tune thou my lofty song; thy battles must I sing. "'Such as thou wert within the sacred breast Of that thrice famous poet, shepherd, king; And taught'st his heart to frame his cantos best Of all that e'er thy glorious works did sing; Or as, those holy fishers once among, Thou flamedst bright with sparkling parted tongues; And brought'st down Heaven to Earth in those all-conquering songs. '" But where both fail is first in the adjustment of the harmony of theindividual stanza as a verse paragraph, and secondly in the management oftheir fable. Spenser has everywhere a certain romance-interest both ofstory and character which carries off in its steady current, where carryingoff is needed, both his allegorising and his long descriptions. TheFletchers, unable to impart this interest, or unconscious of the necessityof imparting it, lose themselves in shallow overflowings like a stream thatoverruns its bank. But Giles was a master of gorgeous colouring in phraseand rhythm, while in _The Purple Island_ there are detached passages notquite unworthy of Spenser, when he is not at his very best--that is to say, worthy of almost any English poet. Phineas, moreover, has, to leave_Britain's Ida_ alone, a not inconsiderable amount of other work. HisPiscatory Eclogues show the influence of _The Shepherd's Calendar_ asclosely as, perhaps more happily than, _The Purple Island_ shows theinfluence of _The Faërie Queene_, and in his miscellanies there is muchmusical verse. It is, however, very noticeable that even in theseoccasional poems his vehicle is usually either the actual stanza of the_Island_, or something equally elaborate, unsuited though such stanzasoften are to the purpose. These two poets indeed, though in poeticalcapacity they surpassed all but one or two veterans of their owngeneration, seem to have been wholly subdued and carried away by the mightyflood of their master's poetical production. It is probable that, had henot written, they would not have written at all; yet it is possible that, had he not written, they would have produced something much more originaland valuable. It ought to be mentioned that the influence of both uponMilton, directly and as handing on the tradition of Spenser, was evidentlyvery great. The strong Cambridge flavour (not very perceptible in Spenserhimself, but of which Milton is, at any rate in his early poems, full)comes out in them, and from _Christ's Victory_ at any rate the poet of_Lycidas_, the _Ode on the Nativity_, and _Paradise Regained_, apparently"took up, " as the phrase of his own day went, not a few commodities. The same rich borrower owed something to William Browne, who, in his turn, like the Fletchers, but with a much less extensive indebtedness, levied onSpenser. Browne, however, was free from the _genius loci_, being aDevonshire man born and of Exeter College, Oxford, by education. He wasborn, they say, in 1591, published the first part of _Britannia'sPastorals_ in 1613, made many literary and some noble acquaintances, isthought to have lived for some time at Oxford as a tutor, and either inSurrey or in his native county for the rest of his life, which is (notcertainly) said to have ended about 1643. Browne was evidently a man ofvery wide literary sympathy, which saved him from falling into the meregroove of the Fletchers. He was a personal friend and an enthusiasticdevotee of Jonson, Drayton, Chapman. He was a student of Chaucer andOccleve. He was the dear friend and associate of a poet more gifted butmore unequal than himself, George Wither. All this various literarycultivation had the advantage of keeping him from being a meremocking-bird, though it did not quite provide him with any prevailing orwholly original pipe of his own. _Britannia's Pastorals_ (the third book ofwhich remained in MS. For more than two centuries) is a narrative butextremely desultory poem, in fluent and somewhat loose couplets, diversified with lyrics full of local colour, and extremely pleasant toread, though hopelessly difficult to analyse in any short space, or indeedin any space at all. Browne seems to have meandered on exactly as the fancytook him; and his ardent love for the country, his really artistic thoughsomewhat unchastened gift of poetical description and presentment enabledhim to go on just as he pleased, after a fashion, of which here are twospecimens in different measures:-- "'May first (Quoth Marin) swains give lambs to thee; And may thy flood have seignory Of all floods else; and to thy fame Meet greater springs, yet keep thy name. May never newt, nor the toad Within thy banks make their abode! Taking thy journey from the sea May'st thou ne'er happen in thy way On nitre or on brimstone mine, To spoil thy taste! This spring of thine, Let it of nothing taste but earth, And salt conceived in their birth. Be ever fresh! Let no man dare To spoil thy fish, make lock or wear, But on thy margent still let dwell Those flowers which have the sweetest smell. And let the dust upon thy strand Become like Tagus' golden sand. Let as much good betide to thee As thou hast favour shew'd to me. '" * * * * * "Here left the bird the cherry, and anon Forsook her bosom, and for more is gone, Making such speedy flights into the thick That she admir'd he went and came so quick. Then, lest his many cherries should distaste, Some other fruit he brings than he brought last. Sometime of strawberries a little stem Oft changing colours as he gather'd them, Some green, some white, some red, on them infus'd, These lov'd, these fear'd, they blush'd to be so us'd. The peascod green, oft with no little toil He'd seek for in the fattest, fertil'st soil And rend it from the stalk to bring it to her, And in her bosom for acceptance woo her. No berry in the grove or forest grew That fit for nourishment the kind bird knew, Nor any powerful herb in open field To serve her brood the teeming earth did yield, But with his utmost industry he sought it, And to the cave for chaste Marina brought it. " _The Shepherd's Pipe_, besides reproducing Occleve, is in parts reminiscentof Chaucer, in parts of Spenser, but always characterised by the free andunshackled movement which is Browne's great charm; and the samecharacteristics appear in the few minor poems attributed to him. Browne hasbeen compared to Keats, who read and loved him, and there are certainly nota few points of resemblance. Of Keats's higher or more restrainedexcellences, such as appear in the finest passages of _St. Agnes' Eve_, and_Hyperion_, in the _Ode to a Grecian Urn_, and such minor pieces as _In aDrear-Nighted December_, Browne had nothing. But he, like Keats, had thatkind of love of Nature which is really the love of a lover; and he had, like Keats, a wonderful gift of expression of his love. [57] Nor is he everprosaic, a praise which certainly cannot be accorded to some men of fargreater repute, and perhaps of occasionally higher gifts both in his owntime and others. The rarest notes of Apollo he has not, but he is neverdriven, as the poet and friend of his, to whom we next come, was oftendriven, to the words of Mercury. This special gift was not very common atthe time; and though that time produced better poets than Browne, it isworth noting in him. He may never reach the highest poetry, but he isalways a poet. [57] Something of the same love, but unluckily much less of the same gift, occurs in the poems of a friend of Browne's once hardly known except bysome fair verses on Shakespere ("Renowned Spenser, " etc. ), but made fullyaccessible by Mr. R. Warwick Bond in 1893. This was William Basse, aretainer of the Wenman family near Thame, the author, probably orcertainly, of a quaint defence of retainership, _Sword and Buckler_ (1602), and of other poems--_Pastoral Elegies_, _Urania_, _Polyhymnia_, etc. --together with an exceedingly odd piece, _The Metamorphosis of theWalnut-Tree of Boarstall_, which is not quite like anything else of thetime. Basse, who seems also to have spelt his name "Bas, " and perhaps livedand wrote through the first forty or fifty years of the seventeenthcentury, is but a moderate poet. Still he is not contemptible, and deservesto rank as a member of the Spenserian family on the pastoral side; whilethe _Walnut-Tree_, though it may owe something to _The Oak and the Brere_, has a quaintness which is not in Spenser, and not perhaps exactly anywhereelse. The comparative impotence of even the best criticism to force writers onpublic attention has never been better illustrated than in the case ofGeorge Wither himself. The greater part of a century has passed sinceCharles Lamb's glowing eulogy of him was written, and the terms of thateulogy have never been contested by competent authority. Yet there is nocomplete collection of his work in existence, and there is no completecollection even of the poems, saving a privately printed one which isinaccessible except in large libraries, and to a few subscribers. Hissacred poems, which are not his best, were indeed reprinted in the Libraryof Old Authors; and one song of his, the famous "Shall I Wasting inDespair, " is universally known. But the long and exquisite poem of_Philarete_ was not generally known (if it is generally known now, whichmay be doubted) till Mr. Arber reprinted it in the fourth volume of his_English Garner_. Nor can _Fidelia_ and _The Shepherd's Hunting_, thingsscarcely inferior, be said to be familiar to the general reader. For thisneglect there is but one excuse, and that an insufficient one, consideringthe immense quantity of very indifferent contemporary work which has hadthe honour of modern publication. What the excuse is we shall saypresently. Wither was born at Brentworth, in the Alresford district ofHampshire (a district afterwards delightfully described by him), on 11thJune 1588. His family was respectable; and though not the eldest son, hehad at one time some landed property. He was for two years at MagdalenCollege, Oxford, of which he speaks with much affection, but was removedbefore taking his degree. After a distasteful experience of farm work, owing to reverses of fortune in his family he came to London, entered atLincoln's Inn, and for some years haunted the town and the court. In 1613he published his _Abuses Stript and Whipt_, one of the general and ratherartificial satires not unfashionable at the time. For this, although thebook has no direct personal reference that can be discovered, he wasimprisoned in the Marshalsea; and there wrote the charming poem of _TheShepherd's Hunting_, 1615, and probably also _Fidelia_, an address from afaithful nymph to an inconstant swain, which, though inferior to _TheShepherd's Hunting_ and to _Philarete_ in the highest poetical worth, is asignal example of Wither's copious and brightly-coloured style. Three yearslater came the curious personal poem of the _Motto_, and in 1622_Philarete_ itself, which was followed in the very next year by the _Hymnsand Songs of the Church_. Although Wither lived until 2d May 1667, and wasconstantly active with his pen, his _Hallelujah_, 1641, another book ofsacred verse, is the only production of his that has received or thatdeserves much praise. The last thirty years of his long life were eventfuland unfortunate. After being a somewhat fervent Royalist, he suddenlychanged his creed at the outbreak of the great rebellion, sold his estateto raise men for the Parliament, and was active in its cause with pen aswell as with sword. Naturally he got into trouble at the Restoration (as hehad previously done with Cromwell), and was imprisoned again, though aftera time he was released. At an earlier period he had been in difficultieswith the Stationers' Company on the subject of a royal patent which he hadreceived from James, and which was afterwards (though still fruitlessly)confirmed by Charles, for his _Hymns_. Indeed, Wither, though a man of veryhigh character, seems to have had all his life what men of high characternot unfrequently have, a certain facility for getting into what is vulgarlycalled hot-water. The defect in his work, which has been referred to above, and which issomewhat passed over in the criticisms of Lamb and others, is its amazinginequality. This is the more remarkable in that evidence exists of notinfrequent retouching on his part with the rather unusual result ofimprovement--a fact which would seem to show that he possessed somecritical faculty. Such possession, however, seems on the other hand to bequite incompatible with the production of the hopeless doggerel which henot infrequently signs. The felicity of language and the command ofrhythmical effect which he constantly displays, are extraordinary, as forinstance in the grand opening of his first Canticle:-- "Come kiss me with those lips of thine, For better are thy loves than wine; And as the pourèd ointments be Such is the savour of thy name, And for the sweetness of the same The virgins are in love with thee. " Compare the following almost unbelievable rubbish-- "As we with water wash away Uncleanness from our flesh, And sometimes often in a day Ourselves are fain to wash. " Even in his earlier and purely secular work there is something, though lessof this inequality, and its cause is not at all dubious. No poet, certainlyno poet of merit, seems to have written with such absolute spontaneity andwant of premeditation as Wither. The metre which was his favourite, andwhich he used with most success--the trochaic dimeter catalectic of sevensyllables--lends itself almost as readily as the octosyllable to thisfrequently fatal fluency; but in Wither's hands, at least in his youth andearly manhood, it is wonderfully successful, as here:-- "And sometimes, I do admire All men burn not with desire. Nay, I muse her servants are not Pleading love: but O they dare not: And I, therefore, wonder why They do not grow sick and die. Sure they would do so, but that, By the ordinance of Fate, There is some concealed thing So each gazer limiting, He can see no more of merit Than beseems his worth and spirit. For, in her, a grace there shines That o'erdaring thoughts confines, Making worthless men despair To be loved of one so fair. Yea the Destinies agree Some good judgments blind should be: And not gain the power of knowing Those rare beauties, in her growing. Reason doth as much imply, For, if every judging eye Which beholdeth her should there Find what excellences are; All, o'ercome by those perfections Would be captive to affections. So (in happiness unblest) She for lovers should not rest. " Nor had he at times a less original and happy command of the rhymeddecasyllabic couplet, which he sometimes handles after a fashion whichmakes one almost think of Dryden, and sometimes after a fashion (as in thelovely description of Alresford Pool at the opening of _Philarete_) whichmakes one think of more modern poets still. Besides this metricalproficiency and gift, Wither at this time (he thought fit to apologise forit later) had a very happy knack of blending the warm amatory enthusiasm ofhis time with sentiments of virtue and decency. There is in him absolutelynothing loose or obscene, and yet he is entirely free from themilk-and-water propriety which sometimes irritates the reader in such booksas Habington's _Castara_. Wither is never mawkish, though he is neverloose, and the swing of his verse at its best is only equalled by the rushof thought and feeling which animates it. As it is perhaps necessary tojustify this high opinion, we may as well give the "Alresford Pool" abovenoted. It is like Browne, but it is better than anything Browne ever did;being like Browne, it is not unlike Keats; it is also singularly like Mr. William Morris. "For pleasant was that Pool; and near it, then, Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen. It was not overgrown with boisterous sedge, Nor grew there rudely, then, along the edge A bending willow, nor a prickly bush, Nor broad-leafed flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush: But here, well ordered, was a grove with bowers; There, grassy plots, set round about with flowers. Here, you might, through the water, see the land Appear, strewed o'er with white or yellow sand. Yon, deeper was it; and the wind, by whiffs, Would make it rise, and wash the little cliffs; On which, oft pluming, sate, unfrighted then The gagling wild goose, and the snow-white swan, With all those flocks of fowl, which, to this day Upon those quiet waters breed and play. " When to this gift of description is added a frequent inspiration of purefancy, it is scarcely surprising that-- "Such a strain as might befit Some brave Tuscan poet's wit, " to borrow a couplet of his own, often adorns Wither's verse. Two other poets of considerable interest and merit belong to this period, who are rather Scotch than English, but who have usually been included inhistories of English literature--Drummond of Hawthornden, and Sir WilliamAlexander, Earl of Stirling. Both, but especially Drummond, exhibit equallywith their English contemporaries the influences which produced theElizabethan Jacobean poetry; and though I am not myself disposed to goquite so far, the sonnets of Drummond have sometimes been ranked before allothers of the time except Shakespere's. William Drummond was probably born at the beautiful seat whence he derivedhis designation, on 13th December 1585. His father was Sir John Drummond, and he was educated in Edinburgh and in France, betaking himself, likealmost all young Scotchmen of family, to the study of the law. He came backto Scotland from France in 1610, and resided there for the greater part ofhis life, though he left it on at least two occasions for long periods, once travelling on the continent for eight years to recover from the griefof losing a lady to whom he was betrothed, and once retiring to avoid theinconveniences of the Civil War. Though a Royalist, Drummond submitted tobe requisitioned against the Crown, but as an atonement he is said to havedied of grief at Charles I. 's execution in 1649. The most famous incidentsof his life are the visit that Ben Jonson paid to him, and the muchdiscussed notes of that visit which Drummond left in manuscript. It wouldappear, on the whole, that Drummond was an example of a well-known type ofcultivated dilettante, rather effeminate, equally unable to appreciateJonson's boisterous ways and to show open offence at them, and in the sameway equally disinclined to take the popular side and to endure risk andloss in defending his principles. He shows better in his verse. His sonnetsare of the true Elizabethan mould, exhibiting the Petrarchian grace andromance, informed with a fire and aspiring towards a romantic ideal beyondthe Italian. Like the older writers of the sonnet collections generally, Drummond intersperses his quatorzains with madrigals, lyrical pieces ofvarious lengths, and even with what he calls "songs, "--that is to say, longpoems in the heroic couplet. He was also a skilled writer of elegies, andtwo of his on Gustavus Adolphus and on Prince Henry have much merit. Besides the madrigals included in his sonnets he has left anothercollection entitled "Madrigals and Epigrams, " including pieces bothsentimental and satirical. As might be expected the former are much betterthan the latter, which have the coarseness and the lack of point noticeablein most of the similar work of this time from Jonson to Herrick. We havealso of his a sacred collection (again very much in accordance with thepractice of his models of the preceding generation), entitled _Flowers ofSion_, and consisting, like the sonnets, of poems of various metres. One ofthese is noticeable as suggesting the metre of Milton's "Nativity, " butwith an alteration of line number and rhyme order which spoils it. Yet afourth collection of miscellanies differs not much in constitution from theothers, and Drummond's poetical work is completed by some local pieces, such as _Forth Feasting_, some hymns and divine poems, and an attempt inMacaronic called _Polemo-Middinia_, which is perhaps not his. He was also aprose writer, and a tract, entitled _The Cypress Grove_, has been notunjustly ranked as a kind of anticipation of Sir Thomas Browne, both instyle and substance. Of his verse a sonnet and a madrigal may suffice, thefirst of which can be compared with the Sleep sonnet given earlier:-- "Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest, Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings, Indifferent host to shepherds and to kings, Sole comforter of minds which are oppressed; Lo, by thy charming rod, all breathing things Lie slumb'ring, with forgetfulness possess'd, And yet o'er me to spread thy drowsy wings Thou spar'st, alas! who cannot be thy guest. Since I am thine, O come, but with that face To inward light, which thou art wont to show, With feignèd solace ease a true felt woe; Or if, deaf god, thou do deny that grace, Come as thou wilt, and what thou wilt bequeath: I long to kiss the image of my death. " * * * * * "To the delightful green Of you, fair radiant een, Let each black yield, beneath the starry arch. Eyes, burnish'd Heavens of love, Sinople[58] lamps of Jove, Save all those hearts which with your flames you parch Two burning suns you prove; All other eyes, compared with you, dear lights Are Hells, or if not Hells, yet dumpish nights. The heavens (if we their glass The sea believe) are green, not perfect blue; They all make fair, whatever fair yet was, And they are fair because they look like you. " [58] In heraldry (but not English heraldry) = "green. " Sir William Alexander, a friend and countryman of Drummond (who bewailedhim in more than one mournful rhyme of great beauty), was born in 1580 of afamily which, though it had for some generations borne the quasi-surnameAlexander, is said to have been a branch of the Clan Macdonald. Alexanderearly took to a court life, was much concerned in the proposed planting ofNova Scotia, now chiefly remembered from its connection with the Order ofBaronets, was Secretary of State for Scotland, and was raised to thepeerage. He died in 1640. Professor Masson has called him "the second-rateScottish sycophant of an inglorious despotism. " He might as well be called"the faithful servant of monarchy in its struggle with the encroachments ofRepublicanism, " and one description would be as much question-begging asthe other. But we are here concerned only with his literary work, which wasconsiderable in bulk and quality. It consists chiefly of a collection ofsonnets (varied as usual with madrigals, etc. ), entitled _Aurora_; of along poem on _Doomsday_ in an eight-lined stanza; of a _Paraenesis_ toPrince Henry; and of four "monarchic tragedies" on _Darius_, _Croesus_, _Alexander_, and _Cæsar_, equipped with choruses and other appliances ofthe literary rather than the theatrical tragedy. It is perhaps in thesechoruses that Alexander appears at his best; for his special forte wasgrave and stately declamation, as the second of the following extracts willprove. The first is a sonnet from _Aurora_:-- "Let some bewitched with a deceitful show, Love earthly things unworthily esteem'd, And losing that which cannot be redeemed Pay back with pain according as they owe: But I disdain to cast my eyes so low, That for my thoughts o'er base a subject seem'd, Which still the vulgar course too beaten deem'd; And loftier things delighted for to know. Though presently this plague me but with pain, And vex the world with wondering at my woes: Yet having gained that long desired repose My mirth may more miraculous remain. That for the which long languishing I pine, It is a show, but yet a show divine. " * * * * * "Those who command above, High presidents of Heaven, By whom all things do move, As they have order given, What worldling can arise Against them to repine? Whilst castled in the skies With providence divine; They force this peopled round, Their judgments to confess, And in their wrath confound Proud mortals who transgress The bounds to them assigned By Nature in their mind. "Base brood of th' Earth, vain man, Why brag'st thou of thy might? The Heavens thy courses scan, Thou walk'st still in their sight; Ere thou wast born, thy deeds Their registers dilate, And think that none exceeds The bounds ordain'd by fate; What heavens would have thee to, Though they thy ways abhor, That thou of force must do, And thou canst do no more: This reason would fulfil, Their work should serve their will. "Are we not heirs of death, In whom there is no trust? Who, toss'd with restless breath, Are but a drachm of dust; Yet fools whenas we err, And heavens do wrath contract, If they a space defer Just vengeance to exact, Pride in our bosom creeps, And misinforms us thus That love in pleasure sleeps Or takes no care of us: 'The eye of Heaven beholds What every heart enfolds. '" Not a few of his other sonnets are also worth reading, and the unpromisingsubject of _Doomsday_ (which connects itself in style partly with Spenser, but perhaps still more with _The Mirror for Magistrates_), does not preventit from containing fine passages. Alexander had indeed more power ofsustained versification than his friend Drummond, though he hardly touchesthe latter in point of the poetical merit of short isolated passages andpoems. Both bear perhaps a little too distinctly the complexion of"_Gentlemen_ of the Press"--men who are composing poems because it is thefashion, and because their education, leisure, and elegant tastes lead themto prefer that form of occupation. But perhaps what is most interestingabout them is the way in which they reproduce on a smaller scale thephenomenon presented by the Scotch poetical school of the fifteenthcentury. That school, as is well known, was a direct offshoot from, orfollowing of the school of Chaucer, though in Dunbar at least it succeededin producing work almost, if not quite, original in form. In the same way, Drummond and Alexander, while able to the full to experience directly theforeign, and especially Italian influences which had been so strong on theElizabethans, were still in the main followers of the Elizabethansthemselves, and formed, as it were, a Scottish moon to the English sun ofpoetry. There is little or nothing that is distinctively national aboutthem, though in their following of the English model they show talent atleast equal to all but the best of the school they followed. But this fact, joined to those above noted, helps, no doubt, to give an air of want ofspontaneity to their verse--an air as of the literary exercise. There are other writers who might indifferently come in this chapter or inthat on Caroline poetry, for the reign of James was as much overlapped inthis respect by his son's as by Elizabeth's, and there are others who needbut slight notice, besides yet others--a great multitude--who can receiveno notice at all. The doggerel of Taylor, the water-poet (not a bad prosewriter), received both patronage and attention, which seem to have annoyedhis betters, and he has been resuscitated even in our own times. FrancisBeaumont, the coadjutor of Fletcher, has left independent poetical workwhich, on the whole, confirms the general theory that the chief executionof the joint plays must have been his partner's, but which (as in the_Letter to Ben Jonson_ and the fine stoicism of _The Honest Man's Fortune_)contains some very good things. His brother, Sir John Beaumont, who diednot so young as Francis, but at the comparatively early age of forty-four, was the author of a historical poem on _Bosworth Field_, as well as ofminor pieces of higher merit, including some remarkable criticalobservations on English verse. Two famous poems, which everyone knows byheart, the "You Meaner Beauties of the Night" of Sir Henry Wotton and the"Tell Me no more how fair She is" of Bishop Henry King, are merely perfectexamples of a style of verse which was largely if not often quite soperfectly practised by lesser or less known men, as well as by greaterones. [59] [59] The most interesting collection and selection of verse of this classand time is undoubtedly Dr. Hannah's well-known and charming but ratheroddly entitled _Poems of Raleigh, Wotton, and other Courtly Poets_ in theAldine Series. I say oddly entitled, because though Raleigh and Wotton werecertainly courtiers, it would be hard to make the name good of some of theminor contributors. There is, moreover, a class of verse which has been referred toincidentally before, and which may very likely be referred to incidentallyagain, but which is too abundant, too characteristic, and too charming notto merit a place, if no very large one, to itself. I refer to thedelightful songs which are scattered all over the plays of the period, fromGreene to Shirley. As far as Shakespere is concerned, these songs are wellenough known, and Mr. Palgrave's _Treasury_, with Mr. Bullen's and Bell's_Songs from the Dramatists_, have given an inferior currency, but still acurrency, to the best of the remainder. The earlier we have spoken of. Butthe songs of Greene and his fellows, though charming, cannot compare withthose of the more properly Jacobean poets. To name only the best of each, Ben Jonson gives us the exquisite "Queen and Huntress, " which is perhapsthe best-known piece of his whole work; the pleasant "If I freely maydiscover, " and best of all--unsurpassed indeed in any language for rollingmajesty of rhythm and romantic charm of tone--"Drink to me only with thineeyes. " Again the songs in Beaumont and Fletcher stand very high, perhapshighest of all next to Shakespere's in respect of the "woodnote wild. " Ifthe snatch of only half articulate poetry of the "Lay a garland on myhearse, " of _The Maid's Tragedy_, is really Fletcher's, he has hereequalled Shakespere himself. We may add to it the fantastic and charming"Beauty clear and fair, " of _The Elder Brother_, the comic swing of "Letthe bells ring, " and "The fit's upon me now;" all the songs withoutexception in _The Faithful Shepherdess_, which is much less a drama than amiscellany of the most delightful poetry; the lively war-song in _The MadLover_, to which Dryden owed not a little; the catch, "Drink to-day anddrown all sorrow;" the strange song of the dead host in _The Lover'sProgress_; the exquisite "Weep no more, " of _The Queen of Corinth_; thespirited "Let the mill go round, " of _The Maid in the Mill_; the "Loversrejoice, " of _Cupid's Revenge_; the "Roses, their sharp spines being gone, "which is one of the most Shakesperean things of _The Two Noble Kinsmen_;the famous "Hence, all you vain-delights, " of _The Nice Valour_, whichMilton expanded into _Il Penseroso_, and the laughing song of the sameplay. This long catalogue only contains a part of the singularly beautifulsong work of the great pair of dramatists, and as an example we may giveone of the least known from _The Captain_:-- "Tell me, dearest, what is love? 'Tis a lightning from above; 'Tis an arrow, 'tis a fire, 'Tis a boy they call Desire. 'Tis a grave, Gapes to have Those poor fools that long to prove. "Tell me more, are women true? Yes, some are, and some as you. Some are willing, some are strange Since you men first taught to change. And till troth Be in both, All shall love to love anew. "Tell me more yet, can they grieve? Yes, and sicken sore, but live, And be wise, and delay When you men are as wise as they. Then I see, Faith will be Never till they both believe. " The dirge of _Vittoria Corombona_ and the preparation for death of _TheDuchess of Malfi_ are Webster's sole but sufficient contributions to thelist. The witch songs of Middleton's _Witch_, and the gipsy, or rathertramp, songs of _More Dissemblers besides Women_ and _The Spanish Gipsy_, have very high merit. The songs of _Patient Grissell_, which are prettycertainly Dekker's, have been noticed already. The otherwise worthless playof _The Thracian Wonder_, attributed to Webster and Rowley, contains anunusual number of good songs. Heywood and Massinger were not great atsongs, and the superiority of those in _The Sun's Darling_ over the songsin Ford's other plays, seems to point to the authorship of Dekker. Finally, James Shirley has the song gift of his greater predecessors. Every oneknows "The glories of our blood and state, " but this is by no means hisonly good song; it worthily closes the list of the kind--a kind which, whenbrought together and perused separately, exhibits, perhaps, as well asanything else of equal compass, the extraordinary abundance of poeticalspirit in the age. For songs like these are not to be hammered out by themost diligent ingenuity, not to be spun by the light of the mostassiduously fed lamp. The wind of such inspiration blows where, and onlywhere, it listeth. CHAPTER IX MILTON, TAYLOR, CLARENDON, BROWNE, HOBBES During the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, or (totake literary rather than chronological dates) between the death of Baconand the publication of _Absalom and Achitophel_, there existed in England aquintet of men of letters, of such extraordinary power and individuality, that it may be doubted whether any other period of our own literature canshow a group equal to them; while it is certain that no other literature, except, perhaps, in the age of Pericles, can match them. They were all, except Hobbes (who belonged by birth, though not by date and character ofwriting, to an earlier generation than the rest), born, and they all died, within a very few years of each other. All were prose writers of the veryhighest merit; and though only one was a poet, yet he had poetry enough tospare for all the five. Of the others, Clarendon, in some of the greatestcharacteristics of the historian, has been equalled by no Englishman, andsurpassed by few foreigners. Jeremy Taylor has been called the mosteloquent of men; and if this is a bold saying, it is scarcely too bold. Hobbes stands with Bacon and Berkeley at the head of English-speakingphilosophers, and is, if not in general grasp, in range of ideas, or inliterary polish, yet in acuteness of thought and originality of expression, perhaps the superior of both his companions. The excellence of Browne isindeed more purely literary and intensely artistic first of all--a matterof expression rather than of substance, --while he is perhaps more flawedthan any of them by the fashionable vices of his time. Yet, as an artist, or rather architect, of words in the composite and florid style, it is vainto look anywhere for his superior. John Milton--the greatest, no doubt, of the five, if only because of hismastery of either harmony--was born in London on 9th December 1608, waseducated at Cambridge, studied at home with unusual intensity and controlof his own time and bent; travelled to Italy, returned, and engaged in thesomewhat unexpected task of school-keeping; was stimulated, by the outbreakof the disturbances between king and parliament, to take part withextraordinary bitterness in the strife of pamphlets on the republican andanti-prelatical side, defended the execution of the king in his capacity ofLatin secretary to the Government (to which he had been appointed in 1649);was struck with blindness, lay hid at the Restoration for some time inorder to escape the Royalist vengeance (which does not seem very seriouslyto have threatened him), composed and published in 1667 the great poem of_Paradise Lost_, followed it with that of _Paradise Regained_, did not alittle other work in prose and poetry, and died on 8th November 1674. Hehad been thrice married, and his first wife had left him within a month ofher marriage, thereby occasioning the singular series of pamphlets ondivorce, the theories of which, had she not returned, he had, it is said, intended to put into practice on his own responsibility. The generalabstinence from all but the barest biographical outline which the scale ofthis book imposes is perhaps nowhere a greater gain than in the case ofMilton. His personal character was, owing to political motives, longtreated with excessive rigour. The reaction to Liberal politics early inthe nineteenth century substituted for this rigour a somewhat excessiveadmiration, and even now the balance is hardly restored, as may be seenfrom the fact that a late biographer of his stigmatises his first wife, theunfortunate Mary Powell, as "a dull and common girl, " without a tittle ofevidence except the bare fact of her difference with her husband, and someinnuendoes (indirect in themselves, and clearly tainted as testimony) inMilton's own divorce tracts. On the whole, Milton's character was not anamiable one, nor even wholly estimable. It is probable that he never in thecourse of his whole life did anything that he considered wrong; butunfortunately, examples are not far to seek of the facility with whichdesire can be made to confound itself with deliberate approval. That he wasan exacting, if not a tyrannical husband and father, that he held in themost peremptory and exaggerated fashion the doctrine of the superiority ofman to woman, that his egotism in a man who had actually accomplished lesswould be half ludicrous and half disgusting, that his faculty ofappreciation beyond his own immediate tastes and interests was small, thathis intolerance surpassed that of an inquisitor, and that his controversialhabits and manners outdid the license even of that period of controversialabuse, --these are propositions which I cannot conceive to be disputed byany competent critic aware of the facts. If they have ever been denied, itis merely from the amiable but uncritical point of view which blinks all aman's personal defects in consideration of his literary genius. That wecannot afford to do here, especially as Milton's personal defects had nosmall influence on his literary character. But having honestly set down hisfaults, let us now turn to the pleasanter side of the subject without fearof having to revert, except cursorily, to the uglier. The same prejudice and partisanship, however, which have coloured theestimate of Milton's personal character have a little injured the literaryestimate of him. It is agreed on all hands that Johnson's acute but unjustcriticism was directed as much by political and religious prejudice as bythe operation of narrow and mistaken rules of prosody and poetry; and allthese causes worked together to produce that extraordinary verdict on_Lycidas_, which has been thought unintelligible. But it would be idle tocontend that there is not nearly as much bias on the other side in the mostglowing of his modern panegyrists--Macaulay and Landor. It is, no doubt, inregard to a champion so formidable, both as ally and as enemy, difficultto write without fear or favour, but it must be attempted. Milton's periods of literary production were three. In each of them heproduced work of the highest literary merit, but at the same timesingularly different in kind. In the first, covering the first thirty yearsof his life, he wrote no prose worth speaking of, but after juvenileefforts, and besides much Latin poetry of merit, produced the exquisitepoems of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, the _Hymn on the Nativity_, theincomparable _Lycidas_, the _Comus_ (which I have the audacity to think hisgreatest work, if scale and merit are considered), and the deliciousfragments of the _Arcades_. Then his style abruptly changed, and foranother twenty years he devoted himself chiefly to polemical pamphlets, relieved only by a few sonnets, whose strong originality and intenselypersonal savour are uniform, while their poetical merit varies greatly. Thethird period of fifteen years saw the composition of the great epics of_Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_, and of the tragedy of _SamsonAgonistes_, together with at least the completion of a good deal of prose, including a curious _History of England_, wherein Milton expatiates with asingular gusto over details which he must have known, and indeed allowsthat he knew, to be fabulous. The production of each of these periods maybe advantageously dealt with separately and in order. Milton's Latin compositions both in prose and verse lie rather outside ofour scope, though they afford a very interesting subject. It is perhapssufficient to say that critics of such different times, tempers, andattitudes towards their subject as Johnson and the late Rector ofLincoln, --critics who agree in nothing except literary competence, --arepractically at one as to the remarkable excellence of Milton's Latin verseat its best. It is little read now, but it is a pity that any one who canread Latin should allow himself to be ignorant of at least the beautiful_Epitaphium Damonis_ on the poet's friend, Charles Diodati. The dates of the few but exquisite poems of the first period are known withsome but not complete exactness. Milton was not an extremely precociouspoet, and such early exercises as he has preserved deserve the descriptionof being rather meritorious than remarkable. But in 1629, his year ofdiscretion, he struck his own note first and firmly with the hymn on the"Nativity. " Two years later the beautiful sonnet on his three-and-twentiethyear followed. _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ date not before, but probablynot much after, 1632; _Comus_ dating from 1634, and _Lycidas_ from 1637. All these were written either in the later years at Cambridge, or in theperiod of independent study at Horton in Buckinghamshire--chiefly in thelatter. Almost every line and word of these poems has been commented on andfought over, and I cannot undertake to summarise the criticism of others. Among the greater memorabilia of the subject is that wonderful Johnsonism, the description of _Lycidas_ as "harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and thenumbers unpleasing;" among the minor, the fact that critics have gravelyquarrelled among themselves over the epithet "monumental" applied to theoak in _Il Penseroso_, when Spenser's "Builder Oak" (Milton was apassionate student of Spenser) would have given them the key at once, evenif the same phrase had not occurred, as I believe it does, in Chaucer, alsoa favourite of Milton's. We have only space here for first-hand criticism. This body of work, then, is marked by two qualities: an extraordinarydegree of poetic merit, and a still more extraordinary originality ofpoetic kind. Although Milton is always Milton, it would be difficult tofind in another writer five poems, or (taking the _Allegro_ and itscompanion together) four, so different from each other and yet of such highmerit. And it would be still more difficult to find poems so independent intheir excellence. Neither the influence of Jonson nor the influence ofDonne--the two poetical influences in the air at the time, and the latterespecially strong at Cambridge--produced even the faintest effect onMilton. We know from his own words, and should have known even if he hadnot mentioned it, that Shakespere and Spenser were his favourite studies inEnglish; yet, save in mere scattered phrases none of these poems owesanything to either. He has teachers but no models; masters, but only in theway of learning how to do, not what to do. The "certain vital marks, " ofwhich he somewhat arrogantly speaks, are indeed there. I do not myself seethem least in the poem on the "Nativity, " which has been the least generalfavourite. It shows youth in a certain inequality, in a slight overdose ofornament, and especially in a very inartistic conclusion. But nowhere evenin Milton does the mastery of harmonies appear better than in the exquisiterhythmical arrangement of the piece, in the almost unearthly beauty of theexordium, and in the famous stanzas beginning "The oracles are dumb. " Itmust be remembered that at this time English lyric was in a veryrudimentary and ill-organised condition. The exquisite snatches in thedramatists had been snatches merely; Spenser and his followers had chieflyconfined themselves to elaborate stanzas of full length lines, andelsewhere the octo-syllabic couplet, or the quatrain, or the dangerous"eights and sixes, " had been chiefly affected. The sestines and canzons andmadrigals of the sonneteers, for all the beauty of their occasionalflashes, have nothing like the gracious and sustained majesty of the"Nativity" piece. For technical perfection in lyric metre, that is not somuch to be sung as said, this ode has no precedent rival. As for_L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, who shall praise them fitly? They are amongthe few things about which there is no difference of opinion, which are asdelightful to childhood as to criticism, to youth as to age. To dwell ontheir technical excellences (the chief of which is the unerring precisionwith which the catalectic and acatalectic lines are arranged andinterchanged) has a certain air of impertinence about it. Even a criticalKing Alfonso El Sabio could hardly think it possible that Milton might havetaken a hint here, although some persons have, it seems, been disturbedbecause skylarks do not come to the window, just as others are troubledbecause the flowers in _Lycidas_ do not grow at the same time, and becausethey think they could see stars through the "star-proof" trees of the_Arcades_. The fragments of the masque just mentioned consist only of three songs andan address in rhymed couplets. Of the songs, those ending-- Such a rural queen, All Arcadia hath not seen, are equal to anything that Milton has done; the first song and the address, especially the latter, do not fall far below them. But it is in _Comus_that, if I have any skill of criticism, Milton's poetical power is at itsgreatest height. Those who judge poetry on the ground of bulk, or oforiginality of theme, or of anything else extra-poetical, --much more those(the greater number) who simply vary transmitted ideas, --may be scandalisedat this assertion, but that will hardly matter much. And indeed theindebtedness of _Comus_ in point of subject (it is probably limited to theOdyssey, which is public property, and to George Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_, which gave little but a few hints of story) is scarcely greater than thatof _Paradise Lost_; while the form of the drama, a kind nearly as venerableand majestic as that of the epic, is completely filled. And in _Comus_there is none of the stiffness, none of the _longueurs_, none of the almostludicrous want of humour, which mar the larger poem. Humour indeed was whatMilton always lacked; had he had it, Shakespere himself might hardly havebeen greater. The plan is not really more artificial than that of the epic;though in the latter case it is masked to us by the scale, by the grandeurof the personages, and by the familiarity of the images to all men who havebeen brought up on the Bible. The versification, as even Johnson saw, isthe versification of _Paradise Lost_, and to my fancy at any rate it has aspring, a variety, a sweep and rush of genius, which are but rarely presentlater. As for its beauty in parts, _quis vituperavit_? It is impossible tosingle out passages, for the whole is golden. The entering address ofComus, the song "Sweet Echo, " the descriptive speech of the Spirit, and themagnificent eulogy of the "sun-clad power of chastity, " would be the mostbeautiful things where all is beautiful, if the unapproachable "Sabrinafair" did not come later, and were not sustained before and after, fornearly two hundred lines of pure nectar. If poetry could be taught by thereading of it, then indeed the critic's advice to a poet might be limitedto this: "Give your days and nights to the reading of _Comus_. " The sole excuses for Johnson's amazing verdict on _Lycidas_ are that it isnot quite so uniformly good, and that in his strictures on its "rhyme" and"numbers" he was evidently speaking from the point of view at which theregular couplet is regarded as the _ne plus ultra_ of poetry. There areindeed blotches in it. The speech of Peter, magnificently as it isintroduced, and strangely as it has captivated some critics, who seem tothink that anything attacking the Church of England must be poetry, is outof place, and in itself is obscure, pedantic, and grotesque. There is someover-classicism, and the scale of the piece does not admit the display ofquite such sustained and varied power as in _Comus_. But what there is, isso exquisite that hardly can we find fault with Mr. Pattison's hyperbolewhen he called _Lycidas_ the "high-water mark of English poetry. "High-water mark even in the physical world is a variable limit. Shakespereconstantly, and some other poets here and there in short passages go beyondMilton. But in the same space we shall nowhere find anything that can outgothe passage beginning "Alas what boots it, " down to "head of thine, " andthe whole conclusion from "Return Alpheus. " For melody of versification, for richness of images, for curious felicity of expression, these cannot besurpassed. "But O the heavy change"--to use an irresistible quotation, the moreirresistible that the change is foreshadowed in _Lycidas_ itself--from thegolden poetry of these early days to the prose of the pamphlets. It is notthat Milton's literary faculty is less conspicuous here, or lessinteresting. There is no English prose before him, none save Taylor's andBrowne's in his time, and absolutely none after him that can compare withthe finest passages of these singular productions. The often quotedpersonal descriptions of his aims in life, his early literary studies, hisviews of poetry and so forth, are almost equal in the "other harmony ofprose" to _Comus_ and _Lycidas_. The deservedly famous _Areopagitica_ isfull of the most splendid concerted pieces of prose-music, and hardlyanywhere from the _Tractate of Reformation Touching Church Discipline_ tothe _History of Britain_, which he revised just before his death, is itpossible to read a page without coming across phrases, passages, and evenwhole paragraphs, which are instinct with the most splendid life. But thedifference between Milton's poetry and his prose is, that in verse he isconstantly under the restraint (sometimes, in his later work especially, too much under the restraint) of the sense of style; while in his prose heseems to be wholly emancipated from it. Even in his finest passages henever seems to know or to care how a period is going to end. He pilesclause on clause, links conjunction to conjunction, regardless of breath, or sense, or the most ordinary laws of grammar. The second sentence of hisfirst prose work contains about four hundred words, and is broken in thecourse of them like a wounded snake. In his very highest flights he willsuddenly drop to grotesque and bathos; and there is no more difficult task(_haud inexpertus loquor_) than the selection from Milton of any passage oflength which shall not contain faults of which a modern schoolboy orgutter-journalist would be ashamed. Nor is the matter made much better bythe consideration that it is not so much ignorance as temper which is thecause of this deformity. Lest it be thought that I speak harshly, let mequote from the late Mr. Mark Pattison, a strong sympathiser with Milton'spolitics, in complete agreement if not with his religious views, yet withhis attitude towards dominant ecclesiasticism, and almost an idolater ofhim from the purely literary point of view. In "_Eikonoclastes_, " Milton'sreply to _Eikon Basilike_, Mr. Pattison says, and I do not care to attemptany improvement on the words, "Milton is worse than tedious: his reply isin a tone of rude railing and insolent swagger which would have been alwaysunbecoming, but which at this moment was grossly indecent. " Elsewhere (andagain I have nothing to add) Mr. Pattison describes Milton's prosepamphlets as "a plunge into the depths of vulgar scurrility and libelbelow the level of average gentility and education. " But the Rector ofLincoln has not touched, or has touched very lightly, on the fault abovenoted, the profound lack of humour that these pamphlets display. Othershave been as scurrilous, as libellous, as unfair; others have prostitutedliterary genius to the composition of paid lampoons; but some at least ofthem have been saved by the all-saving sense of humour. As any one whoremembers the dreadful passage about the guns in _Paradise Lost_ must know, the book of humour was to Milton a sealed book. He has flashes of wit, though not many; his indignation of itself sometimes makes him reallysarcastic. But humorous he is never. Destitute of this, the one saving grace of polemical literature, he plungedat the age of thirty-three into pamphlet writing. With a few exceptions hisproduction in this kind may be thrown into four classes, --the_Areopagitica_ and the _Letter to Hartlib_ (much the best of the whole)standing outside. The first class attacks prelatical government, and bydegrees glides, under the guise of apologetics for the famous_Smectymnuus_, into a fierce and indecent controversy with Bishop Hall, containing some of the worst examples of the author's deplorable inabilityto be jocular. Then comes the divorce series, which, with all its variedlearning, is chiefly comic, owing to Milton's unfortunate blindness to thefact that he was trying to make a public question out of private grievancesof the particular kind which most of all demand silence. Next rank thepieces composing the Apologia of regicide, the _Eikonoclastes_, thecontroversy with Salmasius (written in Latin), and the postscript thereto, devoted to the obscure Morus. And lastly come the pamphlets in which, withsingular want of understanding of the course of events, Milton tried toargue Monk and the weary nation out of the purpose to shake off the heavyyoke of so-called liberty. The _History of Britain_, the very agreeablefragment on the _History of Muscovy_, the late _Treatise Against Popery_, in which the author holds out a kind of olive branch to the Church ofEngland, in the very act of proclaiming his Arianism, and the two littlemasterpieces already referred to, are independent of any suchclassification. Yet even in them sometimes, as always in the others, _furorarma ministrat_; and supplies them as badly as if he were supplying bycontract. Nevertheless both Milton's faults and his merits as a prose writer are ofthe most remarkable and interesting character. The former consist chieflyin the reckless haste with which he constructs (or rather altogetherneglects the construction of) his periods and sentences, in an occasionalconfusion of those rules of Latin syntax which are only applicable to afully inflected language with the rules necessary in a language sodestitute of inflections as English, and in a lavish and sometimes bothneedless and tasteless adaptation of Latin words. All these were faults ofthe time, but it is true that they are faults which Milton, like hiscontemporaries Taylor and Browne, aggravated almost wilfully. Of the threeMilton, owing no doubt to the fury which animated him, is by far the mostfaulty and uncritical. Taylor is the least remarkable of the three forclassicisms either of syntax or vocabulary; and Browne's excesses in thisrespect are deliberate. Milton's are the effect of blind passion. Yet thepassages which diversify and relieve his prose works are far more beautifulin their kind than anything to be found elsewhere in English prose. Thoughhe never trespasses into purely poetical rhythm, the solemn music of hisown best verse is paralleled in these; and the rugged and grandiosevocabulary (it is particularly characteristic of Milton that he mixes theextremest vernacular with the most exquisite and scholarly phrasing) isfused and moulded with an altogether extraordinary power. Nor can we noticeless the abundance of striking phrase, now quaint, now grand, now forcible, which in short clauses and "jewels five words long" occurs constantly, evenin the passages least artistically finished as wholes. There is no Englishprose author whose prose is so constantly racy with such a distinct andvaried savour as Milton's. It is hardly possible to open him anywhere afterthe fashion of the _Sortes Virgilianæ_ without lighting on a line or acouple of lines, which for the special purpose it is impossible to improve. And it might be contended with some plausibility that this abundance ofjewels, or purple patches, brings into rather unfair prominence the slipsof grammar and taste, the inequalities of thought, the deplorable attemptsto be funny, the rude outbursts of bargee invective, which also occur sonumerously. One other peculiarity, or rather one result of thesepeculiarities, remains to be noticed; and that is that Milton's prose isessentially inimitable. It would be difficult even to caricature or toparody it; and to imitate it as his verse, at least his later verse, hasbeen so often imitated, is simply impossible. The third and, in popular estimation, the most important period of Milton'sproduction was again poetical. The characteristics of the poetry of thethree great works which illustrate it are admittedly uniform, though in_Samson Agonistes_ they exhibit themselves in a harder, drier, moreossified form than in the two great epics. This relation is only arepetition of the relation between _Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_themselves on the one hand, and the poems of twenty years earlier, especially _Comus_ and _Lycidas_, on the other. The wonderful Miltonicstyle, so artificial and yet such a triumph of art, is evident even soearly as the ode on the "Nativity, " and it merely developed its owncharacteristics up to the _Samson_ of forty years later. That it is a realstyle and not merely a trick, like so many others, is best shown by thefact that it is very hard, if not impossible, to analyse it finally intoelements. The common opinion charges Milton with Latinising heavily; and sohe does. But we open _Paradise Lost_ at random, and we find a dozen lines, and not the least beautiful (the Third Day of Creation), without a word inthem that is not perfectly simple English, or if of Latin origin, naturalised long before Milton's time, while the syntax is also quitevernacular. Again it is commonly thought that the habits of antithesis andparallelism, of omission of articles, of reversing the position ofadjectives and adverbs, are specially Miltonic. Certainly Milton oftenindulges in them; yet in the same way the most random dipping will findpassages (and any number of them) where no one of these habits isparticularly or eminently present, and yet which every one would recogniseas Miltonic. As far as it is possible to put the finger on one peculiaritywhich explains part of the secret of Milton's pre-eminence, I should myselfselect his unapproached care and felicity in building what may be calledthe verse-paragraph. The dangers of blank verse (Milton's preference forwhich over rhyme was only one of his numerous will-worships) are many; butthe two greatest lie in easily understood directions. With the sensegenerally or frequently ending as the line ends (as may be seen in theearly dramatists and in many bad poets since), it becomes intolerably stiffand monotonous. With the process of _enjambement_ or overlapping, promiscuously and unskilfully indulged (the commonest fault during the lasttwo centuries), it is apt to degenerate into a kind of metrical and barelymetrical prose, distinguished from prose proper by less variety of cadence, and by an occasional awkward sacrifice of sense and natural arrangement tothe restrictions which the writer accepts, but by which he knows not how toprofit. Milton has avoided both these dangers by adhering to what I haveventured to call the verse-paragraph--that is to say, by arranging thedivisions of his sense in divisions of verse, which, albeit identical andnot different in their verse integers, are constructed with as muchinternal concerted variety as the stanzas or strophes of a so-calledPindaric ode. Of the apparently uniform and monotonous blank verse he hasmade an instrument of almost protean variety by availing himself of theinfinite permutations of cadence, syllabic sound, variety of feet, andadjustment of sense to verse. The result is that he has, it may almost besaid, made for himself out of simple blank verse all the conveniences ofthe line, the couplet, and the stanza, punctuating and dividing by cadence, not rhyme. No device that is possible within his limits--even to that mostdangerous one of the pause after the first syllable of a line which has"enjambed" from the previous one--is strange to him, or sparingly used byhim, or used without success. And it is only necessary to contrast hisverse with the blank verse of the next century, especially in its two chiefexamples, Thomson and Young, --great verse-smiths both of them, --to observehis superiority in art. These two, especially Thomson, try theverse-paragraph system, but they do it ostentatiously and clumsily. Thomson's trick of ending such paragraphs with such lines as "And Thulebellows through her utmost isles, " often repeated with only verbalsubstitutions, is apt to make the reader think with a smile of the breathof relief which a man draws after a serious effort. "Thank heaven thatparagraph's done!" the poet seems to be saying. Nothing of the kind is everto be found in Milton. It is only on examination that the completeness ofthese divisions is perceived. They are linked one to another with the sameincomparably artful concealment of art which links their several andinternal clauses. And thus it is that Milton is able to carry his readersthrough (taking both poems together) sixteen books of epic, without muchnarrative interest, with foregone conclusions, with long passages which aremerely versifications of well-known themes, and with others which the mostfavourable critics admit to be, if not exactly dull, yet certainly notlively. Something the same may be said of _Samson_, though here a decidedstiffening and mannerising of the verse is to some extent compensated bythe pathetic and human interest of the story. It is to be observed, however, that Milton has here abused the redundant syllable (the chiefpurely poetical mistake of which he has been guilty in any part of hiswork, and which is partly noticeable in _Comus_), and that his choric odesare but dry sticks in comparison with _Lycidas_. It may be thought strange that I should say little or nothing of thesubject of these immortal poems. But, in the first place, those critics ofpoetry who tell us that "all depends on the subject" seem to forget that, according to this singular dictum, there is no difference between poetryand prose--between an epic and a blue-book. I prefer--having been broughtup at the feet of Logic--to stick to the genus and differentia of poetry, and not to its accidents. Moreover, the matter of _Paradise Lost_ and itssequel is so universally known that it becomes unnecessary, and has been somuch discussed that it seems superfluous, to rediscuss it. The inquiriesinto Milton's indebtedness to forerunners strike me as among the idlestinquiries of the kind--which is saying a great deal. Italians, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Englishmen even, had doubtless treated the Creation and the Fall, Adam and Satan, before him. Perhaps he read them; perhaps he borrowed fromthem. What then? Does any one believe that Andreini or Vondel, Sylvester orDu Bartas, could have written, or did in any measurable degree contributeto the writing of _Paradise Lost_? If he does he must be left to hisopinion. Reference may perhaps be made to some remarks in Chapter IV. On thecomparative position of Milton in English poetry with the only two writerswho can be compared to him, if bulk and majesty of work be taken intoconsideration, and not merely occasional bursts of poetry. Of his ownpoetical powers I trust that I shall not be considered a niggard admirer, because, both in the character of its subject (if we are to considersubjects at all) and in its employment of rhyme, that greatest mechanicalaid of the poet, _The Faërie Queene_ seems to me greater, or becauseMilton's own earlier work seems to me to rank higher than _Paradise Lost_. The general opinion is, of course, different; and one critic of no meanrepute, Christopher North, has argued that _Paradise Lost_ is the only"great poem" in existence. That question need not be argued here. It issufficient to say that Milton is undoubtedly one of the few great poets inthe history of the world, and that if he falls short of Homer, Dante, andShakespere, it is chiefly because he expresses less of that humanity, bothuniversal and quintessential, which they, and especially the last, put intoverse. Narrowness is his fault. But the intense individuality which oftenaccompanies narrowness is his great virtue--a virtue which no poet, whichno writer either in verse or prose, has ever had in greater measure thanhe, and which hardly any has been able to express with more varied andexquisite harmony. Jeremy Taylor, the ornament and glory of the English pulpit, was born atCambridge in 1613. He was the son of a barber, but was well educated, andwas able to enter Caius College as a sizar at thirteen. He spent sevenyears there, and took both degrees and orders at an unusually early age. Apparently, however, no solid endowment was offered him in his ownuniversity, and he owed such preferment as he had (it was never very great)to a chance opportunity of preaching at St. Paul's and a recommendation toLaud. That prelate--to whom all the infinite malignity of political andsectarian detraction has not been able to deny the title of an encourager, as few men have encouraged them, of learning and piety--took Taylor underhis protection, made him his chaplain, and procured him incorporation atOxford, a fellowship at All Souls, and finally the rectory of Uppingham. Tothis Taylor was appointed in 1638, and next year he married a lady who borehim several sons, but died young. Taylor early joined the king at Oxford, and is supposed to have followed his fortunes in the field; it is certainthat his rectory, lying in a Puritan district, was very soon sequestrated, though not by any form of law. What took him into Wales and caused him tomarry his second wife, Joanna Brydges (an heiress on a small scale, andsaid to have been a natural daughter of Charles I. ), is not known. But hesojourned in the principality during the greater part of the Commonwealthperiod, and was much patronised by the Earl of Carbery, who, while residentat Golden Grove, made him his chaplain. He also made the acquaintance ofother persons of interest, the chief of whom were, in London (which hevisited not always of his own choice, for he was more than onceimprisoned), John Evelyn, and in Wales, Mrs. Katherine Philips, "thematchless Orinda, " to whom he dedicated one of the most interesting of hisminor works, the _Measure and Offices of Friendship_. Not long before theRestoration he was offered, and strongly pressed to accept, the post oflecturer at Lisburn, in Ireland. He does not seem to have taken at allkindly to the notion, but was over-persuaded, and crossed the Channel. Itwas perhaps owing to this false step that, when the Restoration arrived, the preferment which he had in so many ways merited only came to him in thetents of Kedar. He was made Bishop of Down and Connor, held that see forseven years, and died (after much wrestling with Ulster Presbyterians andsome domestic misfortune) of fever in 1667. His work is voluminous and always interesting; but only a small part of itconcerns us directly here, as exhibiting him at his best and most peculiarin the management of English prose. He wrote, it should be said, a fewverses by no means destitute of merit, but they are so few, in comparisonto the bulk of his work, that they may be neglected. Taylor's strong pointwas not accuracy of statement or logical precision. His longest work, the_Ductor Dubitantium_, an elaborate manual of casuistry, is constantlymarred by the author's inability to fix on a single point, and to keep hisargumentation close to that. In another, the _Unum Necessarium_, orDiscourse on Repentance, his looseness of statement and want of care indriving several horses at once, involved him in a charge of Pelagianism, orsomething like it, which he wrote much to disprove, but which has so farlasted as to justify modern theologians in regarding his ideas on this andother theological points as, to say the least, confused. All over his workinexact quotation from memory, illicit argumentation, and an abidinginconsistency, mar the intellectual value, affecting not least his famous_Liberty of Prophesying_, or plea for toleration against the newPresbyterian uniformity, --the conformity of which treatise with modernideas has perhaps made some persons slow to recognise its faults. Theseshortcomings, however, are not more constant in Taylor's work than hisgenuine piety, his fervent charity, his freedom from personal arrogance andpretentiousness, and his ardent love for souls; while neither shortcomingsnor virtues of this kind concern us here so much as the extraordinaryrhetorical merits which distinguish all his work more or less, and whichare chiefly noticeable in his Sermons, especially the Golden Grove course, and the funeral sermon on Lady Carbery, in his _Contemplations of the Stateof Man_, and in parts of his _Life of Christ_, and of the universallypopular and admirable tractates on _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_. Jeremy Taylor's style is emphatically and before all things florid andornate. It is not so elaborately quaint as Browne's; it is not so stifflysplendid as Milton's; it is distinguished from both by a much lessadmixture of Latinisms; but it is impossible to call it either verballychastened or syntactically correct. Coleridge--an authority always to bediffered with cautiously and under protest--holds indeed a differentopinion. He will have it that Browne was the corruptor, though a corruptorof the greatest genius, in point of vocabulary, and that, as far as syntaxis concerned, in Jeremy Taylor the sentences are often extremely long, andyet are generally so perspicuous in consequence of their logical structurethat they require no reperusal to be understood. And he will have the sameto be true not only of Hooker (which may pass), but of Milton, in referenceto whom admirers not less strong than Coleridge hold that he sometimesforgets the period altogether. It must be remembered that Coleridge in these remarks was fighting thebattle of the recoverers of our great seventeenth century writers againstthe devotees of "correctness, " and that in the very same context he makesthe unpardonable assertion that Gibbon's manner is "the worst of all, " andthat Tacitus "writes in falsetto as compared to Tully. " This is to "fight aprize" in the old phrase, not to judge from the catholic and universalstandpoint of impartial criticism; and in order to reduce Coleridge'sassertions to that standard we must abate nearly as much from his praise ofTaylor as from his abuse of Gibbon--an abuse, by the way, which isstrangely contrasted with praise of "Junius. " It is not true that, exceptby great complaisance of the reader, Jeremy Taylor's long sentences are atonce understandable. They may, of course, and generally can be understood_kata to semaino menon_, as a telegram with half the words left out may atthe other end of the scale be understood. But they constantly withstandeven a generous parser, even one who is to the fullest extent ready toallow for idiom and individuality. They abuse in particular the conjunctionto a most enormous extent--coupling by its means propositions which have nological connection, which start entirely different trains of thought, andwhich are only united because carelessness and fashion combined made itunnecessary for the writer to take the little extra trouble necessary fortheir separation. Taylor will, in the very middle of his finest passages, and with hardly so much as a comma's break, change _oratio obliqua_ to_oratio recta_, interrupt the sequence of tenses, make his verbs agree withthe nearest noun, irrespective of the connection, and in short, though hewas, while in Wales, a schoolmaster for some time, and author of agrammatical treatise, will break Priscian's head with the calmestunconcern. It is quite true that these faults mainly occur in his morerhetorical passages, in his exercises rather of spoken than of writtenprose. But that, as any critic who is not an advocate must see, is nopalliation. The real palliation is that the time had not yet aroused itselfto the consciousness of the fact that letting English grammar at one momentgo to the winds altogether, and at the next subjecting it to the mostinappropriate rules and licenses of Latin, was not the way to secure theestablishment of an accomplished and generally useful English prose. Nostranger instance of prejudice can be given than that Coleridge, on thepoint of asking, and justly, from Dryden "a stricter grammar, " should exaltto the skies a writer compared to whom Dryden is grammatically impeccable. But a recognition of the fact that Taylor distinctly belongs to theantinomians of English prose, or at least to those guiltless heathens wholived before the laws of it had been asserted, can not in any competentcritic dull the sense of the wonderful beauty of his style. It has beensaid that this beauty is entirely of the florid and ornate order, lendingitself in this way easily enough to the witty and well-worded, thoughunjust and ungenerous censure which South pronounced on it after theauthor's death. It may or may not be that the phrases there censured, "Thefringes of the north star, " and "The dew of angels' wings, " and "Thus haveI seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion, " are not of that "apostolicplainness" that a Christian minister's speech should have. But they andtheir likes are extremely beautiful--save that in literature no less thanin theology South has justly perstringed Taylor's constant and mostunworthy affectation of introducing a simile by "so I have seen. " In thenext age the phrase was tediously abused, and in the age after, and eversince, it became and has remained mere burlesque; but it was never good;and in the two fine specimen passages which follow it is a distinct blot:-- _The Prayers of Anger and of Lust. _ "Prayer is the peace of our spirit, the stillness of our thoughts, the evenness of recollection, the seat of meditation, the rest of our cares, and the calm of our tempest. Prayer is the issue of a quiet mind, of untroubled thoughts; it is the daughter of charity and the sister of meekness; and he that prays to God with an angry--that is a troubled and discomposed--spirit, is like him that retires into a battle to meditate and sets up his closet in the outquarters of an army, and chooses a frontier garrison to be wise in. Anger is a perfect alienation of the mind from prayer, and therefore is contrary to that attention which presents our prayers in a right line to God. For so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, soaring upwards and singing as he rises and hopes to get to Heaven and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it could recover by the vibration and frequent weighing of his wings; till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight and did rise and sing as if it had learned music and motion from an angel as he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries here below. So is the prayer of a good man: when his affairs have required business, and his business was matter of discipline, and his discipline was to pass upon a sinning person, or had a design of charity, his duty met with infirmities of a man and anger was its instrument, and the instrument became stronger than the prime agent and raised a tempest and overruled the man; and then his prayer was broken and his thoughts troubled. * * * * * "For so an impure vapour--begotten of the slime of the earth by the fevers and adulterous heats of an intemperate summer sun, striving by the ladder of a mountain to climb to heaven and rolling into various figures by an uneasy, unfixed revolution, and stopped at the middle region of the air, being thrown from his pride and attempt of passing towards the seat of the stars--turns into an unwholesome flame and, like the breath of hell, is confined into a prison of darkness and a cloud, till it breaks into diseases, plagues and mildews, stinks and blastings. So is the prayer of an unchaste person. It strives to climb the battlements of heaven, but because it is a flame of sulphur salt and bitumen, and was kindled in the dishonourable regions below, derived from Hell and contrary to God, it cannot pass forth to the element of love; but ends in barrenness and murmurs, fantastic expectations and trifling imaginative confidences; and they at last end in sorrows and despair. " Indeed, like all very florid writers, Taylor is liable to eclipses oftaste; yet both the wording of his flights and the occasion of them (theyare to be found _passim_ in the _Sermons_) are almost wholly admirable. Itis always a great and universal idea--never a mere conceit--that fires him. The shortness and dangers of life, the weakness of children, the fragilityof women's beauty and men's strength, the change of the seasons, thevicissitudes of empires, the impossibility of satisfying desire, thedisgust which follows satiety--these are, if any one chooses, commonplaceenough; yet it is the observation of all who have carefully studiedliterature, and the experience of all who have observed their own thoughts, that it is always in relation to these commonplaces that the most beautifulexpressions and the noblest sentiments arise. The uncommon thought is toolikely if not too certain to be an uncommon conceit, and if not worthless, yet of inferior worth. Among prose writers Taylor is unequalled for histouches of this universal material, for the genius with which he makes thecommon uncommon. For instance, he has the supreme faculty of always makingthe verbal and the intellectual presentation of the thought alikebeautiful, of appealing to the ear and the mind at the same time, of neverdepriving the apple of gold of its picture of silver. Yet for all this thecharge of over-elaboration which may justly be brought against Browne veryrarely hits Taylor. He seldom or never has the appearance which ornatewriters of all times, and of his own more especially, so often have, ofgoing back on a thought or a phrase to try to better it--of beingstimulated by actual or fancied applause to cap the climax. His mostbeautiful passages come quite suddenly and naturally as the subjectrequires and as the thought strikes light in his mind. Nor are they ever, as Milton's so often are, marred by a descent as rapid as their rise. He isnever below a certain decent level; he may return to earth from heaven, buthe goes no lower, and reaches even his lower level by a quiet and equablesinking. As has been fully allowed, he has grave defects, the defects ofhis time. But from some of these he was conspicuously free, and on thewhole no one in English prose (unless it be his successor here) has so muchcommand of the enchanter's wand as Jeremy Taylor. Sir Thomas Browne was born in the heart of London in 1605, his father (ofwhom little is known except one or two anecdotes corresponding with thecharacter of the son) having been a merchant of some property, and claimingdescent from a good family in Cheshire. This father died when he was quiteyoung, and Browne is said to have been cheated by his guardians; but he wasevidently at all times of his life in easy circumstances, and seems to havehad no complaint to make of his stepfather, Sir Thomas Dutton. Thisstepfather may at least possibly have been the hero of the duel with SirHatton Cheeke, which Mr. Carlyle has made famous. With him Browne visitedIreland, having previously been brought up at Winchester and at BroadgatesHall, which became, during his own residence, Pembroke College, at Oxford. Later he made the usual grand tour. Then he took medical degrees; practisedit is said, though on no very precise evidence, both in Oxfordshire andYorkshire; settled, why is not known, at Norwich; married in 1641 DorothyMileham, a lady of good family in his adopted county; was a steady Royalistthrough the troubles; acquired a great name for medical and scientificknowledge, though he was not a Fellow of the Royal Society; was knighted byCharles II. In 1662, and died in 1682. His first literary appearance hadbeen made forty years earlier in a way very common in French literaryhistory, but so uncommon in English as to have drawn from Johnson a ratherunwontedly illiberal sneer. At a time unknown, but by his own accountbefore his thirtieth year (therefore before 1635), Browne had written the_Religio Medici_. It was, according to the habit of the time, copied andhanded about in MS. (there exist now five MS. Copies showing remarkabledifferences with each other and the printed copies), and in 1642 it gotinto print. A copy was sent by Lord Dorset to the famous Sir Kenelm Digby, then under confinement for his opinions, and the husband of Venetia wrotecertain not very forcible and not wholly complimentary remarks which, asBrowne was informed, were at once put to press. A correspondence ensued, and Browne published an authorised copy, in which perhaps a little"economy" might be noticed. The book made an extraordinary impression, andwas widely translated and commented on in foreign languages, though itsvogue was purely due to its intrinsic merits, and not at all to thecircumstances which enabled Milton (rather arrogantly and not with absolutetruth) to boast that "Europe rang from side to side" with his defence ofthe execution of Charles I. Four years later, in 1646, Browne published hislargest and in every sense most popular book, the _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_or _Enquiry into Vulgar Errors_. Twelve more years passed before thegreatest, from a literary point of view, of his works, the _Hydriotaphia_or _Urn-Burial_, --a magnificent descant on the vanity of human life, basedon the discovery of certain cinerary urns in Norfolk, --appeared, in companywith the quaint _Garden of Cyrus_, a half-learned, half-fanciful discussionof the mysteries of the quincunx and the number five. Nor did he publishanything more himself; but two collections of posthumous works were issuedafter his death, the most important item of which is the _ChristianMorals_, and the total has been swelled since by extracts from his MSS. , which at the death of his grandson and namesake in 1710 were sold byauction. Most fortunately they were nearly all bought by Sir Hans Sloane, and are to this day in the British Museum. Browne's good luck in thisrespect was completed by the devotion of his editor, Simon Wilkin, aNorwich bookseller of gentle blood and good education, who produced (1835)after twelve years' labour of love what Southey has justly called the bestedited book in the English language. Not to mention other editions, the_Religio Medici_, which exhibits, owing to its history, an unusualvariation of text, has been, together with the _Christian Morals_, separately edited with great minuteness by Dr. Greenhill. Nor is itunimportant to notice that Johnson, during his period of literaryhack-work, also edited Sir Thomas Browne, and wrote what Wilkin's goodtaste has permitted to be still the standard text of his Life. The work of this country doctor is, for personal savour, for strangeness, and for delight, one of the most notable things in English literature. Itis not of extraordinary voluminousness, for though swollen in Wilkin'sedition by abundant editorial matter, it fills but three of the well-knownvolumes of Bohn's series, and, printed by itself, it might not much exceedtwo ordinary library octavos; but in character and interest it yields tothe work of no other English prose writer. It may be divided, from ourpoint of view, into two unequal parts, the smaller of which is in truth ofthe greater interest. The _Vulgar Errors_, those of the smaller tractswhich deal with subjects of natural history (as most of them do), many ofthe commonplace book entries, the greater part of the _Garden of Cyrus_, and most of the _Letters_, are mainly distinguished by an interest ofmatter constantly increased, it is true, by the display of the author'sracy personality, and diversified here and there by passages alsodisplaying his style to the full, but in general character not differingfrom the works of other curious writers in the delightful period whichpassed between the childish credulity of mediæval and classical physics andthe arid analysis of the modern "scientist. " Sir Thomas Browne was of acertain natural scepticism of temperament (a scepticism which, as displayedin relation to other matters in the _Religio Medici_, very unjustlybrought upon him the reproach of religious unorthodoxy); he was a trainedand indefatigable observer of facts, and he was by no means prepared toreceive authority as final in any extra-religious matters. But he had athoroughly literary, not to say poetical idiosyncrasy; he was both bynature and education disposed to seek for something more than that physicalexplanation which, as the greatest of all anti-supernatural philosophershas observed, merely pushes ignorance a little farther back; and he waspossessed of an extraordinary fertility of imagination which made comment, analogy, and amplification both easy and delightful to him. He was, therefore, much more disposed--except in the face of absolutely conclusiveevidence--to rationalise than to deny a vulgar error, to bring explanationsand saving clauses to its aid, than to cut it adrift utterly. In this partof his work his distinguishing graces and peculiarities of style appear butsparingly and not eminently. In the other division, consisting of the_Religio Medici_, the _Urn-Burial_, the _Christian Morals_, and the _Letterto a Friend_, his strictly literary peculiarities, as being less hamperedby the exposition of matter, have freer scope; and it must be recollectedthat these literary peculiarities, independently of their own interest, have been a main influence in determining the style of two of the mostremarkable writers of English prose in the two centuries immediatelysucceeding Browne. It has been said that Johnson edited him somewhat early;and all the best authorities are in accord that the Johnsonian Latinisms, differently managed as they are, are in all probability due more to thefollowing--if only to the unconscious following--of Browne than to anythingelse. The second instance is more indubitable still and more happy. Itdetracts nothing from the unique charm of "Elia, " and it will be mostclearly recognised by those who know "Elia" best, that Lamb constantlyborrows from Browne, that the mould and shape of his most characteristicphrases is frequently suggested directly by Sir Thomas, and that thoughthere seldom can have been a follower who put more of his own in hisfollowing, it may be pronounced with confidence, "no Browne, no Lamb, " atleast in the forms in which we know the author of "Elia" best, and in whichall those who know him best, though they may love him always, love himmost. Yet Browne is not a very easy author to "sample. " A few splendidsustained passages, like the famous one in the _Urn-Burial_, areuniversally known, but he is best in flashes. The following, from the_Christian Morals_, is characteristic enough:-- "Punish not thyself with pleasure; glut not thy sense with palative delights; nor revenge the contempt of temperance by the penalty of satiety. Were there an age of delight or any pleasure durable, who would not honour Volupia? but the race of delight is short, and pleasures have mutable faces. The pleasures of one age are not pleasures in another, and their lives fall short of our own. Even in our sensual days the strength of delight is in its seldomness or rarity, and sting in its satiety; mediocrity is its life, and immoderacy its confusion. The luxurious emperors of old inconsiderately satiated themselves with the dainties of sea and land till, wearied through all varieties, their refections became a study with them, and they were fain to feed by invention: novices in true epicurism! which by mediocrity, paucity, quick and healthful appetite, makes delights smartly acceptable; whereby Epicurus himself found Jupiter's brain in a piece of Cytheridian cheese, and the tongues of nightingales in a dish of onions. Hereby healthful and temperate poverty hath the start of nauseating luxury; unto whose clear and naked appetite every meal is a feast, and in one single dish the first course of Metellus; who are cheaply hungry, and never lose their hunger, or advantage of a craving appetite, because obvious food contents it; while Nero, half famish'd, could not feed upon a piece of bread, and, lingering after his snowed water, hardly got down an ordinary cup of _Calda_. By such circumscriptions of pleasure the contemned philosophers reserved unto themselves the secret of delight, which the Helluos of those days lost in their exorbitances. In vain we study delight; it is at the command of every sober mind, and in every sense born with us; but Nature, who teacheth us the rule of pleasure, instructeth also in the bounds thereof and where its line expireth. And therefore temperate minds, not pressing their pleasures until the sting appeareth, enjoy their contentations contentedly and without regret, and so escape the folly of excess, to be pleased unto displacency. " * * * * * "Bring candid eyes unto the perusal of men's works, and let not Zoilism or detraction blast well-intended labours. He that endureth no faults in men's writings must only read his own, wherein for the most part all appeareth white. Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors, who notwithstanding, being judged by the capital matter, admit not of disparagement. I should unwillingly affirm that Cicero was but slightly versed in Homer, because in his work _De Gloria_ he ascribed those verses unto Ajax which were delivered by Hector. What if Plautus, in the account of Hercules, mistaketh nativity for conception? Who would have mean thoughts of Apollinaris Sidonius, who seems to mistake the river Tigris for Euphrates; and, though a good historian and learned Bishop of Auvergne, had the misfortune to be out in the story of David, making mention of him when the ark was sent back by the Philistines upon a cart, which was before his time? Though I have no great opinion of Machiavel's learning, yet I shall not presently say that he was but a novice in Roman History, because he was mistaken in placing Commodus after the Emperor Severus. Capital truths are to be narrowly eyed, collateral lapses and circumstantial deliveries not to be too strictly sifted. And if the substantial subject be well forged out, we need not examine the sparks which irregularly fly from it. " Coleridge, as we have seen, charges Browne with corrupting the style of thegreat age. The charge is not just in regard to either of the two greatfaults which are urged against the style, strictly speaking; while it ishardly just in reference to a minor charge which is brought against what isnot quite style, namely, the selection and treatment of the thought. Thetwo charges first referred to are Latinising of vocabulary and disorderlysyntax of sentence. In regard to the first, Browne Latinises somewhat morethan Jeremy Taylor, hardly at all more than Milton, though he does not, like Milton, contrast and relieve his Latinisms by indulgence in vernacularterms of the most idiomatic kind; and he is conspicuously free from thegreat fault both of Milton and of Taylor--the clumsy conglomeration ofclauses which turns a sentence into a paragraph, and makes a badly orderedparagraph of it after all. Browne's sentences, especially those of thebooks regularly prepared for the press by him, are by no means long and areusually very perspicuous, being separable in some cases into shortersentences by a mere mechanical repunctuation which, if tried on Taylor orMilton, would make nonsense. To say that they are sometimes longer thanthey should be, and often awkwardly co-ordinated, is merely to say that hewrote when he wrote; but he by no means sins beyond his fellows. In regardto Latinisms his case is not so good. He constantly uses such words as"clarity" for "clearness, " "ferity" for "fierceness" or "wildness, " whennothing is gained by the exotic form. Dr. Greenhill's useful glossary tothe _Religio_ and the _Morals_ exhibits in tabular form not merely suchterms as "abbreviatures, " "æquilibriously, " "bivious, " "convincible, ""exantlation, " and hundreds of others with which there is no need to fillthe page, but also a number only less considerable of those far moreobjectionable usages which take a word generally understood in one sense(as, for instance, "equable, " "gratitudes, " and many others), and bytwisting or translation of its classical equivalents and etymons give itsome quite new sense in English. It is true that in some cases the usualsense was not then firmly established, but Browne can hardly be acquittedof wilfully preferring the obscurer. Yet this hybrid and bizarre vocabulary is so admirably married to thesubstance of the writing that no one of taste can find fault with it. ForBrowne (to come to the third point mentioned above), though he neverdescends or diverges--whichever word may be preferred--to the extravagantand occasionally puerile conceits which even such writers as Fuller andGlanville cannot resist, has a quaintness at least equal to theirs. In nogreat writer is the unforeseen so constantly happening. Everyone who haswritten on him has quoted the famous termination of the _Garden of Cyrus_, where he determines that it is time to go to bed, because "to keep our eyesopen longer were but to act our antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. " A fancy sowhimsical as this, and yet so admirable in its whimsies, requires a stylein accordance; and the very sentence quoted, though one of the plainest ofBrowne's, and showing clearly that he does not always abuse Latinising, would hardly be what it is without the word "antipodes. " So again in the_Christian Morals_, "Be not stoically mistaken in the quality of sins, norcommutatively iniquitous in the valuation of transgressions. " No expressionso terse and yet so striking could dispense with the classicism and thecatachresis of "stoically. " And so it is everywhere with Browne. Hismanner is exactly proportioned to his matter; his exotic and unfamiliarvocabulary to the strangeness and novelty of his thoughts. He can never bereally popular; but for the meditative reading of instructed persons he isperhaps the most delightful of English prosemen. There are probably few English writers in regard to whom the judgment ofcritics, usually ranked as competent, has varied more than in regard toEdward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. To some extent this is easily intelligibleto any one who, with some equipment, reads any considerable quantity of hiswork; but it would be idle to pretend that the great stumbling-block of allcriticism--the attention to matter rather than to form--has had nothing todo with it. Clarendon, at first not a very zealous Royalist, was the onlyman of decided literary genius who, with contemporary knowledge, wrote thehistory of the great debate between king and commonwealth. The effect ofhis history in deciding the question on the Royalist side was felt inEngland for more than a century; and since popular judgment has somewhatveered round to the other side, its chief exponents have found it necessaryeither to say as little as possible about Clarendon or to depreciate him. His interesting political history cannot be detailed here. Of a goodCheshire family, but not originally wealthy, he was educated as a lawyer, was early adopted into the "tribe of Ben, " and was among the first to takeadvantage of the opening which the disputes between king and parliamentgave to men of his birth, education, and gifts. At first he was a moderateopponent of the king's attempts to dispense with parliament; but thegrowing evidence that the House of Commons was seeking to increase its ownconstitutional power at the expense of the prerogative, and especially theanti-Church tendencies of the parliamentary leaders, converted him at firstinto a moderate and then into a strong Royalist. One of the chief of theking's constitutional advisers, he was after the Restoration the mostdistinguished by far of those Cavaliers who had parliamentary andconstitutional experience; and with the title and office of Chancellor, heexercised a practical premiership during the first seven years of theRestoration. But ill-fortune, and it must be confessed some unwisdom, marked his government. He has been often and truly said to have been astatesman of Elizabeth, born three-quarters of a century too late. He wasthought by the public to be arbitrary, a courtier, and even to some extentcorrupt. He seemed to the king to be a tiresome formalist and censor, whowas only scrupulous in resisting the royal will. So he was impeached; and, being compelled to quit the kingdom, spent the last seven years of his lifein France. His great works, begun during his first exile and completedduring his second, are the _History of the Rebellion_ and his own _Life_, the former being by much the more important though the latter (divided intoa "Life" and a "Continuation, " the last of which starts from theRestoration) contains much interesting and important biographical andhistorical matter. The text of these works was conveyed by his heirs to theUniversity of Oxford, and long remained an exception to the general rule ofthe terminableness of copyright. Clarendon is a very striking example of the hackneyed remark, that in somecases at any rate men's merits are their own and their faults those oftheir time. His literary merits are, looked at by themselves, of nearly thehighest kind. He is certainly the best English writer (and may challengeany foreigner without much fear of the result) in the great, difficult, andnow almost lost art of character-(or, as it was called in his time, portrait-) drawing--that is to say, sketching in words the physical, moral, and mental, but especially the moral and mental, peculiarities of a givenperson. Not a few of these characters of his are among the well-known"beauties" justified in selection by the endorsement of half a dozengenerations. They are all full of life; and even where it may be thoughtthat prejudice has had something to do with the picture, still the subjectlives, and is not a mere bundle of contradictory or even of superficiallycompatible characteristics. Secondly, Clarendon is at his best anincomparable narrator. Many of his battles, though related with apparentcoolness, and without the slightest attempt to be picturesque, may rank asworks of art with his portraits, just as the portraits and battle pieces ofa great painter may rank together. The sober vivid touches, the little bitsof what the French call _reportage_ or mere reproduction of the actualwords and deeds of the personages, the elaborate and carefully-concealedart of the composition, all deserve the highest praise. Here, for instance, is a fair average passage, showing Clarendon's masterly skill in summarynarration and his equally masterly, though, as some hold, ratherunscrupulous faculty of insinuating depreciation:-- "Since there will be often occasion to mention this gentleman, Sir Richard Granvil, in the ensuing discourse, and because many men believed that he was hardly dealt with in the next year, where all the proceedings will be set down at large, it will not be unfit in this place to say somewhat of him, and of the manner and merit of his entering into the king's service some months before the time we are now upon. He was of a very ancient and worthy family in Cornwall which had in several ages produced men of great courage, and very signal in their fidelity to and service of the crown; and was himself younger brother (though in his nature or humour not of kin to him) to the brave Sir Basil Granvil who so courageously lost his life at the battle of Lansdowne. Being a younger brother and a very young man, he went into the Low Countries to learn the profession of a soldier; to which he had devoted himself under the greatest general of that age, Prince Maurice, and in the regiment of my Lord Vere, who was general of all the English. In that service he was looked upon as a man of courage and a diligent officer, in the quality of a captain, to which he attained after four years' service. About this time, in the end of the reign of King James, the war broke out between England and Spain; and in the expedition to Cadiz this gentleman served as a major to a regiment of foot, and continued in the same command in the war that shortly after followed against France; and at the Isle of Rhé insinuated himself into the very good graces of the Duke of Buckingham, who was the general in that mission; and after the unfortunate retreat from thence was made colonel of a regiment with general approbation and as an officer that well deserved it. "His credit increased every day with the duke: who, out of the generosity of his nature, as a most generous person he was, resolved to raise his fortune; towards the beginning of which, by his countenance and solicitation, he prevailed with a rich widow to marry him, who had been a lady of extraordinary beauty, which she had not yet outlived; and though she had no great dower by her husband, a younger brother of the Earl of Suffolk, yet she inherited a fair fortune of her own near Plymouth, and was besides very rich in a personal estate, and was looked upon as the richest marriage of the West. This lady, by the duke's credit, Sir Richard Granvil (for he was now made a knight and baronet) obtained, and was thereby possessed of a plentiful estate upon the borders of his own country, and where his own family had great credit and authority. The war being now at an end and he deprived of his great patron, [he] had nothing to depend upon but the fortune of his wife: which, though ample enough to have supported the expense a person of his quality ought to have made, was not large enough to satisfy his vanity and ambition, nor so great as he upon common reports had possessed himself by her. By being not enough pleased with her fortune he grew displeased with his wife, who, being a woman of a haughty and imperious nature and of a wit superior to his, quickly resented the disrespect she received from him and in no respect studied to make herself easy to him. After some years spent together in those domestic unsociable contestations, in which he possessed himself of all her estate as the sole master of it, without allowing her out of her own any competency for herself, and indulged to himself all those licenses in her own house which to women are most grievous, she found means to withdraw herself from him; and was with all kindness received into that family in which she had before been married and was always very much respected. " To superficial observers, or observers who have convinced themselves thathigh lights and bright colourings are of the essence of the art of theprose writer, Clarendon may seem tame and jejune. He is in reality just thecontrary. His wood is tough enough and close-grained enough, but there isplenty of sap coursing through it. In yet a third respect, which is lessclosely connected with the purely formal aspect of style, Clarendon stands, if not pre-eminent, very high among historians. This is his union of acutepenetration and vigorous grasp in the treatment of complicated events. Ithas been hinted that he seems to have somewhat lost grasp, if notpenetration, after the Restoration. But at the time of his earlierparticipation in public affairs, and of his composition of the greater partof his historical writings, he was in the very vigour and prime of life;and though it may be that he was "a Janus of one face, " and looked ratherbackward than forward, even then he was profoundly acquainted with thefacts of English history, with the character of his countrymen, and withthe relations of events as they happened. It may even be contended by thosewho care for might-have-beens, that but for the headlong revolt againstPuritanism, which inspired the majority of the nation with a kind ofcarnival madness for many years after 1660, and the strange deficiency ofstatesmen of even moderately respectable character on both sides (exceptClarendon himself, and the fairly upright though time-serving Temple, thereis hardly a respectable man to be found on any side of politics for fortyyears), Clarendon's post-Restoration policy itself would not have been thefailure that it was. But it is certain that on the events of his own middleage he looked with the keenest discernment, and with the widestcomprehension. Against these great merits must be set a treble portion of the great defectwhich, as we have said, vitiates all the English prose work of his time, the unconscious or wilful ignoring of the very fundamental principles ofsentence-and paragraph-architecture. His mere syntax, in the mostrestricted sense of that word, is not very bad; he seldom indulges out ofmere _incuria_ in false concords or blunders over a relative. But he is themost offending soul alive at any time in English literature in one gravepoint. No one has put together, or, to adopt a more expressive phrase, heaped together such enormous paragraphs; no one has linked clause onclause, parenthesis on parenthesis, epexegesis on exegesis, in such abewildering concatenation of inextricable entanglement. Sometimes, ofcourse, the difficulty is more apparent than real, and by simplysubstituting full stops and capitals for his colons and conjunctions, onemay, to some extent, simplify the chaos. But it is seldom that this isreally effective: it never produces really well balanced sentences andreally well constructed paragraphs; and there are constant instances inwhich it is not applicable at all. It is not that the jostling and confusedrelatives are as a rule grammatically wrong, like the common blunder ofputting an "and which" where there is no previous "which" expressed orimplied. They, simply, put as they are, bewilder and muddle the readerbecause the writer has not taken the trouble to break up his sentence intotwo or three. This is, of course, a very gross abuse, and except when thetalents above noticed either fuse his style into something better, or bythe interest they excite divert the attention of the reader, it constantlymakes Clarendon anything but agreeable reading, and produces an impressionof dryness and prolixity with which he is not quite justly chargeable. Theplain truth is that, as has been said often before, and may have to be saidmore than once again, the sense of proportion and order in prosecomposition was not born. The famous example--the awful example--of OliverCromwell's speeches shows the worst-known instance of this; but the bestwriters of Cromwell's own generation--far better educated than he, professed men of letters after a fashion, and without the excuse ofimpromptu, or of the scurry of unnoted, speech--sometimes came not farbehind him. Against one great writer of the time, however, no such charge can be justlybrought. Although much attention has recently been given to thephilosophical opinions of Hobbes, since the unjust prejudice against hisreligious and political ideas wore away, and since the complete edition ofhis writings published at last in 1843 by Sir William Molesworth made himaccessible, the extraordinary merits of his style have on the whole hadrather less than justice done to them. He was in many ways a very singularperson. Born at Malmesbury in the year of the Armada, he was educated atOxford, and early in the seventeenth century was appointed tutor to theeldest son of Lord Hardwick, afterwards Earl of Devonshire. For fullseventy years he was on and off in the service of the Cavendish family; butsometimes acted as tutor to others, and both in that capacity and for otherreasons lived long abroad. In his earlier manhood he was much in thesociety of Bacon, Jonson, and the literary folk of the English capital; andlater he was equally familiar with the society (rather scientific thanliterary) of Paris. In 1647 he was appointed mathematical tutor to thePrince of Wales; but his mathematics were not his most fortunateacquirement, and they involved him in long and acrimonious disputes withWallis and others--disputes, it may be said, where Hobbes was quite wrong. The publication of his philosophical treatises, and especially of the_Leviathan_, brought him into very bad odour, not merely on politicalgrounds (which, so long as the Commonwealth lasted, would not have beensurprising), but for religious reasons; and during the last years of hislife, and for long afterwards, "Hobbist" was, certainly with very littlewarrant from his writings, used as a kind of polite equivalent for atheist. He was pensioned after the Restoration, and the protection of the king andthe Earl of Devonshire kept him scatheless, if ever there was any realdanger. Hobbes, however, was a timid and very much self-centred person, always fancying that plots were being laid against him. He died at thegreat age of ninety-two. This long life was wholly taken up with study, but did not produce a verylarge amount of original composition. It is true that his collected worksfill sixteen volumes; but they are loosely printed, and much space isoccupied with diagrams, indices, and such like things, while a very largeproportion of the matter appears twice over, in Latin and in English. Inthe latter case Hobbes usually wrote first in Latin, and was not always hisown translator; but it would appear that he generally revised the work, though he neither succeeded in obliterating nor perhaps attempted toobliterate the marks of the original vehicle. His earliest publication wasa singularly vigorous, if not always scholastically exact, translation ofThucydides into English, which appeared in 1629. Thirteen years later hepublished in Paris the _De Cive_, which was shortly followed by thetreatise on _Human Nature_ and the _De Corpore Politico_. The latter ofthese was to a great extent worked up in the famous _Leviathan_, or the_Matter, Power, and Form of a Commonwealth_, which appeared in 1651. Theimportant _De Corpore_, which corresponds to the _Leviathan_ on thephilosophical side, appeared in Latin in 1655, in English next year. Besides minor works, Hobbes employed his old age on a translation of Homerinto verse, and on a sketch of the Civil Wars called _Behemoth_. His verse is a mere curiosity, though a considerable curiosity. The chiefof it (the translation of Homer written in the quatrain, which his friendDavenant's _Gondibert_ had made popular) is completely lacking in poeticalquality, of which, perhaps, no man ever had less than Hobbes; and it iswritten on a bad model. But it has so much of the nervous bull-dog strengthwhich, in literature if not in life, was Hobbes's main characteristic, thatit is sometimes both a truer and a better representative of the originalthan some very mellifluous and elegant renderings. It is as a prose writer, however, that Hobbes made, and that he will keep, his fame. With hisprinciples in the various branches of philosophy we have little or nothingto do. In choosing them he manifested, no doubt, something of the samedefiance of authority, and the same self-willed preference for his own nottoo well-educated opinion, which brought him to grief in his encounter withWallis. But when he had once left his starting points, his sureness ofreasoning, his extreme perspicacity, and the unerring clearness andcertainty with which he kept before him, and expressed exactly what hemeant, made him at once one of the greatest thinkers and one of thegreatest writers of England. Hobbes never "pays himself with words, " neverevades a difficulty by becoming obscure, never meanders on in the gracefulallusive fashion of many philosophers, --a fashion for which the prevalentfaults of style were singularly convenient in his time. He has no ornament, he does not seem to aim at anything more than the simplest and moststraightforward presentation of his views. But this very aim, assisted byhis practice in writing the terse and clear, if not very elegant, Latinwhich was the universal language of the literary Europe of his time, suffices to preserve him from most of the current sins. Moreover, it isfair to remember that, though the last to die, he was the first to be bornof the authors mentioned in this chapter, and that he may be supposed, lateas he wrote, to have formed his style before the period of Jacobean andCaroline luxuriance. Almost any one of Hobbes's books would suffice to illustrate his style; butthe short and interesting treatise on _Human Nature_, perhaps, shows it atits best. The author's exceptional clearness may be assisted by his lavishuse of italics; but it is not necessary to read far in order to see that itis in reality quite independent of any clumsy mechanical device. Thecrabbed but sharply outlined style, the terse phrasing, the independence ofall after-thoughts and tackings-on, manifest themselves at once to anycareful observer. Here for instance is a passage, perhaps his finest, onLove, followed by a political extract from another work:-- "Of love, by which is to be understood the joy man taketh in the fruition of any present good, hath been spoken already in the first section, chapter seven, under which is contained the love men bear to one another or pleasure they take in one another's company: and by which nature men are said to be sociable. But there is another kind of love which the Greeks call Erôs, and is that which we mean when we say that a man is in love: forasmuch as this passion cannot be without diversity of sex, it cannot be denied but that it participateth of that indefinite love mentioned in the former section. But there is a great difference betwixt the desire of a man indefinite and the same desire limited _ad hunc_: and this is that love which is the great theme of poets: but, notwithstanding their praises, it must be defined by the word need: for it is a conception a man hath of his need of that one person desired. The cause of this passion is not always nor for the most part beauty, or other quality in the beloved, unless there be withal hope in the person that loveth: which may be gathered from this, that in great difference of persons the greater have often fallen in love with the meaner, but not contrary. And from hence it is that for the most part they have much better fortune in love whose hopes are built on something in their person than those that trust to their expressions and service; and they that care less than they that care more: which not perceiving, many men cast away their services as one arrow after another, till, in the end, together with their hopes, they lose their wits. " * * * * * "There are some who therefore imagine monarchy to be more grievous than democracy, because there is less liberty in that than in this. If by liberty they mean an exemption from that subjection which is due to the laws, that is, the commands of the people; neither in democracy nor in any other state of government whatsoever is there any such kind of liberty. If they suppose liberty to consist in this, that there be few laws, few prohibitions, and those too such that, except they were forbidden, there could be no peace; then I deny that there is more liberty in democracy than in monarchy; for the one as truly consisteth with such a liberty as the other. For although the word liberty may in large and ample letters be written over the gates of any city whatsoever, yet it is not meant the subjects' but the city's liberty; neither can that word with better right be inscribed on a city which is governed by the people than that which is ruled by a monarch. But when private men or subjects demand liberty under the name of liberty, they ask not for liberty but domination: which yet for want of understanding they little consider. For if every man would grant the same liberty to another which he desires for himself, as is commanded by the law of nature, that same natural state would return again in which all men may by right do all things; which if they knew they would abhor, as being worse than all kinds of civil subjection whatsoever. But if any man desire to have his single freedom, the rest being bound, what does he else demand but to have the dominion?" It may be observed that Hobbes's sentences are by no means very short asfar as actual length goes. He has some on a scale which in strictness isperhaps hardly justifiable. But what may generally be asserted of them isthat the author for the most part is true to that great rule, of logic andof style alike, which ordains that a single sentence shall be, as far aspossible, the verbal presentation of a single thought, and not theagglomeration and sweeping together of a whole string and tissue ofthoughts. It is noticeable, too, that Hobbes is very sparing of theadjective--the great resource and delight of flowery and discursivewriters. Sometimes, as in the famous comparison of human life to a race(where, by the way, a slight tendency to conceit manifests itself, andmakes him rather force some of his metaphors), his conciseness assumes adistinctly epigrammatic form; and it is constantly visible also in his moreconsecutive writings. In the well-known passage on Laughter as "a passion of sudden glory" thewriter may be charged with allowing his fancy too free play; though I, formy part, am inclined to consider the explanation the most satisfactory yetgiven of a difficult phenomenon. But the point is the distinctness withwhich Hobbes puts this novel and, at first sight, improbable idea, the aptturns and illustrations (standing at the same time far from the excess ofillustration and analogy, by which many writers of his time would have spunit out into a chapter if not into a treatise), the succinct, forcible, economical adjustment of the fewest words to the clearest exposition ofthought. Perhaps these things strike the more as they are the more unlikethe work in juxtaposition with which one finds them; nor can it bemaintained that Hobbes's style is suitable for all purposes. Admirable forargument and exposition, it is apt to become bald in narration, and itsabundance of clearness, when translated to less purely intellectualsubjects, may even expose it to the charge of being thin. Such a note asthat struck in the Love passage above given is rare, and sets one wonderingwhether the dry-as-dust philosopher of Malmesbury, the man who seems tohave had hardly any human frailties except vanity and timidity, had himselffelt the bitterness of counting on expressions and services, the madness ofthrowing away one effort after another to gain the favour of the beloved. But it is very seldom that any such suggestion is provoked by remarks ofHobbes's. His light is almost always dry; and in one sense, though not inanother, a little malignant. Yet nowhere is there to be found a style moreabsolutely suited, not merely to the author's intentions but to hisperformances--a form more exactly married to matter. Nor anywhere is thereto be found a writer who is more independent of others. He may have owedsomething to his friend Jonson, in whose _Timber_ there are resemblances toHobbes; but he certainly owed nothing, and in all probability lent much, tothe Drydens, and Tillotsons, and Temples, who in the last twenty years ofhis own life reformed English prose. CHAPTER X CAROLINE POETRY There are few periods of poetical development in English literary historywhich display, in a comparatively narrow compass, such well-marked andpervading individuality as the period of Caroline poetry, beginning, it maybe, a little before the accession of Charles I. , but terminating as aproducing period almost before the real accession of his son. The poets ofthis period, in which but not of which Milton is, are numerous andremarkable, and at the head of them all stands Robert Herrick. Very little is really known about Herrick's history. That he was of afamily which, distinguished above the common, but not exactly reachingnobility, had the credit of producing, besides himself, the indomitableWarden Heyrick of the Collegiate Church of Manchester in his own times, andthe mother of Swift in the times immediately succeeding his, is certain. That he was born in London in 1591, that he went to Cambridge, that he hada rather stingy guardian, that he associated to some extent with the tribeof Ben in the literary London of the second decade of the century, is alsocertain. At last and rather late he was appointed to a living at Dean Priorin Devonshire, on the confines of the South Hams and Dartmoor. He did notlike it, being of that class of persons who cannot be happy out of a greattown. After the Civil War he was deprived, and his successor had not thedecency (the late Dr. Grosart, constant to his own party, made a veryunsuccessful attempt to defend the delinquent) to pay him the shabbypittance which the intruders were supposed to furnish to the rightfulowners of benefices. At the Restoration he too was restored, and survivedit fifteen years, dying in 1674; but his whole literary fame rests on workpublished a quarter of a century before his death, and pretty certainly ingreat part written many years earlier. The poems which then appeared were divided, in the published form, into twoclasses: they may be divided, for purposes of poetical criticism, intothree. The _Hesperides_ (they are dated 1648, and the _Noble Numbers_ orsacred poems 1647; but both appeared together) consist in the first placeof occasional poems, sometimes amatory, sometimes not; in the second, ofpersonal epigrams. Of this second class no human being who has any facultyof criticism can say any good. They are supposed by tradition to have beencomposed on parishioners: they may be hoped by charity (which has in thiscase the support of literary criticism) to be merely literaryexercises--bad imitations of Martial, through Ben Jonson. They are nastierthan the nastiest work of Swift; they are stupider than the stupidestattempts of Davies of Hereford; they are farther from the author's bestthan the worst parts of Young's _Odes_ are from the best part of the _NightThoughts_. It is impossible without producing specimens (which God forbidthat any one who has a respect for Herrick, for literature, and fordecency, should do) to show how bad they are. Let it only be said that ifthe worst epigram of Martial were stripped of Martial's wit, sense, andliterary form, it would be a kind of example of Herrick in this vein. In his two other veins, but for certain tricks of speech, it is almostimpossible to recognise him for the same man. The secular vigour of the_Hesperides_, the spiritual vigour of the _Noble Numbers_, has rarely beenequalled and never surpassed by any other writer. I cannot agree with Mr. Gosse that Herrick is in any sense "a Pagan. " They had in his day shakenoff the merely ascetic temper of the Middle Ages, and had not taken uponthem the mere materialism of the _Aufklärung_, or the remorseful andsatiated attitude of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. I believethat the warmest of the Julia poems and the immortal "Litany" were writtenwith the same integrity of feeling. Here was a man who was grateful to theupper powers for the joys of life, or who was sorrowful and repentanttowards the upper powers when he felt that he had exceeded in enjoyingthose joys, but who had no doubt of his gods, and no shame in approachingthem. The last--the absolutely last if we take his death-date--of thosepoets who have relished this life heartily, while heartily believing inanother, was Robert Herrick. There is not the slightest reason to supposethat the _Hesperides_ were wholly _péchés de jeunesse_ and the _NobleNumbers_ wholly pious palinodes. Both simply express, and express in a mostvivid and distinct manner, the alternate or rather varying moods of a manof strong sensibilities, religious as well as sensual. Of the religious poems the already-mentioned "Litany, " while much the mostfamiliar, is also far the best. There is nothing in English verse to equalit as an expression of religious fear; while there is also nothing inEnglish verse to equal the "Thanksgiving, " also well known, as anexpression of religious trust. The crystalline simplicity of Herrick'sstyle deprives his religious poems of that fatal cut-and-dried appearance, that vain repetition of certain phrases and thoughts, which mars the workof sacred poets generally, and which has led to an unjustly strong censurebeing laid on them by critics, so different from each other as Dr. Johnsonand Mr. Matthew Arnold. As the alleged Paganism of some of Herrick's sacredpoems exists only in the imagination of readers, so the alleged insincerityis equally hypothetical, and can only be supported by the argument(notoriously false to history and to human nature) that a man who couldwrite the looser _Hesperides_ could not sincerely write the _NobleNumbers_. Every student of the lives of other men--every student of his ownheart--knows, or should know, that this is an utter mistake. Undoubtedly, however, Herrick's most beautiful work is to be found in theprofane division, despite the admixture of the above-mentioned epigrams, the dull foulness of which soils the most delightful pages to such anextent that, if it were ever allowable to take liberties with an author'sdisposition of his own work, it would be allowable and desirable to pickthese ugly weeds out of the garden and stow them away in a rubbish heap ofappendix all to themselves. Some of the best pieces of the _Hesperides_ areeven better known than the two well-known _Noble Numbers_ above quoted. The"Night Piece to Julia, " the "Daffodils, " the splendid "To Anthea, " ("Bid meto live"), "The Mad Maid's Song" (worthy of the greatest of the generationbefore Herrick), the verses to Ben Jonson, those to Electra ("I dare notask a kiss"), the wonderful "Burial Piece to Perilla, " the "Grace for aChild, " the "Corinna Maying" (the chief of a large division of Herrick'spoems which celebrate rustic festivals, superstitions, and folkloregenerally), the epitaph on Prudence Baldwin, and many others, are justlyincluded in nearly all selections of English poetry, and many of them areknown by heart to every one who knows any poetry at all. One or two of theleast well known of them may perhaps be welcome again:-- "Good morrow to the day so fair, Good morning, sir, to you; Good morrow to mine own torn hair Bedabbled with the dew. "Good morning to this primrose too, Good morrow to each maid; That will with flowers the tomb bestrew Wherein my love is laid. "Ah, woe is me, woe, woe is me, Alack and well-a-day! For pity, sir, find out that bee That bore my love away. "I'll seek him in your bonnet brave, I'll seek him in your eyes; Nay, now I think, they've made his grave I' th' bed of strawberries. "I'll seek him there: I know ere this The cold, cold earth doth shake him; But I will go, or send a kiss By you, sir, to awake him. "Pray hurt him not; though he be dead He knows well who do love him, And who with green turfs rear his head, And who do rudely move him. "He's soft and tender, pray take heed, With bands of cowslips bind him, And bring him home; but 'tis decreed That I shall never find him. " * * * * * "I dare not ask a kiss; I dare not beg a smile; Lest having that or this, I might grow proud the while. "No, no--the utmost share Of my desire shall be Only to kiss that air That lately kissèd thee. " * * * * * "Here, a little child, I stand Heaving up my either hand: Cold as paddocks though they be Here I lift them up to Thee, For a benison to fall On our meat and on us all. Amen. " But Herrick's charm is everywhere--except in the epigrams. It is very rareto find one of the hundreds of little poems which form his book destituteof the peculiar touch of phrasing, the eternising influence of style, whichcharacterises the poetry of this particular period so remarkably. Thesubject may be the merest trifle, the thought a hackneyed or insignificantone. But the amber to enshrine the fly is always there in larger orsmaller, in clearer or more clouded, shape. There has often been a certaincontempt (connected no doubt with certain general critical errors as theyseem to me, with which I shall deal at the end of this chapter) flavouringcritical notices of Herrick. I do not think that any one who judges poetryas poetry, who keeps its several kinds apart and does not demand epicgraces in lyric, dramatic substance in an anthologia, could ever feel orhint such a contempt. Whatever Herrick may have been as a man (of which weknow very little, and for which we need care less), he was a most exquisiteand complete poet in his own way, neither was that way one to be lightlyspoken of. Indissolubly connected with Herrick in age, in character, and in thesingularly unjust criticism which has at various times been bestowed onhim, is Thomas Carew. His birth-date has been very differently given as1587 and (that now preferred) 1598; but he died nearly forty years beforethe author of the _Hesperides_, and nearly ten before the _Hesperides_themselves were published, while his own poems were never collected tillafter his own death. He was of a Gloucestershire branch of the famousDevonshire family of Carew, Cary, or Cruwys, was of Merton College, Oxford, and the Temple, travelled, followed the Court, was a disciple of BenJonson, and a member of the learned and accomplished society of Clarendon'searlier days, obtained a place in the household of Charles I. , is said byhis friend Hyde to have turned to devotion after a somewhat libertine life, and died in 1639, before the evil days of triumphant Puritanism, _felixopportunitate mortis_. He wrote little, and the scantiness of hisproduction, together with the supposed pains it cost him, is ridiculed inSuckling's doggerel "Sessions of the Poets. " But this reproach (which Carewshares with Gray, and with not a few others of the most admirable names inliterature), unjust as it is, is less unjust than the general tone ofcriticism on Carew since. The _locus classicus_ of depreciation both inregard to him and to Herrick is to be found, as might be expected, in oneof the greatest, and one of the most wilfully capricious and untrustworthyof English critics, in Hazlitt. I am sorry to say that there can be littlehesitation in setting down the extraordinary misjudgment of the passage inquestion (it occurs in the sixth Lecture on Elizabethan Literature), inpart, at least, to the fact that Herrick, Carew, and Crashaw, who aresummarily damned in it, were Royalists. If there were any doubt about thematter, it would be settled by the encomium bestowed in the very samepassage on Marvell, who is, no doubt, as Hazlitt says, a true poet, but whoas a poet is but seldom at the highest height of the authors of "TheLitany, " "The Rapture, " and "The Flaming Heart. " Hazlitt, then, while onhis way to tell us that Herrick's two best pieces are some trivialanacreontics about Cupid and the Bees--things hackneyed through a dozenliteratures, and with no recommendation but a borrowed prettiness--whileabout, I say, to deny Herrick the spirit of love or wine, and in the samebreath with the dismissal of Crashaw as a "hectic enthusiast, " informs usthat Carew was "an elegant Court trifler, " and describes his style as a"frequent mixture of the superficial and commonplace, with far-fetched andimprobable conceits. " What Carew really is, and what he may be peremptorily declared to be inopposition even to such a critic as Hazlitt, is something quite different. He is one of the most perfect masters of lyrical form in English poetry. Hepossesses a command of the overlapped heroic couplet, which for sweep andrush of rhythm cannot be surpassed anywhere. He has, perhaps in a greaterdegree than any poet of that time of conceits, the knack of modulating theextravagances of fancy by the control of reason, so that he never fallsinto the unbelievableness of Donne, or Crashaw, or Cleveland. He had adelicacy, when he chose to be delicate, which is quintessential, and avigour which is thoroughly manly. Best of all, perhaps, he had theintelligence and the self-restraint to make all his poems wholes, and notmere congeries of verses. There is always, both in the scheme of hismeaning and the scheme of his metre, a definite plan of rise and fall, aconcerted effect. That these great merits were accompanied by notinconsiderable defects is true. Carew lacks the dewy freshness, theunstudied grace of Herrick. He is even more frankly and uncontrolledlysensual, and has paid the usual and inevitable penalty that his best poem, _The Rapture_, is, for the most part, unquotable, while another, if hecarried out its principles in this present year of grace, would run him therisk of imprisonment with hard labour. His largest attempt--the masquecalled _Coelum Britannicum_--is heavy. His smaller poems, beautiful as theyare, suffer somewhat from want of variety of subject. There is just so muchtruth in Suckling's impertinence that the reader of Carew sometimes catcheshimself repeating the lines of Carew's master, "Still to be neat, still tobe drest, " not indeed in full agreement with them, but not in exactdisagreement. One misses the "wild civility" of Herrick. Thisacknowledgment, I trust, will save me from any charge of overvaluing Carew. A man might, however, be easily tempted to overvalue him, who observes hisbeauties, and who sees how, preserving the force, the poetic spell, of thetime, he was yet able, without in the least descending to the correctnessof Waller and his followers, to introduce into his work something alsopreserving it from the weaknesses and inequalities which deface that ofalmost all his contemporaries, and which, as we shall see, make much of thedramatic and poetical work of 1630-1660 a chaos of slipshod deformity toany one who has the sense of poetical form. It is an unwearying delight toread and re-read the second of his poems, the "Persuasions to Love, "addressed to a certain A. L. That the sentiment is common enough matterslittle; the commonest things in poetry are always the best. But thedelicate interchange of the catalectic and acatalectic dimeter, thewonderful plays and changes of cadence, the opening, as it were, of freshstops at the beginning of each new paragraph of the verse, so that themusic acquires a new colour, the felicity of the several phrases, thecunning heightening of the passion as the poet comes to "Oh! love me then, and now begin it, " and the dying fall of the close, make up to me, atleast, most charming pastime. It is not the same kind of pleasure, nodoubt, as that given by such an outburst as Crashaw's, to be mentionedpresently, or by such pieces as the great soliloquies of Shakespere. Anyone may say, if he likes to use words which are question-begging, when notstrictly meaningless, that it is not such a "high" kind. But it is a kind, and in that kind perfect. Carew's best pieces, besides _The Rapture_, are the beautiful "Ask me nomore, " the first stanza of which is the weakest; the fine couplet poem, "The Cruel Mistress, " whose closing distich-- "Of such a goddess no times leave record, That burned the temple where she was adored"-- Dryden conveyed with the wise and unblushing boldness which great poetsuse; the "Deposition from love, " written in one of those combinations ofeights and sixes, the melodious charm of which seems to have died with theseventeenth century; the song, "He that loves a rosy cheek, " which, by theunusual morality of its sentiments, has perhaps secured a fame not quitedue to its poetical merits; the epitaph on Lady Mary Villers; the song"Would you know what's soft?" the song to his inconstant mistress: "When thou, poor excommunicate From all the joys of love, shalt see The full reward, and glorious fate Which my strong faith shall purchase me, Then curse thine own inconstancy. "A fairer hand than thine shall cure That heart which thy false oaths did wound; And to my soul, a soul more pure Than thine, shall by love's hand be bound, And both with equal glory crown'd. "Then shalt thou weep, entreat, complain To Love, as I did once to thee; When all thy tears shall be as vain As mine were then, for thou shalt be Damn'd for thy false apostacy. "-- the pleasant pictures of the country houses of Wrest and Saxham; thecharming conceit of "Red and white roses": "Read in these roses the sad story Of my hard fate and your own glory: In the white you may discover The paleness of a fainting lover; In the red, the flames still feeding On my heart with fresh wounds bleeding. The white will tell you how I languish, And the red express my anguish: The white my innocence displaying The red my martyrdom betraying. The frowns that on your brow resided Have those roses thus divided; Oh! let your smiles but clear the weather And then they both shall grow together. "-- and lastly, though it would be easy to extend this already long list ofselections from a by no means extensive collection of poems, the grandelegy on Donne. By this last the reproach of vain and amatorious triflingwhich has been so often levelled at Carew is at once thrown back andblunted. No poem shows so great an influence on the masculine panegyricswith which Dryden was to enrich the English of the next generation, and feware fuller of noteworthy phrases. The splendid epitaph which closes it-- "Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit"-- is only the best passage, not the only good one, and it may be matched witha fine and just description of English, ushered by a touch of acutecriticism. "Thou shalt yield no precedence, but of time, And the blind fate of language, whose tuned chime More charms the outward sense: yet thou mayst claim From so great disadvantage greater fame. Since to the awe of thine imperious wit Our troublesome language bends, made only fit With her tough thick-ribbed hoops to gird about Thy giant fancy, which had proved too stout For their soft melting phrases. " And it is the man who could write like this that Hazlitt calls an "elegantCourt trifler!" The third of this great trio of poets, and with them the most remarkable ofour whole group, was Richard Crashaw. He completes Carew and Herrick bothin his qualities and (if a kind of bull may be permitted) in his defects, after a fashion almost unexampled elsewhere and supremely interesting. Hardly any one of the three could have appeared at any other time, and notone but is distinguished from the others in the most marked way. Herrick, despite his sometimes rather obtrusive learning, is emphatically thenatural man. He does not show much sign of the influence of good society, his merits as well as his faults have a singular unpersonal and, if I mayso say, _terræfilian_ connotation. Carew is a gentleman before all; but arather profane gentleman. Crashaw is religious everywhere. Again, Herrickand Carew, despite their strong savour of the fashion of the time, areeminently critics as well as poets. Carew has not let one piece criticallyunworthy of him pass his censorship: Herrick (if we exclude the filthy andfoolish epigrams into which he was led by corrupt following of Ben) hasbeen equally careful. These two bards may have trouble with the _censormorum_, --the _censor literarum_ they can brave with perfect confidence. Itis otherwise with Crashaw. That he never, as far as can be seen, edited thebulk of his work for press at all matters little or nothing. But there isnot in his work the slightest sign of the exercise of any critical facultybefore, during, or after production. His masterpiece, one of the mostastonishing things in English or any other literature, comes withoutwarning at the end of _The Flaming Heart_. For page after page the poet hasbeen poorly playing on some trifling conceits suggested by the picture ofSaint Theresa and a seraph. First he thinks the painter ought to havechanged the attributes; then he doubts whether a lesser change will not do;and always he treats his subject in a vein of grovelling and grotesqueconceit which the boy Dryden in the stage of his elegy on Lord Hastingswould have disdained. And then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, without warning of any sort, the metre changes, the poet's inspirationcatches fire, and there rushes up into the heaven of poetry this marvellousrocket of song:-- "Live in these conquering leaves: live all the same; And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame; Live here, great heart; and love, and die, and kill; And bleed, and wound, and yield, and conquer still. Let this immortal life where'er it comes Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms. Let mystic deaths wait on't; and wise souls be The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee. O sweet incendiary! show here thy art, Upon this carcase of a hard cold heart; Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light, that play Among the leaves of thy large books of day, Combin'd against this breast at once break in, And take away from me myself and sin; This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me. O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy pow'r of lights and fires; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; By all thy lives and deaths of love; By thy large draughts of intellectual day; And by thy thirsts of love more large than they; By all thy brim-fill'd bowls of fierce desire; By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire; By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul, and seal'd thee his; By all the heavens thou hast in him, (Fair sister of the seraphim) By all of him we have in thee; Leave nothing of myself in me. Let me so read thy life, that I Unto all life of mine may die. " The contrast is perhaps unique as regards the dead colourlessness of thebeginning, and the splendid colour of the end. But contrasts like it occurall over Crashaw's work. He was a much younger man than either of the poets with whom we haveleashed him, and his birth year used to be put at 1616, though Dr. Grosarthas made it probable that it was three years earlier. His father was astern Anglican clergyman of extremely Protestant leanings, his mother diedwhen Crashaw was young, but his stepmother appears to have been mostunnovercal. Crashaw was educated at Charterhouse, and then went toCambridge, where in 1637 he became a fellow of Peterhouse, and came in forthe full tide of high church feeling, to which (under the mixed influenceof Laud's policy, of the ascetic practices of the Ferrars of Gidding, andof a great architectural development afterwards defaced if not destroyed byPuritan brutality) Cambridge was even more exposed than Oxford. Theoutbreak of the civil war may or may not have found Crashaw at Cambridge;he was at any rate deprived of his fellowship for not taking the covenantin 1643, and driven into exile. Already inclined doctrinally and in mattersof practice to the older communion, and despairing of the resurrection ofthe Church of England after her sufferings at the hands of the Parliament, Crashaw joined the Church of Rome, and journeyed to its metropolis. He wasattached to the suit of Cardinal Pallotta, but is said to have been shockedby Italian manners. The cardinal procured him a canonry at Loretto, andthis he hastened to take up, but died in 1649 with suspicions of poison, which are not impossibly, but at the same time by no means necessarilytrue. His poems had already appeared under the double title of _Steps tothe Temple_ (sacred), and _Delights of the Muses_ (profane), but not underhis own editorship, or it would seem with his own choice of title. Severalother editions followed, --one later than his death, with curiousillustrations said to be, in part at least, of his own design. Manuscriptsources, as in the case of some other poets of the time, have considerablyenlarged the collection since. But a great part of it consists of epigrams(in the wide sense, and almost wholly sacred) in the classical tongues, which were sometimes translated by Crashaw himself. These are not alwayscorrect in style or prosody, but are often interesting. The famous line inreference to the miracle of Cana, "Vidit et erubuit nympha pudica Deum, " is assigned to Crashaw as a boy at Cambridge; of his later faculty in thesame way the elaborate and, in its way, beautiful poem entitled _Bulla_(the Bubble) is the most remarkable. Our chief subject, however, is the English poems proper, sacred andprofane. In almost all of these there is noticeable an extraordinaryinequality, the same in kind, if not in degree, as that on which we havecommented in the case of _The Flaming Heart_. Crashaw is never quite sogreat as there; but he is often quite as small. His exasperating lack ofself-criticism has sometimes led selectors to make a cento out of hispoems--notably in the case of the exceedingly pretty "Wishes to His UnknownMistress, " beginning, "Whoe'er she be, That not impossible she, That shallcommand my heart and me"--a poem, let it be added, which excuses thisdubious process much less than most, inasmuch as nothing in it ispositively bad, though it is rather too long. Here is the opening, precededby a piece from another poem, "A Hymn to Saint Theresa":-- "Those rare works, where thou shalt leave writ Love's noble history, with wit Taught thee by none but him, while here They feed our souls, shall clothe thine there Each heavenly word by whose hid flame Our hard hearts shall strike fire, the same Shall flourish on thy brows and be Both fire to us and flame to thee: Whose light shall live bright, in thy face By glory, in our hearts by grace. "Thou shalt look round about, and see Thousands of crown'd souls throng to be Themselves thy crown, sons of thy vows: The virgin births with which thy spouse Made fruitful thy fair soul; go now And with them all about thee, bow To Him, 'Put on' (He'll say) 'put on, My rosy love, that thy rich zone, Sparkling with the sacred flames, Of thousand souls whose happy names Heaven heaps upon thy score, thy bright Life brought them first to kiss the light That kindled them to stars. ' And so Thou with the Lamb thy Lord shall go, And whereso'er He sets His white Steps, walk with Him those ways of light. Which who in death would live to see Must learn in life to die like thee. " * * * * * "Whoe'er she be, That not impossible she, That shall command my heart and me; "Where'er she lie, Lock'd up from mortal eye, In shady leaves of destiny; "Till that ripe birth Of studied Fate stand forth, And teach her fair steps to our earth: "Till that divine Idea take a shrine Of crystal flesh, through which to shine: "Meet you her, my wishes Bespeak her to my blisses, And be ye call'd, my absent kisses. " The first hymn to Saint Theresa, to which _The Flaming Heart_ is a kind ofappendix, was written when Crashaw was still an Anglican (for which he didnot fail, later, to make a characteristic and very pretty, though quiteunnecessary, apology). It has no passage quite up to theInvocation--Epiphonema, to give it the technical term--of the later poem. But it is, on the contrary, good almost throughout, and is, for uniformexaltation, far the best of Crashaw's poems. Yet such uniform exaltationmust be seldom sought in him. It is in his little bursts, such as that inthe stanza beginning, "O mother turtle dove, " that his charm consists. Often, as in verse after verse of _The Weeper_, it has an unearthlydelicacy and witchery which only Blake, in a few snatches, has everequalled; while at other times the poet seems to invent, in the most casualand unthinking fashion, new metrical effects and new jewelries of dictionwhich the greatest lyric poets since--Coleridge, Shelley, Lord Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne--have rather deliberately imitated than spontaneouslyrecovered. Yet to all this charm there is no small drawback. The verymaddest and most methodless of the "Metaphysicals" cannot touch Crashaw inhis tasteless use of conceits. When he, in _The Weeper_ just above referredto, calls the tears of Magdalene "Wat'ry brothers, " and "Simpering sons ofthose fair eyes, " and when, in the most intolerable of all the poet'sexcesses, the same eyes are called "Two waking baths, two weeping motions, Portable and compendious oceans, " which follow our Lord about the hills ofGalilee, it is almost difficult to know whether to feel most contempt orindignation for a man who could so write. It is fair to say that there arevarious readings and omissions in the different editions which affect boththese passages. Yet the offence is that Crashaw should ever have writtenthem at all. Amends, however, are sure to be made before the reader hasread much farther. Crashaw's longest poems--a version of Marini's _Sospettod'Herode_, and one of the rather overpraised "Lover and Nightingale" storyof Strada--are not his best; the metre in which both are written, thoughthe poet manages it well, lacks the extraordinary charm of his lyricmeasures. It does not appear that the "Not impossible she" ever made herappearance, and probably for a full half of his short life Crashaw burntonly with religious fire. But no Englishman has expressed that fire as hehas, and none in his expression of any sentiment, sacred and profane, hasdropped such notes of ethereal music. At his best he is far above singing, at his worst he is below a very childish prattle. But even then he is nevercoarse, never offensive, not very often actually dull; and everywhere hemakes amends by flowers of the divinest poetry. Mr. Pope, who borrowed nota little from him, thought, indeed, that you could find nothing of "Thereal part of poetry" (correct construction and so forth) in Crashaw; andMr. Hayley gently rebukes Cowley (after observing that if Pope borrowedfrom Crashaw, it was "as the sun borrows from the earth") for his "glowingpanegyrick. " Now, if the real part of poetry is anywhere in Hayley, orquintessentially in Pope, it certainly is not in Crashaw. The group or school (for it is not easy to decide on either word, andobjections might be taken to each) at the head of which Herrick, Carew, andCrashaw must be placed, and which included Herbert and his band of sacredsingers, included also not a few minor groups, sufficiently different fromeach other, but all marked off sharply from the innovating and classicalschool of Waller and his followers, which it is not proposed to treat inthis volume. All, without exception, show the influence in different waysof Ben Jonson and of Donne. But each has its own peculiarity. We find thesepeculiarities, together with anticipations of post-Reformationcharacteristics, mixed very curiously in the miscellanies of the time. These are interesting enough, and may be studied with advantage, if notalso with pleasure, in the principal of them, _Wit's Recreations_ (1640). This, with certain kindred works (_Wit Restored_, and the very unsavoury_Musarum Deliciæ_ of Sir John Mennis and Dr. Smith), has been more thanonce republished. In these curious collections, to mention only oneinstance, numerous pieces of Herrick's appeared with considerable variantsfrom the text of the _Hesperides_; and in their pages things old and new, charming pastoral poems, _vers de société_ of very unequal merit, ballads, satires, epigrams, and a large quantity of mere scatology and doggerel, areheaped together pell-mell. Songs from the dramatists, especially Fletcher, make their appearance, sometimes with slight variants, and there are formsof the drinking song in _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ long after, and of SirJohn Suckling's "Ballad on a Wedding, " apparently somewhat before, theirrespective publication in their proper places. Here is the joke about thewife and the almanack which reckless tradition has told of Dryden; printedwhen Lady Elizabeth Howard was in the nursery, and Dryden was not yet atWestminster. Here we learn how, probably about the second or third decadeof the century, the favourite authors of learned ladies were "Wither, Draiton, and Balzack" (Guez de Balzac of the _Letters_), a very singulartrio; and how some at least loved the "easy ambling" of Heywood's prose, but thought that he "grovelled on the stage, " which it must be confessed henot uncommonly did. _Wit Restored_ contains the charming "Phillida floutsMe, " with other real "delights. " Even Milton makes his appearance in thesecollections, which continued to be popular for more than a century, andacquired at intervals fresh vogue from the great names of Dryden and Pope. Neglecting or returning from these, we may class the minor Caroline poetsunder the following heads. There are belated Elizabethans like Habington, sacred poets of the school of Herbert, translators like Stanley, Sherburne, and Quarles, philosophico-theological poets like Joseph Beaumont and More, and poets of society, such as Lovelace and Suckling, whose classdegenerated into a class of boon companion song-writers, such as AlexanderBrome, and, at the extremity of our present period, Charles Cotton, inwhose verse (as for the matter of that in the famous muses of Lovelace andSuckling themselves) the rapidly degenerating prosody of the time issometimes painfully evident. This is also apparent (though it iscompensated by much exquisite poetry, and on the strictly lyric side rarelyoffends) in the work of Randolph, Corbet, Cartwright, Chamberlayne of the_Pharonnida_, Sidney Godolphin, Shakerley Marmion, Cleveland, Benlowes, Kynaston, John Hall, the enigmatic Chalkhill, Patrick Carey, Bishop King. These about exhaust the list of poets who must be characterised here, though it could be extended. Cowley, Marvell, and Waller fall outside ourlimits. George Herbert, the one popular name, if we except Lovelace and Suckling, of the last paragraph, was born at Montgomery Castle in 1593, of the greathouse now represented in the English peerage by the holders of the titlesof Pembroke, Carnarvon, and Powis. George was the younger brother of theequally well-known Lord Herbert of Cherbury; and after being for some yearspublic orator at Cambridge, turned, it is said, on some despite ordisappointment, from secular to sacred business, accepted the living ofBemerton, and, after holding it for a short time, died in 1633. Walton's_Life_ was hardly needed to fix Herbert in the popular mind, for his famousvolume of sacred poems, _The Temple_, would have done so, and has done sofar more firmly. It was not his only book by any means; he had displayedmuch wit as quite a boy in counter-lampooning Andrew Melville's ponderousand impudent _Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria_, an attack on the Englishuniversities; and afterwards he wrote freely in Greek, Latin, and English, both in prose and verse. Nothing, however, but _The Temple_ has heldpopular estimation, and that has held it firmly, being as much helped bythe Tractarian as by the Romantic movement. It may be confessed withoutshame and without innuendo that Herbert has been on the whole a greaterfavourite with readers than with critics, and the reason is obvious. He isnot prodigal of the finest strokes of poetry. To take only his owncontemporaries, and undoubtedly pupils, his gentle moralising and devotionare tame and cold beside the burning glow of Crashaw, commonplace andpopular beside the intellectual subtlety and, now and then, the inspiredtouch of Vaughan. But he never drops into the flatness and the extravaganceof both these writers, and his beauties, assuredly not mean in themselves, and very constantly present, are both in kind and in arrangement admirablysuited to the average comprehension. He is quaint and conceited; but hisquaintnesses and conceits are never beyond the reach of any tolerablyintelligent understanding. He is devout, but his devotion does nottransgress into the more fantastic regions of piety. He is a mystic, but ofthe more exoteric school of mysticism. He expresses common needs, commonthoughts, the everyday emotions of the Christian, just sublimatedsufficiently to make them attractive. The fashion and his own taste gavehim a pleasing quaintness, which his good sense kept from being everobscure or offensive or extravagant. The famous "Sweet day so cool, socalm, so bright, " and many short passages which are known to every one, express Herbert perfectly. The thought is obvious, usual, in no sense farfetched. The morality is plain and simple. The expression, with asufficient touch of the daintiness of the time, has nothing that isextraordinarily or ravishingly felicitous whether in phrasing or versing. He is, in short, a poet whom all must respect; whom those that are insympathy with his vein of thought cannot but revere; who did England aninestimable service, by giving to the highest and purest thoughts thatfamiliar and abiding poetic garb which contributes so much to fix anythoughts in the mind, and of which, to tell the truth, poetry has been muchmore prodigal to other departments of thought by no means so welldeserving. But it is impossible to call him a great poet even in his owndifficult class. The early Latin hymn writers are there to show what agreat religious poet must be like. Crashaw, if his genius had been lessirregular and jaculative, might have been such. Herbert is not, and couldnot have been. With him it is an almost invariable custom to class Vaughanthe "Silurist, " and a common one to unite George Sandys, the traveller, translator of Ovid, and paraphrast of the Psalms and other parts of theBible. Sandys, an older man than Herbert by fifteen, and than Vaughan bymore than forty years, published rather late, so that he came as a sacredpoet after Herbert, and not long before Vaughan. He was son of theArchbishop of York, and brother of that Edwin Sandys who was a pupil ofHooker, and who is said to have been present on the melancholy occasionwhen the judicious one was "called to rock the cradle. " He is interestingfor a singular and early mastery of the couplet, which the followingextract will show:-- "O Thou, who all things hast of nothing made, Whose hand the radiant firmament displayed, With such an undiscerned swiftness hurled About the steadfast centre of the world; Against whose rapid course the restless sun, And wandering flames in varied motions run. Which heat, light, life infuse; time, night, and day Distinguish; in our human bodies sway: That hung'st the solid earth in fleeting air Veined with clear springs which ambient seas repair. In clouds the mountains wrap their hoary heads; Luxurious valleys clothed with flowery meads; Her trees yield fruit and shade; with liberal breasts All creatures she, their common mother, feasts. " Henry Vaughan was born in 1622, published _Poems_ in 1646 (for some ofwhich he afterwards expressed a not wholly necessary repentance), _OlorIscanus_ (from Isca Silurum) in 1651, and _Silex Scintillans_, hisbest-known book, in 1650 and 1655. He also published verses much later, anddid not die till 1695, being the latest lived of any man who has a claim toappear in this book, but his aftergrowths were not happy. To say thatVaughan is a poet of one poem would not be true. But the universally known "They are all gone into the world of light" is so very much better than anything else that he has done that it would behardly fair to quote anything else, unless we could quote a great deal. Like Herbert, and in pretty obvious imitation of him, he set himself tobend the prevailing fancy for quips and quaintnesses into sacred uses, tosee that the Devil should not have all the best conceits. But he is not souniformly successful, though he has greater depth and greater originalityof thought. Lovelace and Suckling are inextricably connected together, not merely bytheir style of poetry, but by their advocacy of the same cause, their date, and their melancholy end. Both (Suckling in 1609, Lovelace nine yearslater) were born to large fortunes, both spent them, at least partially, inthe King's cause, and both died miserably, --Suckling, in 1642, by his ownhand, his mind, according to a legend, unhinged by the tortures of theInquisition; Lovelace, two years before the Restoration, a needy though notan exiled cavalier, in London purlieus. Both have written songs of quitemarvellous and unparalleled exquisiteness, and both have left doggerelwhich would disgrace a schoolboy. Both, it may be suspected, held thedoctrine which Suckling openly champions, that a gentleman should not taketoo much trouble about his verses. The result, however, was in Lovelace'scase more disastrous than in Suckling's. It is not quite true that Lovelaceleft nothing worth reading but the two immortal songs, "To Lucasta on goingto the Wars" and "To Althea from Prison;" and it is only fair to say thatthe corrupt condition of his text is evidently due, at least in part, toincompetent printing and the absence of revision. "The Grasshopper" isalmost worthy of the two better-known pieces, and there are others not farbelow it. But on the whole any one who knows those two (and who does not?)may neglect Lovelace with safety. Suckling, even putting his dramatic workaside, is not to be thus treated. True, he is often careless in the badsense as well as in the good, though the doggerel of the "Sessions" andsome other pieces is probably intentional. But in his own vein, that ofcoxcombry that is not quite cynical, and is quite intelligent, he ismarvellously happy. The famous song in _Aglaura_, the Allegro to Lovelace'sPenseroso, "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" is scarcely better than "'Tisnow since I sat down before That foolish fort a heart, " or "Out upon it! Ihave loved Three whole days together. " Nor in more serious veins is theauthor to be slighted, as in "The Dance;" while as for the "Ballad on aWedding, " the best parts of this are by common consent incomparable. Sideby side by these are to be found, as in Lovelace, pieces that will not evenscan, and, as _not_ in Lovelace (who is not seldom loose but never nasty), pieces of a dull and disgusting obscenity. But we do not go to Suckling forthese; we go to him for his easy grace, his agreeable impudence, hisscandalous mock-disloyalty (for it is only mock-disloyalty after all) tothe "Lord of Terrible Aspect, " whom all his elder contemporaries worshippedso piously. Suckling's inconstancy and Lovelace's constancy may or may notbe equally poetical, --there is some reason for thinking that the lover ofAlthea was actually driven to something like despair by the loss of hismistress. But that matters to us very little. The songs remain, and remainyet unsurpassed, as the most perfect celebrations, in one case ofchivalrous devotion, in the other of the coxcomb side of gallantry, thatliterature contains or is likely ever to contain. The songwriting facultyof the English, which had broken out some half century before, and hadproduced so many masterpieces, was near its death, or at least near thetrance from which Burns and Blake revived it more than a century later, which even Dryden's superhuman faculty of verse could only galvanise. Butat the last it threw off by the mouths of men, who otherwise seem to havehad very ordinary poetical powers, this little group of triumphs in song, to which have to be added the raptures--equally strange and sweet, equallyunmatched of their kind, but nobler and more masculine--of the "GreatMarquis, " the few and wonderful lines of Montrose. To quote "My dear andonly love, I pray, " or "Great, good, and just, could I but rate, " would bealmost as much an insult to the reader as to quote the above-mentionedlittle masterpieces of the two less heroic English cavaliers. Quarles, More, and Joseph Beaumont form, as it were, a kind of appendix tothe poetry of Herbert and Vaughan--an appendix very much less distinguishedby poetical power, but very interesting as displaying the character of thetime and the fashion (strange enough to us moderns) in which almost everyinterest of that time found its natural way into verse. The enormouspopularity of Francis Quarles's _Emblems_ and _Enchiridion_ accounts tosome extent for the very unjust ridicule which has been lavished on him bymen of letters of his own and later times. But the silly antithesis ofPope, a writer who, great as he was, was almost as ignorant of literaryhistory as his model, Boileau, ought to prejudice no one, and it isstrictly true that Quarles's enormous volume hides, to some extent, hismerits. Born in 1592 at Romford, of a gentle though not very distinguishedfamily, which enters into that curious literary genealogy of Swift, Dryden, and Herrick, he was educated at Cambridge, became cup-bearer to theill-fated and romantically renowned "Goody Palsgrave, " held the post whichMiddleton and Jonson had held, of chronologer to the city of London, followed the King to Oxford to his loss, having previously had losses inIreland, and died early in 1644, leaving his memory to be defended in arather affecting document by his widow, Ursula. Quarles was a kind ofjournalist to whom the vehicle of verse came more easily than the vehicleof prose, and the dangers of that state of things are well known. A merelist of his work (the _Enchiridion_ is in prose, and a good thing too)would far exceed any space that can be given to him here. All Quarles'swork is journey-work, but it is only fair to note the frequent wealth offancy, the occasional felicity of expression, which illustrate thiswilderness. More and Beaumont were not, like Quarles, poetical miscellanists andperiodical writers; but they seem to have shared with him the delusionthat poetry is an instrument of all work. Henry More, a man wellconnected and who might have risen, but who preferred to pass the greaterpart of a long and studious life as a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, is best known as a member of the theological school, indifferently called the Cambridge Platonists and the CambridgeLatitudinarians. His chief work in verse is a great philosophical poem, entitled the _Song of the Soul_, with such engaging sub-titles as_Psychozoia_, _Psychathanasia_, _Antipsychopannychia_, and_Antimonopsychia_. I shall not, I hope, be suspected of being ignorant ofGreek, or disinclined to metaphysics, if I say that the _Song of theSoul_ appears to me a venerable mistake. A philosophical controversycarried on in this fashion-- "But contradiction, can that have place In any soul? Plato affirms ideas; But Aristotle, with his pugnacious race, As idle figments stiffly them denies, " seems to me to be a signal instance of the wrong thing in the wrong place. It is quite true that More has, as Southey says, "lines and passages ofsublime beauty. " A man of his time, actuated by its noble thought, trainedas we know More to have been in the severest school of Spenser, and thushabituated to the heavenly harmonies of that perfect poet, could hardlyfail to produce such. But his muse is a chaotic not a cosmic one. Something the same may be said of Joseph Beaumont, a friend of Crashaw, andlike him ejected from Peterhouse, son-in-law of Bishop Wren, and, later, head of Jesus College. Beaumont, a strong cavalier and an orthodoxchurchman, was a kind of adversary of More's, whose length and quaintnesshe has exceeded, while he has almost rivalled his learning in _Psyche_ or_Love's Mystery_, a religious poem of huge dimensions, first published in1648 and later in 1702. Beaumont, as both fragments of this vast thing andhis minor poems show, had fancy, taste, and almost genius on opportunity;but the prevailing mistake of his school, the idea that poetry is a fitvehicle for merely prosaic expression, is painfully apparent in him. First, for various reasons, among the nondescripts of the Caroline school, deserves to be mentioned William Habington, a Roman Catholic gentleman ofgood upper middle-class station, whose father was himself a man of letters, and had some trouble in the Gunpowder Plot. He was born at Hindlip Hall, near Worcester, in the year of the plot itself, courted and married LucyHerbert, daughter of his neighbour, Lord Powis, and published her charmsand virtues in the collection called _Castara_, first issued in 1634. Habington also wrote a tragic comedy, _The Queen of Aragon_, and some otherwork, but died in middle life. It is upon _Castara_ that his fame rests. Totell the truth it is, though, as had been said, an estimable, yet a ratherirritating work. That Habington was a true lover every line of it shows;that he had a strong infusion of the abundant poetical inspiration thenabroad is shown by line after line, though hardly by poem after poem, amongits pieces. His series of poems on the death of his friend Talbot is fullof beauty. His religion is sincere, fervent, and often finely expressed;though he never rose to Herbert's pure devotion, or to Crashaw's flamingpoetry. One of the later _Castara_ poems may be given:-- "We saw and woo'd each other's eyes, My soul contracted then with thine, And both burnt in one sacrifice, By which our marriage grew divine. "Let wilder youths, whose soul is sense, Profane the temple of delight, And purchase endless penitence, With the stolen pleasure of one night. "Time's ever ours, while we despise The sensual idol of our clay, For though the sun do set and rise, We joy one everlasting day. "Whose light no jealous clouds obscure, While each of us shine innocent, The troubled stream is still impure; With virtue flies away content. "And though opinions often err, We'll court the modest smile of fame, For sin's black danger circles her, Who hath infection in her name. "Thus when to one dark silent room Death shall our loving coffins thrust: Fame will build columns on our tomb, And add a perfume to our dust. " But _Castara_ is a real instance of what some foreign critics very unjustlycharge on English literature as a whole--a foolish and almost cantingprudery. The poet dins the chastity of his mistress into his readers' headsuntil the readers in self-defence are driven to say, "Sir, did any onedoubt it?" He protests the freedom of his own passion from any admixture offleshly influence, till half a suspicion of hypocrisy and more than half afeeling of contempt force themselves on the hearer. A relentless criticmight connect these unpleasant features with the uncharitable and more thanorthodox bigotry of his religious poems. Yet Habington, besidescontributing much agreeable verse to the literature of the period, isinvaluable as showing the counterside to Milton, the Catholic Puritanismwhich is no doubt inherent in the English nature, and which, had it notbeen for the Reformation, would probably have transformed Catholicism in avery strange fashion. There is no Puritanism of any kind in a group--it would hardly be fair tocall them a school--of "Heroic" poets to whom very little attention hasbeen paid in histories of literature hitherto, but who lead up not merelyto Davenant's _Gondibert_ and Cowley's _Davideis_, but to _Paradise Lost_itself. The "Heroic" poem was a kind generated partly by the precepts ofthe Italian criticism, including Tasso, partly by the practice of Tassohimself, and endeavouring to combine something of the unity of Epic withsomething and more of the variety of Romance. It may be represented here bythe work of Chalkhill, Chamberlayne, Marmion, and Kynaston. John Chalkhill, the author of _Thealma and Clearchus_, was, with his work, introduced tothe public in 1683 by Izaak Walton, who styles him "an acquaintant andfriend of Edmund Spenser. " If so, he must have been one of the first ofEnglish poets to adopt the very loose enjambed decasyllabic couplet inwhich his work, like that of Marmion and still more Chamberlayne, iswritten. His poem is unfinished, and the construction and working-up of thestory are looser even than the metre; but it contains a great deal ofcharming description and some very poetical phrase. Much the same may be said of the _Cupid and Psyche_ (1637) of the dramatistShakerley Marmion (_v. Inf. _), which follows the original of Apuleius withalternate closeness and liberty, but is always best when it is mostoriginal. The _Leoline and Sydanis_ (1642) of Sir Francis Kynaston is notin couplets but in rhyme royal--a metre of which the author was so fondthat he even translated the _Troilus and Cressida_ of Chaucer into Latin, retaining the seven-line stanza and its rhymes. Kynaston, who was a memberof both universities and at one time proctor at Cambridge, was a maninterested in various kinds of learning, and even started an Academy or_Museum Minervæ_ of his own. In _Leoline and Sydanis_ he sometimes comesnear to the mock heroic, but in his lyrics called _Cynthiades_ he comesnearer still to the best Caroline cry. One or two of his pieces have foundtheir way into anthologies, but until the present writer reprinted hisworks[60] he was almost unknown. [60] In _Minor Caroline Poets_, vols. I. And ii. (Oxford, 1905-6). Animportant addition to the religious verse of the time was made by Mr. Dobell with the _Poems_ (London, 1903) of Thomas Traherne, a follower ofHerbert, with some strange anticipations of Blake. The most important by far, however, of this group is William Chamberlayne, a physician of Shaftesbury, who, before or during the Civil War, began andafterwards finished (publishing it in 1659) the very long heroic romance of_Pharonnida_, a story of the most involved and confused character but withepisodes of great vividness and even sustained power: a piece ofversification straining the liberties of _enjambement_ in line and want ofconnection in syntax to the utmost; but a very mine of poetical expressionand imagery. Jewels are to be picked up on every page by those who willtake the trouble to do so, and who are not offended by the extraordinarynonchalance of the composition. The _Theophila_ of Edward Benlowes (1603?-1676) was printed in 1652 withelaborate and numerous engravings by Hollar, which have made it rare, andusually imperfect when met with. Benlowes was a Cambridge man (of St. John's College) by education, but lived latterly and died at Oxford, havingbeen reduced from wealth to poverty by the liberality which made hisfriends anagrammatise his name into "Benevolus. " His work was abused as anawful example of the extravagant style by Butler (_Character of a SmallPoet_), and by Warburton in the next century; but it was never reprintedtill the date of the collection just noted. It is a really curious book, displaying the extraordinary _diffusion_ of poetical spirit still existing, but in a hectic and decadent condition. Benlowes--a Cleveland with morepoetry and less cleverness, or a very much weaker Crashaw--uses amonorhymed triplet made up of a heroic, an octosyllable, and an Alexandrinewhich is as wilfully odd as the rest of him. Randolph, the youngest and not the least gifted of the tribe of Ben, diedbefore he was thirty, after writing some noteworthy plays, and a certainnumber of minor poems, which, as it has been well observed, rather showthat he might have done anything, than that he did actually do something. Corbet was Bishop first of Oxford and then of Norwich, and died in 1635. Corbet's work is of that peculiar class which is usually, though notalways, due to "University Wits, " and which only appeals to people with aconsiderable appreciation of humour, and a large stock of generalinformation. It is always occasional in character, and rarely succeeds sowell as when the treatment is one of distinct _persiflage_. Thus the elegyon Donne is infinitely inferior to Carew's, and the mortuary epitaph onArabella Stuart is, for such a subject and from the pen of a man of greattalent, extraordinarily feeble. The burlesque epistle to Lord Mordaunt onhis journey to the North is great fun, and the "Journey into France, "though, to borrow one of its own jokes, rather "strong, " is as good. The"Exhortation to Mr. John Hammond, " a ferocious satire on the Puritans, distinguishes itself from almost all precedent work of the kind by theforce and directness of its attack, which almost anticipates Dryden. AndCorbet had both pathetic and imaginative touches on occasion, as here:-- "What I shall leave thee none can tell, But all shall say I wish thee well, I wish thee, Vin, before all wealth, Both bodily and ghostly health; Nor too much wealth, nor wit, come to thee, So much of either may undo thee. I wish thee learning, not for show, Enough for to instruct and know; Not such as gentlemen require To prate at table, or at fire. I wish thee all thy mother's graces, Thy father's fortunes, and his places. I wish thee friends, and one at court, Not to build on, but support To keep thee, not in doing many Oppressions, but from suffering any. I wish thee peace in all thy ways, Nor lazy nor contentious days; And when thy soul and body part As innocent as now those art. " Cartwright, a short-lived man but a hard student, shows best in his dramas. In his occasional poems, strongly influenced by Donne, he is best atpanegyric, worst at burlesque and epigram. In "On a Gentlewoman's SilkHood" and some other pieces he may challenge comparison with the mostfutile of the metaphysicals; but no one who has read his noble elegy on SirBevil Grenvil, unequal as it is, will think lightly of Cartwright. SirEdward Sherburne was chiefly a translator in the fashionable style. Hisoriginal poems were those of a very inferior Carew (he even copies the nameCelia), but they are often pretty. Alexander Brome, of whom very little isknown, and who must not be confounded with the dramatist, was a lawyer anda cavalier song-writer, who too frequently wrote mere doggerel; but on theother hand, he sometimes did not, and when he escaped the evil influence, as in the stanzas "Come, come, let us drink, " "The Trooper, " and not a fewothers, he has the right anacreontic vein. As for Charles Cotton, his "Virgil Travesty" is deader than Scarron's, anddeserves to be so. The famous lines which Lamb has made known to every onein the essay on "New Year's Day" are the best thing he did. But there aremany excellent things scattered about his work, despite a strong taint ofthe mere coarseness and nastiness which have been spoken of. And though hewas also much tainted with the hopeless indifference to prosody whichdistinguished all these belated cavaliers, it is noteworthy that he was oneof the few Englishmen for centuries to adopt the strict French forms andwrite rondeaux and the like. On the whole his poetical power has been alittle undervalued, while he was also dexterous in prose. Thomas Stanley has been classed above as a translator because he wouldprobably have liked to have his scholarship thus brought into prominence. It was, both in ancient and modern tongues, very considerable. His_History of Philosophy_ was a classic for a very long time; and his editionof Æschylus had the honour of revision within the nineteenth century byPorson and by Butler. It is not certain that Bentley did not borrow fromhim; and his versions of Anacreon, of various other Greek lyrists, of thelater Latins, and of modern writers in Spanish and Italian are mostremarkable. But he was also an original poet in the best Caroline style oflyric; and his combination of family (for he was of the great Stanleystock), learning, and genius gave him a high position with men of lettersof his day. Sidney Godolphin, who died very young fighting for the King inHopton's army, had no time to do much; but he has been magnificentlycelebrated by no less authorities than Clarendon and Hobbes, and fragmentsof his work, which has only recently been collected, have long been known. None of it, except a commendatory poem or two, was printed in his own time, and very little later; while the MSS. Are not in very accomplished form, and show few or no signs of revision by the author. Some, however, ofGodolphin's lyrics are of great beauty, and a couplet translation of the_Fourth Æneid_ has as much firmness as Sandys or Waller. Another precociouspoet whose life also was cut short, though less heroically, and on theother side of politics, was John Hall, a Cambridge man, who at barelytwenty (1645-6) issued a volume of poems and another, _Horæ Vacivæ_, ofprose essays, translated Longinus, did hack-work on the Cromwellian side, and died, it is said, of loose and lazy living. Hall's poems are of mixedkinds--sacred and profane, serious and comic--and the best of them, such as"The Call" and "The Lure, " have a slender but most attractive vein offantastic charm. Patrick Carey, again, a Royalist and brother of the famousLord Falkland, brought up as a Roman Catholic but afterwards a convert tothe Church of England, left manuscript pieces, human and divine, which wereprinted by Sir Walter Scott in 1819, and are extremely pleasant; whileBishop King, though not often at the height of his well-known "Tell me nomore how fair she is, " never falls below a level much above the average. The satirist John Cleveland, whose poems were extremely popular and existin numerous editions (much blended with other men's work and hard todisentangle), was made a sort of "metaphysical helot" by a reference inDryden's _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ and quotations in Johnson's _Life ofCowley_. He partly deserves this, though he has real originality of thoughtand phrase; but much of his work is political or occasional, and he doesnot often rise to the quintessential exquisiteness of some of those whohave been mentioned. A few examples of this class may be given:-- "Through a low Dark vale, where shade-affecting walks did grow Eternal strangers to the sun, did lie The narrow path frequented only by The forest tyrants when they bore their prey From open dangers of discovering day. Passed through this desert valley, they were now Climbing an easy hill, whose every bough Maintained a feathered chorister to sing Soft panegyrics, and the rude winds bring Into a murmuring slumber; whilst the calm Morn on each leaf did hang the liquid balm With an intent, before the next sun's birth To drop it in those wounds which the cleft earth Received from's last day's beams. The hill's ascent Wound up by action, in a large extent Of leafy plains, shows them the canopy Beneath whose shadow their large way did lie. " CHAMBERLAYNE, _Pharonnida_, iv. 1. 199-216. It will be observed that of these eighteen lines all but _four_ areoverrun; and the resemblance to the couplet of Keats's _Endymion_ shouldnot be missed. "April is past, then do not shed, And do not waste in vain, Upon thy mother's earthy bed Thy tears of silver rain. "Thou canst not hope that the cold earth By wat'ring will bring forth A flower like thee, or will give birth To one of the like worth. "'Tis true the rain fall'n from the sky Or from the clouded air, Doth make the earth to fructify, Ann makes the heaven more fair. "With thy dear face it is not so, Which, if once overcast, If thou rain down thy showers of woe, They, like the sirens, blast. "Therefore, when sorrow shall becloud Thy fair serenest day, Weep not: thy sighs shall be allow'd To chase the storm away. "Consider that the teeming vine, If cut by chance [it] weep, Doth bear no grapes to make the wine, But feels eternal sleep. " KYNASTON. "Be conquer'd by such charms; there shall Not always such enticements fall. What know we whether that rich spring of light Will staunch his streams Of golden beams Ere the approach of night? "How know we whether't shall not be The last to either thee or me? He can at will his ancient brightness gain, But thou and I When we shall die Shall still in dust remain. " JOHN HALL. This group of poets seems to demand a little general criticism. They standmore by themselves than almost any other group in English literary history, marked off in most cases with equal sharpness from predecessors, followers, and contemporaries. The best of them, Herrick and Carew, with Crashaw as agreat thirdsman, called themselves "sons" of Ben Jonson, and so in a waythey were; but they were even more sons of Donne. That great writer'sburning passion, his strange and labyrinthine conceits, the union in him ofspiritual and sensual fire, influenced the idiosyncrasies of each as hardlyany other writer's influence has done in other times; while his technicalshortcomings had unquestionably a fatal effect on the weaker members of theschool. But there is also noticeable in them a separate and hardlydefinable influence which circumscribes their class even more distinctly. They were, as I take it, the last set of poets anywhere in Europe toexhibit, in that most fertile department of poetry which seeks itsinspiration in the love of man for woman, the frank expression of physicalaffection united with the spirit of chivalry, tempered by the consciousnessof the fading of all natural delights, and foreshadowed by thatintellectual introspection which has since developed itself in such greatmeasure--some think out of all measure--in poetry. In the best of themthere is no cynicism at all. Herrick and Carew are only sorry that theamatory fashion of this world passeth; they do not in the least undervalueit while it lasts, or sneer at it when it is gone. There is, at least to mythinking, little coarseness in them (I must perpetually except Herrick'sepigrams), though there is, according to modern standards, a great deal ofvery plain speaking. They have as much frank enjoyment of physicalpleasures as any classic or any mediævalist; but they have what no classicexcept Catullus and perhaps Sappho had, --the fine rapture, the passing buttransforming madness which brings merely physical passion _sub specieæternitatis_; and they have in addition a faint preliminary touch of thatanalytic and self-questioning spirit which refines even further upon thechivalric rapture and the classical-renaissance mysticism of the shadow ofdeath, but which since their time has eaten up the simpler and frankermoods of passion itself. With them, as a necessary consequence, thephysical is (to anticipate a famous word of which more presently) alwaysblended with the metaphysical. It is curious that, as one result of thechange of manner, this should have even been made a reproach to them--thatthe ecstasy of their ecstasies should apparently have become not an excusebut an additional crime. Yet if any grave and precise person will readCarew's _Rapture_, the most audacious, and of course wilfully audaciousexpression of the style, and then turn to the archangel's colloquy withAdam in _Paradise Lost_, I should like to ask him on which side, accordingto his honour and conscience, the coarseness lies. I have myself nohesitation in saying that it lies with the husband of Mary Powell and theauthor of _Tetrachordon_, not with the lover of Celia and the author of thelines to "A. L. " There are other matters to be considered in the determination of thecritical fortunes of the Caroline school. Those fortunes have been ratherodd. Confounded at first in the general oblivion which the Restorationthrew on all works of "the last age, " and which deepened as the school ofDryden passed into the school of Pope, the writers of the Donne-Cowleytradition were first exhumed for the purposes of _post-mortem_ examinationby and in the remarkable "Life" of Johnson, devoted to the last member ofthe class. It is at this time of day alike useless to defend theMetaphysical Poets against much that Johnson said, and to defend Johnsonagainst the charge of confusion, inadequacy, and haste in hisgeneralisations. The term metaphysical, originating with Dryden, and usedby Johnson with a slight difference, may be easily miscomprehended by anyone who chooses to forget its legitimate application both etymologicallyand by usage to that which comes, as it were, behind or after nature. StillJohnson undoubtedly confounded in one common condemnation writers who havevery little in common, and (which was worse) criticised a peculiarity ofexpression as if it had been a deliberate substitution of alloy for gold. The best phrases of the metaphysical poets more than justify themselves toany one who looks at poetry with a more catholic appreciation thanJohnson's training and associations enabled him to apply; and even theworst are but mistaken attempts to follow out a very sound principle, thatof "making the common as though it were not common. " Towards the end of theeighteenth century some of these poets, especially Herrick, were revivedwith taste and success by Headley and other men of letters. But it sohappened that the three great critics of the later Romantic revival, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Coleridge, were all strongly attracted to the bolder andmore irregular graces of the great dramatic poets, to the not less quaintbut less "mignardised" quaintnesses of prose writers like Burton, Browne, and Taylor, or to the massive splendours of the Elizabethan poets proper. The poetry of the Caroline age was, therefore, a little slurred, and thismishap of falling between two schools has constantly recurred to it. Somecritics even who have done its separate authors justice, have subsequentlyindulged in palinodes, have talked about decadence and Alexandrianism andwhat not. The majority have simply let the Cavalier Poets (as they aresometimes termed by a mere historical coincidence) be something more thanthe victims of the schools that preceded and followed them. The lovers ofthe school of good sense which Waller founded regard the poets of thischapter as extravagant concettists; the lovers of the Elizabethan schoolproper regard them as effeminate triflers. One of Milton's gorgeous butconstantly illogical phrases about the poets of his day may perhaps havecreated a prejudice against these poets. But Milton was a politician aswell as a poet, a fanatic as well as a man of letters of seldom equalled, and never, save in two or three cases, surpassed powers. He was also a manof a more morose and unamiable private character than any other great poetthe world has known except Racine. The easy _bonhomie_ of the Caroline muserepelled his austerity; its careless good-breeding shocked his middle-classand Puritan Philistinism; its laxity revolted his principles of morality. Not improbably the vein of sympathy which discovers itself in the exquisiteverse of the _Comus_, of the _Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, of _Lycidas_itself, infuriated him (as such veins of sympathy when they are rudelychecked and turned from their course will often do) with those who indulgedinstead of checking it. But because _Lycidas_ is magnificent, and _IlPenseroso_ charming poetry, we are not to think meanly of "FairDaffodils, " or "Ask me no more, " of "Going to the Wars, " or "Tell me nomore how fair she is. " Let us clear our minds of this cant, and once more admit, as the student ofliterature always has to remind himself, that a sapphire and diamond ringis not less beautiful because it is not a marble palace, or a bank of wildflowers in a wood because it is not a garden after the fashion of Lenôtre. In the division of English poetry which we have been reviewing, there areto be found some of the most exquisite examples of the gem and flower orderof beauty that can be found in all literature. When Herrick bids Perilla "Wind me in that very sheet Which wrapt thy smooth limbs when thou didst implore The gods' protection but the night before: Follow me weeping to my turf, and there Let fall a primrose and with it a tear; Then lastly, let some weekly strewings be Devoted to the memory of me. _Then shall my ghost not walk about; but keep_ _Still in the cool and silent shades of sleep;_" or when he writes that astonishing verse, so unlike his usual style-- "In this world, _the Isle of Dreams_, While we sit by sorrow's streams, Tears and terrors are our themes;" when Carew, in one of those miraculous closing bursts, carefully led up to, of which he has almost the secret, cries "_Oh, love me then, and now begin it, _ _Let us not lose this present minute;_ _For time and age will work that wrack_ _Which time nor age shall ne'er call back;_" when even the sober blood in Habington's decent veins spurts in thissplendid sally-- "So, 'mid the ice of the far northern sea, A star about the Arctic circle may Than ours yield clearer light; _yet that but shall_ _Serve at the frozen pilot's funeral_:" when Crashaw writes as if caught by the very fire of which he speaks, --thefire of the flaming heart of Saint Theresa; when Lovelace, most carelessand unliterary of all men, breaks out as if by simple instinct into thoseperfect verses which hardly even Burns and Shelley have equalled since, --itis impossible for any one who feels for poetry at all not to feel more thanappreciation, not to feel sheer enthusiasm. Putting aside the very greatestpoets of all, I hardly know any group of poetical workers who so oftencause this enthusiasm as our present group, with their wonderful felicityof language; with their command of those lyrical measures which seem soeasy and are so difficult; with their almost unparalleled blend of asensuousness that does not make the intellect sluggish and of the loftiestspirituality. When we examine what is said against them, a great deal of it is found tobe based on that most treacherous of all foundations, a hard-drivenmetaphor. Because they come at the end of a long and fertile period ofliterature, because a colder and harder kind of poetry followed them, theyare said to be "decadence, " "autumn, " "over-ripe fruit, " "sunset, " and soforth. These pretty analogies have done much harm in literary history. Ofthe Muse it is most strictly and soberly true that "Bocca bacciata nonperde ventura, anzi rinuova come fa la luna. " If there is any meaning aboutthe phrases of decadence, autumn, and the like, it is derived from the ideaof approaching death and cessation. There is no death, no cessation, inliterature; and the sadness and decay of certain periods is mere fiction. An autumn day would not be sad if the average human being did not (veryproperly) take from it a warning of the shortness of his own life. Butliterature is not short-lived. There was no sign of poetry dying whenShelley lived two thousand five hundred years after Sappho, when Shakesperelived as long after Homer. Periods like the periods of the Greek Anthologyor of our Caroline poetry are not periods of decay, but simply periods ofdifference. There are no periods of decay in literature so long as anythinggood is produced; and when nothing good is produced, it is only a signthat the field is taking a healthy turn of fallow. In this time much thatwas good, with a quite wonderful and charming goodness, was produced. Whatis more, it was a goodness which had its own distinct characteristics, someof which I have endeavoured to point out, and which the true lover ofpoetry would be as unwilling to lose as to lose the other goodnesses of allthe great periods, and of all but the greatest names in those periods. Forthe unapproachables, for the first Three, for Homer, for Shakespere, forDante, I would myself (though I should be very sorry) give up all the poetswe have been reviewing. I should not like to have to choose between Herrickand Milton's earlier poems; between the Caroline poets, major and minor, asjust reviewed on the one hand, and _The Faërie Queene_ on the other. But Icertainly would give _Paradise Regained_ for some score of poems of thewriters just named; and for them altogether I would give all but a fewpassages (I would not give those) of _Paradise Lost_. And, as I haveendeavoured (perhaps to my readers' satiety) to point out, this comparativeestimate is after all a radically unsound one. We are not called upon toweigh this kind of poetry against that kind; we are only incidentally, andin an uninvidious manner, called upon to weigh this poet against that evenof the same kind. The whole question is, whether each is good in his ownkind, and whether the kind is a worthy and delightful one. And in regard ofmost of the poets just surveyed, both these questions can be answered withan unhesitating affirmative. If we had not these poets, one particularsavour, one particular form, of the poetical rapture would be lacking tothe poetical expert; just as if what Herrick himself calls "the braveBurgundian wine" were not, no amount of claret and champagne could replaceit. For passionate sense of the good things of earth, and at the same timefor mystical feeling of their insecurity, for exquisite style without thefrigidity and the over-correctness which the more deliberate stylistsfrequently display, for a blending of Nature and art that seems as if itmust have been as simply instinctive in all as it certainly was in some, the poets of the Tribe of Ben, of the Tribe of Donne, who illustrated theperiod before Puritanism and Republicanism combined had changed Englandfrom merriment to sadness, stand alone in letters. We have had as goodsince, but never the same--never any such blending of classical frankness, of mediæval simplicity and chivalry, of modern reflection and thought. [61] [61] Since this book first appeared, some persons whose judgment I respecthave expressed to me surprise and regret that I have not given a higher andlarger place to Henry Vaughan. A higher I cannot give, because I think him, despite the extreme beauty of his thought and (more rarely) of hisexpression, a most imperfect poet; nor a larger, because that would involvea critical arguing out of the matter, which would be unsuitable to the planand scale of this book. Had he oftener written as he wrote in the famouspoem referred to in the text, or as in the magnificent opening of "TheWorld"-- "I saw Eternity the other night, _Like a great ring of pure and endless light_, All calm as it was bright, " there would be much more to say of him. But he is not master of theexpression suitable to his noble and precious thought except in thebriefest bursts--bursts compared to which even Crashaw's are sustained andmethodical. His admirers claim for "The Retreat" the germ of Wordsworth'sgreat ode, but if any one will compare the two he will hardly complain thatVaughan has too little space here. CHAPTER XI THE FOURTH DRAMATIC PERIOD Two great names remain to be noticed in the Elizabethan drama (thoughneither produced a play till after Elizabeth was dead), some interestingplaywrights of third or fourth-rate importance have to be added to them, and in a postscript we shall have to gather up the minor or anonymous work, some of it of very high excellence, of the second division of our wholesubject, including plays of the second, third, and fourth periods. But withthis fourth period we enter into what may really be called by comparison(remembering always what has been said in the last chapter) a period ofdecadence, and at its latter end it becomes very decadent indeed. Only inFord perhaps, of our named and individual authors in this chapter, and inhim very rarely, occur the flashes of sheer poetry which, as we have seenin each of the three earlier chapters on the drama, lighten the work of theElizabethan and Jacobean dramatists proper with extraordinary and lavishbrilliance. Not even in Ford are to be found the whole and perfect studiesof creative character which, even leaving Shakespere out of the question, are to be found earlier in plays and playwrights of all kinds andstrengths, from _The Maid's Tragedy_ and _Vittoria Corombona_, to _TheMerry Devil of Edmonton_ and _A Cure for a Cuckold_. The tragedies have BenJonson's labour without his force, the comedies his coarseness and lack ofinspiriting life without his keen observation and incisive touch. As thetaste indeed turned more and more from tragedy to comedy, we get attemptson the part of playwrights to win it back by a return to the bloody andmonstrous conceptions of an earlier time, treated, however, without theredeeming features of that time, though with a little more coherence andart. Massinger's _Unnatural Combat_, and Ford's _'Tis Pity She's a Whore_, among great plays, are examples of this: the numerous minor examples arehardly worth mentioning. But the most curious symptom of all was thegradual and, as it were, imperceptible loss of the secret of blank verseitself, which had been the instrument of the great triumphs of the stagefrom Marlowe to Dekker. Something of this loss of grasp may have beennoticed in the looseness of Fletcher and the over-stiffness of Jonson: itis perceptible distinctly even in Ford and Massinger. But as theRestoration, or rather the silencing of the theatres by the Commonwealthapproaches, it becomes more and more evident until we reach the chaotic andhideous jumble of downright prose and verse that is neither prose norverse, noticeable even in the early plays of Dryden, and chargeable nodoubt with the twenty years' return of the English drama to the comparativebarbarism of the couplet. This apparent loss of ear and rhythm-sense hasbeen commented on already in reference to Lovelace, Suckling (himself adramatist), and others of the minor Caroline poets; but it is far morenoticeable in drama, and resulted in the production, by some of theplaywrights of the transition period under Charles I. And Charles II. , ofsome of the most amorphous botches in the way of style that disfigureEnglish literature. With the earliest and best work of Philip Massinger, however, we are at anyrate chronologically still at a distance from the lamentable close of agreat period. He was born in 1583, being the son of Arthur Massinger, a"servant" (pretty certainly in the gentle sense of service) to the Pembrokefamily. In 1602 he was entered at St. Alban's Hall in Oxford: he issupposed to have left the university about 1609, and may have begun writingplays soon. But the first definite notice of his occupation or indeed ofhis life that we have is his participation (about 1614) with Daborne andField in a begging letter to the well-known manager Henslowe for an advanceof five pounds on "the new play, " nor was anything of his printed orpositively known to be acted till 1622, the date of _The Virgin Martyr_. From that time onwards he appears frequently as an author, though many ofhis plays were not printed till after his death in 1640. But nothing isknown of his life. He was buried on 18th March in St. Saviour's, Southwark, being designated as a "stranger, "--that is to say, not a parishioner. Thirty-seven plays in all, or thirty-eight if we add Mr. Bullen'sconjectural discovery, _Sir John Barneveldt_, are attributed to Massinger;but of these many have perished, Massinger having somehow been speciallyobnoxious to the ravages of Warburton's cook. Eighteen survive; twelve ofwhich were printed during the author's life. Massinger was thus anindustrious and voluminous author, one of many points which make ProfessorMinto's comparison of him to Gray a little surprising. He was, both atfirst and later, much given to collaboration, --indeed, there is a theory, not without colour from contemporary rumour, that he had nearly if notquite as much to do as Beaumont with Fletcher's great work. But oddlyenough the plays which he is known to have written alone do not, as inother cases, supply a very sure test of what is his share in those which hewrote conjointly. _The Old Law_, a singular play founded on a similarconception to that in the late Mr. Anthony Trollope's _Fixed Period_, isattributed also to Rowley and Dekker, and has sometimes been thought to beso early that Massinger, except as a mere boy, could have had no hand init. The contradictions of critics over _The Virgin Martyr_ (by Massingerand Dekker) have been complete; some peremptorily handing over all the finescenes to one, and some declaring that these very scenes could only bewritten by the other. It is pretty certain that the argumentativetheological part is Massinger's; for he had a strong liking for suchthings, while the passages between Dorothea and her servant Angelo are atonce more delicate than most of his work, and more regular and even thanDekker's. No companion is, however, assigned to him in _The UnnaturalCombat_, which is probably a pretty early and certainly a characteristicexample of his style. His demerits appear in the exaggerated and crudedevilry of the wicked hero, old Malefort (who cheats his friend, makes awaywith his wife, kills his son in single combat, and conceives an incestuouspassion for his daughter), in the jerky alternation and improbable conductof the plot, and in the merely extraneous connection of the farcicalscenes. His merits appear in the stately versification and ethical interestof the debate which precedes the unnatural duel, and in the spirited andwell-told apologue (for it is almost that) of the needy soldier, Belgarde, who is bidden not to appear at the governor's table in his shabby clothes, and makes his appearance in full armour. The debate between father and sonmay be given:-- _Malef. Sen. _ "Now we are alone, sir; And thou hast liberty to unload the burthen Which thou groan'st under. Speak thy griefs. _Malef. Jun. _ I shall, sir; But in a perplex'd form and method, which You only can interpret: Would you had not A guilty knowledge in your bosom, of The language which you force me to deliver So I were nothing! As you are my father I bend my knee, and, uncompell'd profess My life, and all that's mine, to be your gift; And that in a son's duty I stand bound To lay this head beneath your feet and run All desperate hazards for your ease and safety: But this confest on my part, I rise up, And not as with a father (all respect, Love, fear, and reverence cast off) but as A wicked man I thus expostulate with you. Why have you done that which I dare not speak, And in the action changed the humble shape Of my obedience, to rebellious rage And insolent pride? and with shut eyes constrain'd me, I must not see, nor, if I saw it, shun it. In my wrongs nature suffers, and looks backward, And mankind trembles to see me pursue What beasts would fly from. For when I advance This sword as I must do, against your head, Piety will weep, and filial duty mourn, To see their altars which you built up in me In a moment razed and ruined. That you could (From my grieved soul I wish it) but produce To qualify, not excuse your deed of horror, One seeming reason that I might fix here And move no farther! _Malef. Sen. _ Have I so far lost A father's power, that I must give account Of my actions to my son? or must I plead As a fearful prisoner at the bar, while he That owes his being to me sits a judge To censure that which only by myself Ought to be question'd? mountains sooner fall Beneath their valleys and the lofty pine Pay homage to the bramble, or what else is Preposterous in nature, ere my tongue In one short syllable yield satisfaction To any doubt of thine; nay, though it were A certainty disdaining argument! Since though my deeds wore hell's black lining, To thee they should appear triumphal robes, Set off with glorious honour, thou being bound, To see with my eyes, and to hold that reason That takes or birth or fashion from my will. _Malef. Jun. _ This sword divides that slavish knot. _Malef. Sen. _ It cannot: It cannot, wretch, and if thou but remember From whom thou had'st this spirit, thou dar'st not hope it. Who trained thee up in arms but I? Who taught thee Men were men only when they durst look down With scorn on death and danger, and contemn'd All opposition till plumed Victory Had made her constant stand upon their helmets? Under my shield thou hast fought as securely As the young eaglet covered with the wings Of her fierce dam, learns how and where to prey. All that is manly in thee I call mine; But what is weak and womanish, thine own. And what I gave, since thou art proud, ungrateful, Presuming to contend with him to whom Submission is due, I will take from thee. Look therefore for extremities and expect not I will correct thee as a son, but kill thee As a serpent swollen with poison; who surviving A little longer with infectious breath, Would render all things near him like itself Contagious. Nay, now my anger's up, Ten thousand virgins kneeling at my feet, And with one general cry howling for mercy, Shall not redeem thee. _Malef. Jun. _ Thou incensed Power Awhile forbear thy thunder! let me have No aid in my revenge, if from the grave My mother---- _Malef. Sen. _ Thou shalt never name her more. " [_They fight. _ _The Duke of Milan_ is sometimes considered Massinger's masterpiece; andhere again there are numerous fine scenes and noble _tirades_. But theirrationality of the _donneé_ (Sforza the duke charges his favourite not tolet the duchess survive his own death, and the abuse of the authority thusgiven leads to horrible injustice and the death of both duchess and duke)mars the whole. The predilection of the author for sudden turns and twistsof situation, his neglect to make his plots and characters acceptable andconceivable as wholes, appear indeed everywhere, even in what I have nodoubt in calling his real masterpiece by far, the fine tragi-comedy of _ANew Way to Pay Old Debts_. The revengeful trick by which a satellite of thegreat extortioner, Sir Giles Overreach, brings about his employer'sdiscomfiture, regardless of his own ruin, is very like the denouement ofthe Brass and Quilp part of the _Old Curiosity Shop_, may have suggested it(for _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_ lasted as an acting play well intoDickens's time), and, like it, is a little improbable. But the play is anadmirable one, and Overreach (who, as is well known, was supposed to be akind of study of his half namesake, Mompesson, the notorious monopolist) isby far the best single character that Massinger ever drew. He again cameclose to true comedy in _The City Madam_, another of the best known of hisplays, where the trick adopted at once to expose the villainy of theapparently reformed spendthrift Luke, and to abate the ruinous extravaganceof Lady Frugal and her daughters, is perhaps not beyond the limits of atleast dramatic verisimilitude, and gives occasion to some capital scenes. _The Bondman_, _The Renegado_, the curious _Parliament of Love_, which, like others of Massinger's plays, is in an almost Æschylean state oftext-corruptness, _The Great Duke of Florence_, _The Maid of Honour_ (oneof the very doubtful evidences of Massinger's supposed conversion to RomanCatholicism), _The Picture_ (containing excellent passages, but forimprobability and topsy-turviness of incident ranking with _The Duke ofMilan_), _The Emperor of the East_, _The Guardian_, _A Very Woman_, _TheBashful Lover_, are all plays on which, if there were space, it would beinteresting to comment; and they all display their author's strangely mixedmerits and defects. _The Roman Actor_ and _The Fatal Dowry_ must have alittle more attention. The first is, I think, Massinger's best tragiceffort; and the scene where Domitian murders Paris, with his tyrannicalexplanation of the deed, shows a greater conception of tragic poetry--alittle cold and stately, a little Racinish or at least Cornelian ratherthan Shakesperian, but still passionate and worthy of the tragicstage--than anything that Massinger has done. _The Fatal Dowry_, written inconcert with Field and unceremoniously pillaged by Rowe in his once famous_Fair Penitent_, is a purely romantic tragedy, injured by the unattractivecharacter of the light-of-love Beaumelle before her repentance (Massingernever could draw a woman), and by not a few of the author's favouriteimprobabilities and glaring or rather startling non-sequiturs of action, but full also of fine passages, especially of the quasi-forensic kind inwhich Massinger so much delights. To sum up, it may seem inconsistent that, after allowing so many faults inMassinger, I should protest against the rather low estimate of him whichcritics from Lamb downwards have generally given. Yet I do so protest. Itis true that he has not the highest flashes either of verbal poetry or ofdramatic character-drawing; and though Hartley Coleridge's dictum that hehad no humour has been exclaimed against, it is only verbally wrong. It isalso true that in him perhaps for the first time we perceive, what is sureto appear towards the close of a period, a distinct touch of _literary_borrowing--evidence of knowledge and following of his forerunners. Yet hehad a high, a varied, and a fertile imagination. He had, and was the lastto have, an extensive and versatile command of blank verse, never perhapsreaching the most perfect mastery of Marlowe or of Shakespere, butsingularly free from monotony, and often both harmonious and dignified. Hecould deal, and deal well, with a large range of subjects; and if he neverascends to the height of a De Flores or a Bellafront, he never descends tothe depths in which both Middleton and Dekker too often complacentlywallow. Unless we are to count by mere flashes, he must, I think, rankafter Shakespere, Fletcher, and Jonson among his fellows; and this I say, honestly avowing that I have nothing like the enthusiasm for him that Ihave for Webster, or for Dekker, or for Middleton. We may no doubt allowtoo much for bulk of work, for sustained excellence at a certain level, andfor general competence as against momentary excellence. But we may alsoallow far too little; and this has perhaps been the general tendency oflater criticism in regard to Massinger. It is unfortunate that he neversucceeded in making as perfect a single expression of his tragic ability ashe did of his comic, for the former was, I incline to think, the higher ofthe two. But many of his plays are lost, and many of those which remaincome near to such excellence. It is by no means impossible that Massingermay have lost incomparably by the misdeeds of the constantly execrated, butnever to be execrated enough, minion of that careless herald. As in the case of Clarendon, almost absolutely contradictory opinions havebeen delivered, by critics of great authority, about John Ford. In one ofthe most famous outbursts of his generous and enthusiastic estimate of theElizabethan period, Lamb has pronounced Ford to be of the first order ofpoets. Mr Swinburne, while bringing not a few limitations to thistremendous eulogy, has on the whole supported it in one of the mostbrilliant of his prose essays; and critics as a rule have bowed to Lamb'sverdict. On the other hand, Hazlitt (who is "gey ill to differ with" whenthere are, as here, no extra-literary considerations to reckon) hastraversed that verdict in one of the most damaging utterances ofcommonsense, yet not commonplace, criticism anywhere to be found, askingbluntly and pointedly whether the exceptionableness of the subject is notwhat constitutes the merit of Ford's greatest play, pronouncing the famouslast scene of _The Broken Heart_ extravagant, and fixing on "a certainperversity of spirit" in Ford generally. It is pretty clear that HartleyColeridge (who might be paralleled in our own day as a critic, who seldomwent wrong except through ignorance, though he had a sublime indifferenceas to the ignorance that sometimes led him wrong) was of no differentopinion. It is not easy to settle such a quarrel. But I had the goodfortune to read Ford before I had read anything except Hartley Coleridge'srather enigmatic verdict about him, and in the many years that have passedsince I have read him often again. The resulting opinion may not beexceptionally valuable, but it has at least stood the test of frequentre-reading of the original, and of reading of the main authorities amongthe commentators. John Ford, like Fletcher and Beaumont, but unlike almost all others of hisclass, was a person not compelled by need to write tragedies, --comedies ofany comic merit he could never have written, were they his neck verse atHairibee. His father was a man of good family and position at Ilsington inDevon. His mother was of the well-known west-country house of the Pophams. He was born(?) two years before the Armada, and three years afterMassinger. He has no university record, but was a member of the MiddleTemple, and takes at least some pains to assure us that he never wrote formoney. Nevertheless, for the best part of thirty years he was a playwright, and he is frequently found collaborating with Dekker, the neediest ifnearly the most gifted gutter-playwright of the time. Once he worked withWebster in a play (_The Murder of the Son upon the Mother_) which must havegiven the fullest possible opportunity to the appetite of both for horrors. Once he, Rowley, and Dekker combined to produce the strange masterpiece(for a masterpiece it is in its own undisciplined way) of the _Witch ofEdmonton_, where the obvious signs of a play hastily cobbled up to meet apopular demand do not obscure the talents of the cobblers. It must beconfessed that there is much less of Ford than of Rowley and Dekker in thepiece, except perhaps its comparative regularity and the quite unreasonableand unintelligible bloodiness of the murder of Susan. In _The Sun'sDarling_, due to Ford and Dekker, the numerous and charming lyrics arepretty certainly Dekker's; though we could pronounce on this point withmore confidence if we had the two lost plays, _The Fairy Knight_ and _TheBristowe Merchant_, in which the same collaborators are known to have beenengaged. _The Fancies_, _Chaste and Noble_, and _The Lady's Trial_ which wehave, and which are known to be Ford's only, are but third-rate work bycommon consent, and _Love's Sacrifice_ has excited still stronger opinionsof condemnation from persons favourable to Ford. This leaves us practicallyfour plays upon which to base our estimate--_'Tis Pity She's a Whore_, _TheLover's Melancholy_, _The Broken Heart_, and _Perkin Warbeck_. Thelast-named I shall take the liberty of dismissing summarily with the sameborrowed description as Webster's _Appius and Virginia_. Hartley Coleridge, perhaps willing to make up if he could for a general distaste for Ford, volunteered the strange judgment that it is the best specimen of thehistoric drama to be found out of Shakespere; and Hazlitt says nothingsavage about it. I shall say nothing more, savage or otherwise. _TheLover's Melancholy_ has been to almost all its critics a kind of lute-casefor the very pretty version of Strada's fancy about the nightingale, whichCrashaw did better; otherwise it is naught. We are, therefore, left with_'Tis Pity She's a Whore_ and _The Broken Heart_. For myself, in respect tothe first, after repeated readings and very careful weighings of what hasbeen said, I come back to my first opinion--to wit, that the Annabella andGiovanni scenes, with all their perversity, all their availing themselvesof what Hazlitt, with his unerring instinct, called "unfair attractions, "are among the very best things of their kind. Of what may be thought unfairin them I shall speak a little later: but allowing for this, the sheereffects of passion--the "All for love and the world well lost, " theshutting out, not instinctively or stupidly, but deliberately, and withfull knowledge, of all other considerations except the dictates ofdesire--have never been so rendered in English except in _Romeo and Juliet_and _Antony and Cleopatra_. The comparison of course brings out Ford'sweakness, not merely in execution, but in design; not merely inaccomplishment, but in the choice of means for accomplishment. Shakesperehad no need of the _haut goût_ of incest, of the unnatural horrors of theheart on the dagger. But Ford had; and he in a way (I do not say fully)justified his use of these means. _The Broken Heart_ stands far lower. I own that I am with Hazlitt, notLamb, on the question of the admired death scene of Calantha. In the firstplace, it is certainly borrowed from Marston's _Malcontent_; in the second, it is wholly unnatural; in the third, the great and crowning point of it isnot, as Lamb seemed to think, Calantha's sentimental inconsistency, but theconsistent and noble death of Orgilus. There Ford was at home, and long asit is it must be given:-- _Cal. _ "Bloody relator of thy stains in blood, For that thou hast reported him, whose fortunes And life by thee are both at once snatch'd from him, With honourable mention, make thy choice Of what death likes thee best, there's all our bounty. But to excuse delays, let me, dear cousin, Intreat you and these lords see execution Instant before you part. _Near. _ Your will commands us. _Org. _ One suit, just queen, my last: vouchsafe your clemency That by no common hand I be divided From this my humble frailty. _Cal. _ To their wisdoms Who are to be spectators of thine end I make the reference: those that are dead Are dead; had they not now died, of necessity They must have paid the debt they owed to nature, One time or other. Use dispatch, my lords; We'll suddenly prepare our coronation. [_Exeunt_ CAL. , PHIL. , _and_ CHRIS. _Arm. _ 'Tis strange, these tragedies should never touch on Her female pity. _Bass. _ She has a masculine spirit, And wherefore should I pule, and, like a girl, Put finger in the eye? Let's be all toughness Without distinction betwixt sex and sex. _Near. _ Now, Orgilus, thy choice? _Org. _ To bleed to death. _Arm. _ The executioner? _Org. _ Myself, no surgeon; I am well skilled in letting blood. Bind fast This arm, that so the pipes may from their conduits Convey a full stream; here's a skilful instrument: [_Shows his dagger. _ Only I am a beggar to some charity To speed me in this execution By lending the other prick to the other arm When this is bubbling life out. _Bass. _ I am for you, It most concerns my art, my care, my credit, Quick, fillet both his arms. _Org. _ Gramercy, friendship! Such courtesies are real which flow cheerfully Without an expectation of requital. Reach me a staff in this hand. If a proneness [_They give him a staff. _ Or custom in my nature, from my cradle Had been inclined to fierce and eager bloodshed, A coward guilt hid in a coward quaking, Would have betray'd me to ignoble flight And vagabond pursuit of dreadful safety: But look upon my steadiness and scorn not The sickness of my fortune; which since Bassanes Was husband to Penthea, had lain bed-rid. We trifle time in words: thus I show cunning In opening of a vein too full, too lively. [_Pierces the vein with his dagger. _ _Arm. _ Desperate courage! _Near. _ Honourable infamy! _Hem. _ I tremble at the sight. _Gron. _ Would I were loose! _Bass. _ It sparkles like a lusty wine new broach'd; The vessel must be sound from which it issues. Grasp hard this other stick--I'll be as nimble-- But prithee look not pale--Have at ye! stretch out Thine arm with vigour and unshaken virtue. [_Opens the vein. _ Good! oh I envy not a rival, fitted To conquer in extremities: this pastime Appears majestical; some high-tuned poem Hereafter shall deliver to posterity The writer's glory, and his subjects triumph. How is't man?--droop not yet. _Org. _ I feel no palsies, On a pair-royal do I wait in death: My sovereign as his liegeman; on my mistress As a devoted servant; and on Ithocles As if no brave, yet no unworthy enemy: Nor did I use an engine to entrap His life out of a slavish fear to combat Youth, strength, or cunning; but for that I durst not Engage the goodness of a cause on fortune By which his name might have outfaced my vengeance. Oh, Tecnicus, inspired with Phoebus' fire! I call to mind thy augury, 'twas perfect; _Revenge proves its own executioner. _ When feeble man is lending to his mother The dust he was first framed in, thus he totters. _Bass. _ Life's fountain is dried up. _Org. _ So falls the standard Of my prerogative in being a creature, A mist hangs o'er mine eyes, the sun's bright splendour Is clouded in an everlasting shadow. Welcome, thou ice that sit'st about my heart, No heat can ever thaw thee. [_Dies. _ The perverse absurdity of a man like Orgilus letting Penthea die by themost horrible of deaths must be set aside: his vengeance (the primaryabsurdity granted), is exactly and wholly in character. But if anythingcould be decisive against Ford being "of the first order of poets, " even ofdramatic poets, it would be the total lack of interest in the characters ofCalantha and Ithocles. Fate-disappointed love seems (no doubt fromsomething in his own history) to have had a singular attraction for Lamb;and the glorification, or, as it were, apotheosis of it in Calantha musthave appealed to him in one of those curious and illegitimate ways whichevery critic knows. But the mere introduction of Bassanes would show thatFord is not of the first order of poets. He is a purely contemptiblecharacter, neither sublimed by passion of jealousy, nor kept whole by saltof comic exposition; a mischievous poisonous idiot who ought to have hadhis brains knocked out, and whose brains would assuredly have been knockedout, by any Orgilus of real life. He is absolutely unequal to the place ofcentral personage, and causer of the harms, of a romantic tragedy such as_The Broken Heart_. I have said "by any Orgilus of real life, " but Ford has little to do withreal life; and it is in this fact that the insufficiency of his claim torank among the first order of poets lies. He was, it is evident, a man ofthe greatest talent, even of great genius, who, coming at the end of a longliterary movement, exemplified the defects of its decadence. I couldcompare him, if there was here any space for such a comparison, toBaudelaire or Flaubert with some profit; except that he never hadBaudelaire's perfect sense of art, and that he does not seem, likeFlaubert, to have laid in, before melancholy marked him for her own, asufficient stock of living types to save him from the charge of being amere study-student. There is no Frédéric, no M. Homais, in his repertory. Even Giovanni--even Orgilus, his two masterpieces, are, if not exactlythings of shreds and patches, at any rate artificial persons, young men whohave known more of books than of life, and who persevere in their eccentriccourses with almost more than a half knowledge that they are eccentric. Annabella is incomplete, though there is nothing, except her love, unnatural in her. The strokes which draw her are separate imaginations of alearned draughtsman, not fresh transcripts from the living model. Pentheaand Calantha are wholly artificial; a live Penthea would never have thoughtof such a fantastic martyrdom, unless she had been insane or suffering fromgreen-sickness, and a live Calantha would have behaved in a perfectlydifferent fashion, or if she had behaved in the same, would have been quitfor her temporary aberration. We see (or at least I think I see) in Fordexactly the signs which are so familiar to us in our own day, and whichrepeat themselves regularly at the end of all periods of distinct literarycreativeness--the signs of _excentricité voulue_. The author imagines that"all is said" in the ordinary way, and that he must go to the ends of theearth to fetch something extraordinary. If he is strong enough, as Fordwas, he fetches it, and it _is_ something extraordinary, and we owe him, with all his extravagance, respect and honour for his labour. But we cannever put him on the level of the men who, keeping within ordinary limits, achieve masterpieces there. Ford--an Elizabethan in the strict sense for nearly twenty years--did notsuffer from the decay which, as noted above, set in in regard toversification and language among the men of his own later day. He has notthe natural trick of verse and phrase which stamps his greatestcontemporaries unmistakably, and even such lesser ones as his collaborator, Dekker, with a hardly mistakable mark; but his verse is nervous, wellproportioned, well delivered, and at its best a noble medium. He was bygeneral consent utterly incapable of humour, and his low-comedy scenes areamong the most loathsome in the English theatre. His lyrics are not equalto Shakespere's or Fletcher's, Dekker's or Shirley's, but they are betterthan Massinger's. Although he frequently condescended to the Fletcherianlicense of the redundant syllable, he never seems to have dropped (asFletcher did sometimes, or at least allowed his collaborators to drop)floundering into the Serbonian bog of stuff that is neither verse norprose. He showed indeed (and Mr. Swinburne, with his usual insight, hasnoticed it, though perhaps he has laid rather too much stress on it) atendency towards a severe rule-and-line form both of tragic scheme and oftragic versification, which may be taken to correspond in a certain fashion(though Mr. Swinburne does not notice this) to the "correctness" inordinary poetry of Waller and his followers. Yet he shows no sign ofwishing to discard either the admixture of comedy with tragedy (save in_The Broken Heart_, which is perhaps a crucial instance), or blank verse, or the freedom of the English stage in regard to the unities. In short, Ford was a person distinctly deficient in initiative and planning genius, but endowed with a great executive faculty. He wanted guidance in all thegreater lines of his art, and he had it not; the result being that heproduced unwholesome and undecided work, only saved by the unmistakablepresence of poetical faculty. I do not think that Webster could ever havedone anything better than he did: I think that if Ford had been born twentyyears earlier he might have been second to Shakespere, and at any rate theequal of Ben Jonson and of Fletcher. But the flagging genius of the timemade its imprint on his own genius, which was of the second order, not thefirst. The honour of being last in the great succession of Elizabethan dramatistsis usually assigned to James Shirley. [62] Though last, Shirley is only inpart least, and his plays deserve more reading than has usually fallen totheir lot. Not only in the general character of his plays--a characterhardly definable, but recognisable at once by the reader--but by theoccurrence of such things as the famous song, "The glories of our blood andstate, " and not a few speeches and tirades, Shirley has a right to hisplace; as he most unquestionably has also by date. He was born in London in1596, was educated at Merchant Tailors' School, and was a member of bothuniversities, belonging to St. John's College at Oxford, and to CatherineHall at Cambridge. Like other dramatists he vacillated in religion, withsuch sincerity as to give up a living to which, having been ordained, hehad been presented. He was a schoolmaster for a time, began to write playsabout the date of the accession of Charles I. , continued to do so till theclosing of the theatres, then returned to schoolmastering, and survived theRestoration nearly seven years, being buried at St. Giles's in 1666. Heappears to have visited Ireland, and at least one monument of his visitremains in the eccentric play of _St. Patrick for Ireland_. He is usuallycredited with thirty-nine plays, to which it is understood that others, nowin MS. , have to be added, while he may also have had a hand in some thatare printed but not attributed to him. Shirley was neither a very great nora very strong man; and without originals to follow, it is probable that hewould have done nothing. But with Fletcher and Jonson before him he wasable to strike out a certain line of half-humorous, half-romantic drama, and to follow it with curious equality through his long list of plays, hardly one of which is very much better than any other, hardly one of whichfalls below a very respectable standard. He has few or no single scenes orpassages of such high and sustained excellence as to be specially quotable;and there is throughout him an indefinable flavour as of study of hiselders and betters, an appearance as of a highly competent and gifted pupilin a school, not as of a master and leader in a movement. The palm isperhaps generally and rightly assigned to _The Lady of Pleasure_, 1635, aplay bearing some faint resemblances to Massinger's _City Madam_, andFletcher's _Noble Gentleman_ (Shirley is known to have finished one or twoplays of Fletcher's), and in its turn the original, or at least theforerunner of a long line of late seventeenth and eighteenth century playson the extravagance and haughtiness and caprice of fine ladies. Shirleyindeed was much acted after the Restoration, and exhibits, though on thebetter side, the transition of the older into the newer school very well. Of his tragedies _The Traitor_ has the general suffrage, and perhapsjustly. One of Shirley's most characteristic habits was that not of exactlyadapting an old play, but of writing a new one on similar linesaccommodated to the taste of his own day. He constantly did this withFletcher, and once in _The Cardinal_ he was rash enough to endeavour toimprove upon Webster. His excuse may have been that he was evidently inclose contact with the last survivors of the great school, for besides hiswork with or on Fletcher, he collaborated with Chapman in the tragedy of_Chabot_ and the comedy of _The Ball_--the latter said to be one of theearliest _loci_ for the use of the word in the sense of an entertainment. His versification profited by this personal or literary familiarity. It isoccasionally lax, and sins especially by the redundant syllable orsyllables, and by the ugly break between auxiliary verbs and theircomplements, prepositions and their nouns, and so forth. But it never fallsinto the mere shapelessness which was so common with his immediate andyounger contemporaries. Although, as has been said, long passages of highsustained poetry are not easily producible from him, two short extractsfrom _The Traitor_ will show his style favourably, but not too favourably. Amidea, the heroine, declares her intention-- [62] There was a contemporary, Henry Shirley, who was also a playwright. His only extant play, _The Martyred Soldier_, a piece of little merit, hasbeen reprinted by Mr. Bullen. "To have my name Stand in the ivory register of virgins, When I am dead. Before one factious thought Should lurk within me to betray my fame To such a blot, my hands shall mutiny And boldly with a poniard teach my heart To weep out a repentance. " And this of her brother Florio's is better still-- "Let me look upon my sister now: Still she retains her beauty, Death has been kind to leave her all this sweetness Thus in a morning have I oft saluted My sister in her chamber: sat upon Her bed and talked of many harmless passages. _But now 'tis night, and a long night with her:_ _I shall ne'er see these curtains drawn again_ _Until we meet in heaven. _" Here the touch, a little weakened it may be, but still the touch of thegreat age, is perceptible, especially in the last lines, where the metaphorof the "curtains, " common enough in itself for eyelids, derives freshnessand appositeness from the previous mention of the bed. But Shirley is notoften at this high tragic level. His supposed first play, _Love Tricks_, though it appeared nearly forty years before the Restoration, has a curioustouch of post-Restoration comedy in its lively, extravagant, easy farce. Sometimes, as in _The Witty Fair One_, he fell in with the growing habit ofwriting a play mainly in prose, but dropping into verse here and there, though he was quite as ready to write, as in _The Wedding_, a play in versewith a little prose. Once he dramatised the _Arcadia_ bodily and by name. At another time he would match a downright interlude like the _Contentionfor Honour and Riches_ with a thinly-veiled morality like _Honoria andMammon_. He was a proficient at masques. _The Grateful Servant_, _The RoyalMaster_, _The Duke's Mistress_, _The Doubtful Heir_, _The Constant Maid_, _The Humorous Courtier_, are plays whose very titles speak them, though thefirst is much the best. _The Changes_ or _Love in a Maze_ was slightlyborrowed from by Dryden in _The Maiden Queen_, and _Hyde Park_, a verylively piece, set a fashion of direct comedy of manners which was largelyfollowed, while _The Brothers_ and _The Gamester_ are other good examplesof different styles. Generally Shirley seems to have been a man of amiablecharacter, and the worst thing on record about him is his very ungenerousgibing dedication of _The Bird in a Cage_ to Prynne, then in prison, forhis well-known attack on the stage, a piece of retaliation which, if theenemy had not been "down, " would have been fair enough. Perhaps Shirley's comedy deserves as a whole to be better spoken of thanhis tragedy. It is a later variety of the same kind of comedy which wenoted as written so largely by Middleton, --a comedy of mingled manners, intrigue, and humours, improved a good deal in coherence and in stagemanagement, but destitute of the greater and more romantic touches whichemerge from the chaos of the earlier style. Nearly all the writers whom Ishall now proceed to mention practised this comedy, some better, someworse; but no one with quite such success as Shirley at his best, and noone with anything like his industry, versatility, and generally high levelof accomplishment. It should perhaps be said that the above-mentioned song, the one piece of Shirley's generally known, is not from one of his morecharacteristic pieces, but from _The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses_, awork of quite the author's latest days. Thomas Randolph, the most gifted (according to general estimate rather thanto specific performance) of the Tribe of Ben, was a much younger man thanShirley, though he died more than thirty years earlier. Randolph was bornnear Daventry in 1605, his father being a gentleman, and Lord Zouch'ssteward. He was educated at Westminster, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow, and he was also incorporated at Oxford. Hislife is supposed to have been merry, and was certainly short, for he died, of what disease is not known, in his thirtieth year. He left, however, noinconsiderable literary results; and if his dramas are not quite sorelatively good as his poems (there is certainly none of them which is inits own kind the equal of the fine answer to Ben Jonson's threat to leavethe stage and the Ode to Anthony Stafford), still they are interesting andshow a strong intellect and great literary facility. The two earliest, _Aristippus_ and _The Conceited Pedlar_, the first a slight dramaticsketch, the second a monologue, are eminent examples of the class ofuniversity, not to say of undergraduate, wit; but far stronger and fullerof promise than most specimens of that class. _The Jealous Lovers_, a playwith classical nomenclature, and at first seeming to aim at the Terentianmodel, drifts off into something like the Jonsonian humour-comedy, of whichit gives some good studies, but hardly a complete example. Much better are_The Muses' Looking-Glass_ and _Amyntas_, in which Randolph's academicschemes and names do not hide his vivid and fertile imagination. _TheMuses' Looking-Glass_, a play vindicating the claim of the drama in generalto the title, is a kind of morality, but a morality carried off withinfinite spirit, which excuses the frigid nature of the abstractionspresented in it, and not seldom rises to the height of real comedy. Thescene between Colax and Dyscolus, the professional flatterer and theprofessional snarler, is really excellent: and others equally good might bepicked out. Of the two I am inclined to think that this play shows morenatural genius in the writer for its style, than the pretty pastoral of_Amyntas_, which has sometimes been preferred to it. The same penchant forcomedy appears in _Down with Knavery_, a very free and lively adaptation ofthe _Plutus_ of Aristophanes. There is no doubt that Randolph's work givesthe impression of considerable power. At the same time it is fair toremember that the author's life was one very conducive to precocity, inasmuch as he underwent at once the three stimulating influences of anelaborate literary education, of endowed leisure to devote himself to whatliterary occupations he pleased, and of the emulation caused by literarysociety. Jonson's friendship seems to have acted as a forcing-house on theliterary faculties of his friends, and it is quite as possible that, ifRandolph had lived, he would have become a steady-going soaker or adiligent but not originally productive scholar, as that he would haveproduced anything of high substantive and permanent value. It is true thatmany great writers had not at his age done such good work; but then it mustbe remembered that they had also produced little or nothing in point ofbulk. It may be plausibly argued that, good as what Randolph's first thirtyyears gave is, it ought to have been better still if it was ever going tobe of the best. Hut these excursions into possibilities are not veryprofitable, and the chief excuse for indulging in them is that Randolph'scritics and editors have generally done the same, and have as a ruleperhaps pursued the indulgence in a rather too enthusiastic and sanguinespirit. What is not disputable at all is the example given by Randolph ofthe powerful influence of Ben on his "tribe. " Very little is known of another of that tribe, Richard Brome. He was onceservant to Ben Jonson, who, though in his own old age he was himself anunsuccessful, and Brome a very successful, dramatist, seems always to haveregarded him with favour, and not to have been influenced by the ratherilliberal attempts of Randolph and others to stir up bad blood betweenthem. Brome deserved this favour, and spoke nobly of his old master evenafter Ben's death. He himself was certainly dead in 1653, when some of hisplays were first collected by his namesake (but it would seem notrelation), Alexander Brome. The modern reprint of his dramas takes theliberty, singular in the collection to which it belongs, of not attemptingany kind of critical or biographical introduction, and no book of referencethat I know is much more fertile, the latest authority--the _Dictionary ofNational Biography_, in which Brome is dealt with by the very competenthand of the Master of Peterhouse--having little enough to tell. Brome'swork, however, speaks for itself and pretty distinctly to all who care toread it. It consists, as printed (for there were others now lost oruncollected), of fifteen plays, all comedies, all bearing a strong familylikeness, and all belonging to the class of comedy just referred to--thatis to say, a cross between the style of Jonson and that of Fletcher. Of thegreater number of these, even if there were space here, there would be verylittle to say beyond this general description. Not one of them is rubbish;not one of them is very good; but all are readable, or would be if they hadreceived the trouble spent on much far inferior work, of a little editingto put the mechanical part of their presentation, such as the division ofscenes, stage directions, etc. , in a uniform and intelligible condition. Their names (_A Mad Couple well Matched_, _The Sparagus Garden_, _The CityWit_, and so forth) tell a good deal about their most common form; whilein _The Lovesick Court_, and one or two others, the half-courtly, half-romantic comedy of Fletcher takes the place of urban humours. One ortwo, such as _The Queen and Concubine_, attempt a statelier and tragi-comicstyle, but this was not Brome's forte. Sometimes, as in _The Antipodes_, there is an attempt at satire and comedy with a purpose. There are, however, two plays which stand out distinctly above the rest, and which arethe only plays of Brome's known to any but diligent students of this classof literature. These are _The Northern Lass_ and _A Jovial Crew_. The firstdiffers from its fellows only as being of the same class, but better; andthe dialect of the _ingénue_ Constance seems to have been thoughtinteresting and pathetic. _The Jovial Crew_, with its lively pictures ofgipsy life, is, though it may have been partly suggested by Fletcher's_Beggar's Bush_, a very pleasant and fresh comedy. It seems to have beenone of its author's last works, and he speaks of himself in it as "old. " Our two next figures are of somewhat minor importance. Sir Aston Cokain orCockaine, of a good Derbyshire family, was born in 1608, and after a longlife died just before the accession of James II. He seems (and indeedpositively asserts himself) to have been intimate with most of the men ofletters of Charles I. 's reign; and it has been unkindly suggested thatposterity would have been much more indebted to him if he had given us thebiographical particulars, which in most cases are so much wanted concerningthem, instead of wasting his time on translated and original verse of verylittle value, and on dramatic composition of still less. As it is, we oweto him the knowledge of the not unimportant fact that Massinger was acollaborator of Fletcher. His own plays are distinctly of the lower class, though not quite valueless. _The Obstinate Lady_ is an echo of Fletcher andMassinger; _Trappolin Creduto Principe_, an adaptation of an Italian farce, is a good deal better, and is said, with various stage alterations, to haveheld the boards till within the present century under the title of _A Dukeand no Duke_, or _The Duke and the Devil_. It is in fact a not unskilfulworking up of some well-tried theatrical motives, but has no great literarymerit. The tragedy of _Ovid_, a regular literary tragedy in careful if notvery powerful blank verse, is Cokain's most ambitious effort. Like hisother work it is clearly an "echo" in character. A more interesting and characteristic example of the "decadence" is HenryGlapthorne. When the enthusiasm excited by Lamb's specimens, Hazlitt's, andColeridge's lectures for the Elizabethan drama, was fresh, and everybodywas hunting for new examples of the style, Glapthorne had the doubtful luckto be made the subject of a very laudatory article in the _RetrospectiveReview_, and two of his plays were reprinted. He was not left in thishonourable but comparatively safe seclusion, and many years later, in 1874, all his plays and poems as known were issued by themselves in Mr. Pearson'svaluable series of reprints. Since then Glapthorne has become something ofa butt; and Mr. Bullen, in conjecturally attributing to him a new play, _The Lady Mother_, takes occasion to speak rather unkindly of him. As usualit is a case of _ni cet excès d'honneur ni cette indignité_. Personally, Glapthorne has some of the interest that attaches to the unknown. Between1639 and 1643, or for the brief space of four years, it is clear that hewas a busy man of letters. He published five plays (six if we admit _TheLady Mother_), which had some vogue, and survived as an acted poet into theRestoration period; he produced a small but not despicable collection ofpoems of his own; he edited those of his friend Thomas Beedome; he washimself a friend of Cotton and of Lovelace. But of his antecedents and ofthe life that followed this short period of literary activity we knowabsolutely nothing. The guess that he was at St. Paul's School is a mereguess; and in the utter and total absence of the least scrap ofbiographical information about him, his editor has thought it worth whileto print in full some not unamusing but perfectly irrelevant documentsconcerning the peccadillos of a certain _George_ Glapthorne of Whittlesea, who was certainly a contemporary and perhaps a relation. Henry Glapthorneas a writer is certainly not great, but he is as certainly notcontemptible. His tragedy of _Albertus Wallenstein_ is not merelyinteresting as showing a reversion to the practice, almost dropped in histime (perhaps owing to censorship difficulties), of handling contemporaryhistorical subjects, but contains passages of considerable poetical merit. His _Argalus and Parthenia_, a dramatisation of part of the _Arcadia_, caught the taste of his day, and, like the _Wallenstein_, is poetical ifnot dramatic. The two comedies, _The Hollander_ and _Wit in a Constable_, are of the school which has been so frequently described, and not of itsstrongest, but at the same time not of its weakest specimens. _Love'sPrivilege_, sometimes held his best play, is a rather flabby tragi-comedyof the Fletcher-Shirley school. In short, Glapthorne, without beingpositively good, is good enough to have made it surprising that he is notbetter, if the explanation did not present itself pretty clearly. Thoughevidently not an old man at the time of writing (he has been guessed, probably enough, to have been a contemporary of Milton, and perhaps alittle older or a little younger), his work has the clear defects of age. It is garrulous and given to self-repetition (so much so that one of Mr. Bullen's reasons for attributing _The Lady Mother_ to Glapthorne is theoccurrence in it of passages almost literally repeated in his known work);it testifies to a relish of, and a habituation to, the great school, coupled with powers insufficient to emulate the work of the great schoolitself; it is exactly in flavour and character the last _not_ sprightlyrunnings of a generous liquor. There is nowhere in it the same absoluteflatness that occurs in the lesser men of the Restoration school, like theHowards and Boyle; the ancient gust is still too strong for that. It doesnot show the vulgarity which even Davenant (who as a dramatist was tenyears Glapthorne's senior) too often displays. But we feel in reading itthat the good wine has gone, that we have come to that which is worse. I have mentioned Davenant; and though he is often classed with, and to someextent belongs to the post-Reformation school, he is ours for otherpurposes than that of mere mention. His Shakespere travesties (in one ofwhich he was assisted by a greater than he), and even the operas and"entertainments" with which he not only evaded the prohibition of stageplays under the Commonwealth, but helped to produce a remarkable change inthe English drama, do not concern us. But it must be remembered thatDavenant's earlier, most dramatic, and most original playmaking was done ata time far within our limits. When the tragedy of _Albovine_ (Alboin) wasproduced, the Restoration was more than thirty years distant, and Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, and Marston--men in the strictest sense of the Elizabethanschool--were still living, and, in the case of all but Marston, writing. _The Cruel Brother_, which, though printed after, was licensed before, dates three years earlier; and between this time and the closing of thetheatres Davenant had ten plays acted and printed coincidently with thebest work of Massinger, Shirley, and Ford. Nor, though his fame is farbelow theirs, is the actual merit of these pieces (the two above mentioned, _The Wits_, _News from Plymouth_, _The Fair Favourite_, _The UnfortunateLovers_, etc. ), so much inferior as the fame. The chief point in whichDavenant fails is in the failing grasp of verse above noted. This iscurious and so characteristic that it is worth while to give an example ofit, which shall be a fair average specimen and not of the worst:-- "O noble maid, what expiation can Make fit this young and cruel soldier for Society of man that hath defiled The genius of triumphant glorious war With such a rape upon thy liberty! Or what less hard than marble of The Parian rock can'st thou believe my heart, That nurst and bred him my disciple in The camp, and yet could teach his valour no More tenderness than injured Scytheans use When they are wroth to a revenge? But he Hath mourned for it: and now Evandra thou Art strongly pitiful, that dost so long Conceal an anger that would kill us both. " _Love and Honour_, 1649. Here we have the very poetical counterpart of the last of Jaques' ages, thebig manly voice of the great dramatists sinking into a childish treble thatstutters and drivels over the very alphabet of the poetical tongue. In such a language as this poetry became impossible, and it is still amatter for wonder by what trick of elocution actors can have made ittolerable on the stage. Yet it was certainly tolerated. And not only so, but, when the theatre came to be open again, the discontent with blankverse, which partly at least drove Dryden and others into rhyme, neverseems to have noticed the fact that the blank verse to which it objectedwas execrably bad. When Dryden returned to the more natural medium, hewrote it not indeed with the old many-voiced charm of the bestElizabethans, but with admirable eloquence and finish. Yet he himself inhis earliest plays staggered and slipped about with the rest, and I do notremember in his voluminous critical remarks anything going to show that hewas consciously aware of the slovenliness into which his master Davenantand others had allowed themselves and their followers to drop. One more example and we shall have finished at once with those dramatistsof our time whose work has been collected, and with the chief names of thedecadence. Sir John Suckling, who, in Mr. Swinburne's happy phrase-- "Stumbled from above And reeled in slippery roads of alien art, " is represented in the English theatre by four plays, _Aglaura_, _Brennoralt_, _The Sad One_, and the comedy of _The Goblins_. Of thetragedies some one, I forget who, has said truly that their names are thebest thing about them. Suckling had a fancy for romantic names, rathersuggesting sometimes the Minerva press of a later time, but still pretty. His serious plays, however, have all the faults, metrical and other, whichhave been noticed in Davenant, and in speaking of his own non-dramaticverse; and they possess as well serious faults as dramas--a combination ofextravagance and dullness, a lack of playwright's grasp, an absence inshort of the root of the matter. How far in other directions besides mereversification he and his fellows had slipped from the right way, may beperhaps most pleasantly and quite fully discovered from the perusal, whichis not very difficult, of his tragi-comedy or extravaganza, _The Goblins_. There are several good points about this play--an abundance of notaltogether stagey noble sentiment, an agreeable presentment of fresh andgallant youths, still smacking rather of Fletcher's madcap but heart-soundgallants, and not anticipating the heartless crudity of the cubs of theRestoration, a loveable feminine character, and so forth. But hardly aclever boy at school ever devised anything so extravagantly puerile as theplot, which turns on a set of banished men playing at hell and devils incaverns close to a populous city, and brings into the action a series ofthe most absurd escapes, duels, chance-meetings, hidings, findings, and allmanner of other devices for spinning out an unnatural story. Many who knownothing more of Suckling's plays know that _Aglaura_ enjoys the eccentricpossession of two fifth acts, so that it can be made a tragedy or atragi-comedy at pleasure. _The Sad One_, which is unfinished, is muchbetter. The tragedy of _Brennoralt_ has some pathos, some pretty scenes, and some charming songs; but here again we meet with the most inconceivablybad verse, as here--a passage all the more striking because of its attempt, wilful or unconscious, to echo Shakespere:-- "Sleep is as nice as woman; The more I court it, the more it flies me. Thy elder brother will be kinder yet, Unsent-for death will come. To-morrow! Well, what can to-morrow do? 'Twill cure the sense of honour lost; I and my discontents shall rest together, What hurt is there in this? But death against The will is but a slovenly kind of potion; And though prescribed by Heaven, it goes against men's stomachs. So does it at fourscore too, when the soul's Mewed up in narrow darkness: neither sees nor hears. Pish! 'tis mere fondness in our nature. A certain clownish cowardice that still Would stay at home and dares not venture Into foreign countries, though better than Its own. Ha! what countries? for we receive Descriptions of th' other world from our divines As blind men take relations of this from us: My thoughts lead me into the dark, and there They'll leave me. I'll no more on it. Within!" Such were the last notes of the concert which opened with the music, if notat once of _Hamlet_ and _Othello_, at any rate of _Tamburlaine_ and_Faustus_. To complete this sketch of the more famous and fortunate dramatists whohave attained to separate presentation, we must give some account of lessermen and of those wholly anonymous works which are still to be found only incollections such as Dodsley's, or in single publications. As the yearspass, the list of independently published authors increases. Mr. Bullen, who issued the works of Thomas Nabbes and of Davenport, has promised thoseof W. Rowley. Nabbes, a member of the Tribe of Ben, and a man of easytalent, was successful in comedy only, though he also attempted tragedy. _Microcosmus_ (1637), his best-known work, is half-masque, half-morality, and has considerable merit in a difficult kind. _The Bride_, _CoventGarden_, _Tottenham Court_, range with the already characterised work ofBrome, but somewhat lower. Davenport's range was wider, and the interestinghistory of _King John and Matilda_, as well as the lively comedy of _TheCity Nightcap_, together with other work, deserved, and have now received, collection. William Rowley was of a higher stamp. His best work is probablyto be found in the plays wherein, as mentioned more than once, hecollaborated with Middleton, with Massinger, with Webster, with Fletcher, with Dekker, and in short with most of the best men of his time. It wouldappear that he was chiefly resorted to for comic underplots, in which hebrought in a good deal of horseplay, and a power of reporting the low-lifehumours of the London of his day more accurate than refined, together withnot a little stock-stage wit, such as raillery of Welsh and Irish dialect. But in the plays which are attributed to him alone, such as _A New Wonder_, _a Woman Never Vexed_, and _A Match at Midnight_, he shows not merely thissame _vis comica_ and rough and ready faculty of hitting off dramaticsituations, but an occasional touch of true pathos, and a faculty ofknitting the whole action well together. He has often been confused with ahalf namesake, Samuel Rowley, of whom very little is known, but who in hischronicle play _When you see Me you know Me_, and his romantic drama of_The Noble Spanish Soldier_, has distinctly outstripped the ordinarydramatists of the time. Yet another collected dramatist, who has long had ahome in Dodsley, and who figures rather curiously in a later collection of"Dramatists of the Restoration, " though his dramatic fame was obtained manyyears before, was Shakerley Marmion, author of the pretty poem of _Cupidand Psyche_, and a "son" of Ben Jonson. Marmion's three plays, of which thebest known is _The Antiquary_, are fair but not excessively favourablesamples of the favourite play of the time, a rather broad humour-comedy, which sometimes conjoined itself with, and sometimes stood aloof from, either a romantic and tragi-comical story or a downright tragedy. Among the single plays comparatively few are of the latter kind. _TheMiseries of Enforced Marriage_, a domestic tragi-comedy, connects itselfwith the wholly tragical _Yorkshire Tragedy_, and is a kind of introductionto it. These domestic tragedies (of which another is _A Warning to FairWomen_) were very popular at the time, and large numbers now lost seem tohave been produced by the dramatisation of notable crimes, past andpresent. Their class is very curiously mixed up with the remarkable and, inone sense or another, very interesting class of the dramas attributed, andin general estimation falsely attributed, to Shakespere. According to thefullest list these pseudo-Shakesperian plays number seventeen. They are_Fair Em_, _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, _Edward III. _, _The Birth ofMerlin_, _The Troublesome Reign of King John_, _A Warning to Fair Women_, _The Arraignment of Paris_, _Arden of Feversham_, _Mucedorus_, _George aGreen the Pinner of Wakefield_, _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, _The LondonProdigal_, _Thomas Lord Cromwell_, _Sir John Oldcastle_, _The Puritan orthe Widow of Watling Street_, _The Yorkshire Tragedy_, and _Locrine_. Fourof these, _Edward III. _, _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, _Arden ofFeversham_, and _The Two Noble Kinsmen_, are in whole or parts very farsuperior to the rest. Of that rest _The Yorkshire Tragedy_, a violent andbloodthirsty little piece showing the frantic cruelty of the ruinedgambler, Calverley, to his wife and children, is perhaps the most powerful, though it is not in the least Shakesperian. But the four have claims, notindeed of a strong, but of a puzzling kind. In _Edward III. _ and _The TwoNoble Kinsmen_ there are no signs of Shakespere either in plot, character-drawing, or general tone. But, on the contrary, there are in bothcertain scenes where the versification and dialogue are so astonishinglyShakesperian that it is almost impossible to account for the writing ofthem by any one else than Shakespere. By far the larger majority of criticsdeclare for the part authorship of Shakespere in _The Two Noble Kinsmen_; Iavow myself simply puzzled. On the other hand, I am nearly sure that he didnot write any part of _Edward III. _, and I should take it to be a case of akind not unknown in literature, where some writer of great but not veryoriginal faculty was strongly affected by the Shakesperian influence, andwrote this play while under it, but afterwards, either by death ordiversion to non-literary employments, left no other monument of himselfthat can be traced or compared with it. The difficulty with _Arden ofFeversham_ and _The Merry Devil_ is different. We shall presently speak ofthe latter, which, good as it is, has nothing specially Shakesperian aboutit, except a great superiority in sanity, compactness, pleasant humansentiment, and graceful verse, to the ordinary anonymous or named work ofthe time. But _Arden of Feversham_ is a very different piece of work. It isa domestic tragedy of a peculiarly atrocious kind, Alice Arden, the wife, being led by her passion for a base paramour, Mosbie, to plot, and at lastcarry out, the murder of her husband. Here it is not that the versificationhas much resemblance to Shakespere's, or that single speeches smack of him, but that the dramatic grasp of character both in principals and insecondary characters has a distinct touch of his almost unmistakable hand. Yet both in the selection and in the treatment of the subject the playdefinitely transgresses those principles which have been said to exhibitthemselves so uniformly and so strongly in the whole great body of hisundoubted plays. There is a perversity and a dash of sordidness which areboth wholly un-Shakesperian. The only possible hypothesis on which it couldbe admitted as Shakespere's would be that of an early experiment thrown offwhile he was seeking his way in a direction where he found no thoroughfare. But the play is a remarkable one, and deserves the handsome and exactreproduction which Mr. Bullen has given it. _The Second Maiden's Tragedy_, licensed 1611, but earlier in type, is one of the gloomy pity-and-terrorpieces which were so much affected in the earlier part of the period, butwhich seem to have given way later in the public taste to comedy. It isblack enough to have been attributed to Tourneur. _The Queen of Aragon_, byHabington, though in a different key, has something of the starchnessrather than strength which characterises _Castara_. A much higher level isreached in the fine anonymous tragedy of _Nero_, where at least onecharacter, that of Petronius, is of great excellence, and where the verse, if a little declamatory, is of a very high order of declamation. Thestrange piece, first published by Mr. Bullen, and called by him _TheDistracted Emperor_, a tragedy based partly on the legend of Charlemagneand Fastrada, again gives us a specimen of horror-mongering. _The Returnfrom Parnassus_ (see note, p. 81), famous for its personal touches and itscontribution to Shakespere literature, is interesting first for thejudgments of contemporary writers, of which the Shakespere passages areonly the chief; secondly, for its evidence of the jealousy between theuniversities and the players, who after, in earlier times, coming chieflyon the university wits for their supplies, had latterly taken to providefor themselves; and thirdly, for its flashes of light on university andespecially undergraduate life. The comedy of _Wily Beguiled_ has also astrong university touch, the scholar being made triumphant in it; and_Lingua_, sometimes attributed to Anthony Brewer, is a return, though alively one, to the system of personification and allegory. _The DumbKnight_, of or partly by Lewis Machin, belongs to the half-romantic, half-farcical class; but in _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_, the authorshipof which is quite unknown, though Shakespere, Drayton, and other greatnames have been put forward, a really delightful example of romanticcomedy, strictly English in subject, and combining pathos with wit, appears. _The Merry Devil_ probably stands highest among all the anonymousplays of the period on the lighter side, as _Arden of Feversham_ does onthe darker. Second to it as a comedy comes Porter's _Two Angry Women ofAbingdon_ (1599), with less grace and fancy but almost equal lightness, anda singularly exact picture of manners. With _Ram Alley_, attributed to theIrishman Lodowick Barry, we come back to a much lower level, that of thebustling comedy, of which something has been said generally in connectionwith Middleton. To the same class belong Haughton's pleasant _Englishmenfor my Money_, a good patriot play, where certain foreigners, despite thefather's favour, are ousted from the courtship of three fair sisters;_Woman is a Weathercock_, and _Amends for Ladies_ (invective and palinode), by Nathaniel Field (first one of the little eyasses who competed withregular actors, and then himself an actor and playwright); Green's "_TuQuoque_" or _The City Gallant_, attributed to the actor Cook, and derivingits odd first title from a well-known comedian of the time, and thecatchword which he had to utter in the play itself; _The Hog hath Lost hisPearl_, a play on the name of a usurer whose daughter is married againsthis will, by Taylor; _The Heir_ and _The Old Couple_, by Thomas May, morefamous still for his Latin versification; the rather overpraised _Ordinary_of Cartwright, Ben Jonson's most praised son; _The City Match_ by Dr. Jasper Mayne. All these figure in the last, and most of them have figuredin the earlier editions of Dodsley, with a few others hardly worth separatenotice. Mr. Bullen's delightful volumes of _Old Plays_ add the capital playof _Dick of Devonshire_ (see _ante_), the strange _Two Tragedies in One_ ofRobert Yarington, three lively comedies deriving their names from originalsof one kind or another, _Captain Underwit_, _Sir Giles Goosecap_, and _Dr. Dodipoll_, with one or two more. One single play remains to be mentioned, both because of its intrinsic merit, and because of the controversy whichhas arisen respecting the question of priority between it and Ben Jonson's_Alchemist_. This is _Albumazar_, attributed to one Thomas Tomkis, and inall probability a university play of about the middle of James's reign. There is nothing in it equal to the splendid bursts of Sir Epicure Mammon, or the all but first-rate comedy of Face, Dol, and Subtle, and of AbelDrugger; but Gifford, in particular, does injustice to it, and it is on thewhole a very fair specimen of the work of the time. Nothing indeed is moreastonishing than the average goodness of that work, even when allallowances are made; and unjust as such a mere enumeration as these lastparagraphs have given must be, it would be still more unjust to pass overin silence work so varied and so full of talent. [63] [63] A note may best serve for the plays of Thomas Goff (1591-1629), actedat his own college, Christ Church, but not published till after his death. The three most noteworthy, _The Raging Turk_, _The Courageous Turk_, andthe _Tragedy of Orestes_, were republished together in 1656, and a comedy, _The Careless Shepherdess_, appeared in the same year. The tragedies, andespecially _The Raging Turk_, have been a byword for extravagant frigidity, though, as they have never been printed in modern times, and as theoriginals are rare, they have not been widely known at first hand. Aperusal justifies the worst that has been said of them: though Goff wroteearly enough to escape the Caroline dry-rot in dramatic versification. Hislines are stiff, but they usually scan. CHAPTER XII MINOR CAROLINE PROSE The greatest, beyond all doubt, of the minor writers of the Caroline periodin prose is Robert Burton. Less deliberately quaint than Fuller, he isnever, as Fuller sometimes is, puerile, and the greater concentration ofhis thoughts and studies has produced what Fuller never quite produced, amasterpiece. At the same time it must be confessed that Burton's moreleisurely life assisted to a great extent in the production of his work. The English collegiate system would have been almost sufficiently justifiedif it had produced nothing but _The Anatomy of Melancholy_; though there issomething ironical, no doubt, in the fact that this ideal fruit of astudious and endowed leisure was the work of one who, being a beneficedclergyman, ought not in strictness to have been a resident member of acollege. Yet, elsewhere than in Oxford or Cambridge the book could hardlyhave grown, and it is as unique as the institutions which produced it. The author of the _Anatomy_ was the son of Ralph Burton of Lindley inLeicestershire, where he was born on the 8th of February 1577. He waseducated at Sutton Coldfield School, and thence went to Brasenose College, Oxford. He became a student of Christchurch--the equivalent of a fellow--in1599, and seems to have passed the whole of the rest of his life there, though he took orders and enjoyed together or successively the living ofSt. Thomas in Oxford, the vicarage of Walsby in Lincolnshire, and therectory of Segrave in Leicestershire, at both of which latter places heseems to have kept the minimum of residence, though tradition gives him thecharacter of a good churchman, and though there is certainly nothinginconsistent with that character in the _Anatomy_. The picture of him whichAnthony à Wood gives at a short second hand is very favourable; and theattempts to harmonise his "horrid disorder of melancholy" with his "verymerry, facete, and juvenile company, " arise evidently from almost ludicrousmisunderstanding of what melancholy means and is. As absurd, though moreserious, is the traditionary libel obviously founded on the words in hisepitaph (_Cui vitam et mortem dedit melancholia_), that having cast hisnativity, he, in order not to be out as to the time of his death, committedsuicide. As he was sixty-three (one of the very commonest periods of death)at the time, the want of reason of the suggestion equals its want ofcharity. The offspring in English of Burton's sixty-three years of humorous study ofmen and books is _The Anatomy of Melancholy_, first printed in 1621, andenlarged afterwards by the author. A critical edition of the _Anatomy_, giving these enlargements exactly with other editorial matter, is very muchwanted; but even in the rather inedited condition in which the book, oldand new, is usually found, it is wholly acceptable. Its literary history israther curious. Eight editions of it appeared in half a century from thedate of the first, and then, with other books of its time, it dropped outof notice except by the learned. Early in the present century it wasrevived and reprinted with certain modernisations, and four or fiveeditions succeeded each other at no long interval. The copies thuscirculated seem to have satisfied the demand for many years, and have beenfollowed without much alteration in some later issues. The book itself has been very variously judged. Fuller, in one of his leastworthy moments, called it "a book of philology. " Anthony Wood, hitting on anotion which has often been borrowed since, held that it is a convenientcommonplace book of classical quotations, which, with all respect toAnthony's memory (whom I am more especially bound to honour as a Mertonman), is a gross and Philistine error. Johnson, as was to be expected, appreciated it thoroughly. Ferriar in his _Illustrations of Sterne_ pointedout the enormous indebtedness of Tristram Shandy to Democritus Junior. Charles Lamb, eloquently praising the "fantastic great old man, " exhibitedperhaps more perversity than sense in denouncing the modern reprints which, after all, are not like some modern reprints (notably one of Burton'scontemporary, Felltham, to be noticed shortly), in any real sense garbled. Since that time Burton has to some extent fallen back to the base uses of aquarry for half-educated journalists; nevertheless, all fit readers ofEnglish literature have loved him. The book is a sufficiently strange one at first sight; and it is perhaps nogreat wonder that uncritical readers should have been bewildered by thebristling quotations from utterly forgotten authorities which, with fulland careful reference for the most part, stud its pages, by its elaboratebut apparently futile marshalling in "partitions" and "members, " in"sections" and "subsections, " and by the measureless license of digressionwhich the author allows himself. It opens with a long epistle, filling somehundred pages in the modern editions, from Democritus Junior, as the authorcalls himself, to the reader--an epistle which gives a true foretaste ofthe character and style of the text, though, unlike that text, it is notscholastically divided. The division begins with the text itself, and eventhe laziest reader will find the synopses of Burton's "partitions" acurious study. It is impossible to be, at least in appearance, moremethodical, and all the typographical resources of brackets (sub-bracketedeven to the seventh or eighth involution) and of reference letters areexhausted in order to draw up a conspectus of the causes, symptoms, nature, effects, and cure of melancholy. This method is not exactly the method ofmadness, though it is quite possible for a reader to attach more (as alsoless) importance to it than it deserves. It seems probable on the wholethat the author, with the scholastic habits of his time, did actually drawout a programme for the treatment of his subject in some form not verydifferent from these wonderful synopses, and did actually endeavour to keepto it, or at any rate to work on its lines within the general compass ofthe scheme. But on each several head (and reducing them to their lowestterms the heads are legion) he allowed himself the very widest freedom ofdigression, not merely in extracting and applying the fruits of hisnotebook, but in developing his own thoughts, --a mine hardly less rich ifless extensive than the treasures of the Bodleian Library which are said tohave been put at his disposal. The consequence is, that the book is one quite impossible to describe inbrief space. The melancholy of which the author treats, and of which, nodoubt, he was in some sort the victim, is very far from being the mereByronic or Wertherian disease which became so familiar some hundred yearsago. On the other hand, Burton being a practical, and, on the whole, veryhealthy Englishman, it came something short of "The Melencolia thattranscends all wit, " the incurable pessimism and quiet despair which havebeen thought to be figured or prefigured in Durer's famous print. Yet itapproaches, and that not distantly, to this latter. It is the Vanity ofVanities of a man who has gone, in thought at least, over the whole roundof human pleasures and interests, and who, if he has not exactly found allto be vanity, has found each to be accompanied by some _amari aliquid_. Itis at the same time the frankly expressed hypochondria of a man whosebodily health was not quite so robust as his mental constitution. It is thesatiety of learning of a man who, nevertheless, knows that learning, or atleast literature, is the only cure for his disease. In mere style there is perhaps nothing very strongly characteristic inBurton, though there is much that is noteworthy in the way in which headapts his style to the peculiar character of his book. Like Rabelais, hehas but rarely occasion to break through his fantastic habit of stringingothers' pearls on a mere string of his own, and to set seriously to thecomposition of a paragraph of wholly original prose. But when he does, theeffect is remarkable, and shows that it was owing to no poverty orawkwardness that he chose to be so much of a borrower. In his usual style, where a mere framework of original may enclose a score or more quotations, translated or not (the modern habit of translating Burton's quotationsspoils, among other things, the zest of his own quaint habit of adding, asit were, in the same breath, a kind of summary or paraphrase in English ofwhat he has said in Latin or Greek), he was not superior to his time in theloose construction of sentences; but the wonder is that his fashion ofwriting did not make him even inferior to it. One of his peculiartricks--the only one, perhaps, which he uses to the extent of amannerism--is the suppression of the conjunctions "or" and "and, " whichgives a very quaint air to his strings of synonyms. But an example will domore here than much analysis:-- "And why then should baseness of birth be objected to any man? Who thinks worse of Tully for being _Arpinas_, an upstart? or Agathocles, that Sicilian King, for being a potter's son? Iphicrates and Marius were meanly born. What wise man thinks better of any person for his nobility? as he[64] said in Machiavel, _omnes codem patre nati_, Adam's sons, conceived all and born in sin, etc. _We are by nature all as one, all alike, if you see us naked; let us wear theirs, and they our clothes, and what's the difference?_ To speak truth, as Bale did of P. Schalichius, _I more esteem thy worth, learning, honesty, than the nobility; honour thee more that thou art a writer, a doctor of divinity, than earl of the Hunnes, baron of Skradine, or hast title to such and such provinces, etc. Thou art more fortunate and great_ (so Jovius writes to Cosmus Medices, then Duke of Florence) _for thy virtues than for thy lovely wife and happy children, friends, fortunes, or great Duchy of Tuscany_. So I account thee, and who doth not so indeed? Abdalonymus was a gardener, and yet by Alexander for his virtues made King of Syria. How much better is it to be born of mean parentage and to excel in worth, to be morally noble, which is preferred before that natural nobility by divines, philosophers, and politicians, to be learned, honest, discreet, well qualified to be fit for any manner of employment in country and commonwealth, war and peace, than to be _degeneres Neoptolemi_ as so many brave nobles are, only wise because rich, otherwise idiots, illiterate, unfit for any manner of service? Udalricus, Earl of Cilia, upbraided John Huniades with the baseness of his birth; but he replied, _In te Ciliensis comitatus turpiter exstinguitur, in me gloriose Bistricensis exoritur_; thine earldom is consumed with riot; mine begins with honour and renown. Thou hast had so many noble ancestors; what is that to thee? _Vix ea nostra voco_; when thou art a disard[65] thyself, _quid prodest Pontice longo stemmate censeri_? etc. I conclude, hast thou a sound body and a good soul, good bringing up? Art thou virtuous, honest, learned, well qualified, religious? Are thy conditions good? Thou art a true nobleman, perfectly noble though born of Thersites, _dummodo tu sis Aeacidæ similis non natus sed factus_, noble kat' exochên, _for neither sword, nor fire, nor water, nor sickness, nor outward violence, nor the devil himself can take thy good parts from thee_. Be not ashamed of thy birth then; thou art a gentleman all the world over, and shalt be honoured, whenas he, strip him of his fine clothes, dispossess him of his wealth, is a funge[66] (which Polynices in his banishment found true by experience, gentry was not esteemed), like a piece of coin in another country, that no man will take, and shall be contemned. Once more, though thou be a barbarian born at Tontonteac, a villain, a slave, a Saldanian negro, or a rude Virginian in Dasamonquepeuc, [67] he a French monsieur, a Spanish don, a seignior of Italy, I care not how descended, of what family, of what order--baron, count, prince--if thou be well qualified and he not but a degenerate Neoptolemus, I tell thee in a word thou art a man and he is a beast. " [64] Burton, with others of the time, constantly wrote "he" as theequivalent of the classical demonstratives. Modern, but not better, useprefers "the man, " or something similar. [65] A "dizzard" = a blockhead. Said to be connected with "dizzy. " [66] Fungus, mushroom. [67] Saldania is Saldanha Bay. As for Tontonteac and Dasamonquepeuc, Ishall imitate the manly frankness of the boy in _Henry V. _, and say, "I donot know what is the French for fer, and ferret, and firk. " Such, in his outward aspects, is Burton; but of him, even more than of mostwriters, it may be said that a brick of the house is no sample. Only byreading him in the proper sense, and that with diligence, can his greatlearning, his singular wit and fancy, and the general view of life and ofthings belonging to life, which informs and converts to a whole hislearning, his wit, and his fancy alike, be properly conceived. For readingeither continuous or desultory, either grave or gay, at all times of lifeand in all moods of temper, there are few authors who stand the test ofpractice so well as the author of _The Anatomy of Melancholy_. Probably, however, among those who can taste old authors, there will alwaysbe a friendly but irreconcilable difference as to the merits of Fuller andBurton, when compared together. There never can be any among such as to themerits of Fuller, considered in himself. Like Burton, he was a clerk inorders; but his literary practice, though more copious than that of theauthor of _The Anatomy_, divorced him less from the discharge of hisprofessional duties. He was born, like Dryden, but twenty-two yearsearlier, in 1608, at Aldwinkle in Northamptonshire, and in a parsonagethere, but of the other parish (for there are two close together). He waseducated at Cambridge, and, being made prebendary of Salisbury, and vicarof Broadwindsor, almost as soon as he could take orders, seemed to be in afair way of preferment. He worked as a parish priest up to 1640, the yearof the beginning of troubles, and the year of his first important book, _The Holy War_. But he was a staunch Royalist, though by no means a bigot, and he did not, like other men of his time, see his way to play Mr. Facing-both-ways. For a time he was a preacher in London, then he followedthe camp as chaplain to the victorious army of Hopton, in the west, thenfor a time again he was stationary at Exeter, and after the ruin of theRoyal cause he returned to London, where, though he did not recover hisbenefices, he was leniently treated, and even, in 1655, obtained license topreach. Nevertheless, the Restoration would probably have brought himpromotion, but he lived not long enough to receive it, dying on the 15th ofAugust 1661. He was an extremely industrious writer, publishing, besidesthe work already mentioned, and not a few minor pieces (_The Holy andProfane State_, _Thoughts and Contemplations in Good, Worse, and BetterTimes_, _A Pisgah-sight of Palestine_), an extensive _Church History ofBritain_, and, after his death, what is perhaps his masterpiece, _TheWorthies of England_, an extraordinary miscellany, quartering the ground bycounties, filling, in the compactest edition, two mighty quartos, andcontaining perhaps the greatest account of miscellaneous fact to be foundanywhere out of an encyclopedia, conveyed in a style the quaintest and mostlively to be found anywhere out of the choicest essayists of the language. A man of genius who adored Fuller, and who owes to him more than to any oneelse except Sir Thomas Browne, has done, in small compass, a service to hismemory which is not easily to be paralleled. Lamb's specimens from Fuller, most of which are only two or three lines long, and none a pageful, foronce contradict the axiom quoted above as to a brick and a house. Soperfectly has the genius of selector and author coincided, that not havingmyself gone through the verification of them, I should hardly be surprisedto find that Lamb had used his faculty of invention. Yet this would notmatter, for they are perfectly Fullerian. Although Fuller has justly beenpraised for his method, and although he never seems to have suffered hisfancy to run away with him to the extent of forgetting or wilfullymisrepresenting a fact, the conceits, which are the chief characteristic ofhis style, are comparatively independent of the subject. Coleridge hasasserted that "Wit was the stuff and substance of his intellect, " anassertion which (with all the respect due to Coleridge) would have beenbetter phrased in some such way as this, --that nearly the whole force ofhis intellect concentrated itself upon the witty presentation of things. Heis illimitably figurative, and though his figures seldom or never fail tocarry illumination of the subject with them, their peculiar character issufficiently indicated by the fact that they can almost always be separatedfrom the subject and from the context in which they occur without anydamage to their own felicity. To a thoroughly serious person, to a personlike Lord Chesterfield (who was indeed very serious in his own way, andabhorred proverbial philosophy), or to one who cannot away with theintroduction of a quip in connection with a solemn subject, and who thinksthat indulgence in a gibe is a clear proof that the writer has no solidargument to produce, Fuller must be nothing but a puzzle or a disgust. Thata pious and earnest divine should, even in that day of quaintness, comparethe gradual familiarisation of Christians with the sacraments of the Churchto the habit of children first taking care of, and then neglecting a pairof new boots, or should describe a brother clerk as "pronouncing the word_damn_ with such an emphasis as left a dismal echo in his auditors' ears agood while longer, " seems, no doubt, to some excellent people, unpardonable, and almost incomprehensible. Yet no one has ever impeachedthe sincerity of Fuller's convictions, and the blamelessness of his life. That a grave historian should intersperse the innumerable trivialities ofthe _Worthies_ may be only less shocking. But he was an eminent proof ofhis own axiom, "That an ounce of mirth, with the same degree of grace, willserve God farther than a pound of sadness. " Fuller is perhaps the onlywriter who, voluminous as he is, will not disappoint the most superficialinquirer for proofs of the accuracy of the character usually given to him. Nobody perhaps but himself, in trying to make the best of the Egyptianbondage of the Commonwealth, would have discovered that the Church, beingunrepresented by any of the four hundred and odd members of Cromwell'sParliament, was better off than when she had Archbishops, Bishops, and aconvocation all to herself, urging, "what civil Christian would not pleadfor a dumb man, " and so enlisting all the four hundred and odd enemies asfriends and representatives. But it is impossible to enter fully on thesubject of Fuller's quips. What may fairly be said of them is, that whileconstantly fantastic, and sometimes almost childish, they are never reallysilly; that they are never, or hardly ever in bad taste; and that, quaintand far fetched as they are, there is almost always some application orsuggestion which saves them from being mere intellectual somersaults. Thefamous one of the "Images of God cut in ebony, " is sufficient of itself toserve as a text. There is in it all the good side of the emancipationpropaganda with an entire freedom from the extravagance, the vulgarity, theinjustice, the bad taste which marked that propaganda a century and moreafterwards, when taken up by persons very different from Fuller. Perhaps itmay be well to give an extract of some length from him:-- "A lady big with child was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and in the dungeon was delivered of a son, who continued with her till a boy of some bigness. It happened at one time he heard his mother (for see neither of them could, as to decern in so dark a place) bemoan her condition. "Why, mother (said the child) do you complain, seeing you want nothing you can wish, having clothes, meat, and drink sufficient? Alas! child (returned the mother), I lack liberty, converse with Christians, the light of the sun, and many things more, which thou, being prison-born, neither art nor can be sensible of in thy condition. "The _post-nati_, understand thereby such striplings born in England since the death of monarchy therein, conceive this land, their mother, to be in a good estate. For one fruitful harvest followeth another, commodities are sold at reasonable rates, abundance of brave clothes are worn in the city, though not by such persons whose birth doth best become, but whose purses can best bestow them. "But their mother, England, doth justly bemoan the sad difference betwixt her present and former condition; when she enjoyed full and free trade without payment of taxes, save so small they seemed rather an acknowledgment of their allegiance than a burden to their estate; when she had the court of a king, the House of Lords, yea, and the Lord's house, decently kept, constantly frequented, without falsehood in doctrine, or faction in discipline. God of His goodness restore unto us so much of these things as may consist with His glory and our good. " * * * * * "I saw a servant maid, at the command of her mistress, make, kindle, and blow a fire. Which done, she was posted away about other business, whilst her mistress enjoyed the benefit of the fire. Yet I observed that this servant, whilst industriously employed in the kindling thereof, got a more general, kindly, and continuing heat than her mistress herself. Her heat was only by her, and not in her, staying with her no longer than she stayed by the chimney; whilst the warmth of the maid was inlaid, and equally diffused through the whole body. "An estate suddenly gotten is not so lasting to the owner thereof as what is duly got by industry. The substance of the diligent, saith Solomon, Prov. Xii. 27, is precious. He cannot be counted poor that hath so many pearls, precious brown bread, precious small beer, precious plain clothes, etc. A comfortable consideration in this our age, wherein many hands have learned their lesson of labour, who were neither born nor bred with it. " The best judges have admitted that, in contradistinction to this perpetualquipping, which is, as far as it goes, of his time, the general style ofFuller is on the whole rather more modern than the styles of hiscontemporaries. It does not seem that this is due to deliberate intentionof shortening and proportioning his prose; for he is as careless as anyone of the whole century about exact grammatical sequence, and seems tohave had no objection on any critical grounds to the long disjointedsentence which was the curse of the time. But his own ruling passioninsensibly disposed him to a certain brevity. He liked to express hisfigurative conceits pointedly and antithetically; and point and antithesisare the two things most incompatible with clauses jointed _ad infinitum_ inClarendon's manner, with labyrinths of "whos" and "whiches" such as toofrequently content Milton and Taylor. Poles asunder from Hobbes, not merelyin his ultimate conclusions but in the general quality of his mind, heperhaps comes nearest to the author of the treatise on _Human Nature_ inclear, sensible, unambiguous presentation of the thing that he means tosay; and this, joined to his fecundity in illustration of every kind, greatly helps the readableness of his books. No work of his as a workingout of an original conception can compete with _The Anatomy of Melancholy_;but he is as superior in minor method to Burton as he is inferior ingeneral grasp. The remainder of the minor Carolines must be dismissed rapidly. A notunimportant position among the prose writers of this time is occupied byEdward Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the elder brother of GeorgeHerbert the poet. He was born in 1583, and finished his life ingloriously, and indeed discreditably, during the troubles of the civil war, on the 20thof August 1648. His earlier career is elaborately if not exactly truthfullyrecorded in his _Autobiography_, and its details have been carefullysupplemented by his latest editor, Mr. Lee. His literary activity wasvarious and considerable. His greatest work--a treatise which has beenrashly called the foundation of English deism, but which rather expressesthe vague and not wholly unorthodox doubt expressed earlier by Montaigne, and by contemporaries of Herbert's own, such as La Mothe le Vayer--waswritten in Latin, and has never been translated into English. He was anEnglish verse writer of some merit, though inferior to his brother. Hisambitious and academic _History of Henry VIII. _ is a regular and notunsuccessful effort in English prose, prompted no doubt by thethoroughgoing courtiership which ranks with his vanity and want ofstability on the most unfavourable aspect of Herbert's character. Butposterity has agreed to take him as an English writer chiefly on thestrength of the Autobiography, which remained in manuscript for a centuryand more, and was published by Horace Walpole, rather against the will ofLord Powis, its possessor and its author's representative. It is difficultto say that Lord Powis was wrong, especially considering that Herbert neverpublished these memoirs, and seems to have written them as much as anythingelse for his own private satisfaction. It may be doubted whether there isany more astounding monument of coxcombry in literature. Herbert issometimes cited as a model of a modern knight-errant, of an Amadis born toolate. Certainly, according to his own account, all women loved and all menfeared him; but for the former fact we have nothing but his own authority, and in regard to the latter we have counter evidence which renders itexceedingly doubtful. He was, according to his own account, a desperateduellist. But even by this account his duels had a curious habit of beinginterrupted, in the immortal phrase of Mr. Winkle, by "several policeconstables;" while in regard to actual war the exploits of his youth seemnot to have been great, and those of his age were wholly discreditable, inasmuch as being by profession an ardent Royalist, he took the firstopportunity to make, without striking a blow, a profitable composition withthe Parliament. Nevertheless, despite the drawbacks of subject-matter, theautobiography is a very interesting piece of English prose. The narrativestyle, for all its coxcombry and its insistence on petty details, has asingular vivacity; the constructions, though sometimes incorrect ("theedict was so severe as they who transgressed were to lose their heads"), are never merely slovenly; and the writer displays an art, very uncommon inhis time, in the alternation of short and long sentences and the generaladjustment of the paragraph. Here and there, too, there are passages ofmore elevated style which give reason for regretting that the _De Veritate_was not written in English. It is very much to be feared that the chiefreason for its being written in Latin was a desire on the author's part toescape awkward consequences by an appearance of catering for philosophersand the learned only. It must be admitted that neither of the two greatfree-thinking Royalists, Hobbes and Herbert, is a wholly pleasantcharacter; but it may be at least said for the commoner (it cannot be saidfor the peer) that he was constant to his principles, and that if somewhatcareful of his skin, he never seems to have been tempted to barter hisconscience for it as Herbert did. Hardly any other writer among the minor Caroline prosaists is importantenough to justify a substantive notice in a work which has already reachedand almost exceeded the limits accorded to it. The excellent style ofCowley's _Essays_, which is almost more modern than the work of Dryden andTillotson, falls in great part actually beyond the limits of our time; andby character, if not by date, Cowley is left for special treatment in thefollowing volume. He sometimes relapses into what may be called the generalqualities with their accompanying defects of Elizabethan prose--a contemptof proportion, clearness, and order; a reckless readiness to say everythingthat is in the writer's mind, without considering whether it is appropriateor not; a confusion of English and classical grammar, and occasionally avery scant attention even to rules which the classical grammars indicateyet more sternly than the vernacular. But as a rule he is distinguished forexactly the opposite of all these things. Much less modern than Cowley, butstill of a chaster and less fanciful style than most of his contemporaries, is the famous Protestant apologist, Chillingworth--a man whose orderly mindand freedom from anything like enthusiasm reflected themselves in the easybalance of his style. Sanderson, Pearson, Baxter, the two former luminariesof the Church, the latter one of the chief literary lights ofNonconformity, belong more or less to the period, as does Bishop Hall. Baxter is the most colloquial, the most fanciful, and the latest, of thethree grouped together; the other two are nearer to the plainness ofChillingworth than to the ornateness of Jeremy Taylor. Few English prosewriters again are better known than Izaak Walton, though it might bedifficult to prove that in matter of pure literature he stands very high. The engaging character of his subjects, and the still more engaging displayof his own temper and mode of thought which he makes in almost everysentence, both of his _Complete Angler_ and of his hardly less known_Lives_, account for the survival and constant popularity of books whichare neither above nor below the better work of their time in literary form. Walton was born in 1593 and died ninety years later. His early manhood wasspent in London as a "linen-draper, " but in friendly conversation with thebest clerical and literary society. In 1643 he retired from London to avoidthe bustle of the Civil War, and the _Complete Angler_ appeared in 1653. Another writer contemporary with Walton, though less long-lived, JamesHowell, has been the subject of very varying judgments; his appeal beingvery much of the same kind as Walton's, but addressed to a different andnarrower class of persons. He was born in 1594(?) of a fair Welsh family, was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, was employed more than once onconfidential business errands on the Continent, entered Parliament, wasmade Clerk of the Council, was imprisoned for years in the Fleet during theCivil War, received at the Restoration the post of Historiographer, anddied in 1666. He wrote all manner of things, but has chiefly survived asthe author of a large collection of Familiar Letters, which have been greatfavourites with some excellent judges. They have something of the agreeablegarrulousness of Walton. But Howell was not only much more of a gossip thanIzaak; he was also a good deal of a coxcomb, while Walton was destitute ofeven a trace of coxcombry. In one, however, as in the other, the attractionof matter completely outdoes the purely literary attraction. The reader isglad to hear at first hand what men thought of Raleigh's execution; howBen Jonson behaved in his cups; how foreign parts looked to a genuineEnglish traveller early in the seventeenth century, and so forth. Moreover, the book was long a very popular one, and an unusual number of anecdotesand scraps passed from it into the general literary stock of Englishwriters. But Howell's manner of telling his stories is not extraordinarilyattractive, and has something self-conscious and artificial about it whichdetracts from its interest. The _Characters_ of Overbury were followed and, no doubt, imitated by John Earle, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, and a manof some importance. Earle, who was a fellow of Merton, called his sketches_Microcosmography_. Nothing in them approaches the celebrated if perhapsnot quite genuine milkmaid of Overbury; but they give evidence of a gooddeal of direct observation often expressed in a style that is pointed, suchas the description of a bowling green as a place fitted for "the expense oftime, money, and oaths. " The church historian and miscellanist Heylinbelongs also to the now fast multiplying class of professional writers whodealt with almost any subject as it might seem likely to hit the taste ofthe public. The bold and fantastic speculations of Bishop Wilkins and SirKenelm Digby, and the _Oceana_ or Ideal Republic (last of a long line) ofJames Harrington (not to be confounded with the earlier Sir John Harington, translator of Ariosto), deserve some notice. The famous _Eikon Basilike_(the authorship of which has perhaps of late years been too confidentlyascribed to Dr. Gauden independently, rather than to the king, edited byGauden) has considerable literary merit. Last of all has to be mentioned acurious book, which made some noise at its appearance, and which, thoughnot much read now, has had two seasons of genuine popularity, and is stillhighly thought of by a few good judges. This is the _Resolves_ of OwenFeltham or Felltham. Not much is known of the author except that he was ofa respectable family in East Anglia, a family which seems to have beenespecially seated in the neighbourhood of Lowestoft. Besides the _Resolves_he wrote some verse, of which the most notable piece is a reply to BenJonson's famous ode to himself ("Come Leave the Loathed Stage")--a replywhich even such a sworn partisan as Gifford admits to be at least just ifnot very kind. Felltham seems also to have engaged in controversy withanother Johnson, a Jesuit, on theological subjects. But save for the_Resolves_ he would be totally forgotten. The estimate of their value willdiffer very much, as the liking for not very original discussion of ethicalsubjects and sound if not very subtle judgment on them overpowers or not inthe reader a distaste for style that has no particular distinction, andideas which, though often wholesome, are seldom other than obvious. Wordsworth's well-known description of one of his own poems, as being "achain of extremely valuable thoughts, " applies no doubt to the _Resolves_, which, except in elegance, rather resemble the better-known of Cicero'sphilosophical works. Moreover, though possessing no great elegance, theyare not inelegant; though it is difficult to forget how differently Baconand Browne treated not dissimilar subjects at much the same time. Sopopular were they that besides the first edition (which is undated, butmust have appeared in or before 1628, the date of the second), elevenothers were called for up to 1709. But it was not for a hundred years thatthey were again printed, and then the well-meaning but misguided zeal oftheir resuscitator led him not merely to modernise their spelling, etc. (avenial sin, if, which I am not inclined very positively to lay down, it isa sin at all), but to "improve" their style, sense, and sentiment byomission, alteration, and other tamperings with the text, so as to give thereader not what Mr. Felltham wrote early in the seventeenth century, butwhat Mr. Cummings thought he ought to have written early in the nineteenth. This chapter might easily be enlarged, and indeed, as Dryden says, shamemust invade the breast of every writer of literary history on a small scalewho is fairly acquainted with his subject, when he thinks how many worthymen--men much worthier than he can himself ever pretend to be--he hasperforce omitted. Any critic inclined to find fault may ask me where is theever-memorable John Hales? Where is Tom Coryat, that most egregiousOdcombian? and Barnabee of the unforgotten, though scandalous, Itinerary?Where is Sir Thomas Urquhart, quaintest of cavaliers, and not leastadmirable of translators, who not only rendered Rabelais in a style worthyof him, who not only wrote in sober seriousness pamphlets with titles, which Master Francis could hardly have bettered in jest, but who composed apedigree of the Urquhart family _nominatim_ up to Noah and Adam, and thenimprovised chimney pieces in Cromarty Castle, commemorating the prehistoricancestors whom he had excogitated? Where are the great Bishops fromAndrewes and Cosin onwards, and the lesser Theologians who wrangled, andthe Latitudinarians who meditated, and the historians with Whitelocke attheir head, and the countless writers of countless classes of books whomultiplied steadily as time went on? It can only be answered that they arenot, and that almost in the nature of things they cannot be here. It is notthat they are not intrinsically interesting; it is not merely that, beingless intrinsically interesting than some of their forerunners orcontemporaries, they must give way when room is limited. It is that even iftheir individual performance were better than that of earlier men, even ifthere were room and verge enough for them, they would less concern theliterary historian. For to him in all cases the later examples of a styleare less important than the earlier, merely because they are late, becausethey have had forerunners whom, consciously or unconsciously, they have(except in the case of a great genius here and there) imitated, and becauseas a necessary consequence they fall into the _numerus_--into the gross asthey would themselves have said--who must be represented only by choiceexamples and not enumerated or criticised in detail. CONCLUSION A conclusion, like a preface, is perhaps to some extent an old-fashionedthing; and it is sometimes held that a writer does better not to sum up atall, but to leave the facts which he has accumulated to make their own wayinto the intelligence of his readers. I am not able to accept this view ofthe matter. In dealing with such a subject as that which has been handledin the foregoing pages, it is at least as necessary that the writer shouldhave something of _ensemble_ in his mind as that he should look carefullyinto facts and dates and names. And he can give no such satisfactoryevidence of his having possessed this _ensemble_, as a short summary ofwhat, in his idea, the whole period looks like when taken at a bird's-eyeview. For he has (or ought to have) given the details already; and hissummary, without in the least compelling readers to accept it, must givethem at least some means of judging whether he has been wandering over aplain trackless to him, or has been pursuing with confidence a well-plannedand well-laid road. At the time at which our period begins (and which, though psychologicalepochs rarely coincide exactly with chronological, is sufficientlycoincident with the accession of Elizabeth), it cannot be said with anyprecision that there was an English _literature_ at all. There were eminentEnglish writers, though perhaps one only to whom the first rank could evenby the utmost complaisance be opened or allowed. But there was noliterature, in the sense of a system of treating all subjects in thevernacular, according to methods more or less decidedly arranged andaccepted by a considerable tradition of skilled craftsmen. Something of thekind had partially existed in the case of the Chaucerian poetic; but it wasan altogether isolated something. Efforts, though hardly conscious ones, had been made in the domain of prose by romancers, such as the practicallyunknown Thomas Mallory, by sacred orators like Latimer, by historians likeMore, by a few struggling miscellaneous writers. Men like Ascham, Cheke, Wilson, and others had, perhaps with a little touch of patronage, recommended the regular cultivation of the English tongue; and immediatelybefore the actual accession of Elizabeth the publication of Tottel's_Miscellany_ had shown by its collection of the best poetical work of thepreceding half century the extraordinary effect which a judicious xenomania(if I may, without scaring the purists of language, borrow that useful wordfrom the late Karl Hillebrand) may produce on English. It is to theexceptional fertilising power of such influences on our stock that we oweall the marvellous accomplishments of the English tongue, which in thisrespect--itself at the head of the Teutonic tongues by an almostunapproachable distance--stands distinguished with its Teutonic sistersgenerally from the groups of languages with which it is most likely to becontrasted. Its literary power is originally less conspicuous than that ofthe Celtic and of the Latin stocks; the lack, notorious to this day, of onesingle original English folk-song of really great beauty is a rough andgeneral fact which is perfectly borne out by all other facts. But theexquisite folk-literature of the Celts is absolutely unable either byitself or with the help of foreign admixture to arrive at complete literaryperfection. And the profound sense of form which characterises the Latinsis apparently accompanied by such a deficiency of originality, that whenany foreign model is accepted it receives hardly any colour from the nativegenius, and remains a cultivated exotic. The less promising soil ofAnglo-Saxon idiom waited for the foreign influences, ancient and modern, ofthe Renaissance to act upon it, and then it produced a crop which hasdwarfed all the produce of the modern world, and has nearly, if not quite, equalled in perfection, while it has much exceeded in bulk and length offlowering time, the produce of Greece. The rush of foreign influences on the England of Elizabeth's time, stimulated alike by the printing press, by religious movements, by therevival of ancient learning, and by the habits of travel and commerce, hasnot been equalled in force and volume by anything else in history. But thedifferent influences of different languages and countries worked with verydifferent force. To the easier and more generally known of the classicaltongues must be assigned by far the largest place. This was only natural ata time when to the inherited and not yet decayed use of colloquial andfamiliar Latin as the vehicle of business, of literature, and of almosteverything that required the committal of written words to paper, was addedthe scholarly study of its classical period from the strictly humanistpoint of view. If we could assign marks in the competition, Latin wouldhave to receive nearly as many as all its rivals put together; but Greekwould certainly not be second, though it affected, especially in thechannel of the Platonic dialogues, many of the highest and most giftedsouls. In the latter part of the present period there were probablyscholars in England who, whether their merely philological attainmentsmight or might not pass muster now, were far better read in the actualliterature of the Greek classics than the very philologists who now disdainthem. Not a few of the chief matters in Greek literature--the epicalgrandeur of Homer, the tragic principles of the three poets, and soforth--made themselves, at first or second hand, deeply felt. But on thewhole Greek did not occupy the second place. That place was occupied byItalian. It was Italy which had touched the spring that let loose thepoetry of Surrey and Wyatt; Italy was the chief resort of travelledEnglishmen in the susceptible time of youth; Italy provided in Petrarch(Dante was much less read) and Boccaccio, in Ariosto and Tasso, aninexhaustible supply of models, both in prose and verse. Spain was onlyless influential because Spanish literature was in a much less finishedcondition than Italian, and perhaps also because political causes made thefollowing of Spaniards seem almost unpatriotic. Yet the very same causesmade the Spanish language itself familiar to far more Englishmen than arefamiliar with it now, though the direct filiation of euphuism on Spanishoriginals is no doubt erroneous, and though the English and Spanish dramasevolved themselves in lines rather parallel than connected. France and Germany were much (indeed infinitely) less influential, and thefact is from some points of view rather curious. Both were much nearer toEngland than Spain or Italy; there was much more frequent communicationwith both; there was at no time really serious hostility with either; andthe genius of both languages was, the one from one side, the other from theother, closely connected with that of English. Yet in the great productionsof our great period, the influence of Germany is only perceptible in someburlesque matter, such as _Eulenspiegel_ and _Grobianus_, in the furnishingof a certain amount of supernatural subject-matter like the Faust legend, and in details less important still. French influence is little greater; afew allusions of "E. K. " to Marot and Ronsard; a few translations andimitations by Spenser, Watson, and others; the curious sonnets of_Zepheria_; a slight echo of Rabelais here and there; some adapted songs tomusic; and a translated play or two on the Senecan model. [68] [68] Some, like my friend Mr. Lee, would demur to this, especially asregards the sonnet. But Desportes, the chief creditor alleged, was himselfan infinite borrower from the Italians. Soothern, an early but worthlesssonneteer, _c. _ 1584, did certainly imitate the French. But France had already exercised a mighty influence upon England; andGermany had very little influence to exercise for centuries. Putting asideall pre-Chaucerian influence which may be detected, the outside guidingforce of literary English literature (which was almost exclusively poetry)had been French from the end of the fourteenth century to the lastsurvivals of the Scoto-Chaucerian school in Hawes, Skelton, and Lindsay. True, France had now something else to give; though it must be rememberedthat her great school coincided with rather than preceded the great schoolof England, that the _Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française_ wasbut a few years anterior to Tottel's _Miscellany_, and that, except Marotand Rabelais (neither of whom was neglected, though neither exercised muchformal influence), the earlier French writers of the sixteenth century hadnothing to teach England. On the other hand, Germany was utterly unable tosupply anything in the way of instruction in literary form; and it wasinstruction in literary form which was needed to set the beanstalk ofEnglish literature growing even unto the heavens. Despite the immenseadvantage which the English adoption of German innovations in religion gavethe country of Luther, that country's backwardness made imitationimpossible. Luther himself had not elaborated anything like a German style;he had simply cleared the vernacular of some of its grosseststumbling-blocks and started a good plain fashion of sentence. That was notwhat England wanted or was likely to want, but a far higher literaryinstruction, which Germany could not give her and (for the matter of that)has never been in a position to give her. The models which she sought hadto be sought elsewhere, in Athens, in old Rome, in modern Tuscany. But it would probably be unwise not to make allowance for a lesscommonplace and more "metaphysical" explanation. It was precisely becauseFrench and German had certain affinities with English, while Italian andSpanish, not to mention the classical tongues, were strange and exotic, that the influence of the latter group was preferred. The craving forsomething not familiar, for something new and strange, is well known enoughin the individual; and nations are, after all, only aggregates ofindividuals. It was exactly because the models of the south were so utterlydivided from the isolated Briton in style and character that he took sokindly to them, and that their study inspired him so well. There were not, indeed, wanting signs of what mischief might have been done if Englishsense had been less robust and the English genius of a less stubbornidiosyncrasy. Euphuism, the occasional practice of the Senecan drama, thepreposterous and almost incredible experiments in classical metre of mennot merely like Drant and Harvey, but like Sidney and Spenser, weresufficiently striking symptoms of the ferment which was going on in theliterary constitution of the country. But they were only harmlessheat-rashes, not malignant distempers, and the spirit of England wonthrough them, with no loss of general health, probably with the result ofthe healthy excretion of many peccant humours which might have beenmischievous if driven in. Even the strongest of all the foreign forces, thejust admiration of the masterpieces of classical antiquity, was not in anyway hurtful; and it is curious enough that it is only in what may be calledthe autumn and, comparatively speaking, the decadence of the period thatanything that can be called pedantry is observed. It is in Milton andBrowne, not in Shakespere and Hooker, that there is an appearance of unduedomination and "obsession" by the classics. The subdivisions of the period in which these purely literary influencesworked in combination with those of the domestic and foreign policy ofEngland (on which it is unnecessary here to dilate), can be drawn withtolerable precision. They are both better marked and more important inverse than in prose. For it cannot be too often asserted that the age, inthe wide sense, was, despite many notable achievements in the _sermopedestris_, not an age of prose but an age of poetry. The first periodextends (taking literary dates) from the publication of Tottel's_Miscellany_ to that of _The Shepherd's Calendar_. It is not distinguishedby much production of positive value. In poetry proper the writers pursueand exercise themselves upon the track of Surrey, Wyatt, and the otherauthors whom Grimoald, or some other, collected; acquiring, no doubt, acertain facility in the adjustment to iambic and other measures of thealtered pronunciation since Chaucer's time; practising new combinations instanza, but inclining too much to the doggerel Alexandrines andfourteeners (more doggerel still when chance or design divided them intoeights and sixes); repeating, without much variation, images and phrasesdirectly borrowed from foreign models; and displaying, on the whole, asingular lack of inspiration which half excuses the mistaken attempt of theyounger of them, and of their immediate successors, to arrive at thedesired poetical medium by the use of classical metres. Among men actuallyliving and writing at this time Lord Buckhurst alone displays a realpoetical faculty. Nor is the case much better in respect of drama, thoughhere the restless variety of tentative displays even more clearly thevigorous life which underlay incomplete performance, and which promisedbetter things shortly. The attempt of _Gorboduc_ and a few other plays tonaturalise the artificial tragedy, though a failure, was one of thosefailures which, in the great literary "rule of false, " help the way tosuccess; the example of _Ralph Roister Doister_ and _Gammer Gurton'sNeedle_ could not fail to stimulate the production of genuine native farcewhich might any day become _la bonne comédie_. And even the continuedcomposition of Moralities showed signs of the growing desire for life andindividuality of character. Moreover, the intense and increasing liking forthe theatre in all classes of society, despite the discouragement of theauthorities, the miserable reward offered to actors and playwrights, andthe discredit which rested on the vocations of both, was certain in theordinary course of things to improve the supply. The third division ofliterature made slower progress under less powerful stimulants. Noemulation, like that which tempted the individual graduate or templar torival Surrey in addressing his mistress's eyebrow, or Sackville in statelyrhyming on English history, acted on the writers of prose. No publicdemand, like that which produced the few known and the hundred forgottenplaywrights of the first half of Elizabeth's reign, served as a hotbed. Butit is the great secret of prose that it can dispense with such stimulants. Everybody who wished to make his thoughts known began, with the help ofthe printing press, to make them known; and the informal use of thevernacular, by dint of this unconscious practice and of the growingscholarship both of writers and readers, tended insensibly to make itselfless of a mere written conversation and more of a finished prose style. Preaching in English, the prose pamphlet, and translations into thevernacular were, no doubt, the three great schoolmasters in thedisciplining of English prose. But by degrees all classes of subjects weretreated in the natural manner, and so the various subdivisions of prosestyle--oratorical, narrative, expository, and the rest--slowly evolved andseparated themselves, though hardly, even at the close of the time, hadthey attained the condition of finish. The year 1580 may be fixed on with almost mathematical accuracy as the dateat which the great generation of Elizabethan writers first showed its handwith Lyly's _Euphues_ in prose and Spenser's _Shepherd's Calendar_ inverse. Drama was a little, but not more than a little, later in showing thesame signs of rejuvenescence; and from that time forward till the end ofthe century not a year passed without the appearance of some memorable workor writer; while the total production of the twenty years exceeds inoriginality and force, if not always in artistic perfection of form, theproduction of any similar period in the world's history. The group ofUniversity Wits, following the example of Lyly (who, however, in dramahardly belongs to the most original school), started the dramas of history, of romance, of domestic life; and, by fashioning through their leaderMarlowe the tragic decasyllable, put into the hands of the still greatergroup who succeeded them an instrument, the power of which it is impossibleto exaggerate. Before the close of the century they had themselves allceased their stormy careers; but Shakespere was in the full swing of hisactivity; Ben Jonson had achieved the freshest and perhaps capital fruit ofhis study of humours; Dekker, Webster, Middleton, Chapman, and a crowd oflesser writers had followed in his steps. In poetry proper the magnificentsuccess of _The Faërie Queen_ had in one sense no second; but it wassurrounded with a crowd of productions hardly inferior in their own way, the chief being the result of the great and remarkable sonnet outburst ofthe last decade of the century. The doggerel of the earlier years hadalmost entirely disappeared, and in its place appeared the perfectconcerted music of the stanzas (from the sonnet and the Spenseriandownwards), the infinite variety of the decasyllable, and the exquisitelyric snatches of song in the dramatists, pamphleteers, and music-bookwriters. Following the general law already indicated, the formal advance inprose was less, but an enormous stride was made in the direction ofapplying it to its various uses. The theologians, with Hooker at theirhead, produced almost the first examples of the measured and dignifiedtreatment of argument and exposition. Bacon (towards the latter end it istrue) produced the earliest specimens of his singular mixture of gravityand fancy, pregnant thought and quaint expression. History in the propersense was hardly written, but a score of chroniclers, some not deficient innarrative power, paved the way for future historians. In imaginative andmiscellaneous literature the fantastic extravagances of Lyly seemed asthough they might have an evil effect. In reality they only spurredingenious souls on to effort in refining prose, and in one particulardirection they had a most unlooked for result. The imitation in little byGreene, Lodge, and others, of their long-winded graces, helped topopularise the pamphlet, and the popularisation of the pamphlet led the wayto periodical writing--an introduction perhaps of doubtful value in itself, but certainly a matter of no small importance in the history of literature. And so by degrees professional men of letters arose--men of letters, professional in a sense, which had not existed since the days of thetravelling Jongleurs of the early Middle Ages. These men, by working forthe actors in drama, or by working for the publishers in the prose andverse pamphlet (for the latter form still held its ground), earned asubsistence which would seem sometimes to have been not a mere pittance, and which at any rate, when folly and vice did not dissipate it, kept themalive. Much nonsense no doubt has been talked about the Fourth Estate; butsuch as it is, for good or for bad, it practically came into existence inthese prolific years. The third period, that of vigorous manhood, may be said to coincide roughlywith the reign of James I. , though if literary rather than political datesbe preferred, it might be made to begin with the death of Spenser in 1599, and to end with the damnation of Ben Jonson's _New Inn_ just thirty yearslater. In the whole of this period till the very last there is no othersign of decadence than the gradual dropping off in the course of nature ofthe great men of the preceding stage, not a few of whom, however, survivedinto the next, while the places of those who fell were taken in some casesby others hardly below the greatest, such as Beaumont and Fletcher. Many ofthe very greatest works of what is generally known as the Elizabethanera--the later dramas of Shakespere, almost the whole work of Ben Jonson, the later poems of Drayton, Daniel, and Chapman, the plays of Webster andMiddleton, and the prose of Raleigh, the best work of Bacon, the poetry ofBrowne and Wither--date from this time, while the astonishingly various andexcellent work of the two great dramatists above mentioned is whollycomprised within it. And not only is there no sign of weakening, but thereis hardly a sign of change. A slight, though only a slight, depression ofthe imaginative and moral tone may be noticed or fancied in those who, likeFletcher, are wholly of the period, and a certain improvement in generaltechnical execution testifies to longer practice. But Webster might as wellhave written years earlier (hardly so well years later) than he actuallydid; and especially in the case of numerous anonymous or single works, thedate of which, or at least of their composition, is obscure, it is verydifficult from internal evidence of style and sentiment to assign them toone date rather than to another, to the last part of the strictlyElizabethan or the first part of the strictly Jacobean period. Were it notfor the occasional imitation of models, the occasional reference to datedfacts, it would be not so much difficult as impossible. If there seems tobe less audacity of experiment, less of the fire of youth, less of theunrestrainable restlessness of genius eager to burst its way, that, as hasbeen already remarked of another difference, may not improbably be mainlydue to fancy, and to the knowledge that the later efforts actually werelater as to anything else. In prose more particularly there is no changewhatever. Few new experiments in style were tried, unless the _Characters_of Overbury and Earle may be called such. The miscellaneous pamphlets ofthe time were written in much the same fashion, and in some cases by thesame men, as when, forty years before Jonson summoned himself to "quit theloathed stage, " Nash had alternately laughed at Gabriel Harvey, andsavagely lashed the Martinists. The graver writers certainly had notimproved upon, and had not greatly changed the style in which Hooker brokehis lance with Travers, or descanted on the sanctity of law. Thehumour-comedy of Jonson, the romantic _drame_ of Fletcher, with themarmoreally-finished minor poems of Ben, were the nearest approaches of anyproduct of the time to novelty of general style, and all three weredestined to be constantly imitated, though only in the last case with muchreal success, during the rest of our present period. Yet thepost-Restoration comedy is almost as much due to Jonson and Fletcher as toforeign models, and the influence of both, after long failing to produceanything of merit, was not imperceptible even in Congreve and Vanbrugh. Of the fourth period, which practically covers the reign of Charles I. Andthe interregnum of the Commonwealth, no one can say that it shows no signsof decadence, when the meaning of that word is calculated according to thecautions given above in noticing its poets. Yet the decadence is not at allof the kind which announces a long literary dead season, but only of thatwhich shows that the old order is changing to a new. Nor if regard bemerely had to the great names which adorn the time, may it seem proper touse the word decadence at all. To this period belong not only Milton, butTaylor, Browne, Clarendon, Hobbes (four of the greatest names in Englishprose), the strange union of learning in matter and quaintness in formwhich characterises Fuller and Burton, the great dramatic work of Massingerand Ford. To it also belongs the exquisite if sometimes artificial schoolof poetry which grew up under the joint inspiration of the great personalinfluence and important printed work of Ben Jonson on the one hand, and thesubtler but even more penetrating stimulant of the unpublished poetry ofDonne on the other--a school which has produced lyrical work not surpassedby that of any other school or time, and which, in some specially poeticalcharacteristics, may claim to stand alone. If then, we speak of decadence, it is necessary to describe with someprecision what is meant, and to do so is not difficult, for the signs of itare evident, not merely in the rank and file of writers (though they arenaturally most prominent here), but to some extent in the greatillustrations of the period themselves. In even the very best work of thetime there is a want of the peculiar freshness and spontaneity, as ofspring water from the rock, which characterises earlier work. The art isconstantly admirable, but it is almost obtrusively art--a proposition whichis universally true even of the greatest name of the time, of Milton, andwhich applies equally to Taylor and to Browne, to Massinger and to Ford, sometimes even to Herrick (extraordinary as is the grace which he managesto impart), and almost always to Carew. The lamp is seldom far off, thoughits odour may be the reverse of disagreeable. But in the work which is notquite so excellent, other symptoms appear which are as decisive and lesstolerable. In the poetry of the time there appear, side by side with muchexquisite melody and much priceless thought, the strangest blotches, already more than once noticed, of doggerel, of conceits pushed to theverge of nonsense and over the verge of grotesque, of bad rhyme and badrhythm which are evidently not the result of mere haste and creativeenthusiasm but of absolutely defective ear, of a waning sense of harmony. In the drama things are much worse. Only the two dramatists alreadymentioned, with the doubtful addition of Shirley, display anything likegreat or original talent. A few clever playwrights do their journey-workwith creditable craftsmanship. But even this characteristic is wanting inthe majority. The plots relapse into a chaos almost as great as that of thedrama of fifty years earlier, but with none of its excuse of inexperienceand of redeeming purple patches. The characters are at once uninterestingand unpleasant; the measure hobbles and staggers; the dialogue variesbetween passages of dull declamation and passages of almost dullerrepartee. Perhaps, though the prose names of the time are greater thanthose of its dramatists, or, excluding Milton's, of its poets, the signs ofsomething wrong are clearest in prose. It would be difficult to find in anygood prose writer between 1580 and 1625 shameless anomalies of arrangement, the clumsy distortions of grammar, which the very greatest Caroline writerspermit themselves in the intervals, and sometimes in the very course oftheir splendid eloquence; while, as for lesser men, the famous incoherencesof Cromwell's speeches are hardly more than a caricature of the custom ofthe day. Something has yet to be said as to the general characteristics of thistime--characteristics which, scarcely discernible in the first period, yeteven there to be traced in such work as that of Surrey and Sackville, emerge into full prominence in the next, continue with hardly any loss inthe third, and are discernible even in the "decadence" of the fourth. Evenyet they are not universally recognised, and it appears to be sometimesthought that because critics speak with enthusiasm of periods in which, save at rare intervals, and as it were by accident, they are notdiscernible at all, such critics are insensible to them where they occur. Never was there a grosser mistake. It is said that M. Taine, in privateconversation, once said to a literary novice who rashly asked him whetherhe liked this or that, "Monsieur, en littérature j'aime tout. " It was anoble and correct sentiment, though it might be a little difficult for theparticular critic who formulated it to make good his claim to it as amotto. The ideal critic undoubtedly does like everything in literature, provided that it is good of its kind. He likes the unsophisticatedtentatives of the earliest minstrel poetry, and the cultivated perfectionof form of Racine and Pope; he likes the massive vigour of the French andEnglish sixteenth centuries, and the alembicated exquisiteness of Catullusand Carew; he does not dislike Webster because he is not Dryden, or Youngbecause he is not Spenser; he does not quarrel with Sophocles because he isnot Æschylus, or with Hugo because he is not Heine. But at the same time itis impossible for him not to recognise that there are certain periods whereinspiration and accomplishment meet in a fashion which may be sought for invain at others. These are the great periods of literature, and there areperhaps only five of them, with five others which may be said to be almostlevel. The five first are the great age of Greek literature from Æschylusto Plato, the great ages of English and French literature in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries, the whole range of Italian literature from Danteto Ariosto, and the second great age of English from the _Lyrical Ballads_to the death of Coleridge. It is the super-eminent glory of English that itcounts twice in the reckoning. The five seconds are the Augustan age ofLatin, the short but brilliant period of Spanish literary development, theRomantic era in France, the age of Goethe in Germany, including Heine'searlier and best work, and (with difficulty, and by allowance chiefly ofSwift and Dryden) the half century from the appearance of _Absalom andAchitophel_ to the appearance of _Gulliver_ and _The Dunciad_ in England. Out of these there are great men but no great periods, and the first classis distinguished from the second, not so much by the fact that almost allthe greatest literary names of the world are found in it, as because it isevident to a careful reader that there was more of the general spirit ofpoetry and of literature diffused in human brains at these times than atany other. It has been said more than once that English Elizabethanliterature may, and not merely in virtue of Shakespere, claim the firstplace even among the first class. The full justification of this assertioncould only be given by actually going through the whole range of theliterature, book in hand. The foregoing pages have given it as it were in_précis_, rather than in any fuller fashion. And it has been thought betterto devote some of the space permitted to extract as the only possiblesubstitute for this continual book-in-hand exemplification. Many subjectswhich might properly form the subject of excursus in a larger history havebeen perforce omitted, the object being to give, not a series ofinteresting essays on detached points, but a conspectus of the actualliterary progress and accomplishment of the century, from 1557 to 1660. Such essays exist already in great numbers, though some no doubt are yet towrite. The extraordinary influence of Plato, or at least of a more or lessindistinctly understood Platonism, on many of the finer minds of theearlier and middle period, is a very interesting point, and it has beenplausibly connected with the fact that Giordano Bruno was for some years aresident in England, and was acquainted with the Greville-Sidney circle atthe very time that that circle was almost the cradle of the new Englishliterature. The stimulus given not merely by the popular fancy for roughdramatic entertainments, but by the taste of courts and rich nobles formasques--a taste which favoured the composition of such exquisiteliterature as Ben Jonson's and Milton's masterpieces--is another sidesubject of the same kind. I do not know that, much as has been written onthe Reformation, the direct influence of the form which the Reformationtook in England on the growth of English literature has ever been estimatedand summarised fully and yet briefly, so as to show the contrast betweenthe distinctly anti-literary character of most of the foreign Protestantand the English Puritan movement on the one side, and the literarytendencies of Anglicanism on the other. The origins of Euphuism and of thatlater form of preciousness which is sometimes called Gongorism andsometimes Marinism have been much discussed, but the last word hascertainly not been said on them. For these things, however (which aremerely quoted as examples of a very numerous class), there could be foundno place here without excluding other things more centrally necessary tothe unfolding of the history. And therefore I may leave what I have writtenwith a short final indication of what seems to me the distinguishing markof Elizabethan literature. That mark is not merely the presence ofindividual works of the greatest excellence, but the diffusion throughoutthe whole work of the time of a _vivida vis_, of flashes of beauty in proseand verse, which hardly any other period can show. Let us open one of thesongbooks of the time, Dowland's _Second Book of Airs_, published in thecentral year of our period, 1600, and reprinted by Mr Arber. Here almost atrandom we hit upon this snatch-- "Come ye heavy states of night, Do my father's spirit right; Soundings baleful let me borrow, Burthening my song with sorrow: Come sorrow, come! Her eyes that sings By thee, are turnèd into springs. "Come you Virgins of the night That in dirges sad delight, Quire my anthems; I do borrow Gold nor pearl, but sounds of sorrow. Come sorrow, come! Her eyes that sings By thee, are turnèd into springs. " It does not matter who wrote that--the point is its occurrence in anordinary collection of songs to music neither better nor worse than manyothers. When we read such verses as this, or as the still more charmingAddress to Love given on page 122, there is evident at once the _non soche_ which distinguishes this period. There is a famous story of agood-natured conversation between Scott and Moore in the latter days of SirWalter, in which the two poets agreed that verse which would have made afortune in their young days appeared constantly in magazines without beingmuch regarded in their age. No sensible person will mistake the meaning ofthe apparent praise. It meant that thirty years of remarkable originalproduction and of much study of models had made possible and common astandard of formal merit which was very rare at an earlier time. Now thisstandard of formal merit undoubtedly did not generally exist in the days ofElizabeth. But what did generally exist was the "wind blowing where itlisteth, " the presence and the influence of which are least likely to bemistaken or denied by those who are most strenuous in insisting on theimportance and the necessity of formal excellence itself. I once undertookfor several years the criticism of minor poetry for a literary journal, which gave more room than most to such things, and during the time I thinkI must have read through or looked over probably not much less than athousand, certainly not less than five or six hundred volumes. I amspeaking with seriousness when I say that nothing like the note of themerely casual pieces quoted or referred to above was to be detected in morethan at the outside two or three of these volumes, and that where it seemedto sound faintly some second volume of the same author's almost always cameto smother it soon after. There was plenty of quite respectable poeticlearning: next to nothing of the poetic spirit. Now in the period dealtwith in this volume that spirit is everywhere, and so are its sisters, thespirits of drama and of prose. They may appear in full concentration andlustre, as in _Hamlet_ or _The Faërie Queene_; or in fitful andintermittent flashes, as in scores and hundreds of sonneteers, pamphleteers, playwrights, madrigalists, preachers. But they are always notfar off. In reading other literatures a man may lose little by obeying theadvice of those who tell him only to read the best things: in readingElizabethan literature by obeying he can only disobey that advice, for thebest things are everywhere. [69] [69] In the twenty years which have passed since this book was firstpublished, monographs on most of the points indicated on p. 459 haveappeared, both in England and America. INDEX I. --BIBLIOGRAPHICAL Single plays, poems, etc. , not mentioned in this Index will be found in thecollections referred to under the headings Arber, Bullen, Farmer, Grosart, Hazlitt, Park, Simpson. Alexander, Sir William. _See_ Stirling. Arber, E. , English Garner, vols. I. -viii. , Birmingham and London, 1877-96. _Also_ new editions in redistributed volumes by Lee, Collins, and others. Ascham, Roger, Toxophilus. Ed. Arber, London, 1868. The Schoolmaster. Ed. Arber, London, 1870. Works. Ed. Giles, 4 vols. , London, 1865. Bacon, Francis, Works of. 3 vols. Folio, London, 1753. Barnabee's Journal. By R. Braithwaite. Ed. Haslewood and Hazlitt, London, 1876. Barnes, Barnabe, Parthenophil and Parthenophe. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. I. The Devil's Charter. Ed. M'Kerrow, Louvain. Barnfield, Richard, Poems. Ed. Arber, Birmingham, 1882. Basse, William, Poems of. Ed. Bond, London, 1893. Beaumont, Francis, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Vi. Beaumont, Sir John, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Vi. Beaumont, Joseph, Poems of. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed, 1880. Beaumont and Fletcher, Dramatic Works of. 10 vols. , London, 1750. 2 vols. , Ed. Darley, London, 1859. 11 vols. , Ed. Dyce, London, 1843. Two new editions in progress now (1907)--one Ed. Bullen, London, the other Ed. Waller, Cambridge. Benlowes, Edward, Theophila. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. I. , Oxford, 1905. Bible. The Holy Bible, Authorised Version, Oxford, 1851. Revised Version, Oxford, 1885. Breton, Nicholas, Works of. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed, 1879. Brome, Alexander, Poems of. In Chalmers's Poets, vol. Vi. Brome, Richard, Plays of. 3 vols. , London, 1873. Brooke, Fulke Greville, Lord, Works of. Ed. Grosart, 4 vols. Privately printed, 1870. Browne, Sir Thomas, Works of. Ed. Wilkin, 3 vols. , London, 1880. Religio Medici. Ed. Greenhill, London, 1881. Browne, William, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Vi. _Also_ 2 vols. Ed. Hazlitt, London, 1868. _Also_ Ed. Goodwin, 2 vols. , London, 1894. Bullen, A. H. , Old Plays, 4 vols. , London, 1882-85. Ditto, New Series, Vols, i. Ii. Iii. , London, 1887-90. Lyrics from Elizabethan Song-books, 2 vols. , 1887-88. Ditto, Romances, 1890. Ditto, Dramatists, 1890. _Speculum Amantis_, 1891. Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, 2 vols. , 1891. England's Helicon. London, 1887. Arden of Feversham. London, 1887. Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy. 2 vols. , London, 1821. Carey, Patrick. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. Ii. , Oxford, 1906. Carew, Thomas, Poems of. Edinburgh, 1824. _Also_ in Chalmers's Poets, vol. V. _Also_ Ed. Hazlitt, London, 1868. Cartwright, William, Poems of. In Chalmers's Poets, vol. Vi. Chalkhill, John, Thealma and Clearchus. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. Ii. Chalmers, A. , British Poets, 21 vols. , London, 1810. Chamberlayne, William, Pharonnida. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. I. Chapman, George, Works of. 3 vols. , London, 1875. Churchyard, T. No complete edition. Some things reprinted by Collier and in Heliconia. Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of. Works, 1 vol. , Oxford, 1843. Cleveland, John. Contemporary edd. Numerous but puzzling and untrustworthy. A recent one by J. M. Berdan, New York, n. D. Cokain, Sir Aston, Plays of. Edinburgh, 1874. Constable, Henry, Diana. In Arber's English Garner, vol. Ii. Corbet, Bishop, Poems of. In Chalmers's Poets, vol. V. Cotton, Charles, Poems of. In Chalmers's Poets, vol. Vi. Crashaw, Richard, Poems of. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed, 1872. _Also_ in Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Vi. _Also_ Ed. Waller, Cambridge, 1904. Daniel, Samuel, Delia. In Arber's English Garner, vol. Iii. _Also_ Works of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Iii. _Also_ Works of. Ed. Grosart, 5 vols. Privately printed, 1885-96. Davenant, Sir William, Dramatic Works of. 5 vols. , Edinburgh, 1872-73. Poems of. Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Iv. Davies, Sir John, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. V. Davies, John, of Hereford, Works. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed, 1878. Day, John, Works of. Ed. Bullen. Privately printed, 1881. Dekker, Thomas, Dramatic Works of. 4 vols. , London, 1873. Prose Works of. 5 vols. Ed. Grosart. Privately printed, 1884-86. Donne, John, Poems of. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed, 1872. _Also_ Ed. Chambers, 2 vols. , London, 1896. Drayton, Michael, Idea. In Arber's English Garner, vol. Vi. Works of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Iv. Drummond, William, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. V. _Also_ Published for the Maitland Club. Edinburgh, 1832. Dyer, Sir Edward, Poems of. In Hannah's Courtly Poets. Early English Dramatists. Ed. Farmer, vols. I. -ix. , London, 1905-6. Eden, Richard, The First Three English Books on America. Ed. Arber, Birmingham, 1885. Elizabethan Critical Essays. Ed. G. Smith, 2 vols. , Oxford, 1904. Elizabethan Sonnets. Ed. Lee, 2 vols. , London, 1904. Felltham, Owen, Resolves. London, 1820 (but _see_ p. 443). Fletcher, Giles, Licia. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol, ii. Fletcher, Giles, the younger, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Vi. Fletcher, Phineas, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Vi. Ford, John, Works of. Ed. Hartley Coleridge, London, 1859. Fuller, Thomas, Worthies of England. Ed. Nichols, 2 vols. 4to, London, 1811. Thoughts in Good Times. London, 1885. Holy and Profane State. London, 1642. Church History. London, 1655. Gascoigne, George, Works of. Ed. Hazlitt, London, 1868. _Also_ in Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Ii. Gifford, Humphrey, A Posy of Gillyflowers. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. I. Glapthorne, Henry, Works of. 2 vols. , London, 1874. Godolphin, Sidney, Poems of. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. Ii. Goff, Thomas, Plays. London, 1656. Googe, Barnabe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets. Ed. Arber, London, 1871. Greene, Robert, Dramatic Works of. Ed. Dyce, London, 1883. _Also_ Ed. Collins, 2 vols. , Oxford, 1905. _Also_ Complete Works of. Ed. Grosart, 13 vols. Privately printed, 1881-86. Griffin, Bartholomew, Fidessa. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. Ii. Grosart, A. B. , Fuller Worthies Library. Chertsey Worthies Library. Occasional Issues. Privately printed, v. D. Guilpin, Edward, Skialetheia. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. Vi. Habington, William, Castara. Ed. Arber, London, 1870. _Also_ in Chalmers's Poets, vol. Vi. Hakluyt, Richard, The Voyages, etc. , of the English Nation: Edinburgh. _Also_ a later edition, Glasgow. Hales, John, Works of. 3 vols. , Glasgow, 1765. Hall, John, Poems of. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. Ii. Hall, Joseph, Virgidemiarum, etc. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. Ix. _Also_ in Chalmers's Poets, vol. V. Hannah, Dr. , Poems of Raleigh, Wotton, and other Courtly Poets. Aldine Series, London, 1885. Harvey, Gabriel, Works. Ed. Grosart, 3 vols. Privately printed, 1884-85. Hazlitt, W. C. , Dodsley's Old Plays, 15 vols. , London, 1874-76. Shakespere's Library. 6 vols. , London, 1875. Herbert, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Autobiography. Ed. Lee, London, 1886. Herbert, George, Poems of. Ed. Grosart, London, 1876. Herrick, Robert, Poems of. Ed. Grosart, 3 vols. , London, 1876. _Also_ Ed. Pollard, 2 vols. , London, 1891; and Ed. Saintsbury, 2 vols. , London, 1893. Heywood, Thomas, Dramatic Works of. 6 vols. , London, 1874. Pleasant Dialogues, etc. Ed. Bang, Louvain, 1903. Hobbes, Thomas, Works. Ed. Molesworth, 16 vols. , London, 1839-45. Hooker, Richard, Ecclesiastical Polity. 3 vols. , Oxford, 1820. Howell, James, Familiar Letters. The Eleventh Edition, London, 1754. Howell, Thomas, The Arbour of Amity. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. Viii. J. C. , Alcilia. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. Viii. _Also_ in Arber's English Garner, vol. Iv. Jonson, Ben, Works of. Ed. Cunningham, 3 vols. , London, n. D. Knolles, Richard, History of the Turks. Third Edition, London, 1621. Kyd, Thomas, Cornelia. In Hazlitt's Dodsley, vol. V. Jeronimo, (?) in do. Vol. Iv. The Spanish Tragedy, in do. Vol. V. Works. Ed. Boas, Oxford, 1900. Kynaston, Sir Francis, Poems of. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol, ii. Lodge, Thomas, Euphues' Golden Legacy in Shakespere's Library, vol. Ii. , London, 1875. Lovelace, Richard, Poems of. Ed. Hazlitt, London, 1864. Lyly, John, Euphues. Ed. Arber, London, 1868. Dramatic Works. Ed. Fairholt, 2 vols. , London, 1858. Complete Works. Ed. Bond, 3 vols. , Oxford, 1902. Lynch, Diella. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. Iv. Marlowe, Christopher, Works of. Ed. Dyce, London, 1859. _Also_ Ed. Bullen, 3 vols. , London, 1887. Marmion, Shakerley, Plays of. Edinburgh, 1874. Cupid and Psyche. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. Ii. Marprelate, Martin, Tracts by and against. _See_ text. The Epistle. Ed. Petheram. _Also_ Ed. Arber, The English Scholars' Library. Diotrephes, by N. Udall. Ed. Arber. Demonstration of Discipline, by N. Udall. Ed. Arber. An Admonition to the People of England, by T. C. Ed. Petheram. _Also_ Ed. Arber. Hay any Work for Cooper. Ed. Petheram. Pap with a Hatchet. Ed. Petheram. An Almond for a Parrot. Ed. Petheram. A Counter-Cuff to Martin Junior, etc. , in Works of Nash. Ed. Grosart. Plain Percival, the Peacemaker of England. Ed. Petheram. Marston, John, Works of. Ed. Halliwell, 3 vols. , London, 1856. _Also_ Ed. Bullen, 3 vols. , London, 1885. Poems of. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. Xi. Massinger, Philip. Ed. Hartley Coleridge, London, 1859. Middleton, Thomas, Dramatic Works of. Ed. Bullen, 8 vols. , London, 1886. Milton, John, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Vii. Prose Works of. 2 vols. , Philadelphia, 1847. Ed. Masson, 3 vols. , London, 1890. Minor Caroline Poets, vols. I. And ii. , Oxford, 1905-6. Mirror for Magistrates, The. Ed. Hazlewood, 3 vols. , London, 1815. Miscellanies, Seven Poetical. Ed. Collier, London, 1867. Some in Heliconia. More, Henry, Poems of. Ed. Grosart. Privately printed, 1878. Mulcaster, Richard, Positions. Ed. Quick, London, 1888. Nabbes, Thomas, Works of. In Bullen's Old Plays, New Series, vols. I. And ii. Nash, Thomas, Works of. Ed. Grosart, 6 vols. Privately printed, 1883-85. Ed. M'Kerrow, 4 vols. , London, 1904. Park, T. , Heliconia. 3 vols. , London, 1814. Peele, George, Works of. Ed. Dyce, London, 1883. Percy, W. , Coelia, In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. Iv. Puttenham, George, The Art of English Poesy. Ed. Arber, London, 1869. _Also_ in G. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays. Quarles, Francis. Ed. Grosart, 3 vols. Privately printed, 1880-81. Raleigh, Sir Walter, History of the World. 6 vols. , London, 1820. Poems of. In Hannah's Courtly Poets. Randolph, Thomas, Works of. Ed. Hazlitt. 2 vols. , London, 1875. Return from Parnassus, The. Edited by W. Macray, Oxford, 1886. Rowlands, Samuel, Works of. Ed. Gosse, 3 vols. , Glasgow, 1880 (Hunterian Club). Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, Works of. Ed. Sackville-West, London, 1859. Sandys, George, [Sacred] Poetical Works of. Ed. Hooper, 2 vols. , London, 1872. Shakespere, William, Works of. Globe edition, London, 1866. Doubtful plays. Ed. Warnke and Proescholdt, Halle. _Also_ Ed. Hazlitt, London, n. D. Sherburne, Sir Edward, Poems of. In Chalmers's Poets, vol. Vi. Shirley, James, Plays of. Ed. Gifford and Dyce, 6 vols. , London, 1833. Sidney, Philip, Poetical Works. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. , London, 1873. An Apology for Poetry. Ed. Arber, London, 1868. Arcadia. Ed. Sommer, London, 1891. Simpson. R. , The School of Shakespere, 2 vols. , London, 1878. Smith, T. , Chloris. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. Iv. Southwell, Robert, Poems. Ed. Grosart. Printed for private circulation. Spenser, Edmund. Ed. Todd, London, 1853. _Also_ Ed. Morris and Hales, London, 1873. _Also_ Ed. Grosart, vols. I. -ix. Privately printed, 1882-87. Stanley, T. , Poems. Partly reprinted, London, 1814. Stanyhurst, Richard, The First Four Books of the Æneid. Ed. Arber, London, 1880. Still, John, Gammer Gurton's Needle. In Hazlitt's Dodsley, vol. Iii. Stirling, William Alexander, Earl of, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. V. Suckling, Sir John, Works of. Ed. Hazlitt, 2 vols. , London, 1874. Surrey, Earl of. _See_ Tottel's Miscellany. _Also_ in Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Ii. Sylvester, Joshua, Works of. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed, 1880. Taylor, Jeremy, Works of. 3 vols. , London, 1844. Tottel's Miscellany. Ed. Arber, London, 1870. Tourneur, Cyril, Works of. Ed. Collins, 2 vols. , London, 1878. Traherne, Thomas, Poems. Ed. Dobell, London, 1903. Turberville, George, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Ii. Tusser, Thomas. Ed. Mavor, London, 1812. _Also_ by English Dialect Society, 1878. Udall, N. , Ralph Roister Doister. In Hazlitt's Dodsley, vol. Iii. Vaughan, Henry. Ed. Grosart. Privately printed. 4 vols. , 1868-71. _Also_ Silex Scintillans. Facsimile of 1st edition. Ed. Clare, London, 1885. _Also_ 2 vols. , Ed. Chambers, London, 1896. Walton, Izaak, The Complete Angler. London, 1825. Lives. London, 1842. Warner, William, Albion's England. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. Iv. Watson, Thomas, Poems. Ed. Arber, London, 1870. Webbe, William, A Discourse of English Poetry. Ed. Arber, London, 1870. _Also_ in G. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays. Webster, John, Works of. Ed. Dyce, London, 1859. Wither, George, Hymns and Songs of the Church. Ed. Farr, London, 1856. Hallelujah. Ed. Farr, London, 1857. Philarete, in Arber's English Garner, vol. Iv. Fidelia, in Arber's English Garner, vol. Vi. Poems generally in Spenser Society's issues. Wotton, Sir Henry, Poems of. In Hannah's Courtly Poets. Wyatt, Sir Thomas. _See_ Tottel's Miscellany. II. --GENERAL _Albumazar_, 427. Alexander, Sir William. See Stirling. Andrewes, Bishop Lancelot (1555-1626), 444. _Arden of Feversham_, 425. Ascham, Roger (1515-1568), 30-33. Bacon, Francis, Lord (1561-1626), 207-212. _Barnabee's Journal_, 444. Barnes, Barnabe (1569?-1609), 108, 109. Barnfield, Richard (1584-1627), his Poems, 117, 118. Basse, William (d. 1653?), 301. Baxter, Richard (1615-1691), 440. Beaumont, Francis (1584-1616), his Poems, 312. _See_ also Beaumont and Fletcher. Beaumont, Sir John (1583-1627), his Poems, 312. Beaumont, Joseph (1616-1699), 378. Beaumont and Fletcher, 255-266. Benlowes, Edward (1603?-1676), 381. Bible, The English, Authorised and Revised versions, 215-218. Breton, Nicholas (1545?-1626?), his verse, 128; his prose pamphlets, 238-240. Brome, Richard ( ?-1652?), 415, 416. Brooke, Fulke Greville, Lord (1554-1628), 98-100. Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-1682), 336-343; his Life, 336, 337; his Works and Style, 338-343. Browne, William (1591-1643?), his Life and Poems, 299-302. Bruno, Giordano, his influence, 102, 459. Burton, Robert (1577-1640), 428-433. _Cambyses_, 62, 249, _note_. Campion, Thomas ( ?-1619), 34, 120 _sq. _, 156, _note_. Carew, Thomas (1598?-1639), 359-364. Carey, Patrick ( ?- ?), 384. Caroline Poetry, A Discussion of the Merits and Defects of, 386-393. Cartwright, William (1611-1643), his Poems, 383; his Plays, 427. Chalkhill, John ( ?- ?), 380. Chamberlayne, William (1619-1689), 381. Chapman, George (1559?-1634), his Life, Poems, and Translations, 184-195. Chillingworth, William (1602-1644), 440. Churchyard, Thomas (1520?-1604), 17-18, 27, _note_. Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of (1609-1674), his Life, Works, and Style, 343-348. Cleveland, John (1613-1658), 385. Cokain, Sir Aston (1608-1684), 416, 417. Constable, Henry (1562-1613), 113. Corbet, Bishop (1582-1635), his Poems, 382-384. Coryat, Thomas (1577?-1617), 444. Cosin, Bishop (1594-1672), 444. Cotton, Charles (1630-1687), his Poems, 383, 384. Cowley's Prose, 440. Crashaw, Richard (1613?-1649), his Life and Poems, 364-370. Critics, Elizabethan, 33-35. Daniel, Samuel (1562-1619), his Sonnets, 113, 114; his other Poems, 135-139; his Prose, 220-222. Davenant, Sir William (1606-1668), 419, 420. Davenport, Robert ( ?-1655?), 422. Davies, John, of Hereford (1565?-1618), 291-293. Davies, Sir John (1569-1626), his Life and Poems, 293-295. Day, John ( ?- ?), his Plays, 286-288. "Decadence, " 391, 394, 455-457. Dekker, Thomas (1570?-1641?), his Plays and Songs, 201-206; his Pamphlets, 235-238. _Distracted Emperor, The_, 425. Donne, John (1573-1631), his Satires and other Poems, 144-150. Drama, Elizabethan, general characteristics, 50-53. Dramatic Periods, Division of, 50, 51. Drayton, Michael (1563-1631), his Sonnets, 114, 115; his other Poems, 139-144. Drummond, William, of Hawthornden (1585-1649), 306-308. Earle, Bishop (1601?-1665), 442. _Ecclesiastical Polity_, the, 46 _sq. _ Eden, Richard (1521?-1576), his geographical work, 33. _Edward III. _, 424. Edwards, Richard (1523?-1566), dramatist and miscellanist, 25, 26, 62. _Eikon Basilike_, 442. _Euphues_ and Euphuism, 37-40. _Fair Em_, 73, 424. Felltham, Owen (1602?-1668?), 442, 443. Field, Nathaniel (1587-1633), his Plays, 426. Fitz-Geoffrey, Charles (1575-1638), his Poem on Drake, 131. Fletcher, Giles, the elder (1549-1611), 109. Fletcher, Giles and Phineas, Poems of, 295-298. Fletcher, John (1579-1625). _See_ Beaumont and Fletcher. Ford, John (1586?- ?), his Plays, 401-409. Fuller, Thomas (1608-1661), 433-438. _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, 55-57. Gascoigne, George (1525?-1577), 16-18. Gifford, Humphrey ( ?- ?), his _Posy of Gillyflowers_, 129. Gilpin or Guilpin, Edward ( ?- ?), his _Skialetheia_, 155. Glapthorne, Henry ( ?- ?), 417, 418. Godolphin, Sidney (1610-1643), 384. Goff, Thomas (1591-1629), 427, _note_. Googe, Barnabe (1540?-1594), 18-20. Gosson, Stephen (1554-1624), 34. Greene, Robert (1560-1592), Life and Plays, 72-74; Prose, 224-228. Griffin, Bartholomew ( ?-1602?), his _Fidessa_, 116. Grimald or Grimoald, Nicholas (1519?-1562?), 3-8. Grove, Matthew ( ?- ?), his Poems, 130. Habington, William (1605-1654), his _Castara_, 378-380; his _Queen of Aragon_, 425. Hakluyt, Richard (1552?-1616), his Voyages, 220-222. Hales, John (1584-1656), 444. Hall, John (1627-1656), 384. Hall, Joseph (1574?-1650), his Satires, 151-153. Herbert, George (1593-1633), 371-373. Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury (1583-1648), 438-440. Heroic Poem, the, 380. Herrick, Robert (1591-1674), his Life and Poems, 354-359. Heywood, Thomas ( ?-1650?), his Life and Works, 270-284. Historical Poems, 131. Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), his Life, Works, and Style, 348-353. Hooker. Richard (1554?-1600), 44-49; his Life, 44; his Prose Style, 46-48. Howell, James (1594?-1666), 441, 442. Howell, Thomas ( ?- ?), his Poems, 130. J. C. , his _Alcilia_, 115. _Jeronimo_, and _The Spanish Tragedy_, 74, 75. Jonson, Ben (1573-1637), his Life, Poems, and Plays, 174-184; his Prose, 216. Kyd, Thomas (1557?-1595?), 74, 75, 81, _note_. Kynaston, Sir Francis (1587-1642), 380, 381. Lodge, Thomas (1558?-1625), his Plays, 70; his Poems, 109-111; his Satires, 145; his Prose Pamphlets, 228-230. Lovelace, Richard (1618-1658), his Poems, 374-376. Lyly, John (1554?-1606?), 36-40, 65-68; his Life, 36; _Euphues_ and Euphuism, 37-40; his Plays, 65-68. Lynch, Richard ( ?- ?), his _Diella_, 116. Manuscript, habit of keeping Poems in, 2. Markham, Gervase (1568?-1637), his Poem on _The Revenge_, 131. Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593), his Life and Plays, 76-79. Marmion, Shakerley (1603-1639), his Poems and Plays, 380, 423. Marston, John (1575?-1634), his Life and Satires, 153-155; his Plays, 195-199. Martin Marprelate, sketch of the Controversy and account of the principal tracts, 241-252. Massinger, Philip (1583-1640), his Plays, 395-401. _Merry Devil of Edmonton, The_, 426. Metre, Classical, the fancy for, and its reasons, 22, 25. Metre, English, must be scanned by Classical Rules, 14. Middleton, Thomas (1570?-1627), his Life and Works, 266-273. Milton, John (1608-1674), 316-330; his Life and Character, 316, 317; Divisions of his Work, 318; his early Poems, 318-322; his Prose, 322-326; his later Poems, 326-329. _Mirror for Magistrates, The_, 11-15. _Miscellany_, Tottel's, 1-10; a starting-point, 2; its Authorship and Composition, 3; Wyatt's and Surrey's Contributions to it, 4-8; Grimald and minor authors, 8-9; Metrical and Material Characteristics, 9, 10. Miscellanies, the early Elizabethan, subsequent to Tottel's, 25-27. Miscellanies, Caroline and later, 370. _Miseries of Enforced Marriage, The_, 423. More, Henry (1614-1687), his _Song of the Soul_, 377, 378. Nabbes, Thomas ( ?- ?), his Plays, 422. Nash, Thomas (1567-1601), his Plays, 70; his Prose Works, 232-235. _Nero_, 425. North's Plutarch, 33. Oxford, Edward, Earl of (1550-1604), his Poems, 127-128. Pearson, Bishop (1613-1686), 440. Peele, George (1558?-1597), his Life and Plays, 70-72. Percy, William (1575-1648), his _Coelia_, 111. _Pharonnida_, 381. Plays, early nondescript, 62. Poetry, 95-96. Prose, the Beginnings of Modern English, 28-30. Prosody, Weakness of the Early Elizabethans in, 9. Pseudo-Shakesperian Plays, 424, 425. Puttenham, George (1532?-1590), 34. Quarles, Francis (1592-1644), 376, 377. Raleigh, Sir Walter (1552?-1618), his Verse, 125-127; his Prose, 212-215. _Ralph Roister Doister_, 54, 55. Randolph, Thomas (1605-1635), his Poems, 382; his Plays, 413-415. _Return from Parnassus, The_, 81, 426. Rowlands, Samuel (1570?-1630?), 238, 240. Rowley, Samuel ( ?- ?), 423. Rowley, William (1585?-1642?), his Plays, 422. Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst (1536-1608), his Life and Works, 11-15; the _Induction_ and _Complaint of Buckingham_, 12-15; _Gorboduc_, 57-60. Sanderson, Bishop (1587-1663), 440. Sandys, George (1578-1644), 373. Satirists, the Elizabethan, 144-156. _Second Maiden's Tragedy, The_, 425. Senecan Drama, the, 58-61. Shakespere, William (1564-1616), 157-173; his Life, 158; his Works and their Reputation, 159, 160; their divisions, 160, 161 (1573-1636); the Early Poems, 161; the Sonnets, 161-164; the Plays, 164-173; the "Doubtful" Plays, 424-425. Sherburne, Sir Edward (1618-1702), his Poems, 383. Shirley, Henry ( ?-1627), 409, _note_. Shirley, James (1596-1666), his Plays, 449-413. Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-1586), his Prose, 40-43; his Prose style, 42; his Verse, 100-105. Smith, William (1546?-1618?), his _Chloris_, 116. Songs, Miscellaneous, from the Dramatists and Madrigal Writers, 121-125, 312-314. Sonneteers, the Elizabethan, 97. Southwell, Robert (1561 ?-1595), his Poems, 119. Spenser, Edmund (1552?-1599), 82-96; his Life, 83-85; _The Shepherd's Calendar_, 86; the Minor Poems, 87; _The Faërie Queene_, 88-93; the Spenserian Stanza, 90; Spenser's Language, 91; his Comparative Rank in English Poetry, 93-96. Stanley, Thomas (1625-1678), 383, 384. Stanyhurst, Richard (1547-1618), 23-25. Still, John (1543-1608), his _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, 55-57. Stirling, Sir William Alexander, Earl of (1567?-1640), 308-311. Suckling, Sir John (1609-1642), his Poems, 374-376; his Plays, 420-422. Surrey, Lord Henry Howard, Earl of (1517?-1547), 6-8. Sylvester, Joshua (1563-1618), his Du Bartas, etc. , 289-291. Taylor, Jeremy (1613-1667), 330-336; his Life, 330, 331; his Works and Style, 331-336. _Theophila_, 381. _Tottel's Miscellany_. See _Miscellany_. Tourneur, Cyril (1575?-1626?), his Poems, 155-156; his Plays, 284, 285. Traherne, Thomas (1636?-1674), 381, _note_. Translators, the Early Elizabethan, 21, 33. Turberville, George (1540?-1610), 18-19. _Two Angry Women, The_, 426. _Two Noble Kinsmen, The_, 424. Udall, Nicholas (1505-1556), his _Ralph Roister Doister_, 54, 55. University Wits, the, 60-81. Urquhart, Sir Thomas (1611-1660), 444. Vaughan, Henry (1622-1695), 374-375, 393, _note_. Version, the Authorised, 215-218. Walton, Izaak (1593-1683), 441. Warner, William (1558-1649), 122-134. Watson, Thomas (1557?-1592), 105-107. Webbe, William ( ?- ?), 34. Webster, John (1580?-1625?), his Life and Works, 273-279. Willoughby's _Avisa_, 110, 111. Wither, George (1588-1667), Life and Poems, 302-306. _Wit's Recreations_, 370. Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503?-1542), 4-6. _Yorkshire Tragedy, The_, 424. _Zepheria_, 112. THE END _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.