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Edited by John RiCHARD GreeN, MA

ENGLISH

LITERATURE

BY THE

REV. STOPFORD BROOKE, M.A.

TIIIKD EDITION.

Sforonto:
CANADA PUBLISHING COMPANY

(limited).

♦ i860

'■"^M^.w^''v^:^5t^mm

Cnterftd accordinr to the Act of the Parliament of Canadft, in th« year
thousand eight hundred and seventy-seven, by James Campbell
& SoN| in the Office of the Minister of AghcuUurtt.

~.>

JAN 4 1965

HAMiLT

<^ *> S

LIBRARY

Contents.

CHAPTER I

WRITERS BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQttfiSt, 670- ^^
1066

CHAPTER II.

FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, I066-I400 . 19

CHAPTER III.
FROM CHAUCER, 1400, TO ELIZABETH, 1 559 . . 4,

CHAPTER IV.
FROM 1559 TO 1603 eg

CHAPTER V.

FROM ELIZABETH'S DEATH TO THE RESTORATION,

1603— 1660 ' ^,

CHAPTER VI.

FROM THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE III. 1660—

^760 ,^g

CHAPTER VII.

PROSE LITERATURE FROM GEORGE IIL TO

VICTORIA, 1760—1837 ,25

CHAPTER VIII.
POETRY, FROM 1730-1832 ^ ^ j-^

i #■ A '

f - <

-t

PRIMER

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

CHAPTER I.

WRITERS BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 670—1066.

1. Enjrlish Literature begins in England about 670.

2. War Voems.—Bei lau/y, and Fi^^ht at Finncsburg before 600.

Song of Hrunanburh^ 937. i'^'ghi ^^ Maldon, 991. Odes
in A. S. Chronicle.

3. Religious Vo^m%.—Q^^vciOVi% Paraphrase of the Bible^ eTOt

Poems in the Exeter and the Vercelli book.

4. The Traveller's Song— the Lament of Deor — inserted into

Exeter book from pagan MSS.

5. Prose.-— Baeda's /rrt«j/rt//<7« ^6*/. >^w, 735. King iTJfred*8

literary and historical work during his two times of peace^
880— 893 and 897— 901. /Elfrie's Translations, 990—
995, The English Chronicle, ends 1154.

I. What Literature is, — Before we can enter
on the story of our English Literature we must try to
understand what literature itself is. By literature we
mean the written thoughts and feelings of intelligent
men and women arranged in a way which will give
pleasure to the reader. Literature has to do therefore,
so far as its subject goes, with all the things about which
we learn, and think, and feel. As to its form, it has two
large divisions — one of which is called Prose Liter9,t;urQ

<ind th^ other Poetical l.iterature»^

E KG I IS If LITERATURE.

[chap.

2. Prose Literature. — There are many kinds of
prose literature. Men write in prose about philosophy,
or history, or art, or religion, or science, or manners,
or the lives of men. Prose literature then means

ythe written thoughts, learning, and feelings of men
(on all these subjects. Every tiling in fact that is
(written of any kind, except poetiy, may be called
prose. But we must not think that everything that is
called prose is literature. We cannot say, for instance,
that a ship's log, or a catalogue, or the daily journal of
a traveller, is to be called literature simply because
it is written in prose. Writing is not literature unless
it gives to the reader a pleasure which arises, not only
from the things said, but from the way in which they
are said, and that pleasure is only given when the
words are carefully or curiously or beautifully put
together into sentences. To do this in a special way
is to have what we call style. As much art must
be used in building sentences up out of words as in
building houses, if we wish the prose we write to be
worthy of the name of literature. And just as in look-
ing at different kinds of houses, we say that one is
built in a strong way, another in a simple way, another
in an ornamental way, so we say in reading books
written by different men that one is in a simple style,
another in a grand, another in an eloquent style.
Again, in looking at a large building, we see not only
the way in which it is built, but also the character and
the mind of the builder. So also in a prose book which
is fit to belong to literature we ought to feel that there
is a distinct mind and character who is speaking Xo us
through the style, that is, through the way in which
the words are put together. Prose then is not litera-
ture unless it have style and character, and be written
with curious care.

3. Of Poetical Literature we may say the
same thing. Poetry must be tried by rules more
l^vere even th?in those by which we judge prose, £^nd

I., EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST, 7

unless it satisfies tlio e rules it does not take rank as
literature. There must be more care taken, more
beauty, more nmsical movement in the arrangement
of the words than in prose \ and the way in which the
thoughts and feelings of the poet are put together into
words will always be, in true poetry, wholly different
from the way in which they would be put together by
a prose writer. Poetry speaks to us of all that belongs
to Man, and of all that man feels or sees when he is
delighted with the beauty or grandeur of the Natural
World. These are its two chief subjects in literature ;
and it writes of them in different kinds of poetry, in
all of which we English have done well. There is
epic poetry, like Milton's great poem Paradise Losty
dramatic j^Qciry^ like Shakespeare's ])lays ; /yr/^ poetry,
or short pieces on one subject, like the songs in his
plays ; narrative poetry, like Scott's Lady of the
Lake; descriptive poetry, like Thomson's Seasons,
which describes nature ; and allegorical poetry, which
tells a story with a hidden meaning in it. Of this
last the best example is Spenser's Faerie Queen.
These, thenj^are the two main divisions of literature.
4. The History of English Literature, then,
is the story of what great English men and women
thought and. felt, and then wrote down in good
prose or beautiful poetry in the English language.
The story is a ^ong one. It begins about the year
670, and it is still going on in the year 1875. Into
this little book then is to be put the story of 1,200
years. No people that have ever been in the world
can look back so far as we English can to the
beginnings of our literature ; no people can point to
so long and splendid a train of poets and prose writers ;
no nation has on the whole written so much and so
well. P>ery English man and woman has good reason
to be proud of the work done by their forefathers in
prose and poetry. Every one who can write a good
book or a good song may say to himself, " I belong

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

[CHAF.

to a great company, which has been teaching and
delighting the world for more than i,ooo years." And
that is a fact in which those who write and those who
read ought to feci a noble pride.

5. The English and the Welsh. — This litera-
ture is written in English, the tongue of our fathers.
They lived, while thii island of ours was still called
Britain, in Sleswick, Jutland and Holstein ; but, either
because they were pressed from the inland or
for pure love of adventure, they took to the sea,
and, landing at various parts of Britain at various
times drove back, after 150 years of liard fighting, the
Britons, whom they called Welsh, to the land now
called Wal' s, and to Cornwall. It is well for those
who study English literature to remember that in
these two places the Britons remained as a distinct
race with a distinct literature of their own, because
the stories and the poetry of the Britons crept after-
wards into English literature and had a great influence
upon it. The whole tale of King Arthur, of which
English poetry and even English prose is so full, was
a British tale. Otherwise we English have nothing to
do with I ho old dwellers in our country. We drove
these Britons, as the Primer of English History will
describe, utterly away.

6. The First English Poetry. — When we
came to Britain we were great warriors and great
sea pirates — " sea wolves " as a Roman poet calls us ;
and all our poetry down to the present day is full of
war, and still more of the sea. No nation has ever
written so much sea-poetry. It was in the blood of
our fathers, who chanted their sea war-songs as they
sailed. But we were more than mere warriors. We
were a home-loving people when we got settled either
in Sleswick or in England, and all our literature from
the first writings to the last is full of domestic love,
the dearness of home, and the ties of kinsfolk. We
were a religious people, even as l^eathen, still more

■J3S

[chap.

ing and
" And
ose who

is litera-
fathers.
11 called
It, either
and or
the sea,
various
:ing, the
nd now
3r those
that in
distinct
because
pt after-
ifluence
f which
ull, was
hin J to
drove
ory will

en we
great
ills us ;
full of
s ever
ood of
s they

We
either
; from
: love.

I.] EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 9

so when we became Christian ; and our poetry is as
much tinged with religion as with war. Whenever
literature died down in England it rose again in
poetry ; and the first poetry at each recovery was reli-
gious, or linked to religion. V. e shall soon see that
our first poems were of war and religion.

7. The English Tongue. — Of the language
in which our literature is written we can say little
here ; it is fully discussed in the Primer of Eng-
lish Grammar. Of course it hay chrnged its look
very much since it began to be written. The
earliest form of our English tongue is very different
from modern English in form, pronunciation, and
appearance, and one must learn it almost as if it
were a foreign tongue ; but still the language written
in the year 700 is the same as that in which the
prose of the Bible is written just as much as the tree
planted a hundred years ago is the same tree to-day.
It is this sameness of language, as well as the same-
ne*' , of national spirit, which makes our literature one
literature for 1200 years.

8. Old English Poetry was also different then
from what it is now. It was not written in rime,
nor were its syllables counted. The lines are short ;
the beat of the verse depends on the emphasis given
by the use of the same letter, except in the case of
vowels, at the beginning of words ; and the emphasis
of the words depends on the thought. The lines are
written in pairs ; and in the best work the two chief
words in the first, and the one chief word in the
second, usually begin with the same letter. Here is
one example from a war-song ; —

j ** W^arrior of wnnters young
I With w/ords spake."

After the Norman Conquest there gradually crept
in a French system of rimes and of metres and
regent which w^ find full-grown in Chaucer's wprka,

((

IVx^M 7/^ntriim geong
^ordum maelde."

ENGLISH LITER A TURE.

[CHAP.

But unrimed and alliterative verse lasted in poetry to
the reign of John, and alliteration was blended with
rime up to the sixteenth century. The latest form
of it occurs in Scotland.

9. Our Greatest Early Poems remaining are
two — Beowulf 2sA Ccedmon's Paraphrase of the Bible,
The first is on the whole a war story, the second is
religious; and on these two subjects of war and reli-
gion EngUsh poetry for the most part speaks till the
Conquest. Beowulf was brought into our land from
the Continent, and was rewritten in parts by a
Christian Englishman of Northumbria. It is a story
of the great deeds ana death of a hero named
Beowulf. Its social interest lies in what it tells us
of the manners and customs of our forefathers before
they came here; its poetical interest lies in its de-
scriptions of wild nature, of the lives and feelings of
the men of that time, and of the way in which the
Nature-worship of our people made dreadful and
savage places seem dwelt in — as if the places had a
spirit — by monstrous beings. For it was thus that
all that half-natural, half-spiritual world began in
our poetry which, when men gre^ gentler and the
country more cultivated, became so beautiful as
faeryland. Here is the description of the dwelling-
place of the Grendel, a man-fiend that devoured
men, and whom Beowulf overcomes in battle : —

i
PI

o{
F
hi

U
wi

** A lonely land
Won they in ; wolf-caverns,
Wind-U-aversed nesses,
Perilous fen -paths,
Where the mountain flood,
Under the mists of the ness,
Downwards is moved ;
Flood under feld.
Not further from hence

Than a mile's space
Is the place of the mere ;
Over which frown
And rustle the forests.
Fast-rooted the wood
The water that shadows ;
There deadly the wonder
One may watch every iiiglit ^
Fire in the flood."

T}ie lov^ Qf wil4 nature ii^ our poetry, and thg

[CHAP.

)oetry to
led with
ist form

ning are
he Bible.
icond is
ind r-eli-

till the
nd from
s by a
> a story

named

tells us

s before

I its de-

ellngs of

hich the

[fill and

;s had a

us that

gan in

md the

tiful as

welling-

ivoured

nere;

lows ;
Inder
night ^

\^ tUg

EARLY WRITERS TQ THE CONQUEST

eopling of it with wild half-human things, begins in
ork like this. After the fight Beowulf returns to his
wn land, where he rules well for many years, till a
ire-drake, who guards a treasure, comes down to
liarry his people. The old king goes out then to fight
his last fight, slays the dragon, but dies of its flaming
breath, and his body is burned high up on a sea-
washed Ness or headland.

10. Caedmon. — The poem of Beowulf has the
grave Teutonic power, but it is not native to our soil.
It is not the first true English poem. That is the
work of C^DMON, and is also from Northumbria.
The story of it, as told by Baeda, proves that the
making of songs was common at the time. Caedmon
was a servant to the monastery of Hild, an abbess of
royal blood, at Whitby in Yorkshire. He was some-
what aged when the gift of song came to him, and he
knew nothing of the art of verse, so that at the feasts
when for the sake of mirth all sang in turn he left the
table. One night, having done so and gone to the
stables, for he had care of the cattle, he fell asleep,
and One came to him in vision and said, "Caed-
mon, sing me some song." And he answered, " 1
cannot sing ; for this cause I left the feast and came
hither." Then said the other, " However, you shall
sing." " What shall I sing ? " he replied. " Sing the
beginning of created things," answered the other.
Whereupon he began to sing verses to the praise
of God, and, awaking, remembered what he had
sung and added more in verse worthy of God. In
the morning he came to the steward, and told him
of the gift he had received, and, being brought to
Hild, was ordered to tell his dream before learned
men, that they might give judgment w^hence his verses
came. And when they had heard, they all said that
heavenly grace liad been conferred on him by our Lord.

11. Csedmon's Poem, written about 670, is for
§ the beginning of English poetry, and the stgry

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

[chap*

of its origin ought to be loved by us. Nor should
we fail to reverence the place where it began. Above
the small and land-locked harbour of Whitby rises
and juts out towards the sea the dark cliff where
Hildas monastery stood, looking out over the Ger-
man Ocean. It is a wild, wind-swept upland, and
the sea beats furiously beneath, and standing there
one feels that it is a fitting birt. place for the
poetry of the sea-ruling nation. Nor is the verse of
the first poet without the stormy note of the scenery
among which it was written. In it also the old fierce
war element is felt when Caedmon comes to sing the
wrath of the rebel angels with God and the overthrow
of Pharaoh's host, and the lines, repeating, as was the
old English way, the thought a second time, fall like
stroke on stroke in battle. But the poem is religious
throughout — Christianity speaks in it simply, sternly,
with fire, and brings with it a new world of spiritual
romance and feeling. The subjects of the poem were
taken from the Bible, in fact Caedmon paraphrased
the history of the Old and New Testament. He sang
the creation of the world, the history of Israel, the
book of Daniel, the whole story of the life of Christ,
future judgment, purgatory, hell, and heaven. All
who heard it thought it divinely given. " Others
after him," says Bseda, *' tried to make religious poems,
but none could vie with him, for he did not learn
the art of poetry from men, nor of men, but from
God." It was thus that English song began in
religion. The most famous passage of the poem
not only illustrates the dark sadness, the fierce love of
freedom, and the power of painting distinct characters
which has always marked our poetry, but it is also
famous for its likeness to a parallel passage in Milton.
It is when Caedmon describes the proud and angry
cry of Satan against God from his bed of chains in
hell. The two great English poetr, may be brought to

,^eti"iqr ovsr a space of ^ thgusand years in anol^her

•wa
wa

[chap*

for should

n. Above

litby rises

:liff where

' the Ger-

land, and

ding there

J for the

e verse of

le scenery

old fierce

sing the

overthrow

as was the

e, fall like

s religious

ly, sternly,

if spiritual

)oem were

.raphrased

He sang

[srael, the

of Christ,

ven. All

" Others

us poems,

not learn

but from

began in

he poem

:e love of

:haracters

it is also

1 Milton.

,nd angry

:hains in

ought to

anoU^^T

I] EARL Y WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST. 13

ray, for both died in such peace that those who
ratched beside them knew not when they died.
12. Lesser Old English Poems.— Of the
poetry that came after Csedmon we have few remains.
But we have many things said which show us that
his poem, like all great works, gave birth to a number
of similar ones. 'I'he increase of monasteries where
men of letters lived naturally made the written poetry
religious. But an immense quantity of secular poetry
was sung about the country. Aldhc/fft^ a young man
when Caednion died, and afterwards Abbot of Malmes-
bury, united the song-maker to the religious poet.
He was a skilled musician, and it is said that he
had not his equal in the making or singing of English
verse. His songs were popular in King yfi^lfred's time,
and a pretty story tells, that when the traders came
into the town on the Sunday, he, in the character of
, a gleeman, stood on the bridge and sang them songs,
. with which he mixed up Scripture texts and teaching.
Of all this wide- spread poetry we have now only the
few poems brought together in a book preserved at
Exeter, in another found at Vercelli, and in a few
leaflets of manuscripts. The poems in the Vercelh
book are all religious : legends of saints and addresses
' to the soul; those in the Exeter book are hymns and
sacred poems. The famous Traveller's Song and the
Lament of Deor inserted in it, are of the older and
t)agan time. In both there are poems by Cyne-
wuLF, whose work is remarkably fine. They are all
Christian in tone. The few touches of love of nature
tin them dwell on gentle, not on savage scenery. They
are sorrowful when they speak of the life of men,
tender when they touch on the love of home, as tender
as this little bit which still lives for us out of that old
world : *' Dear is the welcome guest to the Frisian wife
[when the vessel strands ; his ship is come, and her hus-
[band to his house, her own provider. And she wel-
comes him in, washes his weedy garment, and clothes

ENGLISH LITER A TURM,

[CttA*.

him anew. It is pleasant on shore to him whom his
love awaits." Of the scattered pieces the finest ai e two
fragments, one long, on the story oi Judith^ and another
short, in which Death speaks to Man, and describes
" the low and hateful and doorless house,'' of which
he keeps the key. But stem as the fragment is, with its
English manner of looking dreadful things in the face,
and with its English pathos, the religious poetry of our
old fathers always went with faith beyond the grave.
Thus we are tofc that King Eadgar, in the ode on
his death in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, " chose for
himself another light, beautiful and pleasant, and left
this feeble life."

13. The War Poetry of England at this time
was probably as plentiful as the religious. But it was
not hkely to be written down by the writers who lived
in religious houses. It was sung from feast to feast
and in the halls of kings, and it naturally decayed
when the English were trodden down by the Normans.
But we have two examples of what kind it was,
and how fine it was, in the Battle Song of Brtinan-
burh^ 937, and in the Song of the Fight at Maldon,
991. A still earlier fragment exists in a short ac-
count of the Battle of Finnesbiirg, probably of the
same time and belonging to as long a story as the
story of Beowulf. Two short odes on the victories
of King Eadmund, and on the coronation of King
Eadgar, inserted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle^ com-
plete the list of war poems.

14. The Songs of Brunanburh and Maldon
are fine war odes, the fitting sources, both in their
short and rapid lines, and in their almost Homeric
simplicity and force, of such war-songs as the ** Battle
of the Baltic " and the " Charge of the Light Brigade."
The first describes the fight of King ^thelstan with
Anlaf the Dane. From morn till night they fought
till they were "weary of red battle" in the "hard

1 five young kings and seven earls of

whom his
St are two
d another
describes
of which
s, with its
the face,
try of our
he grave.
2 ode on
chose for
, and left

this time

5ut it was

vho lived

: to feast

decayed

Normans.

it was,

Bninan-

Maldon^

short ac-

ly of the

ry as the

victories

of King

cle^ com-

Maldon

in their
Homeric

'; Battle
Brigade."
itan with
y fought
e "hard
earls of

t.] EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST. 1%

Anlaf's host lay in that fighting place "quieted by
swords," and the Northmen fled, and only " the
screamers of war were left behind, the black raven
and the eagle to feast on th^ white flesh, and the
greedy battle-hawk, and the grey beast the wolf
in the wood." The second is the story of the
death of Brihtnoth, an ealdorman of Northumbria,
in battle against the Danes. It contains 690 lines.
In the speeches of heralds and warriors before the
fight, in the speeches and single combats of the chiefs,
in the loud laugh and mock which follow a good
death-stroke, in the rapid rush of the verse when the
battle is joined, the poem though broken, as Homer's
verse is not, is Homeric. In the rude chivalry which dis-
dains to take vantage ground of the Danes, in the way
in which the friends and churls of Brihtnoth die one
by one, avenging their lord, keeping faithful the tie of
kinship and clanship, in the cry not to yield a foot's
breadth of earth, in the loving sadness with which
home is spoken of, the poem is English to the core.
And in the midst of it all, like a song from another
land, but a song heard often in English fights from
then till now, is the last prayer of the great earl, when
dying he commends his soul with thankfulness to
God.

15. Old English Prose. — It is pleasant to think
that I may not unfairly make English prose begin
with BiEDA. He was born about a.d. 673, and was,
like Caedmon, a Northumbrian. From 683 he spent
his life at Jarrow, in the same monastery, he says,
" and while attentive to the rule of mine order, and
the service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay
in learning, or teaching, or writing." He long enjoyed
that pleasure, for his quiet life was long, and from
boyhood till his very last hour his toil was unceasing.
Forty-five works prove his industry, and their fame
over the whole of learned Europe during his time
proves their value. His learning was as various a9

^ArCL/SJ/ LITER A TORE,

tCMAP.

it was great. All that the world then knew of science,
music, rhetoric, medicine, arithmetic, astronomy, and
physics was brought together by him ; and his life was
as gentle and himself as loved as his work was great
His books were written in Latin, and with these we
have nothing to do, but his was the first effort to
make English prose a literary language, for his last
work was a Translation of the Gospel of St. John^ as
almost his last words were in English verse. In the
story of his death told by his disciple Cuthbert is
the first record of English prose writing. When the last
day came, the dying man called his scholars to him
that he might dictate more of his translation. "There
is still a chapter wanting," said the scribe, " and it is
hard for thee to question thyself longer." " It is easily
done," said Baeda, ** take thy pen and write quickly."
Through the day they wrote, and when evening fell,
"There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear master," said
the youth. " Write it quickly," said the master. " It
is finished now." " Thou sayest truth," was the reply,
"all is finished now." He sang the " Glory to God"
and died. It is to that scene that English prose looks
back as its sacred source, as it is in the greatness
and variety of Baeda's Latin work that English litera-
ture strikes its key-note.

i6. iElfred's Work.— When Bseda died North-
umbria was the home of English literature. Though
as yet written mostly in Latin, it was a wide- spread
literature. Wilfrid of York and Benedict Biscop
had founded libraries and established monastic
schools far and wide. Six hundred scholars gathered
round Baeda ere he died. But towards the end of
his life this northern literature began to decay, and
after 866 it was, we may say, blotted out by the
Dane^. The long battle with these invaders was
lost in Northumbria, but it was gained for a time by
iElfred the Great in Wessex ; and with ^Elfred's lite-
rary work loarmng changed its seat from the north

[CMAP.

science,
>my, and
1 life was
as great
these we
effort to

his last

John^ as

In the

hbert is

1 the last

to him

"There
and it is
is easily
luickly.'*
ing fell,
:er," said
jr. " It
le reply,
o God"
se looks
reatness
;h litera-

North.
Though
e- spread

Biscop
nonastic
gathered
end of
ay, and
by the
ers was
time by
d's lite-
e north

1.] EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 1 7

to the south. But he made it by his writings an Eng-
lish, not a Latin literature ; and in his translations he,
since Baeoa's work is lost, is the true father of English
prose. As Whitby is the cradle of English poetry, so
is Winchester of English prose. At Winchester Alfred
took the English tongue and made it the tongue in
which history, philosophy, law and religion spoke to the
English people. No work was ever done more eagerly,
or more practically. He brought scholars from different
parts of the world. He set up schools in his monas-
teries "where every free-born youth, who has the means,
shall attend to his book till he can read English
writing perfectly." He presided over a school in his
own court. He made himself a master of a literary
English style, and he did this that he might teach his
people. He translated the popular manuals of the
time into English, but he edited them with large
additions of his own, needful, as he thought, for
English use. He gave his nation moral philosophy in
Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy ; a universal his-
tory, with geographical chapters of his own, in the
History of Orosius; a history of England in Bceda's
History^ giving to some details a West Saxon form ;
and a religious handbook in the Pastoral Rule of
Pope Gregory. We do not quite know whether
he worked himself at the English or Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle^ but at least it was in his reign that it
rose out of meagre lists into a full narrative of
events. To him, then, we English look back as the
father of English literature.

17. The Later Old English Prose.-^The im-
pulse he gave soon fell away, but it was revived under
King Eadgar, when ^thelwald. Bishop of Winchester,
made it his constant work to keep up English schools
and to translate Latin works into English, and when
Archbishop Dunstan took up the same pursuits with
eagerness. -^Ethelwald's school sent out from it a
scholar and abbot named ^Elfric. He takes rank as

ENGLISH LITERA TIRE.

[CHAP.

the fir^t large translator of the Bible, turning into
English the first seven books and part of Job. VVe owe
to him a series of Homilies^ and his Co/loqny, after-
wards edited by another /Elfric, may be called the first
pjiglish-Latin dictioiiary. But this revival had no
sooner begun to take root than the Northmen came
again in force upon the land and conquered it. During
the long interweaving of Danes and English together
under Danish kings from 1013 to 1042, no English
literature arose. It was not till the quiet reign of
Edward the Confessor it again began to Hve. But
no sooner was it born than the Norman invasion
repressed, but aid not quench its life.

18. The English Chronicle. — One great monu-
ment, however, of old English prose lasts beyond the
Conquest. It is the English Chronicle, and in it our
literature is continuous from iElfred to Stephen. At
first it was nothing but a record of the births and
deaths of bishops and kings, and was probably a
West Saxon Chronicle. Alfred edited it from various
sources, added largely to it from Baeda, and raised it
to the dignity of a national history. After his reign, and
that of his son Eadward, 901-925, it becomes scanty,
but songs and odes are inserted in it. In the reign of
iEthelred and during the Danish kings its fulness
returns, and growing by additions from various quarters,
it continues to be our great contemporary authority
in English history till 1154, when it abruptly closes
with the death of Stephen. ^' It is the first history of
any Teutonic people in their own language ; it is the
earliest and the most venerable monument of Englisli
prose." In it old English poetry sang its last song,
in its death old English prose dies. It is not till the
reign of John that English poetry in any extended form
appears again in the Brut of Layamon. It is not till
the reign of Edward the Third that original English
prose again begins.

\ [CHAP.

ung into

We owe

rwjv, after-

d the first

I had no

len came

t. During

together

o English

; reign of

ive. But

invasion

sat monu-
eyond the
[ in it our
)hen. At
)irths and
robably a
m various

raised it
reign, and

J scanty,
le reign of
ts fulness
s quarters,
' authority
)tly closes

history of

; it is the
5f English
last song,

ot till the
ided form

is not till
al English

[n.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 19

CHAPTER II.

FPOM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 1066 — 1400«

aynmon's Prut, 1^05- — Ormin's OrmnJum^ 1215. — J^ir
John Mandcvillo'K Travels^ 1356- — W.llinm Langland's
Vision coucrniii/i^ Piers the P/mvmnn^ 3 texts, 1362, 77. 93.
—John Wyclif's Translation of the Bible^ 1380.— John
Gower's Confessio Amantis^ 1393 — 4'

^Geoffrey Chaucer, born 1340, died 1400- — Dethe of Blaunche
the Duchesse^ 1369. — Troylus and Creseide, — Parlament
of Poules. — Compleynt of Mars. — Anelida and Arcite. —
lious of Fame. 1374 — 1384- — A<.'^wrf^ f*f Good Women^
1385- — Piose Treatise on Asttolabe^ \Z^\, —Canterbury

' Tales, 1373 to 1400-

19. General Outline.— The invasion of Britain
by the English made the island, its speech and its
literature, English. The invasion of England by the
Danes lefl our speech and literature still English.
The Danes were of our stock and tongue, and we
absorbed them. The invasion of England by the
Normans seemed likely to crush the English people,
to root out their literature, and even to threaten their
Speech. But that which happened to the Danes hap-
pened to the Normans also, and for the same reason.
They were originally of like blood to the English,
Jtnd of like speech ; and though during their setile-
inent in Normandy they had become French in
manner and language, and their literature French,
et the old blood prevailed in the end. The Nor-
an felt his kindred with the English tongue and
spirit, became an Englishman, and left the French
tongue to speak and write in English. We absorbed
the Normans, and we took into our literature and
Speech some French elements they had brought with
them. It was a process slower in literature than it

B a

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

[chap.

was ill the political history, but it began from the
poliiical struggle. Up to the time of Henry II. the
Norman troubled himself but little about the English
tongue. But when French foreigners came pouring
into the land in the train of Henry and his sons, the
Norman allied himself with the Englishman against
these foreigners, and the English tongue began to
rise into importance. Its literature grew slowly, but
as quickly as most of the literatures of Europe, and
it never ceased to grow. " The last memoranda of the
Peterborough Chronicle are of year 1154. the last
extar English Charter can scarcely be earlier than
1 155." There are English sermons of the same
century, and now, early in the next century, at the
central time of this struggle, after the death of Richard
the First, the Brut of Layamon and the Ormuhim
come forth within ten years of each other to prove
the continuity, the survival, and the victory of
the English tongue. When the patriotic struggle
closed in the reign of Edward I., English literature
had risen again through the song, the sermon, and the
poem, into importance, and was written by a people
made up of Norman and Englishman welded into one
by the fight against the foreigner. But though the
foreigner was driven out, his literature influenced and
continued to influence, the new English poetry. The
poetry, we say, for in this revival our literature was
only poetical. All prose, with the exception of a few
sermons and some religious works from the French,
was written in Latin.

20. Religious and Story-telling Poetry are the
two main streams into which this poetical literature
divides itself. The religious poetry is entirely English
in spirit and a poetry of the people, from the Ormulum
of Ormin, 12 15, to the Vision of Piers the Plowman^
in which poem the distinctly English poetry reached its
truest expression in 1362. The story-telling poetry
is English at its beginning but becoiii^es more and

[CHAP. j^] j:^Qj^f 7^//^ COKQUEST TO CHAUCER. 21

ore influenced by the romantic poetry of France,
ndin the end grows in Chaucer's hands intoapoelry
if the court and of high society, a hterary in contrast
^ith a popular ])oetry. But even in tliis the spirit of
he poetry is JCnghsh, though the manner is French,
haucer becomes less French and even less Italian,
ill at last we find him entirely national in the
juterbury Talcs, the best example of English story-
elling we possess. The struggle "then of England
against the foreigner to become and remain England
finds its parallel in the struggle of English poetry
llgainst the influence of foreign poetry to become and
temain English. Both struggles were long and weari-
some, but in both England was triumphant. She
became a nation, and she won a national Hterature.
It is the steps of this struggle we have now to trace
tlong the two lines already laid down — the poetry
of religion and the poetry of story-telling ; but to do
«o we must begin in both instances with the Norman
Conquest.

2 1. The Religious Poetry. — The religious re-
vival of the nth century was strongly felt in Normandy,
and both the knights and Churchmen who came to Eng-
land with William the Conqueror and during his son's
teign were founders of abbeys whence the country was
ivilized. In Henry I.'s reign the religion of England
as further quickened by missionary monks sent by
ernard of Clairvaux. London was stirred to rebuild
Paul's, and abbeys rose in all the well-watered
ialleys of the North. The English citizens of London,
and the English peasants in the country received a
laew religious life from the foreign noble and the
foreign monk, and both were drawn together through
common worship. When this took place a desire
rose for religious handbooks in the English tongue.
Ormin's Ormulum is a type of these. We may date it,
though not precisely, at 12 15, the date of the Groat
.Charter, It is entirely English, not five French words

from the
y II. the
e English
J pouring
sons, the
,n against
began to
lowly, but
rope, and
da of the
, the last
dier than
the same
y, at the
f Richard
Ormiiliim
to prove
ictory of
: struggle

literature
n, and the

a people
i into one
lOugh the
meed and
try. The
•ature was
1 of a few
le French,

ry are the
literature
ly English
Ormulwn
Plowman,
•eached its
ing poetry
more and

HAMILTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

ENGLISH LITER A TURE.

[chap.

ll.l

are to be found in it. It is a metrical version of
the service of each day with the addition of a ser-
mon in verse. The book was called OrmiUum^ " for
this that Orm it wrought," Orm being a contraction
for Ormin. It marks the rise of English religious
literature, and its religion is simple and rustic. Orm's
ideal monk is to be " a very pure man, and altogether
without property, except that he shall be found in
simple meat and clothes." He will have "a hard and
stiff and rough and heavy life to lead. All his heart
and desire ought to be aye toward heaven, and his
Master well to serve." This was English religion in
the countiy at this date. .

22. Literature and the Friars. — There was
little religion in the towns, but this was soon changed.
In 1 22 1 the Mendicant Friars came to England, and
they chose the towns for their work. Their influence
was great, and they drew Norman and English more
closely together on the ground of religion. The first
Friars were foreigners, and they necessarily used many
French words in their English teaching, and Normans
as well as English now began to write religious works
in English. In 1303 Robert of Brunne translated a
French poem, the Manual of Sins (wriiten thirty years
earlier by William of Waddington), under the title of
Handlyng Sinne. William of Shoreham translated the
whole of the Psalter into English prose about 1327, and
wrote religious poems. The Cursor Mundi^ written
about 1320, and thought "the best book of all" by
men of that time, was a metrical version of the Old
and New Testament, interspersed, as was the Hand-
lyng Sinne^ with legends of saints. Some scattered
Sermons, and in 1340 \\\^ Aycnbite of Inwyt (Remorse
of Conscience), translated from the French, mark how
English prose was rising through religion. About the
same year Richard RoUe of Hampole wrote in Latin
and in Northumbrian English for the " unlearned,'*
t poem called the FrUkc of Conscience^ and some

HAMILTON PUBLIC LlBRA'^Y

'Ci-

AV,

II.] fA'OAI THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 23

])rose treatises. The poem marks the dose of the
religious influence of the Friars. They had been
attacked before in a poem of 1320; but in this
poem there is not a word said against them. It is
true the author, living far in the country, may not
liave been thrown much with them. Twenty years
later however all is changed ; and in the Vision of
Piers the Plowman^ the protest its writer makes for
purity of life is also a protest against the foul life and
the hypocrisy of the Friars. \\\ that poem, as we
shall see, the whole of the popular English religion
of the time of Chaucer is represented. In it also
the natural, unliterary, country English is best repre-
sented. It brings us up in the death of its author
to the year 1400, the same year in which Chaucer
died.

23. History and the Story-telling Poetry. —
The Normans brought an historical taste with them to
England, and created a most valuable historical litera-
ture. It was written in Latin, and we have nothing
to do with it till story-telling grew out of it in the
time of the Great Charter. But it was in itself of such
importance that a few things must be said about it.

(i) The men who wrote it were called Chron-
iclers. At first they were mere annalists — that is, they
jotted down the events of year after year without
any attempt to bind them together into a connected
whole. But afterwards, from the time of Henry I.,
another class of men arose, who wrote, not in scat-
tered monasteries, but in the Court. Living at the
centre of political life, their histories were written in a
philosophic spirit, and wove into a whole the growth
of law and national life and the story of affairs abroad.
They are our great authorities for the history of these
times. They begin with William of Malmesbury,
whose book ends in 1142, and die out after Matthew
Paris, 1235—73. Historical literature in England is
only represented after the death of Hemy III, by «

' !•

ENGLISH LITEST A TURE,

[citAP.

few dry Latin annalists till it rose again in modern
English prose in 15 13, when Sir Thomas More's
Life of Edzmrd K aud Richard IIL is said to have
been written. > ; •

(2) A distinct English feeling soon sprang up
among these Norman historians. English patriotism
was far from having died among the English them-
selves. The Sayings of Alfred about 1200, were
written in English by the English. These and some
ballads, as well as the early English war songs, inter-
ested the Norman historians and were collected
by them. William of Malmesbury, who was born of
English and Norman parents, has sympathies with
both peoples, and his history marks how both were
becoming one nation. The same welding together of
the conquered and the conquerors is seen in the
others till we come to Matthew Paris, whose view of
history is entirely that of an Englishman. When he
wrote, Norman noble and English yeoman, Norman
abbot and English priest, were, and are in his pages,
one in blood and one in interests.

24. English Story-telling grew out of this his-
torical literature. There was a Welsh priest at the
court of Henry I., called Geoffrey of Monmouth,
who took upon himself to write history. He had been
given, he said, an ancient Welsh book to translate
which told in verse the history of Britain from the
days when Brut, the great grandson of ^neas, landed
on its shores, through the whole history of King
Arthur and his Round Table down to Cadwallo, a
Welsh king who died in 689. The Latin translation
he made of this he called a history. The real his-
torians were angry at the fiction, and declared that
throughout the whole of it "he had iied saucily arid
shamelessly." It was indeed only a clever putting
together of a number of Welsh legends, but it was
the beginning of story-ieiling in our land. Every-
one who read it was delighted vviih it; it made, at

11.1

[citAP.

nodern
Mores
3 have

ang up
riotism
I them-

were
I some

inter-
llected
)orn of
s with
h were
ther of
in the
^iew of
hen he
orman
pages,

lis his-
at the

[QUTH,

i been
anslate
m the
landed
King
lIIo, a
slation
al his-
i that
y arid
utting
it was
Every-
^le, at

l] pi^om tnk cos^qvest to chavcer, 25

^we should say, a sensation, and as much on the
Continent as in England. Jn' it the Welsh had in
some sort their revenge, for in its stories they invaded
English literature, and their tales have never since
ceased to live in it. They charm us as much in
Tennyson's Idylls of the King as they charmed us
in the days of Henry I. But the stories Geoffrey
of Monmouth told were in the Latin tongue. They
were put first into French verse by Geoffrey Gaimar.
They got afterwards to France and, added to from
Breton legends, were made into a poem and decked
out with the ornaments of French romance. In that
form they came back to England as the work of
Wace, a Norman trouveur, who called his poem the
Bnd, and completed it in 1155, shortly after the
accession of Henry H.

25. Layamon's ** Brut.'* — In this French form
the story drifted through England,and at last falling into
the hands of an EngHsli priest in Worcestershire, he re-
solved to tell it in English verse to his countrymen,
and doing so became the author of our first English
poem after the Conquest. We may roughly say that
its date is 1*205, ^^^ years or so before the Orniu-
lum was written, ten years before the Great Charter.
It is plain that its composition, though it told a
Welsh story, was looked on as a patriotic work
by the writer. " There was a priest in the land," he
writes of himself, " whose name was Layamon ; he
was son of Leovenath : May the Lord be gracious
unto him ! He dwelt at Earnley, a noble church on
the bank of Severn, near Radstone, where he read
books. It came in mind to him and in his chiefest
:^lhoughtthat he would tell the noble deeds of England,
what the men were named, and whence they came,
I who first had English land." And it was truly of great
I importance. The poem opened to the imagination of
I the Kni^lish peonle an immense past tor the history of
I the island they dwelt in, and made a common bond

IaI

ENCUsH LlTER.'i TURK,

tCHAP.

of interest between Norman and Englishman. Though
chiefly rendered from the French, there are not fifty
Norman words in its more than 30,000 lines. The
old English alliterative metre is kept up with a few
rare rimes. As we read the short quick lines in which
the battles are described, as we listen to the simpte
metaphors, and feel the strong, rude character of the
poem, it is as if we were reading Csedmon ; and what
Caidmon was to early English poetry, Layamon is to
English poetry after the Conquest. He is the first of
the new singers.

26. Story-telling grows French in form.—
After an interval the desire for story-telling increased
in England. The story of Genesis and Exodus was
versified about 1250, and in it and some others about
the same date rimes are used. Many tales of Arthur's
knights, and other tales which had an English origin,
such as the lays of Havelok the Dane and of King Horn
(about 1280) were translated from the French ; Robert
of Gloucester wrote his J^iining Chrofiide, 1298, and
the Ro7nance of King Alexander, about 1280, originally
a Greek work, was adapted from the French into En-
glish. As the dates grow nearer to 1300, seven years
before the death of Edward I., the amount of French
words increases, and the French romantic manner of
telling stories is more and more marked. In the Lay
of Havelok the spirit and descriptions of the poem
still resemble old English work ; in the Romance of
Alexander, on the other hand, the natural landscape,
the conventional introductions to the parts, the gor-
geous descriptions of pomps, and armour, and cities,
the magic wonders, the manners, and feasts, and
battles of chivalry, the love passages, are all steeped
in the colours of French romantic poetry. Now this
romance was adapted by a Frenchman in the year
1200. (?) It took therefore nearly a century before the
French romantic manner of poetry could be natural-
ised in English \ and it was naturaiizedi curigus to

11.] - FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. n

say, at (he very time when England as a nation had
lost its French elements and become entirely English.
Finally, the influence of this French school in England
is seen in the earUer poems of Chaucer, and in poems,
such as the Court of Love ^ attributed to him. It came
to its height and died in the translation of the Romaunt
of the Rose^ the last and crowning effort also of French
romance. After that time the story-telling of England
sought its subjects in another country than France.
It turned to Italy.

27. Englis^h Lyrics. — In the midst of all this story-
telling, like prophecies of what should afterwards be
so lovely in our poetry, rose, no one can tell how,
some lyric poems, country idylls, love songs, and,
later on, some war songs. The English ballad, sung
from town to town by wandering gleemen, had never
altogether died. A number of rude ballads collected
round the legendary Robin Hood, and the kind of poetic
literature which sung of the outlaw and the forest, and
afterwards so fully of the wild border life, gradually
took form. Ab »ut 1280 a beautiful little idyll, called
The 07vl and the Nightingale, was written in Dorset-
shire, in which the author, Nicholas of Guildford,
judges between the rival birds. In 1300 we meet
with a few lyric poems, full of charm. They sing of
springtime with its blossoms, of the woods ringing
with the thrush and nightingale, of the flowers and the
seemly sun, of country work, of the woes and joy of
love, and many other delightful things. They are
tinged with the colour of French romance, but they
have an English background. We read nothing like
them, except in Scotland, till we come to the Eliza-
bethan time. After this, in 1352, the war lyrics of
Laiirejice Minot sing the great deeds and battles of
Edward III.

28. The King's English. — We have thus traced
the rise of our English literature to the time of Chaucer.
We must now complete the sketch by a word or iwo

ill'

'■m

\ I

'A
4 fill]

ill

■' ^'A

= r

i- ■

I'?

English liter a ture.

[ctlAt*.

on the language in which it was written. The hterary
EngUsh language seemed at first to he destroyed by
the Conquest. It lingered till Stephen's death in the
English Chronicle ; a few traces of it are still found
about Henry III.'s death in the Brut of Layamon.
But, practically speaking, from the 12th century till
the middle of the 14th there was no standard of
English. The language, spoken only by the people^
fell back into that broken state of anarchy in which
each part of the country has its own dialect, and each
writer uses the dialect of his own dwelling-place. All
the poems then of which we have spoken were written
in dialects of English, not in a fixed English common
to all writers. French or Latin was the language of
literature and of the literary class. But towards the
middle of Edward the Third's reign English got the
better of French. After the Black Death in 1349
French was less used; in 1362 EngUsh was made the
language of the courts of law. At the same time a
standard English language was born, It did not over-
throw the dialects, for the Vision of Fiers the Plowman
and Wyclif 's Translation of the Bible are both in a
dialect ; but it stood forth as the literary language in
which all future English literature had to be written.
It had been growing up in Robert of Brunne's work,
and in the Ro?nance of Ring Alexander; but it was
fixed into clear form by Chaucer and Gower. It was
in fact the English language talked in the Court and in
the Court society to which these poets belonged. It
was the King's English, and the fact that it was the
tongue of the best and most cultivated society, as well
as the great excellence of the works written in it by
these poets, made it at once the tongue of literature.

29. Religious Liiterature in Langland and
Wyclif. — We have traced the work of "transition
English," as it has been called, along the lines ot
popular religion and story-telhng. The first of these,
in the realm of poetry, reaches its goal in the work of

n.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 19

William Langland ; in the realm of prose it reaches
its goal in Wyclif. In both these writers, the work
differs from any that went before it, by its extraordinary
power, and by the depth of its religious feeling. It is
plain that it represented a society much more strongly
moved by religion than that of the beginning of the
fourteenth century. In Wyclif, the voice comes from
the university, and it went all over the land in the
body of preachers whom, like Wesley, he sent forth.
In Langland's Vision we have a voice from the centre
of the people themselves ; his poem is written in a
rude English dialect, in alliterative English verse, and
in the old English manner. The very ploughboy could
understand it. It became the book of those who
desired social and Church reform. It was as eagerly
read by the free labourers and fugitive serfs who col-
lected round John Ball and Wat Tyler.

30. Causes of the Religious Revival. — It was
originally due to the preaching of the Friars in the last
century and to the noble example they set of devotion
to the poor. When the Friars however became rich,
though pretending to be poor, and impure of life,
though pretending to goodness, the religious feeling
they had stirred turned against themselves, and its two
strongest cries, both on the Continent and in England,
were for Truth, and for Purity, in life and in the
Church. •

Another cause common to the Continent and to
England in this century was the movement for the
equal rights of man against the class system of the
middle ages. It was made a religious movement
when men said that they were equal before God, and
that goodness in His eyes was the only nobility.
And it brought with it a religious protest against the
oppression of the people by the class of the nobles.

There were two other causes, however, special to
England at this time. One was the utter misery of
the people owing to the French wars. Heavy taxation

'*<

^ ■■■

ENGLISH LITERATURE, "^"^y^^^ [CHAP.

fell upon them, and they were ground down by severe
laws, which prevented them bettering themselves.
They felt this all the more because so many of them
had bought their freedom, and began to feel the delight
of freedom. It was then that in their misery they
turned to religion, not only as their only refuge, but as
supplying them with reasons for a social revolution.
The other cause was the Black Death, the great
Plague which, in 1349, '62, and '69, swept over England.
Grass grew in the towns ; whole villages were left
uninhabited ; a wild panic fell upon the people, which
was added to by a terrible tempest in 1362, that to
men's minds told of the wrath of God. In their terror
then, as well as in their pain, they fled to religion.

3 [. Piers the Plowman. — AH these elements are
to be found fully represented in the Vision of Piers the
Plowman, Its author, William Langland, though we
are not certain of his surname, was born about 1332,
at Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire. His " Vision "
begins with a description of his sleeping on the Malvern
Hills, and the first text of it was probably written in
the country in 1362. At the accession of Richard XL,
1377, he was in London. The great popularity of his
poem made him in -that year, and again in the year
1393 send forth two more texts of his poem. In these
texts he added to the original Vision the poems of Do
Wel^ Do Bet, and Do Best. In 1399, he wrote at
Bristol his last poem, The Deposition of Richard //.,
and then died, probably in 1400.

He paints his portrait as he was when he lived in
Comhill, a tall, gaunt figure, whom men called Long
Will ; clothed in the black robes in which he sung
for a few pence at the funerals of the rich ; hating
to take his cap off his shaven head to bow to the
lords and ladies that rode by in silver and furs as he
stalked in observant moodiness along the Strand. It
is this figure, which in indignant sorrow walks through
the whole poem.

Pit I

n.l FROM THE CONQUEST CO CHAUCER, 31

32. His Vision. — The dream of the "field full of
folk," with which it begins, brings together nearly as
many typical characters as the Tales of Chaucer do
In the first part, the Truth sought for is righteous deal-
ing in Church, and Law, and State. In the second
part, the Truth sought for is that of righteous life.
None of those who wish to find Truth know the way,
till Piers the Plowman, who at last enters the poem,
directs them aright. The search for a righteous life
is a search to Do Well, to Do Better, to Do Best, the
three titles of the poems which were added afterwards.
In a series of dreams, and a highly-wrought allegory.
Do Well, Do Better, and Do Best, are identified with
Jesus Christ, who appears at last as Love, in the dress
of Piers the Plowman. The second of these poems
describes Christ's death. His struggle with sin, His resur-
rection, and the victory over Death and the Devil. And
the dreamer wakes in a transport of joy, with the Easter
chimes pealing in his ears. But as Langland looked
round on the world, the victory did not seem real, and
the stem dreamer passed out of triumph into the dark
sorrow in which he lived. He dreams again in Do
Besty and sees, as Christ leaves the earth, the reign of
Antichrist. Evils attack the Church and mankind.
Envy, Pride, and Sloth, helped by the Friars, besiege
Conscience. Conscience cries on Contrition to help
him, but Contrition is asleep, and Conscience, all but
despairing, grasps his pilgrim staff and sets out to
wander over the world, praying for lucfe and health,
*'till he have Piers the Plowman," till he find the
Saviour.

This is the poem which wrought so strongly in
men's minds that its influence was almost as great
as Wyclif 's in the revolt which had now begun against
Latin Christianity. Its fame was so great, that it
produced imitators. About 1394, another alliterative
poem was set forth by an unknown author, with the
title of Pieice the Plowman's Cr:de, and the Plowmar^s

■1

ENGLISH LITER A TURE,

[chap.

Tale^ wrongly attributed to Chaucer, is another witness
to the popularity of Langland.

33* Wyclif. — At the same time as the Vision was
being read all over England, John Wyclif, about 1380,
began his work in the English tongue with a nearl}'
complete translation of the Bible, and in it did as
much probably to fix our language as Chaucer
did in his Tales. But he did much more than
this for our tongue. He made it the popular lan-
guage of religious thought and feeling. In 1381
he was in full battle with the Church on the doctrine
of tran substantiation, and was condemned to silence.
He replied by appealing to the whole of England
in the speech of the people. He sent forth tract after
tract, sermon after sermon, couched not in the dry,
philosophic style of the schoolmen, but in short,
sharp, stinging sentences, full of the homely words
used in his own Bible, denying one by one almost all
the doctrines, and denouncing the practices, of the
Church of Rome. He was our first Protestant. It
was a new literary vein to open, the vein of the pam-
phleteer. With his work then, and with Langland's,
we bring to the year 1400 the English prose and
poetry pertaining to religion which we have been
tracing since the Conquest.

34. Story-telling is the other line on which we
have placed our literature, and it is represented first
by John Gower. He belongs to a school older than
Chaucer, inasmuch as he is never touched by the
Italian, only by the French influence. He belongs
to a different school even as an artist ; for his tales
are not pure story- telling like Chaucer's, but tales
with a special moral. Partly the religious and social
reformer, and partly the story-teller, he represents a
transition and fills up the intellectual space between
Langland and Chaucer. In the church of St. Saviour,
at Southwark, his head is still seen resting on his
three great works, the Speculu7n Meditatitis^ the Vox

U.) FROM THE CONQUEST' TO CHAUCER. 33

ClamanttSy the Confcssio Amantis, 1393. It marks
the unsettled state of our literary language, that each
of these was written in a different tongue, the tirst in
French, the second in Latin, the third in English.

The third is his English work. In 30,000 lines or
more, he mingles up allegory, morality, the sciences,
the philosophy of Aristotle, all the studies of the day,
with comic or tragic tales as illustrations. We have
seen that Robert de Brunne was the first to do this j
Gower was the second. The tales are wearisome and
long, and the smoothness of the verse makes them
more wearisome. Gower was a careful writer of Eng-
lish ; and in his satire of evils, and in his grave reproof
of the follies of Richard II., he rises into his best
strain. The kmg himself, even though reproved, was a
patron of the poet. It was as Gower was rowing on the
Thames that the royal barge drew near, and he was
called to the king's side. *' Book some new thing,''
said the king, " in the way you are used, into which
book I myself may often look ; " and the request was
the origin of the Confession of a Lover. It is with
pleasure that we turn from the learned man of talent
to Geoffrey Chaucer — to the genius who called Gower,
with perhaps some of th^ irony of an artist, "the moral
Gower.''

35. Chaucer's French Period. — Geoffrey Chau-
cer was the son of a vintner, of Thames Street, London,
and was born, it is now believed, in 1340. He lived
almost all his life in London, in the centre of its work
and society. When he w^as sixteen he became page
to the wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, and con-
tinued at the Court till he joined the army in France
in 1359. He was taken prisoner, but ransomed be-
fore the treaty of Bretii;ny, in 1360. We then know
nothing of his life for six years ; but from items in
the Exchequer Rolls, we find that he was again
connected with the Court, from 1366 to 1372. It
was during this time that he begaji to write. His first

^|!;
i>.l

■.| .1

ENGLISH LITER A TURM,

[citAt*.

poem mny have been the A, B, C, a prayer Englished
from the French at the request of the Duchess Blanche.
The translation of the Romaunt of the Rose has been
attributed to him, but the best critics are doubtful of,
or deny, his authorship. They are only sure of
two poems, the Cojnpleynte to Pity in 1368, and in the
next year the Dcthe of Blaunche the Dtwhesss, whose
husband, John of Gaunt, was Chaucer's jxatron. These,
being written under the influence of French poetry,
are classed under the name of Chaucer's first period.
There are hnes in them which seem to speak of a
luckless love affair, and in this broken love it has been
supposed we find the key to Chaucer's early life.

36. Chaucer's Italian Period. — Chaucer's
second ]:)oetic period may be called the period of
Italian influence, from 1372 to 1384. During these
years he went for the king on no less than seven
diplomatic missions. Three of these, in 1372, '74,
and '78, were to Italy. At that time the great Italian
literature which inspired then, and still inspires, Euro-
pean literature, had reached full growth, and it opened
to Chaucer a new world of art. If he read the Vita
Nuova^ and the Divina Commedia of Dante, he
knew for the first time the power and range of
poetry. He read the Sonnets of Petrarca, and he
lecarnt what is meant by "form " in poetry. He read
the tales of Boccaccio who made Italian prose, and in
them he first saw how to tell a story exquisitely.
Petrarca and Boccaccio he may even have met, for
they died in 1374 and 1375, but he never saw Dante,
who died at Ravenna in 132 1. When he came back
from these journeys he was a new man. He threw
aside the romantic poetry of France, and laughed at
it in his gay and 'kindly manner in the Rime of Sir
ThopaSy afterwards made one of the Canterbury Tales,
His chief work of this time bears witness to the influ-
ence of Italy. It was Troylus a7id Creseide, 1382 (?),
which is a translation, with many changes and addi«

.••s <

tl.] PKOM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 35

lions, of the Filostrato of Boccaccio. The additions
(and he nearly doubled the poem) are stamj)ed with
his own peculiar tenderness, vividness, and simplicity.
Hif. changes from the original are all towards the side
of purity, good taste, and piety. We meet the further
influence of Boccaccio in the birth of some of the
Canterbury Talcs, and of Petrarca in the Tales them-
selves. To this time is now referred the tale of the
Second Nun, that of the Doctor, the Man of Law,
the Clerk, the Prioress, the Squire, the Franklin, Sir
Thopas, and the first draft of the Knight's Tale,
borrowed, with much freedom, from the Teseidc of
Boccaccio. The other poems of this period were the
Parlament of Foidcs, the Complcynt of Mars, Anelida
and A rate, Boece, and the Former Age, all between
1374 and '76, the lines to Adam Scrivener, 1383, and
the Hous of Fame, 1384 (?). In the passion with
which Chaucer describes the ruined love of Troilus
and Anelida, some have traced the lingering sorrow
of his early love affair. But if this be true, it was
now passing away, for in the creation of Pandarus in
the Troilus, and in the delightful fun of the Parla-
ment of Foules, 2l new Chaucer appears, the humorous
poet of the Canterbury Tales. In the active business
life he led during this period he was likely to grow
out of mere sentiment, for he was not only employed
on service abroad, but also at home. In 1374 he
was Comptroller of the Wool Customs, in 1382 of
the Petty Customs, and in 1386 Member of Par-
liament for Kent.

37. Chaucer's English Period. — It is in the
next period, from 1384 to 1390, that he left behind
Italian influence as he had left French, and became
entirely himself, entirely English. The compara-
tive poverty in which he now lived, and the loss of
his offices, for in John of Gaunt's absence he lost
Court favour, may have given him more time for
study, and the retired liie of a poet. At least ia

c a

'^\

■«,1 A'

,'fl:

i \'

3« ENGLtsn LITKRATURE, tCHAA

hia Le^ende of Good Women, the prologue to which
was written in 1385, we find him a closer student than
ever of books and of nature. His appointment as
Clerk of tlie Works in 1389 brought him again into
contact with men. He superintended the repairs
and build ini; at the Palace of Westmin-ster, the
'J ower, and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, till July,
1391, when he was superseded, and lived on pensions
alloited to him by Richard and by Henry IV., after
he had sent the King in 1399 his Complcint to his
I^ursc. Jiefore 1390, however, he had added to his
great work its best tales, those of the Miller, th-e
Keevo, tlie Cook, the Wife of Bath, the Merchant,
the Friar, the Nun, Priest, Pardoner, and perhaps
"•he Sompnour. The Prologue was probably written
\\y 1388. In these, in their humour, in their vivid-
ne.-.s of portraiture, in their ease of narration, and in
the variety of their characters, Chaucer shines supreme.
A few smaller poems belong to this best time, such as
2 ruth md the Alodcr of God,

During the last ten years of his life, which may be
called tlie period of his (iecay, he wrote some small
poems, and along with the Co)npIeytite of Venus, and
a prose treatise on the Astrolabe, four uiore tales,
the Canon's-yeoman's, Manciple's, Monk's, and Par-
sone's. The last was written the year of his death,
1400. Having done this work, he died in a house
under the shadow of the Abbey of Westminster.
Within the walls of the Abbey Church, the first of
the poets who lies there, that " sacred and happy
spirit " sleeps.

38. Chaucer's Character — Born of the tradesman
class, Chaucer was in every sense of the word orte of
our finest gentlemen : tender, graceful in thought,
glad of heart, humourous, and satirical without
unkindness ; sensitive to every change of feeling in
liimself and others, and therefore full of sympathy ;
brave in misfortune, even to mirth, and doing weU

II.1 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 37

and with careful honesty all he undertook. His
first and great delight was in human nature, and
he makes us love the noble characters in his poems
and feel with kindliness towards the baser and ruder
sort. Me never sneers, for he had a wide charity,
and we can always smile in his pages at the follies
and forgive the sins of men. He had a true and
chivalrous regard for women, and his wife and he
must have been very hai)py if they fulfilled the ideal
he had of marriage, lie lived in aristocratic society,
and yet he thought him the greatest gentlem-an who
was " most vertuous alway, prive, and port (open), and
most entendeih aye to do the gentil dedes that he
can." He lived frankly among men, and as we have
seen, saw many different types of men, and in his
own time filled many parts as a man of the world and
of business. Yet, with all this active and observant
life, he was commonly very quiet and kept much to
himself. The Host in the Tales japes at him for his
lonely, abstracted air. "Thou lookest as thou wouldest
find a hare. And ever on the ground I see thee stare."
Being a good scholar, he read morning and night alone,
and he says that after his (office) work he would go
home and sit at another book as dumb as a stone, till his
look was dazed. While at study and when he was
making of songs and ditties, " nothing else that God
had made " had any interest for him. There was but
one thing that roused him then, and that too he liked
to enjoy alone. It was the beauty of the morning and
the fields, the woods, and streams, and flowers^ and
the singing of the little birds. This made his heart
full of revel and solace, and when spring came after
winter, he rose with the lark and cried, " Farewell my
book and my devotion." He was the first who made
the love of nature a distinct element in our poetry.
He was the first who, in spending the whole day
gazing alone on the daisy, set going that lonely delight
in natural scenery which is so special a^ wark of ouy

,i '^

t il

ENGLISH LITERATURE,

[chap.

later poets. He lived thus a double life, in and out
01 the world, but never a gloomy one. For he was
fond of mirth and good-living, and when he grew
towards age, was portly of waist, *'no poppet to
embrace." But he kept to the end his elvish coun-
tenance, tL': shy, deHcate, half mischievous face
which looked on men from its grey hair and forked
beard, and was set off by his dark- coloured dress and
hood. A knife and inkhorn hung on his dress, we
see a rosary in his hand, and when he was alone he
walked swiftly.

39. The Canterbury Tales. — Of his work it is
not easy to speak briefly, because of itb great
variety. Enough has been said of it, with the ex-
ception of his most complete creation, the Can-
terbury Tales. It will be seen from the dates given
above that they were not written at one time.
They are not, and cannot be looked on as a whole.
Many were written independently, and then fitted
into the framework of the Prologue in 1388. At
that time a number more were written, and the
rest added at intervals till his death. In fact, the
whole thing was done much in the same way as Mr.
Tennyson has written his Idylls of the King. The
manner in which he knitted them together was very
simple and likely to please English people. The
holiday excursions of the time were the pilgrimages,
and the most famous and the pleasantest pilgrimage
to go, especially for Londoners, was the three or four
days' jcurney to see the shrine of St. Thomas at
Canterbury. Persons of all ranks in life met and
travelled together, starting from a London inn.
Chaucer seized on this as the frame in which to set
his pictures of life. He grouped around the jovial
host of the Tabard Inn men and women of every
class of society in England, set them on horseback
to ride to Canterbury, and made each of them tell a
tale. No one could hit off ft char^ict^r better, and W

:iiAP.

out

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and in

«.] FI^OM niE CONs^EST TO CHAUCER,

his Prologue, and in the prologues to the several Tales,
the whole of the new, vigorous English society which
had grown up since Edward I. is painted with as-
tonishing vividness. " I see all the pilgrims in the
Canterbury Tales," says Dryden, " their humours, their
features, and the very dress, as distinctly as if 1 Iiad
supped with them at the Tabard in South wark."
The Tales themselves take in the whole range of the
poetry of the middle ages ; the legend of the saint,
the romance of the Knight, the wonderful fables
of the traveller, the coarse tale of common life,
the love story, the allegory, the satirical lay, and
the apologue. And they are pure tales. He has
been said to have had dramatic power, but he has
none. He is simply our greatest story-teller in
verse. All the best tales are told easily, sincerely, with
great grace, and yet with so much homeliness, that
a child would understand them. Sometimes his
humour is broad, sometimes sly, sometimes gay,
sometimes he brings tears into our eyes, and he can
make us smile or be sad as he pleases.

He had a very fine ear for the music of verse, and
the tale and the verse go together like voice and music.
Indeed, so softly flowing and bright are they, that to
read them is like listening in a meadow full of sun-
shine to a clear stream rippling over its bed of
pebbles. The English in which they are written is
almost the English of our time ; and it is literary
English. Chaucer made our tongue into a true means
of poetry. He did more, he welded together the
French and English elements in our language and
made them into one English tool for the use of
literature, and all our prose writers and poets derive
tlidir tongue from the language of the Canterbury
Tales. They give him honour for this, but still
more for that he was the first EngHsh ardst. Poetry
is an art, and the artist in poetry is one v/ho writes
for pure pleasure and for nothing else the thing he

I 'I

ENGLISH LITER A TURE.

[chap.

writes, and who desires to give to others the same
fine pleasure by his poems which he had in writing
them. The thing he most cares about is that the
form in which he puts his thoughts or feeHngs may-
be perfectly fitting to the subject, and as beauti-
ful as possible — but for this he cares very greatly ; and
in this Chaucer stands apart from the other poets of
his time. Gower wrote with a moral object, and
nothing can be duller than the form in which he yjuts
his tales. The anther of Fiers the Flnwmaii wrote
with the object of reform in social and ecclesiastical
affairs, and his form is uncouth and harsh. Chaucer
wrote because he was full of emotion and joy in his
own thoughts, and thought that others would weep
and be glad with him, and the only time he ever
moralizes is in the t^les of • the Yeoman and the
Manciple, written in his decay. He has, then, the best
right to the poet's name. He is our first English artist.
40. Mandeville. — I have already noticed the prose
of Wyclif under the religious class of English work.
I have kept Sir John Mandeville for this place,
because he belongs to light literature. He is called
our " first writer in formed English." Chaucer him-
self however wrote some things, and especially one
of his Tales, in rhythmical prose, and John of
Trevisa translated into English prose, 1387, Higden's
Folychroriicon. Mandeville wrote his Travels first
in Latin, then in French, and finally put them mto
our tongue about 1356, "that every man of the
nation might understand them." His quaint delight
in teUing his " traveller's tales," and sometimes the
grace with which he tells them, rank him among the
story-tellers of England.

■li

•^

III.]

FROM CHAUCER TO EL2ZABETH.

CHAPTER III.

FROM CHAUCER, 1400> TO ELIZABETH, 1559-

Thomas Occleve (Henry V.*s reign) ; J. Lydgate, Falls of Frincei
(in Henry VI.). — Sir John Fortescue's prose work, and Sir T.
W'3\Qxf's> Alorte d^ Arlhur (Edward IV. ). — Caxton prints at
Westminster, 1477.— Paston Letters, 1422— 1505.— Hawes'
Pastime of Pleasure^ 150C. — ^John Skelton's poems, 1508 —
1529.— Sir T. More's History of Richard III., 1513.—
Tyndale's Translation of the Bible, 1525. — English Prayer-
Book, 1549. — Ascham's Toxophilus, \^l^^. — Poems ol
Wyatt and Surrey, in TotteVs Miscellany, 1557.

Scottish Poetry, begins with Barbour's Bruce, 1375-7 J James
\S King's Quhair, 1424. — T. Henryson dies, 1508- — Dun-
bar's Thistle and Rose, \ 503 . — Gawin Douglas dies, 1522- —
Sir D. Lyndsay born, 1490 ; Satire of Three Estates^ 1535 ;
dies 1555.

41. The Fifteenth Century Prose.— The last
poems of Chaucer and Langland bring our story up to
the year 1400. The century that followed is the most
barren in our literature. History sank down into a
few Latin chroniclers, of whom Thomas of Walsing-
ham is best known. Two Riming Chronicles were
written in Henry V.'s time by Andrew of Wyntoun,
a Scotchman, and John Harding, an Englishman.
John Capgrave wrote in English, in Edward IV. 's
reign, a Chronicle of England which began with
the Creation. Political prose is then represented
by Sir John Fortescue's book on the Differejice
between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, |t is our
second important book in the history of English
prose. The religious war between the Lollards
and the Church went on during the reign of
Henry V. and VI., and in the reign of the latter,
Reginald Pecock took it out of Latin into homely
English, He fought the Lollards with their owi|

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weapons, with sermons preached in English, and with
tracts in English; and after 1449, when Bishop of
Chichester, published his work, The Repressor of
<yvermuch Blaming of the Clergy, It pleased neither
party. The Lollards disliked it because it defended the
customs and doctrines of the Church. Churchmen
burnt it because it agreed with the " Bible-men," that
the Bible was the only rule of faith. Both abjured
it because it said that doctrines were to be proved
from the Bible by reason. Pecock is the first of all the
Church theologians who wrote in English, and the
book is a fine example our early prose. <

42. Poetical Lite iture. — The only literature
which reached any strength was poetical, but even that
is almost wholly confined to the reign of Henry VI.
Th-e new day of poetry still went on, but its noon
an Chaucer was now succeeded by the grey afternoon
«of Lydgate, and the dull twilight of Occleve. John
ILydgate, a monk of Bury, who was thirty years of a^e
when Chaucer died, v/rote nothing of importance
till Henry VI.*s reign. Though a long-winded and
third-rate poet, he was a delightful man ; fresh,
natural, and happy even to his old age when he
recalls himself as a boy, "weeping for nought,
and anon after glad." There was scarcely any
literary work he could not do. He rimed history,,
ballads, and legends, till the monastery was delighted.
He made pageants for Henry VI., masks an 1
May-games for aldermen, mummeries for the Lord
Mayor, and satirical ballads on the follies of the day.
Educated at Oxford, a traveller in France and Italy,
he knew the literature of his time, and he even
dabbled in the sciences. He enjoyed everything,
but had not t*he power of adequately expressing his
enjoyment. He was as much a lover of nature as
Chaucer, but cannot make us feel the beauty of nature
as Chaucer does. It is his story- telling which brings
\m PlQs^st \o Cb^ucer. His three chief poems

in.]

FROM CHAUCER 10 ELIZABETH.

were the Falls of Princes^ The Storie of Thebes^ and
the Troye Book, The first is a translation of a book
of Boccaccio's. It tells the tragic fates of great men
from the time of Adam to the capture of King John of
France, at Poitiers. There is a touch of the drama
in the plan, which was suggested by the pageants of
the time. The dead princes appear before Boccaccio
pensive in his library, and each relates his downfall.
The Storie of Thebes is an additional Canterbury
Tale, and the Troye Book is a version from the French
of the prose romance of Guido della Colonna, a Sicilian
poet, if the book be not in truth originally French.
The Complaint of the Black Knighty usually given
to Chaucer, is stated to be Lydgate's by Shirley, the
contemporary of him and Chaucer. I should like to
be able to call him the author of the pretty Uttle poem
called the Cuckoo and the Nightingale^ included in
Chaucer'p works. But its authorship is unknown.

Thomag Occleve, who wrote chiefly in Henry V.'s
reign, about 1420, was nothing but a bad versifier.
His one merit is that he loved Chaucer. With his
loss "the whole land smartith," he says, and he
breaks out into a kind of rapture once : —

** Thou wert acquainted with Chaucer ! Pardie,
God save his soul,
The first finder of our faire langage."

And it is in the MS. of his longest poem; The
Governail of Princes that he caused to be drawn, with
" fond idolatry," the portrait of his master. With this
long piece of verse we mark the decay of the poetry of
England. Romances and 1 ys were still translated;
there were verses written on such subjects as huntmg
and alchemy. Caxton himself produced a poem ; but
the only thing here worth noticing is that at the end
of the century some of our ballads were printed.

43. Ballads, lays, fragments of romances, had been
§ung in England fron^ th^ earliest times^ and popul^j

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tales and jokes took form in short lyric pieces to be
accompanied by lausic and dancing. We have seen
war celebrated in Minot's songs, and the political ballad
is represented by ihe lampoon made by some follower
of Simon de Montfort on the day of the battle of Lewes,
and by the Elegy on Edward L*s Death, But the ballad
went over the whole land among the people. The trader,
the apprentices, and poor of the cities, the peasantry,
had their own songs. They tended to collect them-
selves round some legendary name like Robin Hood,
or some historical character made legendary, like
Randolf, EcU 1 of Chester. Sloth, in Fiers Flowmaiis
Vision^ does not know his paternoster, but he does
know the rimes of these heroes. A crowd of min-
strels sang them througli city and village. The very
friar sang them '* and made his Englissch swete upon
his tunge." A collection of Robin Hood ballads
was soon printed under the title of A Lytel Geste oj
Robin Hood ^ by Wynken de Worde. The Nut Brown
Matdy The Battle of Otterbiirn^ and Chevy Chase, may
belong to the end of the century, though probably not
in the form we possess them. It was not however till
much later that any collection of ballads was made ;
and few, as we possess them, can be dated farther back
than the reign of Elizabeth.

44. Growth of interest in Literature. — This
was then the literature of this century. Little creative
work was done, and that little was poor. There
was small learning in the monasteries, and few books
were written. But a good deal of interest in litera-
ture was scattered about the country, and it increased as
the century went on. The Wars of the Roses stopped
the writing, but not the reading, of books. We have
in the Jraston Letters, 142 2- 1505 — the correspondence
of a country family from Henry VI. to Henry VH.,
pleasantly, even correctly written — passages which
refer to translations of the classics, and to manuscripts
being sent to and fro for reading. Henry VL,

til.)

PROM CHAUCER TO ELlZABETn,

Edward IV., and some of the great nobles were
lovers of books. Men like Duke Humphrey of
Gloucester made libraries and brought over Italian
scholars to England to translate Greek works. There
were fine scholars in England, like John Lord Tiptoft,
Earl of Worcester, who had won fame in the schools
of Italy. Before 1474, when Caxton finished the first
book said to have been printed in this country, The
Game and Playe of the Chesse, a number of French
translations of the Latin authors were widely read.
There was, therefore, in England, a general, though
an unir formed interest in the ancient writers.

45. First Influence of the Italian RevivaL —
Such an interest v;as added to by the revival of
letters which arose at this time in Italy, and the
sixteenth century had not long begun before many
Englishmen went to Italy to read and study the
old Greek authors on whom the scholars driven
from Constantinople by the Turks v;ere lecturing
in the schools of Florence. Printing enabled
these men on their return to turn the classic books
they loved into English for the English people.
We began to do our own work as translators ;
and from the time of Henry VIII. onwards,
there is scarcely any literary fury equal to that with
which the young English scholars fell upon the
ancient authors and tilled the land with English
versions of them . It is, then, in the slow upgrowth
during this century of interest in and study of the
ancients that we are to see che gathering together at
its source of one of the streams which fed that great
rive-r of Elizabethan literature which it is so great a
mistake to think burst suddenly up through the earth.

46. Influence of Caxton's Work. — We find
another of these sources in the work of our first
printer, William Caxton. The first book that bears
the inscription : " Imprynted by me, William Cax-
ton, at Westmynstre '' is 2he Dictes and Sayings of

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£MGUS!i LITER A WRE,

[CttA^.

FJdl^ophe'rs. Caxton did little or nothing forclassica.
learning. His translation of the ^neid of Vergil is
from a contemptible French romance. But he pre-
served for us Chaucer, and Lydgate, and Gower, with
zealous care. He printed the Chronicles of Brut
and Higden ; he translated the Golden Legend : and
the Morte d Arthur^ written by Sir Thomas Malory
in the reign of Edward IV., and one of our finest and
simplest examples of early prose, was printed by him
with all the care of one who loved "the noble acts of
chivalry." He had a tradesman's interest in publish-
ing the romances, for they were the reading of the
day, but he could scarcely have done better for the
interests of the coming literature. These books
nourished the imagination of England, and supplied
poet after poet with fine subjects for work, or fine
frames for their subjects. He had not a tradesman's,
but a loving literary interest in printing the old
English poets ; and in sending them out from his press
Caxton kept up the continuity of English poetry.
The poets after him at once began on the models
of Chaucer and Gower and Lydgate ; and the books
themselves, being more widely read, not only made
poets but a public that loved poetrj. If classic
literature then was one of the sources in this century
of the Elizabethan literature, the recovery of old
English poetry was another.

47. Prose Literature. — Witn the exception of
Caxton's work all the good prose of the fifteenth
<:entury was written before the death of Edward IV.
The reigns of Richard III. and of Henry VII. pro-
duced no prose of any value, but ^lie country
awakened from its dulness with the Accession of
Henry VIII., 1509. A band of new scholars who
had studied in Italy taught Greek in Oxford, Cam-
bridge and London. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's,
with John Lilly, the grammarian, set on foot a school
'-^'here the classics were tau^-ht in a new and practical

lit.l 1^'kOM CHAVCM to ELU^AQl^Tir, ifl

way. Erasmus, who had all the enthusiasm which
sets others on fire, came to England, and with
Grocyn, Linacre, Sir Thomas More, and Archbishop
Warham formed a eehtrfe I'rom which a liberal and
wise theology was sjpread. The tiew learning which
had been borh iti Italy came to England. It
stirred and gave life to everything, and it woke up
English Prose from its sleep. Much of the new life
of English Literature was due to the patronage of the
young king. It was Kcnry VIII. who supported
Sir Thomas Elyot, and encouraged him to write
books in the vulgar tongue that he might delight his
countrymen. It was the king who asked Lord BernerS'
to translate Froissart, a book which "made a landmark:
in our tongue," and who made LeLnd, our first Englishi
writer on antiquarian subjects, the " King's Antiquary."*
It was the king to whom Roger Aschaji dedicated
his first work, 1545, and the king sent him abroad to
pursue his studies. This book, the Toxophilus^ or the
School of Shooting, 1545, was written for the pleasure of
the yeomen and gentlemen of England in their own
tongue. Ascham apologizes for this, and the apology
marks the state of English prose. "Everything has
been done excellently in Greek and Latin, but in the
English tongue so meanly that no man can do worse."
He has done his work well, and in quaint but charm-
ing English.

48. Prose and the Reformation. — But the
man who did best in English prose was Sir Thomas
More in our earliest English history, the History of
Edward V, and Richard III, The simplicity of his
genius showed itself in the style, and his wit in the
picturesque method and the dramatic dialogue that
graced the book. English prose grew larger and richer
under his pen, and began that stately step which fu-
ture historians followed. The work i said to have been
written in 1513 but it was not printed till 1557, The
most famous book More wrowc, The Utopia^ was not

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ENGLISH LITERATURE.

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Written in English. The most famous controversy he
had was with John Tyndale, a man who in his tnins-
latioii of the New Testament^ 1525, " fixetl our tongue
once for all." His style was as pureljr English as
More's, and of what kind it was may be read in our
bibles, for our authorized version is still in great
part his translation. In t! is work Tyndale was
assisted by William Roy, a runaway friar, and his
friend Rog.rs, the Trst martyr in Queen Mary's reign,
added to it a translation of the Apocrypha^ and made
up what was wanting in Tynckile's translation from
Chronicles to Malachi out of Coverdale's translation.
It was this Bible which, revised by Coverdale and
edited and re-edited as CromwelPs Bible, i539> ^^'^^l
again as Cranmei''' s Bible, 154O) was set up in every
parish church in England. It got north into Scotland
and made the Lowland English more like the London
English, and after its revisal in 16 11 went with the
Puritan fathers to New England and fixed the
standard of English in America. There is no book
which has had so great an influence on the style of
English literature. In Edward VI. 's reign also Cran-
mer edited the Eiiglish Prayer Book, 1549-52. Its
English is a good deal mixed with Latin words, and
its style is some times weak and heavy, but on the whole
it is a fine example of stately prose. Latimer, on the
contrary, whose Sermon on the Ploiighers and others
were delivered in 1549 and in 1552, wrote in a plain,
shrewd style, which by its humour and rude directness
made hirn the first preacher of his day.

49. Poetry in the Sixteenth Century under
the Influence of Chaucer. — We shall speak in this
section only of the poets in England whose work was
due to the publication of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate
by Caxton, and go back also to the Scotch poetry which
owed itself to the impulse of Chaucer. After a short
revival that influence died, and a new one entered
from Italy into English verse in the poems of Surrey

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FROM CHAUCER 10 ELIZABETH,

and Wyatt. The transition period between the one
inrtuence and the other is of great interest. We see
how the old poets had been neglected by the way in
which the new poets speak of them, as of something
wonderful, and by the indignant reproach a man like
Hawes makes when he says that people care for nothing
but ballads, and wiU not read these old books. iUit
the reproach was unwise. It is better for the interests
of literature to make a new ballad than to read an old
poem, and the ballads of Kngland kept up the original
vein of poetry of the land. It is one of the signs of
a new poetic Ufe in a nation when it is fond of poetry
which, hke the ballad, has to do with the human
interests of the present : and when that kind of human
poetry pleases the upper classes as well as the lower a
resurrection of poetry is at hand.

50. Hawes and Skelton. — At such a time we
are likely to find imitators of the old work, and in the
reign of Henry VII. Stephen Hawes recast a poem
of Lydgate's (?) The Temple of Glass, and imitated
Chaucer's work and the old allegory in his Pastime
of Pleasure, 1506. We shall also find men who,
while they still follow the old, leave it for an ori-
ginal line, because they are more moved by human--
life in the present than in the past. Their work will
be popular, it may even resemble the form of the
ballad. Such a man was John Skelton, who wrote
in Henry VII. and Henry VIII. 's reii/n, and died
1529. His earliest poems were after the manner of
Chaucer, but he soon took a manner of his own, and
being greatly excited by the cry of the people for Church
reformation, wrote a bitter satire on Wolsey for his
pride, and on the clergy for their luxury. His poem
Why come ye not to Court '^ was a fierce satire on the
great Cardinal. That of Colhi Clout was also the
cry of the country Colin, and of the Clout or me-
chanic of the town against the corruption of the
Church. Both are written in short "rude rayling

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ENGLISH LITER A TURE.

[CHAT.

rimes, pleasing only the popular ear," and Skelton
chose them for that purpose. Both have a rough,
impetuous power; their language is coarse, full even
of slang, but Skelton could use any language he
pleased. He was an admirable scholar. Erasmus
calls him the "glory and light of English letters," and
Caxcon says that he improved our language. Colin
Clout represents the whole popular feeling of the time
just before the movement of the Reformation took a
new turn by the opposition of the Pope to Henry's
divorce. It was not only in this satirical vein that
Skelton wrote. We owe to him some ])retty and new
love lyrics ; and the Boke of Fhyllyp Sj>arowe, which
tells the grief of a nun called Jane Scrope for the
death of her sparrow, is one of the gayest and most
inventive poems in the language. Skelton stands quite
alone between the last flicker of the influence of
Chaucer, whose last true imitator he was, and the rise
of a new Italian influence in England in the poems of
Surrey and Wyatt. In his own special work he was
entirely original, cxnd standing thus between two periods
of poetry, he is a kind of landmark in English litera-
ture. The Sliip of Fooles^ 1508, by Barclay is of this
time, but it has no value. It is a recast of a work
published at Basel, and was popular because it at-
tacked the follies and questions of the time. It was
written in Chaucer's stanza. But far better work in,
poetry was being done at this time in Scotland than
in England.

SCOTTISH POETRY.

51. Scottish Poetry is poetry written in the
English tongue by men living in Scotland. These
men though calling themselves Scotchmen are of
good English blood. But the blood, as I think, was
mixed with an infusion of Celtic blood.

Old Northumbria extended from the Humber t&

III.]

FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZA i:ETH.

the Firth of Forth, leaving however on its western
border a line of unconquered land, which took in
Lancashire, Cumberland, and Westmcreland in our
iMigland, and over the border most of the western
country between the Clyde and Solway Firth. This
unconcjuered country was the Welsh kingdom of
Sirathclyde, and it was dwelt in by the Celtic race.
The present KngHsh part of it was soun conquered
and the Celts driven out. Bat in tlie part to the north
of the Solway Firth tlie Celts were not driven out.
They remained, lived with the EngUshmen who were
settled over the old Northumbria, inter-married with
them and became under Scot kings one mixed
people. Literature in the Lowlands then would have
Celtic elements in it ; literature in England was
purely Teutonic. The one sprang from a mixed, the
other from an unmixed race. I d'aw attention to this,
because it seems to me to accouut fo** certain peculi-
arities in Scottish poetry which colour the whole of it,
which rule over it, and are specially Celtic.

52. Celtic Elements of Scottish Poetry. —
The first of these is the hwe of wild nature for its
own sake. There is a passionate, close, and poetical
observation and description of natural scenery in
Scotland from the earliest times of its poetry, such
as we do not possess in English poetry till the time of
Wordsworth. The second is the love of colour, x\ll
early Scottish poetry differs from English in the extra-
ordinary way in which colour is insisted on, and at
times in the lavish exaggeration of it. The third
is the wittier^ more rollicking humour in the Scottish
poetry, which is distinctly Celtic in contrast with that
humour which has its root in sadness and which
belongs to the Teutonic races. Few things are really
more different than the humour of Chaucer and the
humour of Dunbar, than the humour of Cowper and
the humour of Burns. These are the special Celtic
elements in the Lowland poetry.

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[CHAP.

53. Its National Elements; came into it from
the circumstances under which Scotland rose into
a separate kingdom. The first of these is the strong,
almost fierce assertion of national life. The Eng-
lish were as national as the Scots, and felt the
emotion of patriotism as strongly. But they had no

, need to assert it ; they were not oppressed. But for
nearly forty years the Scotch resisted for their very life
the efforts of England to conquer them. And the
war of freedom left its traces on their poetry from
Barbour to Burns and Walter Scott in the almost
obtrusive way in which Scotland, and Scottish liberty,
and Scottish heroes are thrust forward in their verse.
Their passionate nationality appears in another form
in their descriptive poetry. The natural description
of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or even Milton, is not dis-
tinctively English. But in Scotland it is always the
scenery of their own land that the poets describe.
Even when they are imitating Chaucer, they do
not imitate his conventional landscape. They put
in a Scotch landscape, and in the work of sUv . men
as Gawin Douglac the love of Scotland and the love
of nature mingle their influences together to make
him sit down, as it were, to paint, with his eye on
everything he paints, a series of Scotch landscapes.
It is done without any artistic composition ; it reads
like a catalogue, but it is work which stands quite
alone at the time he wrote. There is nothing even
resembling it in England for centuries after.

54. Its Individual Element. — There is ore
more special element in early Scottish poetry which
arose, I think, out of its political circumstances.
All through the struggle for freedom, carried on
as it was at first by small bands under separate
leaders till they all came together under a leader
like Bruce, a much greater amount of individuality,
and a greater habit of it, was created among the
Scotch than among the English. Men fought for

til.]

FliOM CtiAVCER TO BUZ A BETH,

their own land and lived in their own way. Every
little border chieftain, almost every border farmer
was or felt himself to be his own master. The
poets would be likely to share in this individual
quality, and in spite of the overpowering influence of
Chaucer, to strike out new veins of poetic thonglit and
new methods of poetic expression. And this is what
happened. Long before forms of poetry like the short
pastoral or the fable had appeared in England, the
Scottish poets had started them. They were less docile
imitators than the EngUsh, but their work in the new
forms they started was not so good as the after English
work in the same forms.

55. The first of the Scottish poets, omitting
Thomas of Erceldoune, is John Barbour, Arch-
deacon of Aberdeen. His long poem of The Bruce
represents the whole of the eager struggle for
Scottish freedom against the English which closed
at Bannockburn; and the national spirit, which
I have mentioned, springs in it, full grown, into
life. But it is temperate, i^: does not pass into the
fury against England which is so plain in writers
like Blind Harry, who, about 1461, composed a long
poem in the heroic couplet of Chaucer on the deeds
of William Wallace. Barbour was often in England
for <:he sake of study, and his patriotism though strong
is tolerant of England. The date of his poem is 1375, 7 ;
St never mentions Chaucer, and Barbour is the only
early Scottish poet on whom Chaucer had no influence.
In the next poet we find the influence of Chaucer,
and it is hereafter continuous till the Elizabethan time.
James the First of Scotland was prisoner in England
for nineteen years, till 1422. There he read Chaucer,
and fell in love with Lady Jane Beaufort, niece of
Henry the Fourth. The poem which he wrote —
The Kin^s Quhair (the quire or book) — is done in
imitation of Chaucer, and in Chaucer's seven-lined
Stanza, which from James's use of it is called Rime

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ENGLISH LITER A TURR,

[CHAh

Royal. In six cantos, sweeter, tenderer and purer than
any verse till we come to Spenser, he describes the be-
ginning of his love and its happy end. '* I must write,
he says, " so much because I have come so from Hell
to Heaven." Nor did the flower of his love and
hers ever fade. She defended him in the last ghastly
scene of murder when his kingly life ended. There
is something especially pathetic in the lover of
Chaucer, in the first poet of sentiment in Scotland
being slain so cruelly. He was no blind imitator of
Chaucer. We are conscious eX. once of an original
element in his work. The natural description is
more varied, the colour is more vivid, and there is a
modern self-reflective quality, a touch of spiritual feel-
ing which does not belong to Chaucer at all. The
poems of The Kirk ofi the Green and Peebles to the
Flay have been attributed to him. If they be his,
he originated a new vein of poetry, which Burns after-
wards carried out — the comic and satirical ballad
poem. But they are more likely to be by James V.

Robert Henryson, who died before 1508, a school-
master in Dunfermline, was also an imitator of Chaucer,
and his Testament of Cresseid continues Chaucer's
Troilus, But he set on foot two new forms of poetry.
He made poems out of \\\q fables. They differ entirely
from the short, neat form in which Gay and La Fon-
taine treated the fable. They are long stories, full of
pleasant dialogue, political allusions, and with elabo-
rate morals attached to them. They have a peculiar
Scottish tang, and are full of descriptions of Scotch
scenery. He also began the short pastoral in his
Robin and Makyne. It is a natural, prettily turned
dialogue ; and a subtle Celtic wit, such as charms us
in Duncan Grey^ runs through it. " The individuality
which struck out two original lines of poetic work in
these poems appears again in his sketch of the graces
of womanhood in the Garment of Good Ladies ; a
poem ot tne same type as inos(i moughtful lyrics which

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FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH.

describe what is best in certain phases of professions,
or life, such as Sir H. Wotton's Character of a Happy
Life, or Wordsworth's Happy Warrior,

But among lesser men, whom we need not mention,
the greatest is William Dunbar. He carries the in
fluence of Chaucer on to the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury and into the sixteenth. Few have possessed a more
mascuUne genius, and his work was as varied in its
range as it was original. He followed the form and plan
of Chaucer in his two poems of The Thistle and the
Rose, 1503? and The Golden 2erge, 1508, the first on the
marriage of James IV. to Margaret Tudor, the second
an allegory of Love, Beauty, Reason, and the Poet. In
both, though they begin with Chaucer's conventional
May morning, the natural description becomes Scottish,
and in both the national enthusiasm of the poet is
strongly marked. But he soon ceased to imitate.
The vigorous fun of the satires and the satirical
ballads that he wrote is only matched by their coarse-
ness, a coarseness and a fun that descended to Burns.
Perhaps Dunbar's genius is still higher in a wild poem
in which he personifies the seven deadly sins, and
describes their dance, with a mixture of horror and
humour which makes the little thing unique.

A man almost as remarkable as Dunbar is Gavvin
Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, who died in 1522, at
the Court of Henry VI XL, and was buried in the Savoy.
He is the author of the first metrical English transla-
tion from the original of any Latin book. He trans-
lated Ovid^s Art of Love, and afterwards, with truth
and spirit, the /^//^/V/ of Vergil, 15 13. To each book
of the /Encid\\t wrote a prologue of his own. And it is
chiefly by these that he takes rank among the Scottish
poets. Three of them are descriptions of the country
in May, in autumn, and in winter. The scenery is
altogether Scotch, and the few Chaucerisms that appear
seem absurdly out of place in a picture of nature whicli
is as close as if it had been done by Keats in his early

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ENGLISH LITER A TURE,

[ghap.

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time. The colour is superb, the landscape is described
with an excessive detail, l3ut it is not composed by
any art into a whole. Still it astonishes the reader, and
it is only by bringing ir the Celtic element of love of
nature that we can account for the vast distance
between work like this and contemporary work in
England such as Skelton's. Of Douglas's other original
work, one poem, The Palace of Honour, 1 501, continues
the influence of Chaucer.

There . were a number of other Scottish poets
belonging to this time who are all remembered and
praised b^^ Sir David Lyndsay, whom it is best to men-
tion in <i.is place, because he still connects Scottish
poetry with Chaucer. He was born about 1490 and is
the last of the old Scottish school, and the most
popular. He is the most popular because he is not
only the Poet, but also the Reformer. His poem The
Dreme, 1528, connects him with Chaucer. It is in the
manner of the old poet. But its scenery is Scottish,
and instead of the May morning of Chaucer, it opens
on a winter's day of wind and sleet. The place is a cave
over the sea, whence Lyndsay sees the weltering of
the waves. Chaucer goes to sleep over Ovid or Cicero,
Lyndsay falls into dream as he thinks of the " false
world's instability,^' wavering like the sea waves. The
difference marks not only the difference of the two
countries, but the different natures of the men.
Chaucer did not care much for the popular storms
and loved the Court more than the Commonweal.
Lyidsay in the Dreme and in two other poems —
the Complaijit to the Kin^^ and the Testament of
the Ki?ig's Fapyngo'' — is absorbed in the evils and
sorrows of the people, in the desire to reform the
abuses of the Church, of the Court, of party, of the
nobility. In 1539 his Satire of the Three Estates^
a Morality interspersed with interludes, was repre-
sented before James V. at Linlithgow. It was first
acted in 1535, and was a daring attack on the ignor-

111.]

FkOM CHAUChR TO Mj^I^ABETH,

ance, profligacy and exactions of the priesthood, on
the vices and flattery of the favourites — "a mocking
of abuses used in the country by diverse sorts of
estate." A still bolder poem, and one thought so
even by himself, is the Monarchies 1 553, his last work.
Reformer as he was, he was more a social and political
than a religious one. He bears the same relation to
Knox as Langland did to Wiclif. When he was
sixty-five years old he saw the fruits of his work.
Ecclesiastical councils met to reform the Church.
But the reform soon went beyond his temperate
wishes. In 1557 the Reformation in Scotland was
fairly launched when in December the Congregation
signed the Bond of Association. Lyndsay had died
three years before; he is as much the reformer as he
is the poet, of a transition time. "Still his verse
hath charms," but it was neither sweet nor imaginative.
He had genuine satire, great moral breadth, much
preaching power in verse, coarse, broad humour in
plenty, and more dramatic power and invention than
the rest of his fellows, and he lived an active, bold
and brave life in a very stormy time.

56. Italian Influence : Wyatt and Surrey. —
While poetry under Skelton and Lyndsay became an
instrument of reform, it revived as an art at the close
of Henry VII I. 's reign in Sir Thomas Wyatt and the
Earl of Surrey. They were both Italian travellers,
and in bringing back to England the inspiration
they had gained from Petrarca they re-made Eng-
lish poetry. They are our firs4; really modern poets ;
the first who have anything of the modern man-
ner. Though Italian in sentiment, their language
is more English than Chaucer's, that is, they use
fewer romance words. They handed down this
purity of English to the Elizabethan poets, to Sackville,
Spenser, and Shakespeare. They introduced a new
kind of poetry, the amourist poetry. The "amourists,"
as they are called, were poets w1m> composed a series of

5'iti

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ENGLISH LITERATURE,

[chap.

poems on the subject of love — sonnets mingled with
lyrical pieces after the manner of Petrarca, and in
accord with the love philosophy he built on Plato. The
Hundred Passions of Watson, the sonnets of Sidney,
Shakespeare, Spenser, and Drummond, are all poems
of this kind, and the same impulse in a similar form
appears in the sonnets of Rosetti and Mrs. Browning
of our time. The subjects of Wyatt and Surrey were
chielly lyrical, and the fact that they imitated the same
model has made some likeness between them. Like
their personal characters, however, the poetry of Wyatt
is the more thoughtful and the more strongly felt, but
Surrey's has a sweeter movement and a livelier fancy.
Both did this great thing for English verse — they chose
an exquisite model, and in imitating it " corrected
the ruggedness of English poetry." Such verse as
Skelton's became impossible. A new standard was
made below which the after poets could not fall.
They also added new stanza measures to English
verse, and enlarged in this way the " lyrical range."
Surrey was the first, in his translation of VergiFs
/Eneid to use the ten-syllabled, unrimed verse, which
we now call blank verse. In his hands it is
not worthy of praise ; it had neither the true form nor
harmony into which it grew afterwards. Sackville,
Lord Buckhurst, introduced it into drama ; Marlowe,
in his Ta^nbwlaine, made it the proper verse of tlie
drama, and Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Massinger
used it splendidly. In plays it has a special manner
of its own ; in poetry proper it was, we may say, not
only created but perfected by Milton.

The new impulse thus given to poetry was all but
arrested by the bigotry that prevailed during the
reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, and all the work of
the New Learning seemed to be useless. But Thomas
Wilson's book in English on Rhetoric and Logic in
^."^SSj and the publication of Thos. Tusser's Pointesof
Jtiuibandric and of ToUel's Miscellany of Uncertain

ivj

FROM 1559 TO 1603.

Authors^ i55*7> in the last years of Mary's reign,
proved that something was stirring beneath the gloom.
The latter book contained the poems of Surrey and
Wyatt, and others by Grimald, by Lord Vaux,
and Lord Berners. The date should be remembered,
for it is the first printed book of modern English
poetry. It proves that men cared now more for the new
than the old poets, that the time of imitation of
Chaucer was over, and that of original creation begun.
It ushers in the Elizabethan literature.

CHAPTER IV.
FROM 1559 TO 1603. ,

Sackville's Mirror of Magistrates ^ 1559. — Lyly's Euphues. —
Spenser's Shepheardes Calender^ 1579' — Sidney's Arcadia,
1580- — Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, 1594- — Bacon's
Essavsy 1597. — Spenser born, 1552 ; Faerie Queen, 1590-
1595 ; died, 1598 — W. Warner's, S. Daniel's, M. Dray-
ton's historical poems, 1595-1598- — Sir J. Davies's. and
Lord Brooke's philosophical poems, 1599-1620.

The Drama. —First Miracle Play, lllQ. — Interludes of J.
Heywood, 1530-— Fiist English Comedy, 1540?~First
English Tragedy, 1562-— First English Theatre, 1576.—
Marlowe's Tamburlainc, 1587- — Shakespeare born, 1564;
Lorve's Labour's Lost, 1588 ; Merchant of Vence, 1596 ;
Hamlet, 1602; Cymbeline, 1610; Henry VLLL, 1613;
died, 1616. — Ben Jonson begins work, 1596 ; dies,
1637- — Beaumont ancl Fletcher in James I. reign.

Webster's first Play, 1612- -Massinger begins, 1620; dies,
lQ39._Tqhn Ford's fist play, 1629 —James Shirley, last
Elizabetnan Dramatist, lives to 1666 > Theatre closed,
1642 ; opens again, 1656.

57. Elizabethan Literature, as a literature,
may be said to begin with Surrey and Wyatt. But
as their poems were published shortly before Elizabeth
ume to the throne, we date tlxe beginning of the

I-

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)

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ENGLISH LITER A TURE,

[citAP.

early period oi Elizabethan literature from the year of
her accession, 1559. That period lasted till 1579,
and was followed by the great literary outburst, as it
has been called, of the days of Spenser and Shake-
speare. The apparent suddenness of this outburst has
been an object of wonder. Men have ^jearched for
its causes, chiefly in the causes which led to the revival
of learning, and no doubt these bore on England
as they did on the whole of Europe. But we shall
best seek its nearest causes in the work done during
the early years of Elizabeth, and in doing so we
shall find that the outburst was not so sudden after
all. It was preceded by a very various, plentiful, but
inferior literature, in which new forms of poetry and
prose-writing were tried and new veins of thought
opened, which were afterwards wrought out fully and
splendidly. All the germs of the coming age are to
be found m these twenty years. The outburst of a
plant into flower seems sudden, but the whole growth
of the plant has caused it, and the flowering of
Elizabethan literature was the slow result of the
growth of the previous literature and the influences
that bore upon it.

58. First Elizabethan Period, 1559-1579. —
(i.) The only literary prose of this time is that of the
6<rW^w^j/^/* of AsciiAM, published 1570. This book,
which is on education, is the \^K)rk of the scholar of
the New Learning of the time of Henry VIII. who
has lived on into another time. It is not, properly
speaking, Elizabethan, it is like a stranger in a new
land and among new manners.

(2.) Poetry is first represented by Sackville Lord
Buckhurst. The J///'nv' of Magistrates^ i559) foi" which
he wrote the Induction and one tale, is a poem on
the model of Boccaccio's Falls of Princes^ already
imitated by Lydgate. Seven poets, along with
Sackville, contributed tales to it, but his poem is the
only one of any value. The Induction paints the

IV.]

FROM 1559 TO 1603.

poet's descent into Avernus, and his meeting with
Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whose fate he
tells with a grave and inventive imagination. Being
written in the manner and stanza of the elder poets,
this poem has been called the transition between
Lydgate and Spenser. But it does not truly belong
to the old time ; it is as modern as Spenser. George
Oascoigne, whose satire, the Steele Glas^ 1576, is our
first long satirical poem, is the best among a crowd
of lesser poets who came after Sackville, They
wrote legends, pieces on the wars and d'scove/ies of
the Englishmen of their day, epitaphs, epigrams,
songs, sonnets, elegies, fables, and sets of love poems ;
and the best things they did were collected in a
miscellany called the Paradise of Dainty Devices, in
1576. This boc^', with Tottel's, set on foot in the
later years nf Elizabeth a crowd of other miscellanies
of poetry which were of great use to the poets.
Lyrical poetry, and that which we may call " occa-
sional poetry,'' was now fairly started.

(3.) Frequent translations were now made from the
classical writers. AVe know^ the names of more than
twelve men who did this work, and there must have
been many more. Already in Henry VIII.'s and
Edward VI.'s time, ancient authors had been made
English; and before 1579, Vergil, Ovid, Cicero,
Demosthenes, and many Greek and Latin plays
were translated. In this way the best models were
brought before the English people, and it is in the
influence of the spirit of Greek and Roman literature
on literary form and execution that we are to find
one of the vital causes of the greatness of the later
Elizabethan literature.

(4.) Theological reform stirred men to another
kind of literary work. A great number of satirical
ballads, and pamphlets, and plays issued every year
from ol3scure presses and filled the land. Poets like
George Gascoigne, ard still more Bamaby Googe,

J •,:•

•'■'.I

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UNGLISff LITERA '^URE,

[chap.

represent in their work the hati-ed .ne young men had
of the old religious system. It was a spirit which did
not do much for literature, but it quickened the
habit of composition, an-d it made it easier. The Eible
also became common property, and its language
glided into all theological writing and gave it a literary
tone; while the publication of John Fox's Ads and
Monuments or Book of Martyrs^ i5^3> g^ve to the
people all over England a book which, by its simple
style, the ease of its story-telling, and its popular
charm made the verv peasants who heard it read
feel whac is meant by literature.

(5.) The love of stories again awoke. The old
English tales and ballads were eagerly read and
collected. Italian Tales by various authors were
translated and sown so broadcast over London by
William Painter ia his collection The Palace of
Measure 1566, by George Turbervile and others, that
it is said they »vere to be bought at every bookstall.
K great number of subjects for prose and poetry
were thus made ready for literary men, and fiction
became possible in English literature.

(6.) The history of the country and its manners was
not neglected. A whole class of antiquarians wrote
steadily, if with some dulness, on this subject.
Grafton, Stow, Hoh'nshed and others, at least sup-
plied materials for the study and use of the historical
drama.

(7.) The masques y pageants^ interludes, and plays
that were written at this time, are scarcely to be
counted. At every great ceremonial, whenever the
queen made a progress, or visited one of the great
lords or a university ; at the houses of the nobility,
and at the court on all important days, some obscure
versifier, or a young scholar at the Inns of Court, at
Oxford or at Cambridge, produced a masque or a
pageant, or wrote or translated a play. The habit of
play-writing became common ; a kind of school, one

ivj

FROM I5S9 TO 1603.

might almoi^t say a manufacture of plays aiose, which
partly accounts for the rapid producticn, the excellence,
and the multitude of plays that we find after 1579. Re-
presented all over England, these masques, pageants,
and dramas were seen by the people who were thus
accustomed to take an interest though of an unedu-
cated kind in the larger drama that was to follow.
The literary men on the other hand ransacked, in
order to find subjects and scenes for their pageants,
ancient and mediaeval and modern literature, and
many of them in doing so became fine scholars. The
imagination of England was quickened and educated
in this way, and as Biblical stories were also largely
used, the images of oriental life were added to the
materials of imagination.

(8.) Another influence bore on literature. It was
that given by the stories of the voyagers^ who in the
new commercial activity of the country, penetrated
into strange lands. Before 1579, books had been pub-
lished on the north-west passage. Frobisher had made
his voyages and Drake had started, to return in 1580
to amaze all England with the story of his sail round
the world and of the riches of the Spanish Main. We
may trace everywhere in Elizabethan literature the
impression made by the wonders told by the sailors
and captains who explored and fought from the
North Pole to the Southern Seas.

(9.) Lastly, we have proof that there was a large
number of persons writing who did not publish their
works. It was considered at this time, that to write
for the public mjured a man, and unless he were
driven by poverty he kept his manuscript by him. But
things were changed when a great genius like Spenser
took the world by storm ; when Lyly's Eiiphues en-
chanted the whole of court society; when a great
gentleman like Sir Philip Sidney became a writer.
Literature was made the fashion, and the disgrace
being taken from it, the production became enormous.

•IS

£ •I-

ENGLISH LITER A TURE.

[CHAP.

Manuscripts written and laid by were at once sent
forth ; and when the rush began it grew by its own
force. Those who had previously been kept from
writing by its unpopularity now took it up eagerly,
and those who had written before wrote twice as
much now. The great improvement also in literary
quality is easily accounted for by this — that men
strove to equal such work as Sidney's or Spenser's, and
tliat a wider and sharper criticism arose.

59. The Later Literature of Elizabeth's
Reign,i579-i6o2, begins with the pubHcation of Lyly's
Etiphues and Spenser's Shepheardes Calender y both in
1579, and with the writing of Sir Philip Sidney's Area-
dia and his Defe7ice of Poetrie^ 1580-81. It will be best
to leave the poem of Spenser aside till we come to write
of the poets. Ti)e Etiphues and the Arcadia carried
on the story-telling literature ; the Defence of Poetrie
created a new form of literature, that of criticism.

The Etiphues was the work of John Lyi.y, poet and
dramatist. It is in two parts, Euphiies and Etiphues^
England. In six years it ran through five editions, so
great was its popularity. Its prose style is too poetic,
but it is admirable for its smoothness and charm,
and its very faults were of use in softening the rude-
ness of previous prose. The story is long and is
more a loose framework into which Lyly could fit his
thoughts on love, friendship, education and religion
than a true story. The second part is made up of
several stones in one, and is a picture of the English-
man abroad. It made its mark because it fell in with
all the fantastic and changeable life of the time. Its
far-fetched conceits, its extravagance of gallantry, its
^ endless metaphors from the classics and natural history,
its curious and gorgeous descriptions of dress and its
pale imitation of chivalry were all reflected in the life
and talk and dress of the court of Ehzabeth. It became
the fashion to talk " Euphuism," and, like the Utopia
of More, Lyly's book has created an English word.

IV.] FROM 1 559 TO 1603. 6$

The Arcadia was the work of Sir pHitrp SinNF.Y,
and though written in 1580, did not appear till
iiticr his death. It is more poeti'c in style than tlie
Ktiphues^ and Sidney himself, as he wrote it under the
trees of Wilton, would have called it a poem. It is
less the image of the time than of the man. Most
people know that bri|^;ht and noble figure, the friend of
Spenser, the lover of Stella, the last of the old knights,
the poet, the critic, and the Christian, who, wounded
to the death, gave up the cup of water to a dying
soldier. We find his whole spirit in the story of the
Arcadia, in the first two books and part of the third,
wlii'ch alone were written by him. It is a romance
mixed up with pastoral stories, after the fashion of the
Spanish romances. The characters are real, but the
story is confused by endless digressions. The senti-
ment is too fine and delicate for the world. The de-
scriptions are picturesque and the sentences made as
perfect as possible, A quaint or poetic thought or an
epigram appear in every line. There is no real art in it,
or in its prose. But it is so full of poetical thought that
it became a mine into which poets dug for subjects.

60. Criticism began with Sidney's Art of Foetrie,
Its style shows us that he felt how faulty the prose of
the Arcadia was. The book made a new step in the
creation of a dignified English prose. It is still too
tlowery, but in it the fantastic prose of his own Arcadia
and of the Eiiphues dies. As criticism it is chietly
concerned with poetry. It defends, against Stephen
Gosson's School of Abuse, in which poetry and plays
were attacked from the Puritan point of view, the nobler
uses of poetry. Sackville, Surrey and Spenser are
praised, and the other i>oets made little of in its pages.
It was followed by Webbe's Discourse of English
Podne written " to stirre up some other of nic«.^t
abilitie to bestow travell on the matter," Already the
other was travailing, and the Arte of English Poesie,
supposed to be written by George Puttenham, was

r :

ENGLISH LlTP.kATVRk.

tCttAP.

published in 1589. It is the most elaborate book on
the whole subject in Ehzabeth's reign, and it marks
the strong interest now taken in poetry in the highest
society that the author says he writes it " to help the
courtiers and the gentlewomen of the court to write
good poetry, that the art may become vulgar for all
Englishmen's use/'

61. Later Theological Literature. —Before we
come to the Poetry we will give an account of the Prose
into which the tendencies of the earlier years of Eliza-
beth grew. The first is that of theology. For a long
time it remained only a literature of pamphlets. Puri-
tanism in its attack on the stage, and in the Martin
Marprelate controversy upon episcopal government
in the Church, flooded England with small books.
Lord Bacon e^ en joined in the Utter controversy, and
Nash the dramatist made himself famous in the war
by the vigour and fierceness of his wit. Over this
troubled sea rose at last the stately work of Richard
Hooker. It was in 1594 that the first four books
of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a defence of
the Church against the Puritans, were given to the
world. Before his death he finished the other four.
The book has remained ever since a standard work
It is a J much moral and political as theological. Its
style is grave, clear, and often musical. Pie adorned
it with the figures of poetry, but he used them with
temperance, and the grand and rolling rhetoric with
which he often concludes an argument is kept for its
right place. On the whole it is the first monument of
splendid literary prose that we possess.

62. The Essay. — We may place alongside of it, as
the other great prose work of Elizabeth's later time, the
development of tlie Essay in Lord Bacon's Essays
1597. Their highest literary merit is their combina-
tion of charm and even of poetic prose with concise-
ness of expression and fulness of thought. The rest
of Bacon's work belpngs to the followii^ reign. The

nrj

PROM ISS9 TO 1603.

splendour of the form, and of the English prose
of the Advancement of Learnings afterwards written
in the Latin knguage, and intended to be worked up by
the addition of the Novum Organum and the Sylva
Sylvarum into the treatise of the Instauratio Magna,
which Bacon meant to be a philosophy of human
knowledge, raises it into the realm of pure literature.
67,. History, except in the publication of the earliei
Chronicles by Archbishop Pai?lker, does not appear
again in Elizabeth's reign ; but in the next reign
Camden, Spelman, and John Speed continued the
antiquarian researches of Stow and Grafton. Bacon
published a history of Henry VII., and Samuel
Daniel, the poet, in his History of England to the
Time of Edward in., 1613,18, was one of the first to
throw history into such a literary form as to make it
popular. Knolles* History of the Turks and Sir
Walter Raleigh's vast sketch of the History of the
World show how for the first time history spread
itself beyond English interests. Raleigh's book,
written in the -peaceful evening of a stormy life, and
in the quiet of his prison, is not only literary from the
ease and vigour of its style, but from its still spirit of
melancholy thou'ght.

64. The Literature of Travel was carried on
by the publication in 1589 of Hakluyt's Navigation,
Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, cut
larged afterwards in 1625 by Samuel Purchas, who
had himself written a book called Purchas, his Pil-
grimage ; or, The Relations and Religions of the World.
The influence of a compilation of this kind, contain-
ing the great deeds of the English on the seas, has
been felt ever since in the literature of fiction and
poetry.

65. Translations. — There are three translators
that take literary rank among the crowd that carried
on the work of the earlier time. Two mark the in-
fluence of Italy^ one the more powerful influence o(

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ENGUsn UTERA TV RE.

[chap.

m. !!

the r^rcck !-:pirit. Sir JoHxN Harington in 1591 trans-
lulc<l Ariosto's Grlatido Furioso, Fairfax in 1600
translated '\dj^?,o'% Jerusaletn^ and his book is " one of
the glories of Elizabeth's reign." But the noblest
tKinslation is that of Homej-'s whole work by George
Chapman, the dramatist, the first part of which ap-
pealed in 1598. The vivid life and energy of the time,
its creative power and its force, are expressed in this
poem, which is more an Elizabetlian tale written about
Achilles and Ulysses than a translation. The rushing
gallop of the long fourteen syllable stanza in which it
is written has the fire and swiftness of Homer, but it
lja,s not his directness or dignity. Its " inconquerable
quaintness " and diffuseness are as unlike the pure form
and light and measure of Greek work as possible.
Jkit it is a distinct poem of such power that it will
excite and delight all loverc of poetry, as it excited
and delighted Keats. John Florio's translatioji of the
Essays of Montaigne^ 1603, is also worth mentioning
because Shakespeare used the book, and because we
trace Montaigne's influence on English literature even
before his retranslation by Charles Cotton.

66. In the Tales, which poured out like a flood
from the dramatists, from such men as Peele, and
Lodge, and Greene, we find the origin of English
fiction, and the subjects of many of our plays ; while
the fantastic attempt to revive the practices of chivalry
which we have seen in the Arcadia found food in the
translation of a new school of romances, such as
A mad is of Gaul^ Palmer in of England ^ and the Seven
Champions of Christendom. 'vVe turn now to the
Poetry.

67. Edmund Spenser.— The later Elizabethan
poetry begins with the Shepheardes Calender of Spenser.
Spenser was born in London, 1552, and educated
at Merchant Taylor's School and at Cambridge, which
he left at the age of twenty-four. His early boyhood
^as passed in London, and he went frequently to

:1M

ire even

XV.]

FRO.)f 1559 TO 1603.

an English home among the glens of Lancashire. He
returned thither after he left Cambridge and fell in love
with a " fair widowe's daughter of the glen " whom he
called Rosalind. His love was not returned and her
coldness drove him southward. His college friend,
Gabriel Harvey, made him known to Leicester, and
probably, since Harvey was "Leicester's man," to Philip
Sidney, Leicester's nephew; and it was at Sidney's
house oi Penshurst that the Shcphcardcs Calender was
made, and the Faerie Queen begun. The publication
of the former work in 1579 at once made Spenser the
first poet of the day, and its literary freshness was
such tlrat men felt that for the first time since Chaucer,
England had given birth to a great poet. It was a
pastoral poem, divided into twelve eclogues, one for
each month of the year. Shepherds and shepherd
life were mixed in itS verse with complaints for his lost
love, with a desire for Church reform, with loyalty to
the Queen. It marks the strong love of old English
poetry by iis reference to Chaucer, though it is in
form imitated from the French pastoral of Clement
Marot. The only tie it really has to Chaucer is in the
choice of disused English words and spelling, a practice
of Spenser's which somewhat spoils the Faerie Queen.
The Puritanism of the poem does not lie in any attack
on the Episcopal theory, but in an attack on the sloth
and pomp of the clergy, and in a demand for a nobler
moral life. It is the same in the Faerie Queen.

68. The Faerie Queen. — The twelve books
of this poem were to represent the twelve moral
virtues, each in the person of a knight who was to
conquer all the separate sins and errors which were
at battle with the virtue he personified. In Arthur,
the king of the company, the Magnificence of the whole
of virtue was to be represented, and he was at last to
arrive at union w" h the Faerie Queen, that divine
glory of God to which all human thought, and act
aspiredt This was Spenser's Puritanism — the de^irQ

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ENGLISH LITERATURE.

[chap.

after a perfectly pure life for State and Church and Man.
It was opposed in State and Church, he held, by the
power of Rome which ha paints as Duessa, the false-
hood which wears the garb of truth, and who also
strves to represent her in whom Catholicism most
threatened England — Mary, Queen of Scots. Puritan
in this sense, he is not Puritan in any other. He had
nothing to do with the attack on Prelacy which was
then raging, and the last canto of the Faerie Queen
represents Calidore the knight of courtesy sent forth
to bridle " the blatant beast," the many-tongued and
noisy Presbyterian body which attacked tl)e Church.

The poem however soars far above this region of
debate into the calm and pure air of art. It is the
poem of the human soul and all its powers strugghng
towards the perfect love, the love which is God. Filled
full with christianized platonism, the ideas of truth,
justice, temperance, courtesy do not remain ideas in
Spenser's mind, as in Plato's, but become real personages
whose lives and battles he honours and tells in verse
so delicate, so gliding, and so steeped in the finer life
of poetry, that he has been called the poet's poet.
As the nobler Puritanism of the time is found in it, so
also are the other influences of the time. It goes
back, as men were doing then, to the old times for
its framework, to the Celtic story of Arthur and his
knights that Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Chaucer, and
Thomas Malory had loved. It represents the new
love of chivalry, the new love of classical learning,
the new delight in mystic theories of love and reli-
gion. It is full of those allegorical schemes in which
doctrines and heresies, virtues and vices were con-
trasted and personified. It takes up and uses the
popular legends of fairies, dwarfs, and giants, and
mingles them with the savages and the wonders of
the New World of which the voyagers told in every
company. Nearly the whole spirit of the English
Repaissance under Elizabeth, except its co^irser ;iud

t'i 1

rv.l

FROM 1559 TO 1603.

baser elements, is in its pages. Of anything im-
pure or u^iy, or violent, there is not a trace. Spenser
walks through the whole of this woven world of faerie

** With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace."

The first three books were finished in Ireland, whither
he had gone as secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton in
1580. Raleigh listened to them in 1589 at Kilcolman
Castle, among the alder shades of the river Mulla
that fed the lake below the castle. Delighted with the
poem, he brought Spenser to England. The books
were published in 1590, and the Queen, the Court, and
the whole of England soon shared in Raleigh's de-
light. It was the first great ideal poem that Eng-
land had produced, and it is the source of all our
modern poetry. It has never ceased to make poets
and it will not lose its power while our language lasts.
69. Spenser's Minor Poems. — The next year,
1 59 1, Spenser being still in England, collected his
smaller poems and published them. Among them J/J^M^/*
HubbanVs Tale is a bright imitation of Chaucer, and
the Tears of the Muses supports my statement that litera-
ture was looked on coldly previous to 1580 by the
complaint the Muses make in it of their subjects being
despised in England. Sidney had died in 1586, and
three of these poems bemoan his death. The others
are of slight importance, and the whole collection
was entitled Complaitiis. Returning to Ireland he
gave an account of his visit in Colin Cloufs come
Home again, 1591, and at last after more than a year's
pursuit won his second love for his wife, and found
with her perfi-ct happiness. A long series of Son?iets
records the progress of his wooing, and the Epitha-
laminm, his marriage hymn, is the most glorio'is
love-song in the English tongue. At the close of 1595
he brought to England in a second visit the last
tliree books of the Faerie Queen. The next year he
speut iu London and published these books with

'HI

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ENGLISH LITERATURE.

[CHAP,

his other poems, the Prothalamion on tne marriage of
Ldrd Worcester's daughters, and his Hymnes to Love
and Beauty, and to Hmvenly Love and Beauty^ in
which the love philosophy of Petrarca is enshrined.
The end of his life was sorrowful. In 1508 the Irish
rising took place, his castle was burnt, and he and his
family fled for their lives to England. Broken-hearted,
poor, but not forgoiten, the poet died in a London
tavern. All his fellows weftt with his body to the
grave where, close by Chaucer, he lies in Westminster
Abbey. London, *'his most kindly nurse," takes care
also of his dust, and England keeps him in her love.

70. Later Elizabethan Poetry, its Four
Phases. —Spenser reflected in his poems the spirit
of the Enghsh Renaissance. The other poetry of
Elizabeth's reign reflected the whole of English Life.
The best way to arrange it — omitting as yet the Drama
— is in an order parallel to the growth of the national
life, and the proof that it is the best way is that on
the whole such an order is a true chronological order.
First then, if we compare England after 1580, as
writers have often done, to an ardent youth, we shall
find in the poetry of the first years that followed that
date all the elements of youth. It is a poetry of love,
-and romance, and fancy. Secondly, and later on, when
Englishmen grew older in feeling, their unsettled
enthusiasm, which had flitted here and there in action
and literature over all kinds of subjects, settled down
into a steady enthusiasm for England itself. The
country entered on its early manhood, and parallel
with this there is the great outburst of historical
plays, and a set of poets whorp I will call the patriotic
poets. Thi?'dly, and later still, all enthusiasm died
down into a graver and more thoughtful national life,
and parallel with this are the tragedies of Shakespeare
and the poets whom I will call philosophical. These
three classes of Poets overlapped one another, and
grew up gradually, but on the whole their succession

ivj

FROM 1559 TO 1603.

represents a real succession of national thought and
emotion.

A fourth and separate phase does not represent, as
these do, a new national life, a new religion, and new
politics, but the despairing struggle of the old faith
against the new. There were numbers of men such
as Wordsworth has fmely sketched in old Norton
in the Doe of Ry /stone, who vainly strove in sorrow
against all the new national elements. Robert South-
well, of Norfolk, a Jesuit priest, was the poet of
Roman Catholic England. Imprisoned for three years,
racked ten times, and finally executed, he wrote during
his prison time his two longest poems, St. Peter's Com-
^.laint, and Mary Magdalen^ s Funeral Tears, and it
marks not only the large Roman Catholic element in
the country but also the strange contrasts of the
time that eleven editions of poems with these titles
were published between 1593 and 1600, at a time
when the Venus and Adonis of Shakespeare led the
way for a multitude of poems that sung of love and
delight and England's glory. To these we now turn.

71. The Love Poetry. — I have called it by this
name because in all its best work (to be found in the
first book of Mr. Palgrave's *' Golden Treasury ") it is
almost limited to that subject— the subject of youth.
It is chiefly composed in the form of songs and sonnets
and was published in miscellanies in and after 1600.
The mosjt famous of these, in which men like Nicholas
Breton, Henry Constable, W. Barnfield and others
wrote, are England's Helicon, and Davison! s Rhapsody
and the Passionate Pilgrim. The latter contained
some poems of Shakespeare, and he i'S by virtue of
these, and the songs in his Dramas, the best of these
lyriC writers. The songs themselves ure "old and
plain, and dallying with the innocence of love.*' They
have natural sweetness, great simplicity of speech,
and directness of statement. Some, as Shakespeare's,
possess^ " passionate reality ; " ot{aer$ a c^uuint pastor-

•■■'i
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ENGLISH LITER A TURK.

[chap.

alism like shepherd life in porcelain, such as Marlowe's
well known song, "Come live with me, and be my love;'*
others a splendour of love and beauty as in Lodge's
Song of Rosaline and Spenser's on his marriage.
The sonnets were written chiefly in series, and I have
already said that such writers are called amourists.
Such were Shakespeare's and the Amoretti of Spenser,
and those to Diana b Co^ table. They were some-
times mixed with Cj r ^dj; s and Ballatas after the
Italian manner, and the ^" ■ ' of these were a series by
Sir Philip Sidney. A number ' other sonnets and of
longer love poems were .written by the dramatists
before Shakespeare, by Peele and Greene and Mar-
lowe and Lodge, far the finest being the Hero and
Leander, which Marlowe left as a fragment to be
completed by Chapman. Mingled up with these were
small religious poems, the reflection of the Puritan and
the more religious Church element in English society.
They were collected under such titles as the Handfnl
of Jloney suckles ^ the Poor Widow's Mite^ Psalms and
Sonnets^ and there are some good things among
them written by William Hunni's.

In one Scotch poet, William Drummond of Haw-
thornden, the friend of Ben J on son, the love poet
and the religious poet were united. I mention him
here, though his work properly belongs to the reign
of James I., because his poetry really goes back in
spirit and feeling to this time. He cannot be counted
among the true Scottish poets. Drummond is entirely
Elizabethan and English, and he is worthy to be
named among the lyrical poets below Spenser and
Shakespeare. His love sonnets have as much grace as
Sidney's and less quaintness, his songs have often
the grave simplicity of Wyat, and his religious poem^,
especially one solemn sonnet on John the Baptist,
have a distant resemblance to the grandeur of Milton.

72.^ The Patriotic Poets. — Among all this poetry
9I" Jiomancej Qhivalry, I^eligion, an4 I^Qve, rose ^

il :i

iv.l

FROM 1559 TO 1603.

poetry which devoted itself to the glory of England.
It was chiefly historical, and as it may be said to have
had its germ in the Mirror of Magistrates^ so it had
its perfect flower in the historical drama cf Shake-
speare. Men had now begun to have a great pride
in England. She had stepped into the foremost rank,
had outwitted France, subdued internal foes, beaten
and humbled Spain on every sea. Hence the history
of the land became precious, and the very rivers
and hills and plains honourable, and to be sung and
praised in verse. This poetic impulse is best repre
sented in the works of three men — William Warn e^v..
Samuel Daniel, and Michael Drayton. Born wiLV'n
a few years of each other, about 1560, they all )' ''ci
beyond the century, and the national poetry they sti
on foot lasted when the romantic poetry died.

William Warner's great book was Albion's England^
1586, a history of England in verse from the Deluge
to Queen Elizabeth. It is clever, humorous, crowded
with stories, and runs to 10,000 lines. Its popularity
was great, and the English in which it was written
deserved it. Such stories as Argentile and Ctiran^
and the Patient Countess^ prove him to have had a
true and pathetic vein of poetry. His English is not
however better than that of " well-languaged Danie V*
who among tragedies and pastoral comedies and
poems of pure fancy wrote in verse a prosaic History
of the Civil Wars, ^595? ^s we have already found
him writing history in prose. Spenser saw in him a
new *' shepherd" of poetry who did far surpass the
others, and Coleridge says that the style of his
Hymen's Triumph may be declared '* imperishable
English/' Of the three the greatest poet was Drayton.
Two historical poems are his work — the Civil Wars
of Edward II. and the Barons ^ and England's If eroical
Epistles, 1598. Not content with these, he set him-
self to glorify the whole of his land in the Polyolbijn,
thirty bopks^ and niore than 30,000 lines, l\ \^ ^

<«
*

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ENGLISH LITERATURE.

[chap.

i .11'^

lir

description in Alexandrines of the ** tracts, moi^ntains,
forests, and other parts of this renowned isle of
Britain, with intermixture of the most remarkable
stories, antiquities, wonders, pleasures, and commo-
dities of the same, digested into a poem." It was
not a success, though it deserved success. Its
great length was against it, but the real reason was
that this kind of poetry had had its day. It r.ppeared
in 1 6 13, in James I.'s reign.

' 73. Philosophical Poets. — Before that time a
change had come. As the patriotic poets came
after the romantic, so the romantic were followed
by the philosophical poets. The youth and early
manhood of the Elizabethan poetry passed, about

1600, into its thoughtful manhood. The land was
settled; enterprise ceased to be the first thing; men
sat down to think, and in poetry questions of religious
and political philosophy were treated with "senten-
tious reasoning, grave, subtle, and condensed." Shake-
speare, in his passage from comedy to tragedy, in

1 60 1, represents this change. The two poets who re-
present it are Sir Jno. Davies and Fulke Greville,
Lord Brooke. In Davies himself we find an instance
of it. His earlier poem of the Orchestra, ^59^, in
which the whole world is explained as a dance, is as
gay and bright as Spenser. His later poem, 1599, is
compact and vigorous reasoning, for the most part
without fancy. Its very title, Nosce te ipsum — Know
Thyself — and its divisions, i. " On humane learning,"
2. ^' The immortality of the soul " — mark the altera-
tion. Two little poems, one of Bacon's, on the
Life of Man, as a bubble, and one of Sir Henry
Wotton's, on the Character of a Happy Life, are in-
stances of the same change. It is still more marked
in Lord Brooke's long, obscure poems On Lliiman
Learnings on Wars, on Monarchy, and on Religion.
They are political and historical treatises, not poems,
^pd all ii> them, says Lamb, "is made frozen and

tv.l /veOiW 1559 r(9 1603. 77

rigid by intellect." Apart from poetry, " they are
worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit
on political science which was to produce the riper
£peculations of Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke." We
turn row to the Drama, which includes all these
different forms of poetry.

THE DRAMA.

74. Early Dramatic Representation in Eng-
land. — The drama, as in Greece, so in England, began
in religion. In early times none but the clergy could
read the stories of their religion, and it was not the
custom to deliver sermons to the people. It was neces- .
sary to instruct uneducated men in t'le history of
the Bible, the Christian faith, the lives of the Saints
and Martyrs. Hence the Church set on foot
miracle plays and mysteries. We find the first of
these about mo, when Geoffrey, afterwards Abbot of
St. Albans, prepared his miracle play of St. Catherine
for acting. Such plays became more frequent from
thf* time of Henry II., and they were so comimon
m Chaucer's time that they were the resort of idle
gossips in Lent. The wife of Bath went to ** plays of
miracles and marriages." They were acted not only
by the clergy, but by the laity. About the year
1268 the town guilds began to take them into their
own hands, and acted complete sets of plays, setting
forth the whole of Scripture history from the Creation
to the Day of Judgment. Each guild took one play
in the set. They lasted sometimes three days, some-
times eight, and were represented on a great movable
stage on wheels in the open spaces of the towns. Of
these sets we have three remaining, the Towneley,
Coventry and Chester plays : 1300 — 1600. The first
set has 32, the second 42, and the third 25 plays. %

75. The Miracle Play was a representation of
some portioL of Scripture history, or of thfc life oi scmq;

(til

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ENGLISH LITER A WRB.

(CttAP.

Saint of the Church. The Mystery was a represen-
tation of any portion of the New Testament history
concerned with a mysterious subject, such as the
Incarnation, the Atonement or the Resurrection. It
has been attempted to distinguish these more particu*
larly, but they are mingled together in England
into one. From the towns they went to the Court
and the houses of nobles. The Kings kept players
of them, and we know that exhibiting Scripture plays
at great festivals was part of the domestic regulations
of the great houses, and that it was the Chaplain's
business to write them. Their "Dumb Show" and
their "Chorus" leave their trace in the regular drama.
We cannot say that the modern drama arose after
them, for it came in before they died out in England.
They were still acted in Chester in 1577, and in
Coventry in 1580.

76. The Morality was the next step to these, and
in it we come to a representation which is closely con-
nected with the drama. It was a play in which the
characters were the Vices and Virtues, with the
addition afterwards of allegorical personages, such as
Riches, Good Deeds, Confessior, Death, and any
human condition or quality needed for the play.
These characters were brought together in a rough
story, at the end of which Virtue triumphed, or some
moral principle was established. The dramatic fool
grew up in the Moralities out of a personage called
" The Vice," and the humorous element was intro-
duced by the retaining of " The Devil " from the
Miracle play and by making the Vice torment him.
They were continually represented, but becoming
coarser were finally supplanted by the regular drama
about the end of Elizabeth's reign.

77. The Transition between these and the
regular Drama is not hard to trace. The Virtues
and Vices were dull because they stirred no human
sympathy. Historical characters were therefore then

tv.l

hS'OM 1559 TO 1603.

the

rtues
iiman
then

introxluced, who were celebrated for a virtue or a vice ;
Brutus represented palriotism, Aristides represented
justice J or, as in Bale's Kynge Johan, historical and
allegorical personages were mixed together. The
transition was hastened by the impulse of the Re-
formation. The religious struggle came so home to
men's hearts that they were not satisfied with subjects
dr.twn from the past, and the Morality was used to
support the Catholic or the Protestant side. Real men
and women were shown under the thin cloaks of its
allegorical characters ; the vices and the follies of the
time were displayed. It was the origin of satiric
comedy. The stage was becoming a living power
when this began. The excitement of the audience
was now very different from that felt in listening to
Virtues and Vices, and a demand arose for a comedy
and tragedy which should picture human life in all
its forms. The Interludes of John Heywood, most
of which were written for Court representation in
Henry VIII.'s time 1530, 1540, represent this further
transition. They differed from the Morality in
that most of the characters were drawn from real
life, but they retained " the Vice '' as a personage.
The Interlude — a short, humorous piece, to be acted
in the midst of the Morality for the amusement of
the people — had been frequently used, but Heywood
isolated it from the Morality and made of it a kind
of farce. Out of it we may say grew English comedy.
78. The First Stage of the regular Drama
begins with the first English comedy, Ralph Roister
Bolster, written by Nicholas Udall, master of Eton,
known to have been acted before 1551, but not
published till 1566. It is our earliest picture of
London manners ; the characters are well draw-n ; it
is divided into regular acts and scenes and is made
in rime. The first English tragedy is Gorboduc^
written by Sackrille and Norton and represented in
1562. The story was taken from British legend, and

it
%, 1

jf.

"I*

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ENGLISH LITERATURE.

[CHAP.

the characters are gravely sustained. But the piece
was heavy and too solemn for the audience, and
Richard Edwards by mixing tragic and comic ele-
ments together in his r)lay, Damon aJid Pythias^
acted about 1564, succeeded better. These two gave
the impulse to a number of dramas from classical
and modern story, which were acted at the Universi-
ties, Inns of Court, and the Court up to 1580, when
the drama, having gone through its boyhood, entered
on a vigorous manhood. More than fifty-two dramas,
so quick was their production, are known to have
been acted up to this time. Some were translated
from the Greek, as the Jocasta from Euripides, and
others from the Italian, as the Supposes from Ariosto,
both by the same author, George Gascoigne, already
mentioned as a satirist. These were acted in 1566.

79. The Theatre.- — There was as yet no theatre.
A patent was given in 1574 to the Earl of Leicester's
servants to act plays in any town in England, and
they built in 1576 the Blackfriars Theatre. In the
same year two others were set up in the fields about
Shoreditch—** The Theatre" and "The Curtain." The
Globe Theatre, built for Shakespeare and his fellows
in 1599, may stand as a type of the rest. In the form
of a hexagon outside, it was circular within and open
to the weather, except above the stage. The play began
at three o'clock ; the nobles and ladies sat in boxes or
in stools on the stage, the people stood in the pit or
yard. The stage itself, strewn with rushes, was a naked
room with a blanket for a curtain. Wooden imitations
of animals, towers, woods, etc., were all the scenery
u'sed, and a board, stating the place of action, was
hung out from the top when the scene changed. Boys
acted the female parts. It was only after the restora-
tion that movable scenery and actresses were intro-
duced. No " pencil's aid " supplied the landscape of
Shakespeare's plays. The forest of Arden, the castle
gf Duncan, were " seen only by the intellectual eye."

IV^ FROM ISS9 TO 1603. 8|

So. The Second Stage of the Drama ranges
from 1580 to 1596. It includes the work of Lyly
(author of the Euphues), the plays of Peele, Greene,
Lodge. Marlowe, Kyd, Munday, Chettle, Nash, and
the earliest works of Shakespeare. During this time
we know that more than 100 different plays were per-
formed by four out of the eleven companies ; so swift
and plentiful was their production. They were written
in prose, and in rime, and in blank verse mixed
with prose and rime. Prose and rime prevailed
before 1587, when Marlowe in his play of Tatnburlaine
made blank verse the fashion. John Lyly illustrates
the three methods, for he wrote seven plays in prose,
one in rime, and one (after Tamburlaine) in blank
verse. Some beautiful little songs scattered through
them are the forerunners of the songs with which
Shakespeare made his dramas bright, and the witty
*' quips and cranks," repartees, and similes cf their fan-
tastic prose dialogue were the school of Shakespeare's
prose dialogue. Peele, Greene, and Marlowe
are the three important names of the period. They
are the first in whose hands the play of human
passion and action is expressed with any true dramatic
etfect. Peele and Greene make their characters act
on, and draw out, one another in the several scenes,
but they have no power of making a plot, or of work-
ing out their plays, scene by scene, to a natural
conclusion. They are, in one word, without art, and
their characters, even when they talk in good poetry,
are neither natural nor simple.

Christopher Marlowe, on the other hand, rose
by degrees and easily into mastery of his art. The
ditference between the unequal and violent action
and thought of his Doctor Fausttis, and the quiet
and orderly progression to its end of the play of
Eihvai'd Jl.f is all the more remarkable when we
know that he died at thirty. Though less than
Shakespeare, he was worthy to precede hun. As he

^^ii

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ENGLISH LITER A TURE.

[CHAP.

may be said to have invented and made the verse of
the drama, so he created the EngUsh tragic drama.
His plays are wrought with art to their end, his
characters are sharply and Ltrongly outlined. Each
play illustrates one ruling passion, in its growth, its .
power, and its extremes. Tamhiirlaine paints the
desire of universal empire; \kiQ Jew of Malta ^ the pas-
sions of greed and hatred ; Doctor Faiistus^ the struggle
and failure of man to possess all knowledge and all
pleasure without toil and. without law; Edward IL^
the misery of weakness and the agony of a king's ruin.
Marlowe's verse is "mighty," his poetry strong and weak
alike with passionate feeling, and expressed with a tur-
bulent magnificence of words and images, the fault of
which is a very great want of temperance. It reflects
his life and the lives of those with whom he lived. Mar-
lowe lived and died an irreligious, imaginative, tender-
hearted, licentious poet. Peele and Greene lived an
even more riotous life and died as miserably, and they
are examples of a crowd of other dramatists who passed
their lives between the theatre, the wine-shop, and
the prison. Their drama, in which we see the better
side of the men, had all the marks of a wild youth.
It was daring, full of strong but unequal life, romantic,
sometimes savage, often tender, always exaggerated in
its treatment and expression of the human passions.
If it had no moderation, it had no tame dulness. If
it w^as coarse, it was powerful, and it was above all
national. It was a time full of strange contrasts, a
time of fiery action and of sentimental contempla
tion ; a time of fancy and chivalry, indelicacy and
buffoonery; of great national adventure and private
brawls, of literary quiet and polemic thought ; of faith
and infidelity — and the whole of it is painted with
truth, but with too glaring colours, in the dram^a of
these men.

8t. William Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist
of the world, now took up the work of Marlowe, ai:d in

nr.]

FROM 1559 TO 1603.

twenty-eight years made the drama represent the whole
of human life. He was born April 26, 1564, the son
of a comfortable burgess of Stratford-on-Avon. While
he was still young his lather fell into poverty, and an
interrupted education left him an inferior scholar.
" He had small Latin and less Greek." But by dmt of
genius and by living in a society in which all sorts of in-
formation were attainable, he became an accompHshed
man. The story told of his deer-stealing in Charlecote
woods is without proof, but it is likely that his youth
was wild and passionate. At nineteen, he married
Ann Hathaway, seven years older than himself, and
was probably unhappy with her. For this reason, or
from poverty, or from the driving of the genius that
led him to the stage, he left Stratford about 15S6-7,
and came to London at the age of twenty-two years,
and falling in with Marlowe, Greene and the rest, be-
came an actor and play-wright, and may have lived
their unrestrained and riotous life for some years.

82. His First Period. — It is probable that before
leaving Stratford he had sketched a part at least
of his Venus and Adonis. It is full of the country
sights and sounds, of the ways of birds and animals,
such as he saw when wandering in Charlecote woods.
Its rich and overladen poetry and its warm colouring
made him, when it w^as published in 1593, at once the
favourite of men like Lord Southampton and lifted him
into fame. But before that date he had done work for
the stage by touching up old plays, and writing new
ones. We seem to trace his "prentice hand" in many
dramas of the time, but the first he is usually thought to
have retouched is Tiius AndroniaiSy and some time
after the First Part of Henry VI, Lovers Labour's
Lost the first of his original plays, in which he
quizzed and excelled the Euphuists in wit, was fol-
lowed by the raj)id farce of the Comedy of Erf'ors.
Out of these frolics of intellect and action he passed
into pure poetry in the Alidsunimer-Nig/it's Jjream^

F 2

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EN GUSH LITERATURE,

[chap.

and mingled into fantastic beauty the classic legend,
the mediaeval fairyland, and the clownish life of the
English mechanic. Italian story then laid its charm
upon him, and the Two Gentlemen of Verona preceded
the southern glow of passion in Romeo and Juliet^ in
which he first reached tragic power. They complete,
with Lovds Labour's Won, afterwards recast as A/l's
Weil that Ends Well, the love plays of his early
period. We may perhaps add to them the second
act of an older play, Edward III. We should cer-
tainly read along with them, as belonging to the same
passionate time, his Rape of Lucrece, a poem finally
printed in 1594, one year later than the Venus and
Adonis. >

The same poetic succession we have traced in the
poets is now found in Shakespeare. The patriotic
feeUng of England, also represented in Marlowe and
Peele, now seized on him, and he turned from love to
begin his great series of historical plays with Richard
JL, 1593 — 4. Richard III, followed quickly. To
introduce it and to complete the subject, he recast ^he
Second and Third Parts of Hejiry VI. (written by
some unknown authors) and ended his first period by
King John ; five plays in a little more than two years.

83. His Second Period, 1596 — 1602. — In the
Mej'chantof Fi:*///'^^ Shakespeare reached entire mastery
over his art. A mingled woof of tragic and comic
threads is brought to its highest point of colour when
Portia' and Shylock meet in court. Pure comedy fol-
lowed in his retouch of the old laming of the Shreiv^
and all the wit of the world mixed with noble history
met nex<- in the three comedies of Falstaff, the first
and becond Hciwy IV, and the Merry Wives of Wind-
so^. The historical plays were then closed with
Hcn/y v.; !i splendid ''Iramatic song to the glory of
Engf IT vi. The Globe theatre, in which he was one of
the p^opietors, was built in 1599. In the comedies
he wroie Jo.; it Shakespeare turned to write of love

IV.]

FROM 1559 TO 1603,

again, not to touch its deeper passion as before but to
play with it in all its lighter phases. The flashing
dialogue of Much Ado About Nothing was followed by
the far-off forest world of As You Like It, where
'* the time fleets carelessly," and Rosalind's character
is the play. Amid all its gracious lightness steals in
a new element, and the melancholy of Jaques is the
first touch we have of the older Shakspere who
had " gained his experience, and whose experience
had made him sad." As yet it was but a touch ;
Twelfth Night shows no trace of it, though the play
that followed, AiTx Well That Ends Well^ again
strikes a sadder note. We find this sadness fully
grown in the later sonnets, which are said to have been
finished about 1602. They were published in 1609.

Shakespeare's life changed now, and his mind
changed with it. He had grown wealthy during this
period, famous, and loved by society. He was the friend
of the Earls of Southampton and Essex, and William
Herbert, Lord Pembroke. The Queen patronized
him ; all the best literary society was his own. He
had rescued his father from poverty, bought the best
house in Stratford and much land, and was a man of
wealth and comfort. Suddenly all his life seems to
have grown dark. His best friends fell into ^ ^n
Essex perished on the scaffold, Southampton we
the Tower, Pembroke was banished from the C
he may himself, as some have thought, have beei
cerned in the rising of Essex. Added to this, w
conjecture, from the imaginative pageantry j
sonnets, that he had unwisely loved, and been betrayed
in his love by a dear friend. Disgust of his profes-
sion as an actor and public and private ill weighed
heavily on him, and in darkness of spirit, he retired
from the business of the theatre, and passed from
comedy to write of the sterner side of the world, to
tell the tragedy of mankind.

84. His Third Period, 1602— x5o8, begins with

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the last days of Queen Elizabeth. It contains all the
great tragedies, and opens with the fate of Hamlet,
who felt, like the poet himself, that "the time was
out of joint." Hamlet^ the dreamer, may well repre-
sent Shakespeare as he stood aside from the crash that
overwhelmed his friends, and thought on the chan^^ing
world. I'he tragi-comedy of Measure for Measure
was next written and is tragic in thought throughout.
Julius CcBsar, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Troilus and
Crcssida (finished from an incomplete work of his
youth), Antony and Cleopati'a, Coriolanus, Izmon,
(only in part his own), were all written in these five
years. The darker sins of men, the unpitying fate
which slowly gathers round and falls on men, the
avenging wrath of conscience, the cruelty and punish-
ment of weakness, the treachery, lust, jealousy,
ingratitude, mndness of men, the follies of the great
and the fickleness of the mob, are all, with a thousand
otlier varying moods and passions, pi.inted, and felt as
his own while he painted them, during this stern time.
85. His Fourth Period, 1608— 1613. — As Shake*
speare wrote of these things he passed out of them,
and his last days ar - full of the gentle and loving calm
of one who has known sin and sorrow and fate but
has risen above them into peaceful victory. Like his
great contemporary Bacon, he left the world and his
own evil time behind him, and with the same quiet
dignity sought the innocence and stillness of country
life. The country breathes through all the dramas of
this time. The flov/ers Perdita gathers in Wiuter's
Tale, the frolic of the sheep-shearing, he may have
seen in the Stratford meadows; the song of Fidele in
Cymbelifie is written by one who already feared no
more the frown of the great, nor slander, nor censure
rash, and was looking forward to the time when men
fihould say of him —

** Quiet consummation have ;
Avid renowned he thv irravfi I *

iv.l

FROM 1559 TO 1603.

Shakespeare probably left London in 1609, and lived
in the house he had bought at Stratford- on- A von.
lie was reconciled, it is said, to his wife, and the plays
he v.Tites speak of domestic peace and forgiveness.
The story of Marina, which he left unfinished, and
which two later writers expanded into the play of
'Pericles, is the first of his closing series of dramas.
The Two Noble Kinsmcji of Fletcher, a great part of
which is now, on doubtful grounds I think, attributed to
Shakespeare, and in which the poet sought the inspira-
tion of Chaucer, would belong to this period. Cymbe-
liiie^ IVinfer^s Tale, and the Tempest, bring his history
up to 1612, and in the next year he closed his poetic
life by writing, with Fletcher, Henry VIII. All these
belong to and praise forgiveness, and it seems, if we
may conjecture, that looking back on all the wrong
he had suffered and on all that he had done, Shake-
speare could say in the forgiveness he gave 10 men, and
in the forgiveness he sought from God, the words he
had written in earlier days: *'The quality of mercy is
not strained." For three years he kept silence, and
then, on the 23rd of April, 1616, on his fifty-second
birthday, he died*

86. His work. — We cah only guess with regard to
Shakespeare's life ; we can only guers with regard to his
character. It has been tried to find out what he was
from his sonnets, and from his plays, but every attempt
seems to be a failure. We cannot lay our hand or
anything and say for certain that it was spoken by
Shakespeare out of his own character. The most
personal thing in all his writings is one that has
been scarcely noticed. It is the Epilogue to the Tem-
pest^ and if it be, as is most probable, the last thing
he ever wrote, then its cry for forgiveness, its tale
of inward sorrow only to be relieved by prayer, give
us some dim insiijht into how the silence of those
three years was passed ; while its declaration of his
aim in writing "which was to please"— the true defini-

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ENGLISH LITER A TV RE.

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tion of an artist's aim — should make us very cautious in
our efforts to define his character from his works.
Shakespeare made men and women whose dramatic
action on each other, and towards a catastrophe, was
intended to please the pubHc, not to reveal himself.
He was altogether, from end to end, an artist, and
the greatest artist the modern world has known. No
commentary on his writings, no guesses about his life
or character, are worth much which do not rest on
this canon as their foundation — What he did, thought,
learnea, and felt, he did, thought, learned, and felt as
an artist. And he was never less the artist, through
all the changes of the time. Fully influenced, as we
see in Hamlet he was, by the graver and more philo-
sophic cast of thought of the later time of Elizabeth ;
passing on into the reign of James I., when pedantry
took the place of gaiety, and sensual the place of
imaginative love in the drama, and artificial art the
place of that art which itself is nature ; he preserves
to the last the natural passion, the simple tenderness,
the sweetness, grace, and fire of the youthful EJiza-
bethan poetry The Wintcr''s Tale is as lovely a love
^tory diS Romeo and y^ulid, the 7>/;//ri"/is more instinct
with imagination and as great in fancy as the Mid-
summer-Ntg/ifs Dream, and yet there are fully twenty
years between them. The only change is in the increase
of power and in a closer and graver grasp of human
nature. In this unchangeableness of pure art-power
Shakespeare stands entirely alone. Around him the
whole tone and manner of the drama altered for the
worse as his life went on, but his work grew to the close
in strength and beauty.

87. The Decay of the Drama begins while
Shakespeare is alive. At first one can scarcely call it
decay, it was so magnificent. For it began with " rare
Ben Jonson," His first play, in its very title, Every
Man in his Humour^ 159^ 98, enables us to say in
wli^t the first step of this detay consisted. The drama

IV.]

PkOM 1559 to 1^3.

in Shakespeare's hands had been the painting of the
whole of human natuie, the painting of characters as
they were built up by their natural bent, and by the
play of circumstance upon them. The drama, in Ben
Jonson's hands, was the painting of that particular
human nature which he saw in his own age ; and his
characters are not men and women as they are, but as
they may become when they are mastered by a special
bias of the mind or humour. " The Manners, now
called Humours, feed the Stage," says Jonson himself.
Every Man in his Humour was followed by Every
Man out of his Humour^ and by Cynthia's Revels,
written to satirize the courtiers. The fierce satire of
these plays brought the town down upon him, and
he replied to their " noise " in the Poetaster^ in which
Dekker and Marston were satirized. Dekker answered
with the Satiro-AfastiXj a bitter parody on the Poet-
aster, in which he did not spare Jonson's bodily defects.
The staring Leviathan, as he calls Jonson, is not a
very untrue description. Silent then for two yeais, he
reappeared with the tragedy of Sejanus, and shortly
after produced three splendid comedies in James I.'s
reign, Volpone the Fox, 1 he Silent Woman, and 77ie
Alchemist, 1605 o-io. The first is the finest thing
he ever did, as great in power as it is in the interest
and skill of its plot; the second is chiefly valuable as
a picture of English life in high society ; the third is
full to weariness of Jonson's obscure learning, but its
character of Sir Epicure Mammon redeems it. In
161 1 his Catilifie appeared, and eight years after
he was made Poet Laureate. Soon he became poor
and palsy stricken, but his genius did not decay. The
most graceful and tender thing he ever wrote was
written in his old age His pastoral drama The Sad
Shepherd proves that, l:ke Shakespeare, Jonson grew
kinder and gentler as he grew near to death, and
death took him in 1637. He was a great man. The
power of the young Elizabethan age belonged to him ;

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ENGLISH LITERATURE.

[chap.

and he stands far below, but still worthily by, Shake-
speare, ** a robust, surly, and observing dramatist."

88. Masques. — Rugged as Jonson was, he could
turn to light and graceful work, and it is with his name
that we connect the Masques. Masques were dramatic
representations made for a fes-tive occasion, with a re-
ference to the persons present and the occasion. Their
personages were allegorical. They admitted of dialogue,
music, singing, and dancing, combined by the use of
some ingenious f^ble into a whole. They were made
and performed for the court and the houses of the
nobles, and the scenery was as gorgeous and varied
as the scenery of the playhouse proper was poor and
unchanging. Arriving for the first time at any repute
in Henry VIII.'s time, they reached splendour under
James and Charles I. Great men took part in them:
When Ben Jonson wrote them, Inigo Jones made the
scenery, and Lawes the music, and Lord Bacon, White-
lock, and Selden sat in committee for the last great
masque presented to Charles. Milton himself made
them worthier by writing Comtis^ and their scenic deco-
ration was soon introduced into the regular theatres.

89. Beaumont and Fletcher worked together,
but out of more than fifty plays, all written in James
I.'s reign, not more than fourteen were shared in by
Beaumont, who died at the age of thirty in 16 16.
Fletcher survived him, and died in 1625. Both were
of gentle birth. Beaumont, where we can trace his
work, is weightier and more dignified than his comrade,
but Fletcher was the better poet. Fletcher wrote
rapidly, but his imagination worked slowly. Their
PhilasterdiXid Thierry and Theodoret are fine examples
of their tragic power. Y\Q\.Q\\Q.r^^ Faithful Shepherdess
is full of lovely poetry, and both are masters of
grace, and pathos and style. They enfeebled the
blank verse of the drama, while they rendered it sweeter
by using feminine endings and adding an eleventh
syllable with great frequency. This gave freedom and

IV.]

FROM 1559 '^0 1603.

»t

elasticity to their verse and was suited to the dialogue
of comedy, but it lowered the dignity of their tragedy.
The two men mark a change in politics and society
from Shakespeare's time. Shakespeare's loyalty is con-
stitutional ; Beaumont and Fletcher are blind supporters
of James I.'s invention of the divine right of kings.
Siiakespeare's society was on the whole decent, and it
is so in his plays. Beaumont and Fletcher are
"studiously indecent." In contrast to them Shakespeare
is as white as snow. Shakespeare's men are of the type
of Sidney and Raleigh, Burleigh and Drake. The men
of these two writers represent the " young bloods ; "
of the Stuart Court ; and even the best of theii older
and graver men are base and foul in thought. Their
women are either monsters of badness or of goodness.
When they paint a good woman (two or three at most
being excepted), she is beyond nature. The fact is
that the high art which in Shakespeare sought to give a
noble pleasure by being true to human nature in its
natural aspects, sank now into the baser art which
wished to excite, at any cost, the passions of the
audience by representing human nature in unnatural
aspects.

90. In Massinger and Ford this evil is just as
plainly marked. Massinger s first dated play was the
Virgm Alartyr, 1620. He lived poor, and died "a
stranger," in 1639. I^ these twenty years he wrote
thirty-seven plays, of which the Neiif Way to Pay
Old Debts is the best known by its character of
Sir Giles Overreach. No writer is fouler in language,
and there is a want of unity of impression both in his
plots and in his characters. He often sacrifices art to
effect, and " unlike Shakespeare, seems often to de-
spise his own characters." On the other hand, his
versification and language are flexible and strong.
*' and seem to rise out of the passions he describes."
He speaks the tongue of real life. His men and
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and Fletcher, and with all hi.; coarseness, he is the
most moral of the secondary dramatists. Nowhere is
his work so great as when he represents the brave man
struggling through trial to victory, the pure wonian
suffering for the sake of truth and love ; or when he
describes the terrors that conscience brings on in-
justice and cruelty. John Ford, his contemporary,
published his first play, the Lover's Melancholy^ in
1629, and five years after, Perkin Warbeck^ the best
historical drama after Shakespeare. Between these
dates appeared others, of which the best is the Broken
Heart, He carried to an extreme the tendency of
the drama to unnatural and horrible subjects, but he
did so with very great power. He has no comic
humour, but no man has described better the worn
and tortured human heart.

91. Webster and other Dramatists.— Higher
as a poet, and possessing the same power as Ford,
though not the same exquisite tenderness, was John
Webster, whose best drama, The Duehess of Malfi,
was acted in 16 16. Vittoria Corombona was printed
ill 161 2, and was followed by the Devils Law
Case, Appius and Virginia^ and others. Webster's
peculiar power of creating ghastly horror is re-
deemed from sensationalism by his poetic insight.
His imagination easily saw, and expressed in short and
intense lines, the inmost thoughts and feelings of
characters whom he represents as wrought on by
misery, or crime, or remorse, at their very highest
point of passion. In his worst characters there is some
redeeming touch, and this poetic pity brings him nearer
to Shakespeare than the rest. He is also neither so
coarse, nor so great a king worshipper, nor so irreligious
as the others. We seem to taste the Puritan in his
work. Two comedies Westward Ho! and North-
ward Ho ! remarkable for the light they throw on the
manners of the time, were written by him along wiih
Thomas Dekkek. George Chapman is the only one of

IV.]

FROM ISS9 TO 1603.

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the later Elizabethan dramatists who kept the old fire
of Marlowe, though he never had the naturalness or
temperance which lifted Shakespeare far beyond Mar-
lowe. The same power which we have seen in his
translation of Homer is to be found in his plays.
The mingling of intellectual power with imagination,
swollen violence of words and images wilh tender and
natural and often splendid passages, is entirely in the
earlier Elizabethan manner. He too, like Marlowe, to
quote his own line, " hurled instinctive fire about the
world." These were the greatest names auiong a
crowd of dramatists. We can only mention John
Marston, Heniy Glapthorne, Richard Brome, William
Rowley, Thomas Middleton, Cyril Tourneur, and
Thomas Heywood. Of these, " all of whom," says
Lamb, " spoke nearly the same language, and had a
set of moral feelings and notions in common," James
Shirley is the last. He lived till 1666. In him the
fire and passion of the old time passes away, but some
of the delicate poetry remains, and in him the Eliza-
bethan drama dies. In 164a, the theatres were closed
during the calamitous times of the Civil War. Strolling
players managed to exist with difficulty, and against
the law, till 1656, when Sir William Davenant had
his opera of the Siege of Rhodes acted in London.
It was the beginning of a new drama, in every point
but impurity different from the old, and four years
after at the Restoration it broke loose from the prison
of Puritanism to indulge in a shameless licence.

In this rapid sketch of the Drama in England we
have been carried on beyond the death of Elizabeth
to the date of the Restoration. It was necessary, be-
cause it keeps the whole story together. We now return
to the time that followed the accession of James I.

Note. — The dates and aiiangement of Shakespeare's plays
^iven above are only tentative. They are so placed by the con-
jectuers of the latest criticism, and the conjectures wait foi
proof. Julius Cissar, e.g., is now dated 1601. ,

•I

ENGLISH UTERA TURE.

[CHAP.

CHAPTER V.

FROM Elizabeth's death to the restoration.

1603-1660.

Lord Bacon, Advamement of Learning (two books), 1605 ;
expanded into nine Latin books, 1623 ; Noz'um Ort^-atton
(first sketch), 1607 ; finished, 1620 ; Historia naturalis H
expentnentulis^ 1 ■122. These three form the Instauratio
Magna ; last edition of Essays, 1625 ; dies 1626- — Giles
Fletcher's Temptation of Christ, 1610 — W. Browne's
Britannia's Pastorals, 1613, 16- —J. Donne's P>euis and
Satires, 1613-1635.-G. Wither, Poems; 14131622-1641.
— Gedrge Herbert, Temple, 1631— Jt^remy Taylor, Liberty of
Prophesying, 1647.— K. Herri.k, Hesperides, 1648—
Hobbe's Leviathan, 1651. — T. Fuller's Church History,
1656._J. Milton, born 1608 ; First Poem, 1626 ; H Allegro,
1632 ; Comus and Lycidas, 1634-1637 ; Prose writings and
most of the Sonnets, 1640-1660 ; Paradise Lost, 1667 ;
Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, 1671 J dies 1674-
- Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, 1678-1684.

92. The Decline of the Elizabethan Litera-
ture.^— Prose. — We have traced in the last chapter
the decline of the drama of Elizabeth up to the date
of the Restoration. All poetry suffered in the same
way after the reign of James I. It became fantastic
in style and overwrought in thought. It was diffubC,
or violent, in expression. Prose literature^ on the con-
trary, gradually grew into greater excellence, spread
itself over larger fields of thought, and took up a
greater variety of subjects. The grave national
struggle, while it lessened poetical, increased prose
literature. The painHng of short ^^ Characters'^ was
begun by Sir T. Overbury's book in 16 14, and car-
ried on by John Earle and Joseph Hall, afterwards
made bishops. They mark the interest in individual
life which now began to arise, and which soon took

v.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATIObT.

form in Bioi^raphy. Thomas Fuller's Holy and
Profane State^ 1642, added to sketches of *' charac-
ters,** illustrations of them in the lives of famous per-
sons, and in 1662 his Worthies of England %\\\\ further
set on foot the literature ©f Bioj^raphy. 2 he historical
literature which we have noticed already in the works
of Raleigh and Bacon was carried on by Fuller in his
CliU'Tch History of Britain^ 1656. He is a quaint and
delightful writer ; good sense, piety, afid inventive wit
are woven together in his work. We may place to-
gether Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy^ 16.21,
and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, 1642, and
Pseiidodoxia as books which treat of miscellaneous
subjects in a witty and learned fashion, but without
any true scholarship. This kind of writing was greatly
increased by the setting up of libraries where men
dipped into every kind of literature. It was in James
I.'s reign that Sir Thomas Bod ley established the
Bodleian at Oxford, and Sir Robert Cotton a library
now placed in the British Museum. A number of
bmall writers took part in the Puritan and Church
controversies, among whom William Prynne, a violent
Puritan, deserves to be mentioned for his Histrio-
Mastix, or Scourge of Players.

But there were others on each side v/ho rose above
the war of party into the calm air of spiritual religion,
Jrremy Taylor at the close of Charles I.'s reign
published his Great Exemplar and his Holy Living
and Holy Dying, and shortly afterwards his Sermo?is.
They had been preceded in 1647 ^Y his Liberty of
Prophesying, in which he claimed full freedom of
Biblical interpretation as the right of all, and asked
for only one standard of faith — the Apostles' Creed.
His work is especially literary. Weighty with argu-
ment, his sermons and books of devotion are still
read among us for their sweet and deep devotion, for
their rapidly flowing and poetic eloquence. Towards
the end of the Civil Wars Richard Baxter, the great

I n

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EATGL/S// UTERA TURE.

[CHAf.

Pnritan writer, wrocC a good book which, as it still re-
mains a household book in England, takes its place
in literature. There are few cottages which do not
possess a copy of The Saint's Everlasting Rest ; and
there are few parsonc^ges in England in which Robert
liEiGHTON's book on the Epistle of St. Peter is not
also to be found. Leighton died in 1684, Archbishop
of Glasgow. In philosoi)hi(: literature I have already
si)oken of Bacon, and of the political writers, such as
Hobbes and Harrington, who wrote during the Com-
monwealth, I will speak hereafter in their proper
place.

Miscellaneous writing is further represented in the
literature of travel by George Sandys and Thomas Cor-
yat. Coryafs Crudities, 161 1, describes his journey
through France and Italy; Sandys' book, 1615, a jour-
ney to the East. We have also from abroad some in-
teresting letters from Sir Henry Wotton, and he gave
Milton introductions to famous men in Italy. Wotton's
quaint and pleasant friend Izaak Walton closes the
list of these pre Restoration writers with the Compleat
Angler, 1653, a book which resembles in its quaint
and garrulous style the rustic scenery and prattling
rivers that it celebrates, and marks the quiet interest
in the country which now began to grow up in England.

The style of all these writers links them to the age
of Elizabeth. It did not follow the weighty gravity
of Hooker, or the balanced calm and splendour of
Bacon but rather the witty quaintness of Lyly and
of Sydney. The prose of men like Browne and
Burton and Fuller is not as poetic as that of these
Elizabethan writers, but it is just as fanciful. Even
the prose of Jeremy Taylor is over poetical, and
though it has all the Elizabethan ardour, it has also
the Elizabethan fai'^s of excessive wordiness and
involved periods and images. It never knows where
to stop. Milton's prose works, whirh shall be men-
tioned in their place in his life^ are also Elizabethan

•/.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION.

in style. Their style has the fire and violence, the
eloquence and diffuseness, of the earlier literature,
but in spite of the praise it has received, it is in
reality scarcely to be called a style. It has all the
faults a prose style can have except obscurity and vul-
garity. Its bursts of eloquence ought to be in poetry,
and it never charms except when Milton becomes
purposely simple in personal narrative. There is no
pure style in prose writing till Hobbes began to write
in English, indeed we may say till after the Restora-
tion, unless we except, on grounds of weight and
power, the styles of Bacon and Hooker.

93. The Decline of Poetry. — The various ele-
ments which we have noticed in the poetry of Eliza-
beth's reign, without the exception, even, of the
slight Catholic dement, though opposed to each
other were filled with one spirit — the love of England
and the Queen. Nor were they ever sharply divided ;
they are found mixed together and modifying one
another in the same poet, as for instance Puritanism
and Chivalry in Spenser, Catholicism and Love in
Constable ; and all are mixed together in Shakespeare
and the dramatists. This unity of spirit in poetry
became less and less after the Queen's death. The
elements remained, but they were separated. Poetry
was the bundle of sticks with the cord round it in
Ehzabeth's time ; in the time of Charles I. it was
the same bundle with the cord removed and the
sticks set apart. The cause of this was that the
strife, in politics between the Divine Right of Kings
and Liberty, and in religion between the Church and
the Puritans, grew so defined and intense that En-
gland ceased to be at one, and the poets, though not
so strongly as other classes, were separated into sec-
tions. A certain style, which induced Johnson to
call them " metaphysical J^ belongs more or less to all
these poets. They were those, Hallam says, "who
laboured after conceits, or novel turns of thought,

' 1

\ X

ENGLISH UTERATLRE,

[chap.

usually false, and resting on some ecjii vocation of
language or exceedingly remote analogy." This form
finds its true source m the fantastic style of the Euphues
and the Arcadia. It grew up again towards the close of
Elizabeth's reign and it ended by greatly lessening good
sense and clearness in English poetry. It was in the
reaction from it, and in the determination to bring
clear thought and clear expression of thought into
English verse, that the school of Dryden and Pope —
the critical school — began. The poetry from the
later years of Elizabeth to Milton illustrates all these
remarks.

94. The Lyric Poetry struck a new note in the
songs of Ben Jonson, such as the Hymn to Diana.
They are less natural, less able to be sung than
Shakespeare's, more classical, more artificial. But they
have no special tendency. Later on, during the reign
of Cha»*'^s I., and during the Civil War, the lyrics of
Will i Carevv, Sir John Suckling, Colonkl Lovk-
LACE, and Robert Herrick, whose Ilispcriilcs was
published in 1648, have a special royalist and court
character. They are, for the most part, light, pleasant,
short songs and epi'jjrams on the passing interests of
the day, on the charms of the court beauties, on a
lock of hair, a dress, on all the fleeting forms of
fleeting love. Here and there we find a pure or
pathetic song, and there are few of them which time
has selected that do not possess a gay or a gentle
grace. As the Civil War deepened, the special
court poetry died, and the songs became songs of
battle and marching, and devoted and violent loyalty.
These have been lately collected under the title of
Songs of the Cavaliers.

95. Satirical Poetry, always arising when natural
passion in poetry decays, is represented in the later
days of Elizabeth by Joseph Hall, afterwards Bishop
Hall, whose Virgidemiarum, 1597, satires partly in
poetry, make him the master satirist of this time. John

v.]

ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION^,

DoNNK, Dean of St. Paul's, who also partly belongs to
*he age of Elizabeth, was, with John Cleveland (a
Prions royalist and satirist of Charles I.'s time), the
most obscure and fanciful of the poets absurdly called
Metai)hysical. Donne, however, rose far above the
rest in the beauty of thought and in the tenderness of
his religious and love poems. His satires are graphic
pictures of tiie manners of the age of James I. Ceorge
WiTHKR hit the follies and vices of the (\Ay so hard in
his Abiiu's Stript and Whipt^ 1613, that he was put
into the Marshalsea prison and there continued his
satires in the ShcpheriVs Huntiug. As the Puritan
and the Royalist became more opj)osed to oiie another,
satirical poetry naturally became more bitter ; but, like
the poetry of the Civil War, it took the form of short
songs and pieces which went about the country, as
those of Bishop Corbet did, in manuscript.

96. The Rural Poetry. — The /^j/t;^^/ now began
to take a more truly rural form than the conventional
pastorals of France and Italy out of which it rose.
In William Browne's Britannia's Pas-torais, 16 16, the
element of pleasure in country life arises, and from
til is time it begins to grow in our poetry. It appears
slightly in Wither's Shepherd's Huntings but plainly
in his Mistress of Phiiarete, a poem interspersed with
lyrics. In dwelling so much as he did on the beauty
of natural scenery away from cities he brings a new
element into English verse. Henceforth we always
find a country poetry set over against a town poetry, a
pretry of nature set over against a poetry of man. It is
still stronger in Andrew Marvell, Milton's secretary,
who, with the exception of Milton, did the finest work
of this kind. In imaginative intensity, in the fusing to-
gether of personal feeling and thought with the delight
received from nature, his verses on T/ie Emigrants in
the Bermudas and The Thoughts in a Garden, and the
little p'^em, The Girl describes her Fawn, are like the
work of Wordsworth on one side, and like the best

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Elizabethan work on the other. They are the last
and the truest echo of the lyrics of the time of Eliza-
beth, but they reach beyond them in the love of
nature.

97. Spenserians. — Among these broken up forms
of poetry, there was one kind which was imitative of
Spenser. Phineas Fletcher, Giles Fletcher,
Henry More in his Platonkal Song of the Soul^
1642, and John Chalkhill in his Thealma^ owned
him as their master. The Purple Island^ 1633, of the
first, an elaborate allegory of the body and mind of
man, has some grace and sweetness, and tells us that
the scientific element which after the Restoration
took form in the setting up of the Royal Society was
so far spread in England at his time as to influence
the poets.

98. Religious Poetry. — The Temptation and
Victory of Christy 16 10, ot (liles Fletcher, is a lovely
poem and gave hints to Milton for the Paradise Re-
gained, It is one of the many religious poems that
now began to interest the people. Of all these The
Temple^ 1631, of George Herbert, rector of Bemer-
ton, has been the most popular. The purity and pro-
found devotion of its poems have made it dear to all.
Its gentle Church feeling has pleased all classes of
churchmen ; its great qiiaintness which removes it
from true poetry has added perhaps to its charm.
With him we must rank Henry Vaugh an, the Silurist,
whose Sacred Poems are equally devotional, pure, and
quaint, and Francis Quarles, whose Divine Emblems^
1635, is still read in the cottages of England. On the
Roman Catholic side, William Habington mingled
his devotion to his religion with the praises of his
wife under the name of Castara, 1634 ; and Richard
Crashaw, whose rich inventiveness was not made less
rich by the religious mysticism which finally led him
to become a Roman Cntholic, published his Steps to
the Temple in 1646. On tlie Puritan side, we may

v.] ELIZABETH TO THE /RESTORATION. loi

now place Gloroe Wither, M^bose Hallelujah, 1641,
a series of religious poems, was sent forth just
before the Civil War began, when he left the king's
side to support the Parliament. Finally, religious
poetry, after the return of Charles II. passed on
through the Daindeis of Abraham Cowley, and the
Divine Love of Edmund Waller to find its highest
expression in the Paradise Lost, We have thus traced
through all its forms the decline of poetry. It is a
poetry often beautiful, but as often injured by obscurity,
over-fancifulness, confusion of thought and of images.
From this decay we pass into a new created world
when we come to speak of Milton. Between the
dying poetry of the past, and the uprising of a new
kind of poetry in Dryden, stands alone the majestic
work of a great genius who touches the Elizabethan
time with one hand and our own time with the
other.

99. John Milton was the last of the Elizabethans,
and, except Shakespeare, far the greatest of them all.
IJorn in 1608, in Bread -street, he may have seen Shake-
s])eare, for he remained till he was sixteen in London.
His literary life may be said to begin with his entrance
into Cambridge, in 1625, the year of the accession
of Charles I. Nicknamed the "lady" from his
beauty and delicate taste and morality, he got soon
a great fame, and during the seven years of his life
at the university his poetic genius opened itself in the
English poems of which I give the dates. On the
Deatf^of a Fair Infant, 1626. At a Vacation Exer-
cise, 1628. On the Morning of Chris fs ISlativity, 1629.
On the Circumcision, The Passion, Time, At a Solemn
Mil sick. On the May Morning, On Shakespeare, 1630.
On the University Carrier, Epitaph on Marchioness of
Worcester, Sonnet, i., 7o the Nightingale, Sonnet, 2.,
On Arriving at Age of Twenty-three^ 163 1. The
last sonnet, when explained by a letter that accom-
panied it, shows that Milton, influenced by the

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siifTennps of the Puritans, had given up his inten-
tion of becoming a clergyman. He left therefore the
university in 1632, and went to live at Horton,
near Windsor, where he spent five years, steadily
reading the Greek and T^tin writers, and amus-
ing himself with mathematics and music. Poetry
was not neglected. The A/le^ro and // Pcnseroso
were written in 1632 and probably the Arcades;
Comus in 1634, and Lycidas in 1637. They all
prove that though Milton was Puritan in heart,
his Puritanism was of that earUer type which
neither disdained literature, art, or gaiety, nor de-
spised the ancient Church, nor turned away from
natural beauty. He could still enjoy the village
dance, the masque, the lists, the music in the dim
Cathedral ; he could still mingle the learning of
the Renaissance with his delight in the fields and
flowers, with his feasting and his grief. He was as
much the child of the New Learning as Spenser was,
but his Puritanism was set deeper than Spenser's.

In 1638 he went to Italy, the second home of so
many of the English poets, and visited the great towns,
making friends in Florence where he saw Galileo,
and in Rome. At Naples he heard the sad news
of civil war, which determined him to return ; " inas-
much as I thought it base to be travelling at my ease
for intellectual culture, v/hile my fellow-countrymen
at home were fighting for liberty." But, hearing that
the war had not yet arisen, he remained in Italy till
the end of 1639, and at the meeting of the* Long
Parliament we find him in a house in Aldersgate,
where he lived till 1645. He had projected while
abroad, a great epic poem on the subject of Arthur
(again the Welsh subject returns), but in London
his mind changed, and among a number of subjects,
tended at last to Paradise Lost, which he meant to
throw into the form of a Greek Tragedy with lyrics
and choruses.

v.] ELIZA BETH TO THE RBSTORATIOhT, 103

100. Milton's Prose. The Commonwealth,

— Suddenly his whole life changed, and for twenty
years — 1640- 1660 — he was carried out of art into
politics, out of poetry into prose. Before T642, when
the Civil War began, he had written fi/e vigorous
pamphlets against episcopacy. Six more pan^)hlets
appeared in the next two years. One of these was
the Areopagitica; or^ Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed
Frintini!^^ 1644, a bold and elo(iuent attack on
the censorship of the press by the Presbyter'ans.
The four pamphlets in which he advocated conditional
divorce made him still more the horror of the Presby-
terians. When on the execution of the king, 1649,
England became a republic, Milton defended the net
in an answer to the Eikon Basilike (a portraiture of
the sufferings of the king by Dr. Gauden), and con-
tinued to defend it in his lamous Latin Defence for the
People of England (1651), in which he inflicted so
pitiless a lashing on Salmasius, the great Leyden
scholar, that lis fame went over the whole of Europe.
In the next year he wholly lost his sight. But he
continued his work when Cromwell was made Pro-
tector, and wrote another Defence for the English
People^ and a further defence of himself against
scurrilous charges. This closed the controversy in
1655. In the last year of the Protector's life he
began the Paradise Lost, about the date of the last
of his sonnets. The two years that cam^. before the
Restoration were employed in a fruitless effort to
prevent it by the publication of six more pamphlets.
It was a wonder he was not put to death, and he was
in hiding and in custody for a time. At last he
settled in a house near Bunhill Fields. It was here that
Paradise Lost was finished, before the end of 1665,
and then published in 1667. •

loi. Paradise Lost. — We may perhaps regret
that our greatest poet was shut away from his art
for twenty years during which no verse was wi^ittea

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but the sonnets. But it may be that the poems
he wrote, when the great cause he fought for had
closed in seeming defeat but real victory, gained
from its solemn issues and from the moral grandeur
with which he wrought for its ends their majestic
movement, their grand style, and their grave beauty.
During the struggle he had never forgotten his art
"I may one day hope," he said, speaking of his
youthful studies, "to have ye again, in a still tinie,
when there shall be no chiding. Not in these
Noises," and the saying strikes the note of calm sub-
limity which is kept in Paradise Lost, It opens with
the awaking of the rebel angels in Hell after their fall
from Heaven, the consultation of their chiefs how
best to carry on the war with God, and the resolve of
Satan to go forth and tempt newly created man to
fall. He takes his flight to the earth and finds Eden.
Eden is then described, and Adam and Eve in their
innocence. The next four books, from the fifth to
the eighth, contain the Archangel Raphael's story of
the war in heaven, the fall of Satan, and the creation
of the world. The last four books describe the temp-
tation and the fall of Man, the vision shown by
Michael to Adam of the future and of the redemption
of Man by Christ, and the expulsion from Paradise.

As we read the great epic, we feel that the lightness
J^r}:! grace of Milton's youthful time is gone. The
Lv-auty of the poem is rather that of ideal purity, and
<A ^nblime thought expressed in language which has
the severe loveliness of the best Greek sculpture. The
interest collects round the character of Satan at first,
but he grows more and more mean as the poem goes
on, and seems to fall a second time, to lose all his
original brightness, after his temptation of Eve. In-
deed this second degradation of Satan after he has
not only sinned himself but made innocence sin, and
beaten back in himself the last remains of good, is
one of the finest motives in the poeni. At last all

e poems

v.] BLlZABETti TO T^E kEStORATIOM, 105

thought and emotion centre round Adam and Eve,
until the closing lines leave us with their lonely niiage
on our minds. In every part of the poem, in every
character in it, as indeed in all his poems, Milton's
intense individuality appears. It is a pleasure to find
it. The egotism of such a man, said Coleridge, is a
revelation oT spirit.

102. Milton's Later Poems. — It was followed
by Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, published
together in 1671. Paradise Regained opens with the
journey of Christ into the wilderness after his baptism,
and its four books describe the temptation of C'lnst
by Satan, and the answers and victory of the Re-
deemer. The speeches in it drown the action, and
their learned argument is only relieved by a few de-
scriptions; but these, as in that of Athens, are done
with Milton's highest power. The same solemn beauty
of a quiet mind and, a more severe style than that of
Paradise Lost make us feel in it that Milton has grown
older.

In Samson Agonistes, the style is still severer, even
to the verge of a harshness which the sublimity alone
tends to modify. It is a choral drama, after the
Greek model. Samson in his blindness is described,
is called on to make sport for the Philistines, and
overthrows them in the end. Samson represents the
fallen Puritan cause, and his victorious death Mil-
ton's hopes for its final triumph. The poem has all
the grandeur of the last words of a great man in
whom there was now " calm of mind, all passion
spent." He wrote it blind and old and fallen on evil
rlays. But in it, as in the others, blindness did not
prevent sight. No man saw more vividly and could
say more vividly what he saw. Nor did age make
him lose strength. The force of thought and verse in
his last poem is only less than in Paradise Lost Nor
did evil days touch his imagination with weaknes8|

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[CHAfk

or make less the dignity of his art. Till the end
it was

* <

. ** An undisturbed song of pure concent,
Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne,
To Him that sits thereon."

It ended in his death, November 1674.

T03. His Work. — To the greatness of the artist
Milion joined the majesty of a pure and lofty
character. His poetic style was as lofty as his
character, and proceeded from it. Living at a time
when criticism began to purify the verse of Eng-
land, and being himself well acquainted with the
great classical models, his work is free from the
false conceits and the intemperance of the Elizabethan
writers, and yet is as imaginative as theirs, and as
various. He has their grace, naturalness, and inten-
sity, when he chooses, and he adds to it a sublime
dignity which they did not possess. All the kinds
of poetry which he touched, he touched with the
ease of great strength, and with so much weight,
that they became new in his hands. He put a
new life into the masque, the sonnet, the elegy, the
descriptive lyric, the song, the choral drama ; and he
created the epic in England. The lighter love poem
he never wrote, and he kept satire for prose. In
some points he was untrue to his descent from the
Elizabethans, for he had no dramatic faculty and he
had no humour. He summed up in himself all the
higher influences of the Renaissance, and when they
had died in England revived and handed tliem to
us. His taste was as severe, his verse as polished^
his method and language as strict as those of the
school of Dryden and Pope that grew up v*^hen he was
old. A literary past and present thus met in him,
nor did he fail, like all the greaiest men, to make a
cast into the future. He began that pure poetry of
natural description which has no higher examples to

■qn«4ln«4MHt*«a^«l*a

v.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION. 167:

show in Wordsworth or Scott or Keats than his
V Allegro and // Penseroso, Lastly, he did not re-
present in any way the England that followed the
tyranny, the coarseness, the sensuality, the falseness,
or the irreligion of the Stuarts, but he did represent
Puritan England, and the whole career of Puritanism
from its cradle to its grave.

T04. The Pilgrim's Progress. — ^With Milton
the great Elizabethan age of imaginative poetry and
the spirit of the New Learning said their last word. We
might say that Puritanism also said its last great words
with him, were it not that its spirit lasted in English
life, were it not also that four years after his death, in
1678, John Bunyan, who had previously written much,
published the Pil^rim^s Progress. It is the journey of
Christian, the Pilgrim, from the City of Destruction
to the Celestial City. The second part was published
in 1684, and in 1682 the allegory of the Holy War,
I class the PilgrMs Progress here, because in its
imaginative fervour and poetry, and in its quality
of naturalness, it belongs to the spirit of the Eliza-
bethan times. It belongs also to that time in
this, that its simple and clear form grew up out
of passionate feeling and not out of self-conscious
art. It is a people's book and not the book of a
literary class, and yet it lives in literature because
it first revealed the poetry which fervent belief in a
spiritual world can kindle in the rudest hearts. In
doing this, and in painting the variou. changes and
feelings of the pilgrim's progress towards God, the
book touched the deepest human interests, and set on
foot a new and plentiful literature. Its language is
the language of the Bible. It is a prose allegory con-
ceived as an epic poem. As such, it admits the vivid
dramatic dialogue, the episodes, the descriptions, and
the clear drawing of types of character which give a
different, but an equal pleasure to a peasant boy
wxd to an intellect like Lord Macauiay's, . _ ,

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CHAPTER VI.

FROM THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE IIL

1680-1760.

Sir John Dcnhan's; Co'^per^s HVl, 1643- — Hobbe's Leviathan^
1651— Butler's Hudibras, 1663.— J. Dryden, born 1631 ;
hi> Dramas begin, 1663 ; Absalom and Akitophd^ 1681 ;
hind and Panther, 1687 ; Fables and death, 1700- —
Wycherlev, Congreve, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh, Dramas,
from 1672-1726 —Newton's Principia, 1687.— Locke's
Essay on the Human Understanding, 1690- — Alexander
Pope, born 1688 ; Pastorals, 1709; Rape of the Lock, 1712 ;
Honur finished, 1725 ; Essay on Man, 1732-1734 ; Dun-
dad finished, 1741 ; dies, 1744.— Swift's Tale of a I'ub,
1704; Gulliver'' s Travels, 1726. — Defoe's Robinson Cruwe,
1719- — Steele and Addison, Spectator, 1711. — Addison's
Cato, 1713. —Johnson's Irene^ 1749. — Sheridan and Gold-
smith's /V^>'j, 1768-1778.

THE LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION AND

REVOLUTION.

105. Poetry. Change of Style. — We have seen
the natural style as distinguished from the artificial in
the Elizabethan poets. Style became not only natural
but artistic when it was used by a great genius like
Shakespeare or Spenser, for a first rate poet creates
rules of art ; his work itself is art. But when the art
of poetry is making, its rules are not laid down, and
the second rate poets, inspired only by their feel-
ings, will write in a natural style unrestrained by
rules, that is, they will pui their feelings into verse
without caring much for the form in which they do it.
Af long as they live in the midst of a youthful national
life, and feel an ardent sympathy with it, their stylQ

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VI.I THE RESTORATION' TO GEORGE III 10$

will be fresh and impassioned, and give pleasure be-
cause of the strong feeling that inspires it. But it
will also be extravagant and unrestrained in its use of
images and words, because of its want of art. This is
the history of the style of the poets of the middle
period of Elizabeth's reign, (2) Afterwards the na-
tional life grew chill, and the feelings of the poets
also chill. Then the want of art in the style made
itself felt. The far-fetched images, the hazarded
meanings, the over- fanciful way of putting thoughts,
the sensational expression of feeling, in which the
Elizabethan poets indulged, not only appeared in
all their ugliness when they were inspired by no
warm feelings but were indulged in far more than
before. Men tried to produce by extravagant use
of words the same results that living feeling had
produced, and the more they failed the more ex-
travagant and fantastic they became, till at last
their poetry ceased to have clear meaning. This is
the history of the style of the poets from the later
days of Elizabeth till the Civil War. (3) The natural
style, unregulated by art, had thus become unnatural.
When it had reached that point, men began to feel
how necessary it was that the style of poetry should
be subjected to the rules of art, and two influences
partly caused and partly supported this desire. One
was the influence of Milton. Milton, first by his
genius, which as I said creates of itself an artistic
style, and secondly by his knowledge and imitation
of the great classical models was able to give the
first example in England of a pure, grand, and
finisned style, and in blank verse and the sonnet,
wrote for the first time with absolute correctness.
Another infiuence was that of the movement all over
Europe towards inquiry into the right way of doirg
things, and into the truth of things, a movement we
shall soon see at work in science, politics, and religion.
In poetry it produced a school of criticism which

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first took form in France, and the influence ofBoileau,
La Fontaine, and others who were striving after
greater finish and neatness of expression told on Eng-
land now. It is an influence which has been ex-
aggerated. It is absurd to place the " creaking lyre "
of Boileau side by side with Dryden's "long re-
sounding march and energy divine " of verse. Our
critical school of poets have no French qualities in
them even when they imitate the French. (4) Further,
our own poets had already, before the Restoration,
begun the critical work, and the French influence
served only to give it a greater impulse. We shall
see the growth of a colder and more correct spirit of
art in Cowley, Denham, and Waller. Vigorous form
was given to that spirit by Dryden, and perfection
of artifice added to it by Pope. The artificial style
succeeded to and extinguished the natural,

106. Change of Poetic Subject. — The subject
of the Elizabethan poets was Man as influenced by the
Passions, and it was treated from the side of natural
feeling. This was fully and splendidly done by Shake-
speare. But after a time the subject followed, as we
have seen in speaking of the drama, the same career
as the style. It was treated in an extravagant and
sensational manner, and the representation of the pas-
sions tended to become, and did become unnatural or
fantastic. Milton alone redeemed the subject from
this vicious excess. He wrote in a grave and natural
manner of the passions of the human heart, and he
made strong the religious passions of love of God,
sorrow for sin, and others, in English poetry. But with
iiim the subject of man as influenced by the passions
died for a time. Dryden, Pope, and their followers,
turned to another. They left the passions aside, and
wrote of the things in which the intellect and the con-
science, the social and political instincts in man
were interested. In this way the satiric, didactic,
philosophical, and party poetry of a new school arose.

VI.] THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE TIL iir

107. Transition Poets. — There 'were a few
poets, writing parJy before and partly after the Re-
storation, who represent the passage from the fantastic
to tLe more correct style. Auraham Cowley wus one
of these. His love poems, 71ie Mistress ^ i^47, are
courtly, witty, and have some of the Eliza l^ethan
imagination. His later poems, owing probably to
his life in France, were more exact in verse, at.d
more cold in form. The same may be said of Edmund
Waller, who " first made writing in rhyme easily
an art." He also lived a long time in France, and
died in 1687. Sir Jno. Denham's Cooper's Hill, 1643,
was a favourite with Dryden for the " majesty of
its style." It may rank as one of the first of our
descriptive poems, and its didactic reflectiveness,
and the chill stream of its verse and thought, link
him closely to Pope. Sir W. Davenant's Gondibert,
1651, an heroic poem, is perhaps the most striking
example of this transition. Worthless as poetry, it
represents the new interest in political philosophy
and in science that was arising, and preludes the intel-
lectual poetry. Its preface discourses of rime and the
rules of art, and represents the new critical influence
which came over with the exiled court from Fiance,
The critical school had therefore begun even before
Dryden's poems were written. The change was less
sudden than it seemed.

Satiric poetry, soon to become a greater thing, was
made during this transition time into a powerful weapon
by two men, each on a different side. Andrew Marvell's
Satires, after the Restoration, represent the Puritan's
vrath with the vices of the court and king, and his
shame for the disgrace of England among the nations.
The Ilttdibras of Samuel Butler, in 1663, represents
the fierce reaction which had set in against Puritanism.
It is justly famed for wit, learning, good sense, and
ingenious drollery, and in accordance with the new
criticism, it is absolutely without obscurity. It is

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often as terse as Pope's best work. But it is too
long, its wit wearies us at last, and it undoes the force
of its attack on the Puritans by its exaggeration. Satire
should have at least the semblance of truth ; yet Butler
calls the Puritans cowards. We turn now to the first
of these poets in whom poetry is founded on intellect
rather than on feeling, and whose best verse is devoted
to argument and satire.

io8. John Dryden was the first of the new, as
Milton was the last of the elder, school of poetry.
It was late in life that he gained fame. Bom in
1 63 1, he was a Cromwellite till the Restoration, when
he began the changes which mark his life. His
poem on the death of the Protector was soon fol-
lowed by the Astrcea Redux which celebrated the
return of justice to the realm in the person of
Charles II. The Annus Alirabilis appeared in 1667,
and in this his great power was first clearly shown.
It is the power of clear reasoning expressing
itself with entire ease in a rapid succession of con-
densed thoughts in verse. Such a power fitted Dryden
for satire, and his Absalom and Ahitophel is the fore*
most of Enghsh satires. He had been a playwriter
till its appearance in 1681, and the rimed plays
which he had written enabled him to perfect the versi-
fication which is so remarkable in it and the poems
that followed. The satire itself, written in mockery
of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill, attacked
Shaftesbury as Ahitophel, was kind to Monmouth as
Absalom, and in its sketch of Buckingham as Zimri
the poet avenged himself for the Rehearsal, It
was the first fine example of that party poetry which
became still more bitter and personal in the hands
of Pope. It was followed by the Medal^ a. new at-
tack on Shaftesbury, and the Mae FleeMoe, in which
Shadwell, a rival poet, who had supported Shaftes-
bury's party, was made a laughing-stock. After these
Dryden taught theology in verse, and the Religio

'■^^"^WgWWWB

'mm»

VI.] r//£: RESTORATIOl^ TO GEORGE IIL IIS

Laid, 1682, defends, and states the argument for,
the Church of England. It was perhaps poverty
that drove him on the accession of James II. to
change his reHgion, and the Hind and Panther^ 1687,
is as fine a model of clear reasoning in behalf of
the milk-white hind of the Church of Rome, as
the Religio Laid was in behalf of the Church of
England, which now becomes the spotted panther.
As a narrative poet his fables and translations, pro-
duced late in life, in 1700, give him a high rank,
though the fine harmony of their verse uoes not win
us to forget their coarseness, and their lack of that
skill in arranging a story which comes from imagi-
native feeling. As a lyric poet his fame rests on
the animated Ode for St, Cedlia^s Day. His trans-
lation of Vergil has fire, but wants the dignity and
tenderness of the original. From Milton's death till
his own in 1700, Dryden reigned undisputed, and
round his throne in Will's Coffeehouse where he sat
as " Glorious John " we may place the names of the
lesser poets, the Earls of Dorset, Roscommon, and
Mulgrave, Sir Charles Sedley, and the Earl of Roches-
ter. The lighter poetry of the court lived on in the
two last. John Oldham won a short fame by his
Satires on the Jesuits^ 1679 ; and Bishop Ken, 1668, set
on foot, in his Morning and Evening Hymns ^ a new
type of religious poetry.

109. The Drama of the Restoration. — The
change that now passed over literature was ns great in
me drama as in poetry. Two acting companies were
formed on the king's return under Thomas Killigrew
and Davenant \ actresses came on the stage for the
first time, and scenery began to be used. Dryden
began his dramatic work with comedies, 1663, but
soon after, following Corneille, though he abjured
French influence, made rime instead of blank verse
the vehicle of tragedy. His tragedies, like the rest of
the time, were written in a pompous heroic style. The

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114

ENGLISH LITER A TVRE,

tcrtA^.

Duke of Buckingham ridiculed them in the Rehearsal^
167 1, and sometime after Dryden changed his style,
and wrote in another manner, of which All for Love^
and the Spanish Friar ^ are perhaps the best examples.
His plays have but little sentiment, for Dryden's
treatment of the emotions is always brutal, but they
have some neat intrigue, some fine passages. John
Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice, Nat. Lee's Rival Queens,
and two pathetic tragedies by Thomas Otway, 77ie
Orphan and Venice Preserved, are of the Restoration
time and kept the stage.

It was in Comedy that the dramatists of the Restora-
tion excelled. William Wycherley, whose gross
vigour is remarkable, introduced the prose Comedy
of Manners, in 1672, and Mrs. Behn, Sir George
Etherege, and others, carried it on to the Revolution.
The wit of their comedies is the wit of a vulgar and
licentious society. After the Revolution, William
CoNGREVE, Sir John Vanbrugh, and George Far-
QUAR made comedy more gentlemanly and its intrigue
more subtle. Though without truth to nature, their
plays sparkle with wit in every line. They exaggerate
the vices of the time, but their immorality is partly
forgotten in their swift and delightful gaiety. Poetry,
however, was less an important part of literature
during this period than prose.

no. The Prose Literature. — I have said that
towards the end of Elizabeth's reign men settled down
to think and inquire. Intellectual had succeeded to
active life. We have seen this in the poetry of the
time ; and the great work of Bacon, which was then
begun, represents the same thing in prose. He worked
at not only all subjects of inquiry, but also at the
right method of enquiry. The Advancement of Learn-
ing and the Novum Organum did not fulfil all he
aimed at, but they did stir the whole of English intel-
ligence into activity. In Science, the impulse he gave
was only partly riglit, and the work of Science in Eng-
land was behind that of the Continent The religious

chearsal^
lis style,
for Love^
xamples.
Dryden's
but they
IS. John
/ QtieenSy
way, 77ie
^storation

3 Restora-
ose gross
; Comedy
r George
evolution,
vulgar and

William
DRGE Far-
ts intrigue
ture, their
exaggerate

is partly
\f. Poetry,

literature

I said that
ttled down
cceeded to
fetry of the
1 was then
He worked
Jso at the
:/ of Learn-
ilfil all he
iglish intcl-
Ise he gave
ice in Eng*
he religious

VI.) t^^E ^RESTORATION' TO CEORGE UL 1 15

and the political struggle absorbed the country, and it
was not till after the Restoration, with two exceptions,
that scientific discovery advanced so far as to claim
recognition in a history of Literature. The Royal
Society was embodied in 1662, and astronomy, expe-
rimental chemistry, medicine, mineralogy, zoology,
botany, vegetable physiology were, all founded as
studies and their literature begun in the age of the
Restoration. One man's work was so great in science
as to merit his name being mentioned among the liter-
ary men of England. In 167 1, Isaac Newton laid his
Theory of Light before the Royal Society ; in the
year before the Revolution his Frinclpia established
with its proof of the theory of gravitation the true
system of the universe.

It was in political and religious knowledge however
that the intellectual inquiry of the nation was most
shown. When the thinking spirit succeeds the active
and adventurous in a people, the first thing they will
think upon is the true method and grounds of govern-
ment, both divine and human. Two sides will be
taken, the side of Authority and the side of Reason
in Religion ; the side of Authority and the side of in-
dividual Liberty in Politics.

III. The Theological Literature of those who
declared that reason was supreme as a test of truth,
arose with some men who met at Loid Falkland's just
before the civil war, and especially with John Hales and
William Chillingworth. With them, J eremy Taylor
pleaded, as we have seen, the cause of religious liberty
and toleration, and of rightness of life as more important
than a correct theology. After the Restoration and Re-
volution, their work was carried on by Bishop Burnet,
Robert Boyle, the philosopher, Archbishop Tillotson,
and Bishop Butler, whose Sermons and Analogy of
Religion, Natural and Rei^ealed, to the Constitution and
Course of Nature^ 1736, endeavour to make peace be-
tween Authority and Reason* Many other divines o(

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the Engli.sh Church took one side or another, or
opposed the growing Deism. Isaac iiarrow is to be
mentioned for his sedate, Robert South for his fierce
and witty eloquence, and in them, and in men hke
Kdvvard Stilhnglleet and WilHam Sherlock, English
theological prose took form.

112. Political Literature. — The resistance to
authority in the opposition to the theory of the Divine
Rij^ht of Kings did not enter into Literature till after
it had been worked out practically in the Civil War.
During the Commonwe?lth and after the Revolution it
took the form of a discussion on the abstract question of
the Science of Government, and was mingled with an in-
quiry into the origin of society and the ground of social
life. Thomas Hobbes, during the Commonwealth, was
the first who dealt with the question from the side of
reason alone, and he is also the first of all our prose
writers whose style may be said to be uniform and
correct, and adapted carefully to tne subjects on which
he wrote. His treatise, the Leviathan^ ^651, declared
(i) that the origin of all power was in the people, and
(2) the end of all power was for the common weal. It
destroyed the theory of a Divine Right of Kings and
Priests, but it created another kind of Divine Right
when it said that the power lodged in rulers by the
people could not be taken away by the people. Sir
R. Filmer supported the side of Divine Right in his
/^(C?/;7^n*//^, pubHshed, 1680. Henry Nevile in \(\% Dia-
logue concerning Governfnent^ and James Harrington in
his romance The Commonwealth of GceanUj published
at the beginning of the Commonwealth, contended that
all secure government was to be based on property, but
Nevile supported a monarchy, and Harrington — with

. whom I may class Algernon Sidney, executed in 1683—
a democracy, on this basis.

113, John Locke, after the Revolution, in 1689-
1690 followed the two doctrines of Hobbes in his

, treatise on Civil Government, but with these important

-i

VI.] THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE ///. 117

additions — (i) that the people have a right to take
away the power given by them to the ruler, (2) that
the ruler is responsible to the people for the trust
reposed in him, and (3) that legislative assemblies
are Supreme as the voice of the people. This was
the political philosophy of the Revolution. Locke
carried the same s[)irit of free incjuiry into the realm
of religion, and in his three Letters on Toleration
1689-90-92, laid down the philosophical grounds for
liberty of religious thought. He finished by entering
the realm of metaphysical inquiry. In 1690 ap-
peared his Essay concerning the Hitman Understanding^
in which he investigated its limits and traced all ideas
and therefore all knowledge to experience. In his
clear statement of the way in which the Understand-
ing works, in the way in which he guarded it and Lan-
guage against their errors in the inquiry after truth,
he did as much for the true method of thinking as
Bacon had done for the Science of nature.

1 1 4. The intellectual stir of the time produced, apart
from the great movement of thought, a good deal of
Miscellaneous Literature. Sir William Petty, in
1667, made the first efibrt after a science of political
economy in his Treatise on Taxes. Characters, essays,
letter-writing, memoirs, all came to the front. The paint-
ing of short '* characters " was carried on after the
Restoration by Saml. Butler, and W. Charleton. These
" characters ** had no personality, but as party spirit
deepened, names thinly disguised were given to
characters drawn of living men, and Dryden and Pope
in poetry and all the prose wits of the time of Queen
Anne and George 1. made personal and often violent
sketches of their opponents a special element in
literature. After the Restoration, Cowley's small
volume, and Dryden, in the masterly criticism on his
art which he prefixed to some of his dramas, gave
richness to the Essay. .These two writers began—
^yith Hobbes — the second period of English pr^sf^

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ENGLISH LITER A TURE.

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in which the style is easy, unaffected, moulded to the
subject, and the proper words are put in their proper
places. It is as different from the style that came
before it, as the easy manners of a gentleman are from
those of a learned man unaccustomed to society. In
William Ill's, time Sir VV. Temple's pleasant Essays
bring us in style and tone nearer to the great class of
essayists of whom Addison was chief. Lady Rachel
Russell's Letiers begin the letter-writing literature of
England, in which Gray and Cowper, Byron and
Beckford, have done the best work. Pepys (1660-69)
and Evelyn, whose Diary grows full after 1640, begin
that class of gossiping me?noirs which have been of
so much use in giving colour to history. History
itself at this time is little better than memoirs, and such
a name may be fairly given to Clarendon's History oj
the Civil Wars (begun in 1641) and to Bishop
Burnet's History of his own Ti?n€ and to his History
of the Reformation (\^Qgxmm. 1679, completed in 1715).
Finally classical criticism, in the discussion on the
genuineness of the Letters of Phalaris, was created
by Richard Bentley in 1697-99.

115. The Literature of Queen Anne and the
first Georges. — With the closing years of William
III. and the accession of Queen Anne (1702) a litera-
ture aro$e which was partly new and partly a continu-
ance 6f that of the Restoration. The conflict between
those who took the oath to the new dynasty and the
Nonjurors who refused, the hot blood that it produced,
the war between Dissent and Church and between the
two parties which now took the names of Whig and
Tory, produced a mass of political pamphlets, of which
Daniel Defoe's and Swift's were the best ; of songs
and ballads, like Lillibullero, \vhich were sung in every
street ; of squibs, reviews, and satirical poems and
letters. Everyone joined in it, and it rose into im-
portance in the work of the greater men who mingled
inore literary studies with their political excitement,

[chap.

td to the
iir proper
hat came
1 are from
:iety. In
nt Essays
Lt class of
ly Rachel
"rature of
yron and
(1660-69)
>4o, begin
i been of
History
:, and such
History oj

Bishop
is History

in 17/5).

1 on the
,s created

and the

WilHam
j) a litera-
i continu-
between
J and the
Droduced,
tween the
Whig and
of which
of songs
in every
)ems and
into i ill-
mingled

citement,

VI.] Tim RESTORATION TO GEORGE III 119

In politics all the abstract discussions we have men-
tioned ceased to be abstract and became personal and
practical, and the spirit of inquiry applied itself more
closely to the questions of everyday life. The whole
of this stirrin-g literary life was concentrated in London,
where the agitation of society was hottest ; and it is
round this vivid city life that the Literature of Queen
Anne and the two following reigns is best grouped.

116. It was with a few exceptions a Party Litera-
ture. The Whig and Tory leaders enHsted on their
sides the best poets and prose writers, who fiercely
satirized and unduly praised them under names thinly
disguised. Personalities were sent to and fro like shots
in battle. Those who could do this work well were well
rewarded, but the rank and file of writers were left to
starve. Literature was thus honoured not for itself,
but for the sake of party. The result was that the
abler men lowered it by making it a political tool, and
the smaller men, the fry of Grub Street, degraded it
by using it in the same way, only in a baser manner
Their flattery was as abject as their abuse was shame*
less, and both were stupid. They received and de-
se. ved the merciless lashing which Pope was soon to
give them in the Duiiciad. Being a party literature,
it n«iturally came to study and to look siiarply into
human character and into human life as seen in the
great city. It discussed all the varieties of social
life, and painted town society more vividly than
has been done before or since ; and it was so wholly
taken up with this that couniry life and its interests,
except in the writings of Addison, was scarcely touched
by it at all. The society of the day was one in which
all subjects of intellectual and scientific inquiry were
eagerly debated, and the wit of this society was
stimulated by its party spirit. Its literature reflected
this intellectual excitement, and at no time in our
history was literary work so vigorous and masculine
on the various problems of thought and know-

^!i

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120

ENGLISH LITER A TURE,

[CHAP.

I-

ell

ledge. Criticism being so active, Xht form in which
thought was expressed was now especially dwelt on,
and the result was that the style of English prose
became for the first time absolutely simple and clear,
and English verse reached a neatness of expression
and a closeness of thought which was as exquisite as
it was artificial. At the same time, and for the same
reasons, Nature, Passion, and Imagination decayed in
poetry.

117. Alexander Pope absorbed and reflected all
these elements. Born in 1688, he wrote excellent verse
at twelve years old ; the Pastorals appeared in 1709,
and two years afterwards he took full rank as the
critical poet in the Essay on Criticism (17 11). The
next year saw the first cast of his Rape of the Lock, the
** epos of society under Queen Anne," and the most
brilliant play of wit in our language. This closed what
we may call his first period. He now became known
to Swift and to Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, a
statesman who was also a writer. With these, and with
Gay, Parnell, Prior, and Arbuthnot, Pope formed the
Scriblerus Club, and soon rose into great fame by his
Translation of the Iliad and Odyssey under George I.
(1715-1725), for which he received 7,000 pounds.
He now, being at ease, lived at Twickenham, where he
had completed his Homer. It was here, retired from
the literary mob, that in bitter scorn of the many petty
scribblers, he wrote in 1728 the Dunciad, afterwards
altered and enlarged, in 1741. It was the fiercest of
his satires and it closes his second period, which took
much of its savageness from the influence of Swift.
The third phase of Pope's literary life was closely
linked to his friend Bolingbroke. It was in conver-
sation with him that he originated the Essay on Alan
(1732-4), and the Imitations of Horace. The Moral
Essays^ or Epistles to men and women, were written to
praise those whom he loved, and to satirize the bad
poets and the social follies of the day, and 9JI ^Yho

VI.] T//E RESTORATION TO GEORGE III. I2L

disliked him or his party. In the last few years of his
life, Bishop Warburton, the writer of the Legation of
Moses and editor of Shakespeare, helped him to fit the
Moral Essays into the plan of which the Essay on Man
formed part. Warburton was Pope's last great friend ;
but almost his only old friend. By 1740 nearly all the
members of his literary circle were dead, and a new
race of poets and writers had grown up. In 1744 he
died. He is our greatest master in didactic poetry,
not so much because of the worth of the thoughts, as
because of the masterly form in which they are put.
The Essay on Man, though its philosophy is poor
and not his own, is crowded with lines that have
passed into daily use. The Essay ofi Criticism is
equally full of critical precepts put with exquisite
skill. The Satires and Epistles are also didactic.
They set virtue and cleverness over against vice and
stupidity, and they illustrate both by types of character,
in the drawing of which Pope is without a rival in our
literature. His translation of Homer is made with
great literary art, but for that very reason it does not
make us feel the simp.icity and directness of Homer.
It has neither the manner of Homer, nor the spirit of
the Greek life, just as Pope's descriptions of nature have
neither the manner nor the spirit of nature. The heroic
couplet, in which he wrote his translation and nearly
all his work, he used in various subjects with a cor-
rectness that has never been surpassed, but it some-
times fails from being too smooth, and its cadences too
regular. Finally, he was a true artist, hating those who
degraded his art, and at a time when men followed it
for money, and place, and the applause of the club
and of the town, he loved it faithfully to the end, for
its own sake.

118. The Minor Poets who surrounded Pope in
the first two-thirds of his life did not write in his manner
nor approach his genius. Thomas Parnell is known
by his ffermit^ and both h^ and John Gay, in his si^^

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ENGLISH IJTERA TURE,

[CHAP.

pastorals, The Shepherd's Week (17 14), touched on
country life. Swift's poetical satires were coarse but
always hit home; Addison celebrated the battle of
Blenheim in the Cainpaign^ and his sweet grace is
found in some devotional pieces ; while Pkior's charm-
ing ease is best shown in the light narrative poetry
which I may say began with him in the reign of William
I J I. The Elack-eyed Susan of Gay, and 'J'ickeH's Colin
and Lucy diVid Carey*s Sally iii our Alley, siud afterwards
Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina mark the rise of the
modern ballad; a class of poetry wholly apart from
the genius of Pope. When we next speak of the
poets we shall see how during Pope's later hfe, an
entirely new impulse came on poetry, and changed it
root and branch.

119. The Prose Literature of Pope's time col-^
lects itself round four great names. Swift, Defoe,
Addison, and Bishop Berkeley, and they all exhibit
those elements of the age of which I have spoken.
Jonathan Swift was the keenest of political parti-
zans. The Battle of the Books, or the literary fight
about the T^etters of Phalaris, and the Tale of a Tub,
a satire on the Presbyterians and the Papists, made
his reputation in 1704 and established him as a satirist.
Swift left the Whig for the Tory party, and his poli-
tical tracts brought him Court favour and literary
fame. On the fall of the Tory party at the acces-
sion of George I., he retired to the Deanery of St.
Patrick in Ireland an embittered man, and the JDrapier's
Letters (1724) written against Wood's halfpence, gained
him popularity in a country that he hated. In 1726,
his inventive genius, his savage satire, and his cruel
indignation with life, were all shown in Gulliver'' s
Travels, The voyage to Lilliput and Brobdingnag
satirized the politics and manners of England and
Europe; that to Laputa mocked the philosophers; and
the Inst, to the country of the Houyhnhnms, lacerated
ftu4 defile4 tbe wl;oIe bod^ of humanity. Nq Publish

'■^^l

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THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE IIL

ia3

is more robust than Swift's, no wit more scathing,
no I'fe in private and public more sad and proud, no
death more pitiable. He died in 1745 hopelessly in-
sane. Daniel Defoe was almost as vigorous a political
writer as Swift, but he will hve in literature by Robin-
son Crusoe (17 19). In it he equalled Gulliver's Travels
in truthful representation, and excelud them in inven-
tion. The story lives and charms from day to day. Witn
his other tales it makes him our first fine writer of
fiction. But none of his stories are true novels ; that
is, they have no plot to the working out of which the
characters and the events contribute. They form the
transition however from the slight tale and the ro-
mance of the Elizabethan time to the finished novel
of Richardson and Fielding.

I2C. Metaphysical Literature was enriched by
the work of Bishop Berkeley. His Minute Philoso-
pher and other works questioned the real existence of
matter, and founded on the denial of it an answer to
the English Deists, round whom in the first half of
the eighteenth century centred the struggle between
the claims of natural and revealed religion. Shaftes-
bury, Bolingbroke, and Wollaston, Tindal, Toland, and
Collins, on the Deists' side, were opposed by Clarke,
by Bentley, whose name is best known as the founder
of the true school of classical criticisnr^ and by
Bishop Warburton. I may mention here a social
satire. The Fable of the Bees, by Mandeville, half poem,
half prose dialogue, and finished in 1729. It tried to
prove that the vices of society are the foundation of
civilisation, and is the first of a new set of books
which marked the rise in England of the bold specu-
lations on the nature and ground of society which
the French Revolution aftei wards increased.

121. The Periodical Essay is connected with the
names of Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Stesxe.
Thi-s gay, light, and graceful kind of literature, differ-
ing ixQxa. such J^ssays as Bacon'^ as g;ood convers^UQH

iii

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ENGLISH LITER A TURE,

[CHAP.

about a subject differs from a clear analysis of all its
points, was begun in P'rance by Montaigne in 1580.
Charles Cotton, a wit of Charles II/s time, re-translated
Montaigne's Essays, and they soon found imitators
in Cowley, and Sir W. Temple. But the periodical
Essay was created by Steele and Addison. It was
published three times a week, then daily, and it was
anonymous, and both these characters necessarily
changed its form from that of an Essay of Montaigne.
Steele began it in the Tatler, 1709, and it treated of
everything that was going on in the world. He
paints as a social humourist the whole age of Queen
Anne — the political and literary disputes, the fine
gentlemen and ladies, the characters of men, the
humours of society, the new book, the new play : we
live in the very streets and drawing-rooms of old
London. Aidison soon joined him, first in the
Tatler, afterwards in the Spectator, 171 1. His work
is more critical, literary, and didactic than his com-
panion's. The characters he introduces, such as
Roger de Coverley, are finished studies after nature,
and their talk is easy and dramatic. No humour is
more fine and tender ; and, like Chaucer's, it is never
bitter. The style adds to the charm : in its varied
cadence and subtle ease it has never been surpassed ;
and it seems to grow out of the subjects treated of.
Addison's work was a great one, lightly done. The
Spectator, the Guardian, and the Freeholder, in his
hands, ga\'e a better tone to manners, and a gentler
one to political and literary criticism. The essays
published every Friday were chiefly on literary sub-
jects, the Saturday essays chiefly on religious sub-
jects. The former popularized literature, so that
culture spread among the middle classes and crept
down to the country ; the latter popularized religion.
" I have brought," he says, " philosophy out of closets
and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs
^1^4 ?i5s^mbUes, at t^a-tablcs and ia cofftje-houses/

Vt;l TME kESTORATItN TO CEOkGR III MJ

The next important series was Johnson's Rambler
(1750-2) and Idler^ but in the n lightness, the essence
of this kind of Essay, was lost Goldsmith's Citizen oj
the Worlds a series of letters supposed to be written
by a Chinese traveller in England, and collected in
1762, satirizes the manners and fashionable follies
of the time. Several other series followed but they
are now unreadable. One man alone in our own
century caught the old inspiration, and with a humour
less easy, as gentle, but more subtle than Addison's.
It was Charles Lamb, in the Essays of Elia^ and the
fineness of perception he showed in these was equally
displayed in his criticisms on the old dramatists.

122. The Drama. — During this time the Drama
continued. Jeremy Collier's famous attack on the stage
(1698) may have h^d some influence in purifying it,
but it was really the growth of a higher tone of society
which improved it. It grew dull in the stupid plays
of Steele, in Addison's ponderous tragedy of Cato
(17 1 3), and in the melancholy tragedies of Rowe
(1700-13), whose name is, however, to be remem-
bered as the first editor of Shakespeare, 1709-10. The
four folio editions of Shakespeare had been previ-
ously set forth in 1623, 1632, 1664, and 1685. llie
Beggar's Opera (1728) of Gay introduced a new
form of dramatic literature, and Colley Cibber carried
on the lighter comedy into the reign of George II.
Fielding then made the stage the vehicle of criticism
on the follies, literature, and politics of the time,
and the actors Foote and Garrick did the same
in their farces. Tragedy now trod the boards with
the heavy foot of Johnson in his Itejie (1749),
and Home's Douglas kept the stage. A number of
sentimental comedies written by Macklin, Murphy,
Cumberland and the Colmans still survive, but the
classic comedy can only be said to be represented
by The Goodnatured Man and She Stoops to Conquer
pf Goldsmith, by The Rivals and the School /of

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* i

1 ■

■4 1

lift

Mmitsff umkA tuM.

MAt».

Scandal of Sheridan, all of which appeared between
1768 and 1778. Both were Irishmen, but Golvl.^mith
has more of the Celtic grace, and Sheridan of the
Celtic wit. With Sheridan we may say that the
history of the English drama closes*

CHAPTER VIL

PROSE LITERATURE FROM GEORGE 111. TO VICTORIA.

1760-1837.

Richardson's Pamelay 1740 — Fielding's yoseph Andrews ^
1742. — Smollett's Roderick Random and Richardson's
Clarissa Harlowe^ 1748' — Fielding's Tom yones, 1749. —
Johnson's Dictionary J 1755- — Sterne's Tristra??i Shandy ^
1759. — Hume's History of England^ completed 1761. —
Gok\sm\\.\i' s Vicar 0/ Wa kef eld, 1766.— Adam Smith's IVealih
of Nations^ 1776. — G'lhhon'?, Decline and Fall of the Roman
^w/^V^, completed 1788- — ^os'WQlV&IJfeofyohnson, 1791*
— Burke's ll'ritings^ from 1756-1797- — Miss Axxsi^n*^ Novels ^
1811-1817.-Scott's Novels, 1814-1831.

123. Prose Literature. — The rapid increase of
manufactures, science, and prosperity which began
with the middle of the eighteenth century is paral-
leled by the growth of Literature. The general causes
of this growth were —

ist, That a good prose style had been per-
fected, and the method of writing being made easy,
production increased. Men were born, as it were,
into a good school of the art of composition, and
the boy of eighteen had no difficulty in making sen-
tences which the Elizabethan writer could not have
put together after fifty years of study.

2ndly, The long peace after the accession of the
House of Hanover had left England at rest, and
given it wealth. The reclaiming of waste tracts, tl^e

VII.] PkOSM PJ^OM CPORGk in. to iricfOktA, r^i

increased wealth and trade, made better communica-
tion necessary ; and the country was soon covered witli
a network of highways. The leisure gave tmie to
men to think and write : the quicker interchange
between the capital and the country spread ovei
England the literature of the capital, and stirred men
everywhere to write. The coaching services, and the
post carried the new book and the literary criticism
to the villages, and awoke the men of genius there,
who might otherwise hfeve been silent.

3rdly, The Press sent far and wide the news of
the day, and grew in importance till it contained the
opinions and writings of men like Canning. Such
seed produced literary work in the country. News-
papers now began to play their part in literature. They
rose under the Commonwealth, but became important
when the censorship which reduced them to a mere
broadsheet of news was removed after the Revolution
of 1688. The political sleep of the age of the two
first Georges hindered their progress ; but in the reign
of George III., after a struggle with which the name of
John Wilkes and the author of the letters of Junius are
connected, the Press claimed and obtained the right to
criticize the conduct and measures of Ministers and
Parliament and the King ; and after the struggle in
177 1 the right to publish and comment on the debates
in the two Houses. The great English Journals, the
Morning Chronicle^ the Post^ the Herald^ and the Times
gave an enormous impulse within the next twenty years
to the production of books, and created a new class of
literary men — the Journalists. Later on, in 1802, the
publication of the Edinburgh Re^new^ and afterwards
of the Quarterly Review and Blachvood'' s Magazine^
started another kind of prose writing, and by theii
criticisms on new books improved and stimulated
literature.

4thiy, Communication with the Continent
bad increased during the peaceable times of Walpole,

%
I

•r

i !

t»8

kMGUSfi LITER ATVkE.

[chap.

.■.A

ill-

and the wars that followed made it still easier. With its
increase, two new and great outbursts of literature told
upon England. France sent the works of Montes-
quieu, of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'AIembert,
and the rest of the liberal thinkers who were called the
Encyclopaedists, to influence and quicken English
literature on all the great subjects that belong to the
social and political life of man. Afterwards, the fresh
German movement, led by Lessing and others, and
carried on by Goethe and Schiller, added its impulse
to the poetical school that arose in England* along
with the French Revolution. These were the general
causes of the rapid growth of literature from the time
of George III. We turn now to the forms Literature
took — first in Prose, then in Poetry.

124. The Novel is perhaps the most remarkable.
It began in the reign of George II. No books have
ever produced so plentiful an offspring as the novels
of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. The novel
arranges and combines round the passion of love and
its course between two or more persons a number ol
events and of characters which in their action on one
another develop the plot of the story and bring about
a sad or a happy close. The story may be laid at any
time, in any class of society, in any place. The whole
world and the whole of human life lies before it as its
subject. Its vast sphere accounts for its vast produc-
tion — its human interest for its vast numbers of readers.

Samuel Rich ardson, while Pope was yet alive, wrote
in the form of letters, and in two months' time Pamela
(1740), and afterwards Clarissa Harlowe {i^j ^%)^ and
Sir Charles Grandison. The second is the best, and all
are celebrated for their subtle and tender drawing of
the human heart. They are novels of Sentiment; and
their intense minuteness of detail gives them reality.
Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett followed him
with the novel of Real life, full of events, adventures,
fun^ and vivid painting of various- kinds of life in

'i I

[chap.

'ith its
[e told

ontes-

mbert,

Jed the

fnglish

to the

le fresh

and

ipulse

along
general
le time
erature

rkable.
ks have
J novels
; novel
ove and
mber ol

on one
y about

at any
e whole
it as its
produc-
readers,
^e, wrote

Pamela
1.8), and
, and all
iwing of
jnt; and

reality,
^ed him
entures,

life iu

vn.] PKOSE FROM GEORGE III. TO VICTORIA, 129

England. Fielding began \\\\h/oseJ>h Andreivs ( 1 742),
Smollett with Roderick Random (i 748). lio^li wrote
many other stories, but in truth of representation of
common life, and in the natural growth and winding
up of the stoiy, Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) is our
English masterpiece and model. Ten years thus suf-
ficed to create an entirely new literature. Laurence
Sterne, in his Tristram SJbandy^ (1759) introduced
the novel of Character in which events are few. His
peculiar vein of labyrinthine humour and falsetto
sentiment has been imitated, but never attained.
We mention Johnson's Rasselas (1759) as the first
of our Didactic tales, and the Fool of Quality^ by
Henry lirooke, as the first of our Theological tales.
Under George III. new forms of fiction appeared —
Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (i^j 66) was the first,
and perhaps the most charming, of all those novels
which we may call Idyllic, which describe the loves
and the simple lives of country people in country
scenery. Miss Burney's Evelina (1778) and Cecilia
were the first novels of Society. Mrs. Inchbald's
Siinfh Story (1791) introduced the novel of Passion,
and Mrs. Radcliffe, in her wild and picturesque tales,
the Romantic novel. The interest kindled in political
questions by the French Revolution showed itself in
another, class of novels, and the Political stories of
Holcroft and William. Godwin opened a new realm
to the novelist, while the latter excluded love alto-
gether from his story of Caleb Williams, Mrs. Opie
made Domestic life the sphere of her graceful and
pathetic stories (1806). Miss Edgeworth, in her Irish
stories, gave the first impulse to the novel of National
character, and in her other tales to the novel with a
Moral purpose (1801-1811). Miss Austen, with " an
exquisite touch which renders commonplace things
and characters interesting from truth of description
and sentiment," produced the best stories we have
of Everyday English society. Sense and Sensibility^

«1^

i I'

•i'1>

•1

^v; .*.•',

,!* ii

I jo

ENG'USII LlfEkATUk}^,

tdttXfi

1^'

■Fi;

Pride and Prejudice^ Emma^ Mansfield Park^ and
Fersuasi^^ were all written between 1811 and 181 7.

Sir Walter Scott, the great Enchanter, now began
the long series of his novels. Men are still alive who
well remember the wonder and delight of the land
when Waverley (18 14) was published. In the rapidity
of his work Scott recalls the Elizabethan time. Guy
Afanneringj his next tale, was written in six weeks.
The Bride of Lammermoorj as great in fateful pathos
as Romeo and Juliet , was done in a fortnight. His
National tales, such as The Heart of Midlothian, and
jthe Antiquary^ are written as if he saw directly all
the characters and scenes, and when he saw them
enjoyed t^^em so much that he could not helj) writing
them dowi:. And the art with which this was done
was so inspired, that since Shakespeare there is
nothing we can compare to it. " All is great in the
Waverley Novels," says Goethe, "material, effects,
characters, execution." In the vivid portraiture and
dramatic telling of such tales as Kenilworth and Quentin
Durivard, he created the Historical Novel. His
last tale of power was the Fair Maid of Perth in
1828; his last effort in 1831 was made the ye.ir
before he died. He raised the whole of the lite-
rature of the novel into one of the greatest inHu-
ences that bear on the human mind. The words
his uncle once said to him, may be applied to the
work he did, — *' God bless thee, Walter, my man 1
Thou hast risen to be great, but thou wast always
good."

John Gait and Miss Ferrier followed him in de-
scribing Scottish life and society. With the peace
of 18 1 5 arose new forms of fiction, and travel, which
became very popular when the close of the war with
Napoleon opened the world again to Englishmen,
gave birth to the tale of Foreign scenery and manners.
Thomas Hope's Anastasius (1819) was the first. Lock-
bart began the Classical novel in Valerius, Fashionable

and

817.
egan

e who
land

pidity
Guy

weeks.

pathos

. His

;;;, and

ctly all
kv them

writing
is done
there is
t in the

effects,
^ure and
[ Quentin
^el. His
Perth in
the ye.^r
the litt-
est influ-
le words
:d to the
ny man !
5t always

m in de-
he peace
el, which
war with
glishmen,
manners.
}t. Lock-
shionabte

Vtl.] PMSk FkOM GkOkGB in. TO VICTORIA, IJt

society was now painted by Theodore Hook, Mrs.
TroUope, and Mrs. Gjre; and Rural life by Misa
Mitfordin Our Village. Edward Bulwer Lytton began
with the Fashionable novel in Pelham (1827), and fol-
lowed it with a long succession of tales on historical,
classical, and romantic subjects. Towards the close
of his life, he changed his manner altogether, and Ihe
Caxtons and those that followed are novels of Modern
Society. The tone of them all from the beginning
to the end is too high-pitched for real life, but each
of them being kept in the same key throughout has
a reality of its own. Charlotte BRONTii revived in
/ane Eyre the novel of Passion, and Miss Yonge set
on foot the Religious novel in support of a si)ecial
school of theology. We need only mention Captain
Marryatt, whose delightful sea stories carry on the
seamen of Smollett to our own times. Miss Martineaii
and Mr. Disraeli continued the novel of Politicnl
opinion and economy, and Charles Kingsley applied
the novel'.to the social and theological problems of our
own day* Three other great names are too close to us
to admit of comment : Charles Dickens, William M.
Thackeray, and the novelist who is known as George
Eliot. It will be seen then that the Novel cbims
almost every sphere of human interest as its own,
and it has this special character, that it is the only
kind of literature in which women have done ex-
cellently.

125. History, to which we now turn, was raised
into the rank of literature in the latter half of the
eighteenth century by three men. David Hume's
History of England^ finished 1761, is, in the import-
ance it gives to letters, in its clear narrative and
style, and in the writer's endeavour to make it a
philosophic whole, our first literary history. Of Dr.
Robertson's Histories of Scotland^ of Charles V., and
of Americay the two last are literary by their descrip-
Uv^ aud popular atyle, and show how our Jiistorical

I a '

I '

It'

14*

»..«, ■•• .

119

B:mUsH LTTMRA TVRE,

\t'Ak>i

interests Were reaching beyond our own land. Edward
Gibbon excelled the others in his Deciim and Fall
of the Roman Empire^ completed in 1788. The
execution of his work was as accurate and exhaus-
tive as a scientific treatise. Gibbon's conception of
the whole subject was as poetical as a great picture.
Rome, eastern and westc ..1, was painted in the centre,
dying slowly like a lion. Around it he pictured all
the nations and hordes that wrought its ruin, told
their stories from the beginning, and the results on
themselves and on the world of their victories over
Rome. The collecting and use of every detail of the
art and costume and manners of the times he de-
scribed^ "he reading and use of all the contemporary
literature, the careful geographical detail, the mar«
shalling of all this information with his facts, the great
iraaginati 7e conception of the work as a whole, and
the use of a full and perhaps too heightened style to
add importance to the subject, gave a new impulse
and a new model to historical literature. The con-
temptuous tone of the book is made still more re-
markable by the heavily-laden style, and the mono-
tonous balance of every sentence. The bias Gibbon
bad against Christianity illustrates a common fault ol
historians. The historical value of Hume's history
was spoiled by his personal dislike of the principles
of our Revolution. W. Mitford's History of Greece^
completed in 18 10, is made untrue by his hatred of a
democracy; and Dr. Lingard's excellent History of
England, 18 19, is influenced by his dislike of the
Reformation. Henky Hallam was the first who
wrote history in this country with so careful a love of
truth, and with so accurate a judgment of the relative
value of facts and things, that prejudice was ex-
cluded. His Europe during the Middle Ages, 18 j8,
and his Literature of Europe, 1837-8, are distinguished
for their exhaustive and judicia;l summing up of facts ;
fUid his Constitutional History of England, 1827, set

^VARD
Fall
The

:baus-
ion of
icture.
:entre,
fed all
told
ilts on
over
of the
he de-
iporary
e mar«
le great
)le, and
style to
impulse
he con-
lore re-
: mono-
Gibbon
fault ol
history
■inciples
^ Greece^
red of a
istory of
of the
rst who
L love of
I relative
was ex-
s, 1818,
iguished
of facts ;
827, set

TO.] PROSE FROM GEORGE III TO VICTORIA. 133

on foot a new kind of history in the best way. Our
own history now engaged a number of writers. Lord
Macau lay's great work told the story of the Revolu-
tion of 1688 in a style sometimes too emphatic, often
monotonous from its mannerism, but always clear.
Its vivid word-painting of characters and great events,
and the splendid use in such descriptions of his vast
knowledge of details, gave as great an impulse to the
literature of history as Gibbon had done in his day,
and his Historical Essays on the times and statesmen
between the Restoration and Pitt are masterpieces of
their kind.

Sir Francis Palgrave gave interest to the study of
the early English period, and in our own day, a
critical English history school has arisen, of which Mr.
Freeman and Professor Stubbs are the leaders.

As the interest in the history of our own land in-
creased, our interest in the history of the world in-
creased. Dean Milman's History of Latin Christianity
well deserves, by its brilliant and romantic style, the
title of fine literature. Greece old and new found her
best historians in Bishop Thirlwall, George Grote, and
Mr. Finlay ; Rome in Dr. Arnold. The history of
events near at hand on the Continent was also taken
up with care. Among the books of this class, I
mention, for their special literary character and style,
Sir William Napier's History of the Peninsular War^
and Thomas Q2Ay\€% History of the Freiich RevoltUion,^
Both are written in too poetic prose, and the latter is a"
kind of epic, and full of his reaUstic, fantastic, and un-
equal power of representing persons and things. With
him we close this account of historical literature, and
return to the eighteenth century.

126. Biography and Travel are linked at many

points to History. The first was lifted into a higher

place in Hterature by Johnson's Lives of the PoetSy

1779-81, and hy BoswelPs Life of Johnson^ i79i' Since

%^\ time 9 multitude of biographies h^ve poured frow

•^1

IH I

\^^

■I

134

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

[CHAIP.

- 1

the press, and have formed useful materials for his-
tory. Few of them have reached literary excellence.
Southey's Life of Nelsofi^ Lockhart's Life of Scott^
Moore's Life of Lord Byroji ; or in our own days,
Forster's Life of Goldsmith^ and Dean Stanley's Life
of Artiold^ rise out of a crowd of inferior books.

The production of books of Travel since James
Bruce left for Africa in 1762 till the present day has
increased as rapidly almost as that of the Novel, and
there is scarcely any part of the world that has not
been visited and described. In this way a vast amount
of materials has been collected for the use of philoso-
phers, poets, and historians. Travel has rarely pro-
duced literature, but it has been one of its assistants.

127. Theological Literature received a new im-
pulse in 1738-91 from the evangelising work of John
Wesley and Whitfield; and their spiritual followers,
John Scott, Newton, and Cecil made by their writ-
ings the Evangelical school. William Paley, in his
Evidences y and Sydney Smith, well known as a wit
and an essayist, defended Christianity from the com-
mon-sense point of view ; while the sermons of Robert
Hall and of Dr. Chalmers are, in different ways, fine
examples of devotional and philosophical eloquence.

The decay of the Evangelical school was hastened
by the writings of Coleridge, whose religious philo-
sophy, in the Aids to Reflection and other books,
created the school which has been called the Broad
Church. Dr. Arnold's sermons supplied it with an
element of masculine good sense. Frederick Maurice
in his numerous woAs added to it mystical piety and
one-sided learning, Charles Kingsley a rough and
ready power, and Frederick Robertson gave it passion,
sentiment, subtilty, and a fine form. At the same
time that Maurice began to write (1830-32) the com-
mon-sense school of theology was continued by Arch-
bishop Whately's works ; and in strong reaction against
ttie llvangelicals, the High Church party rose intp

i i-1

[chap.

3r his-

llence.

ScoHf

days,

s Life

James
ay has
el, and
as not
tmount
>hiloso-
ly pro-
itants.
lew im-
f John
lowers,
r writ-
in his
5 a wit
e corn-
Robert
ys, fine
lence.
istened

1 philo-
books,
Broad

i^ith an
laurice
ety and
jh and
lassion,

2 same
2 com-
r Arch-
against

5e iotQ

VII.] PROSE FJiOM GEORGE III. TO VICTORIA, 13.5

prominence in Oxford, and was chiefly supported
by the tracts and sermons of John Henry Newman,
whose work, with Keble's Christian Year, a collection
of exquisitely wrought hymns, belongs to literature.

128. Philosophical and Political Literature
were both stimulated by the great movement of thought
on all subjects pertaining to the natural rights of man,
which was led by Voltaire and Rousseau. In philosophy
the historian David Hume (1738— 1755) led the way,
and the transparent clearness of his style gave full
force to opinions which made utility the only measure
of virtue, and the knowledge of our ignorance the
only certain knowledge. An eloquent school of Scotch
metaphysicians came after him, and for the most
part opposed the ideal system on which Hume had
founded his famous argument on causation. Dr. Reid,
Dr. Stewart, and Dr. Brown carried this school on to
1820. The Utilitarian view of morals was put forth with
great power by Jeremy Bentham, and in our own day by
John Stuart Mill, whose name, with Sir W. Hamilton's
and Professor Whewell's, belongs to the literature of
philosophy. The philosophy of Jurisprudence may
be said to have been founded by Jeremy Benthali,
and law was for the first time made a little clear to
common minds by Blackstone's Commentaries.

129. In political literature, Edmund Burke
is our greatest, almost our only, writer of this time.
From 1756 to 1797, when he died, his treatises and
speeches proved their right to the title of literature by
their extraordinary influence on the country. Philo-
sophical reasoning and poetic passion were wedded
together in them on the side of conservatism, and
every art of eloquence was used with the maslery that
imagination gives. His Thoughts on the Cause of the
Present Discontents, i773) was perhaps the best of his
works in point of style. The Reflectio7is on the French
Revolution, 1790, and the Letters on a Regicide Peace,
X796-7, were the moot powerful. The first of thcso

«f 1

\ \,

,1; ,

I ■

4fi

iJt'J

13^

ENGLISH LITER A TURE,

{chap.

•.ft;

two spread all over England a terror of the principles
of the Revolution ; the second increased the eager-
ness of England to carry on the war with France.
All his work is more literature than oratory. Many of
his speeches enthralled their hearers, but many more
put them .to sleep. The very men, however, who
slept under him in the House read over and over
again the same speech when published with renewed
delight. Goldsmith's praise of him — that he " wound
himself into his subject like a serpent" — gives the
reason why he sometimes failed as an orator, why he
always succeeded as a writer.

130. Before Burke, a new class f political writings
had arisen which concerned thei elves with social
and ecofiomical reform. Th immense increase
of the industry, wealth, and commerce of the country
from 1720 to 1770, aroused inqu-iry into the laws that
regulate wealth, and Adam Smith, a professor at
Glasgow, w4io had in 1759 written his book on the
Moral SmtimmtSy published in 1776 the Wealth of
Nations, By its theory, that labour is the source of
wealth, and that to give the labourer absolute freedom
to pursue his own interest in his own way is the best
means of in^^reasing the wealth of the country ; by its
proof that all laws made to restrain, or to shape, or to
promote commerce, were stumbling-blocks in the way
of the weahh of any state, he created the Science of
Political Economy, and started the theory and practice
of Free Trade. All the questior^s of labour and capital
were now placed on a scientific basis, and since that
time the Hterature of the whole of the subject has en-
gaged great thinkers. Connected with this were all the
writings on the subjects of the poor, and educatioiiy
and reform. The Methodist movement gave the
first impulse to popular education, and stirred men
to take interest in the cause of the pool. This new
philanthropy, stirred still more by the theories of the
French Revolution concerning the right pf naen to

■•m\

ICHAP.

[iciples
eager-
i'rance.
[any of
yr more
r, who
i over
inewed
wound
'■es the
why he

I'ritings
social
[icrease
:ountry
ws that
ssor at
on the
'ulth of
rce of
eedom
e best
; by its
, or to
he way
jnce of
)ractice
capital
ce that
has en-
all the
HcattoUy
ve the
d men
lis new
of the

VII.] PROSE FROM GEORGE IIL TO VICTORIA. I37

freedom and equality, took up the subjects of slavery^
of prison reform, of the emancipation of the Catholics,
and of a wider representation of the people, and their
literature fills a large space till 1832, when Reform
brought forward new subjects, and the old subjects
under new forms.

131. Miscellaneous Literature. — During the
whole of this time, from the days of Johnson till 1832,
the finer literature of prose had flourished. With
Samuel Johnson began the literary man euch as we
know him in modern times, who, independent of
patronage or party, lives by his pen, and finds in the
public his only paymaster. His celebrated letter to
Lord Chesterfield gave the death-blow to patronage.
The great Dictionary of the English Language^ i755>
at which he worked unhelped, and which he published
without support, was the first book that appealed
solely to the public. He represents thus a new class.
But he was also the last representative of the literary
king who, like Dryden and Pope, held a kind of court
in London. When he died (1784) London was no
longer the only literary centre, and poetry and prose
were produced from all parts of the country.

The miscellaneous literature of the latter half of
the eighteenth century^ passing over Johnson and
Goldsmith, whom we have already touched on, includes
the admirable Letters of Gray the poet; Thomas
Warton's History of English Poetry which founded
a new school of poetic criticism ; the many collections
of periodical essays all of which ceased in 1787 ;
Burke's Liquify mto the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful; and the Letters of Junius,
political invectives written in a st} le which has pre-
served them to this day.

The miscellaneous literature of the early part of
the nineteenth century took mainly the form of long
essays, most of which were originally published in
tb^ R^vi^w.^ ^n4 Ma^azines^ \% was in Blc^ki/i^qgi^^

i« 'I'

'"1 \

fNli

'1'!

138 ENGLISH LITERATUKR. < -', [CHAP.

Magazine that Christopher North (Professor Wilson)
published the Ncctes Amhrosianco — lively conversations
that treated of all the topic < of the day. It was in the
JEdinburgh Review that Macaulay and Sydney Smith
and Jeffrey wrote essays on literature, politics,
and philosophy. It was in Fraser's Magazine that
Thomas Carlyle first came before the public with
Sartor Resartus and the Lectures on Heroes, books
which gave an entirely new impulse to the generation
in which we live. Of all these miscellaneous writers,
Carlyle was the most original, and Thomas De Quin-
cey the greatest writer of English prose. De Quincey's
style has so peculiar a quaUty that it stands alone.
The sentences are built up like passages in a fugue;
and there is nothing in English Literature which can
be compared in involved melody to the prose of the
Confessions of an Efi^^ish Opium Eater. One man
alone in our own day is as great a master of English
prose, John Ruskin. He has created a new literature,
that of art, and all the subjects related to it ; and the
work he has done has more genius and is more original
than any other prose work of our time. Some of De
Quincey's best work was done on the lives of the poets
of his day; and indeed a great part of the miscellaneous
literature consisted of Criticistn on poetry, past and
present. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Campbell
carried on that study of the Elizabethan and earlier
poetry which Warton had begun in the eighteenth cen-
tury. Wordsworth wrote admirable prose on poetry,
and the prose of his Essays just now published, es-
pecially of that on the Cotivention of Cintra, is quite
stately. W. Hazlitt, W. S. Land or, Jeffrey, and a
host of others added to the literature of criticism, and
the ceaseless discussion of the works of the poets
made them the foremost literary figures of the day. It
is the work of the poets that we now take up, and
in tracing it from the time of Pope to 18^2 we shall

m
m

"^^

[chap.

Wilson)
rsations
LS in the
^ Smith
politics,
me that
(lie with
, books
neration
; writers,
le Quin-

aiNCEY'S

Is alone,
a fugue-,
liich can
je of the
Dne man
: English
iterature,

and the
e original
me of De
the poets
ellaneous
past and

ampbell
id earlier
;enth cen-
n poetry,
ished, es'
is quite
y, and a
cism, and
the poets
le day. It
; up, and

we shall

Vin.1 " POETRY FROM 1730 TO 183a. I39

CHAPTER VIII.

POETRY, FROM 173O TO 1 832.

Ramsay's Genfle Shepherd^ 1725' — Thomson's Seasons, 1730.
—Gray and Collins, Poems, 1746T7 57- — Goldsmith's
Traveller, 1764.— Chatterton's Poems, 1770- — Blake's
Poems, 1777-1794.— Crabbe's Village, 1783-— Cowper's
Task, 1785.— Burns's first Poems, 1786- — Campbell's
Pleasures of Hope, 1799. — Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads,
1798 ; his Prelude, 1806 ; Excursion, 1814.— Coleridge's
Christabel,\^'^^. — Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, Mar-
mion. Lady of the Lake, 1805-8-10. — V>yxovi% Poems, 1807-
1823.— Shelley's Poems, 1813-1821.— Keats' Poems, 1817-
1820.— Tennyson's /^^/ Poems, 1830-

132. The Elements and Forms of the New
Poetry. — The poetry we are now to study may be
divided into two pa-iods. The first dates from about
the middle of Pope's life, and closes with the pub-
lication of Cowper's Task^ 1785; the second begins
with the Task and closes in 1832. The first is not
wrongly called a time of transition. The influence
of the poetry of the past lasted ; new elements were
added to poetry, and new forms of it took shape.
There was a change also in the style and in the
subject of poetry. Under these heads I shall bring
together the various poetical works of this period.

(i.) The influence of the didactic end satirical poetry
of the critical school lingered among the new ele-
ments which I shall notice. It is found in Johnson's
two satires on the manners of his time, the London^
1738, and the Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749; in
Robert Blair's dull poem of The Grave, 1743; in
Edward Young's Night Thoughts, 1743, a poem
on the immortality of the soul, and in his satires on
The U7iiversal Passioji of Fame; in the tame
WprH Qf Richard Savage, Johnson's poor friend } ?t|l4

■<^

•v

ENGLISH LITER A TURE,

[CHAF.

in the short-lived but vigorous satires of Charles
Churchill, who died in 1764, twenty .years after
Savage. The Pleasures of the Imagination^ I744)
by Mark Akenside, belongs also in spirit to the time
of Queen Anne, and was suggested by Addison's
essays in the Spectator on imagination.

(2.) The study of the Greek and Latin classics re-
vived^ and with it a more artistic poetry. Not only
correct form, for which Pope sought, but beautiful
form also was sought after. Men like Thomas Gray
and WiuJAM Collins strove to pour into their work
that simplicity of beauty which the Greek poets
and Italians like Petrarca had reached as the last
result of genius restrained by art. Their poems, pub-
lished between 1746 and 1757, are exquisite examples
of perfectly English work wrought in the spirit of
classic art. They remain apart as a unique type of
poetry. The refined workmanship of these poets, their
manner of blending together natural feeling and natural
scenery, their studious care in the choice of words
are worthy of special study.

(3.) The study of the Elizabethan and the earlier poets
like Chaucer^ and of the whole course of poetry in
England^ was taken up with great interest. Shakespeare
and Chaucer had engaged both Dry den and Pope ;
but the whole subject was now enlarged. Gray like
Pope projected a history of English poetry, and his
Ode on the Progress of Poesy illustrates this new
interest. Thomas Warton wrote his History of English
Poetry^ 1774-78, and in doing so gave fresh material
to the poets. They began to take delight in the
childlikeness and naturalness of Chaucer as 'dis-
tinguished from the artificial and critical verse of the
school of Pope. Shakespeare was studied in a more
accurate way. Pope's, Theobald's, Sir Thomas Han-
mer's, and Warburton's editions of Shakespeare were
svicgq^d^d by Johnson's in i^6§ \ and G^rrigtf t^Q ^ctQr

[chap.

Charles
sars after

?;/, 1744,
) the time
Addison's

'/assies re-
Not only

beautiful
MAS Gray
heir work
2ek poets
s the last
)ems, pub-
! examples
e spirit of
le type of
>oets, their
,nd natural

of words

tr Her poets
poetry in
iake:peare
md Pope ;
Gray like
y, and his
this new
of English
h material
ht in the
as dis-
rse of the
in a more
mas Han-
Deare were

Vllt.l

PO^TkV FkOM 1730 TO 18^2.

t4t

c gan the restoration of the genuine text of Shake-
speare's plays for the stage.

Spenser formed the spirit and work of some
poets, and T. Warton wrote an essay on the Faerie
Queen. William ^htnstoxio^s Schoolmistress^ 1742, was
one of these Spenserian poems, and so was the Castle
of Indolence, 1748, by James Thomson author of the
Seasons. James Beattie, in the Minstrel, 1774, a
didactic poem, followed the stanza and manner of
Spenser.

(4.) A new element — interest in the romantic past
— was added by the publication of Dr. Percy's
E cliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765. The nar-
rative ballad and the narrative romance, afterwards
taken up and perfected by Sir Walter Scott, now struck
their roots afresh in English poetry. Men began ta
seek among the ruder times of history for wild,
natural stories of human life ; and the pleasure in
these increased and accompanied the growing love of
lonely, even of savage scenery. The Ossian, 1762,
of James Macpherson, which gave itself out as a
translation of Gaelic epic poems, is an example of
this new element. Still more remarkable in this way
were the poems of Thomas Chatterton, the * mar-
vellous boy,' who died by his own hand in 1770, at
the age of seventeen. They were imitations of old
poetry. He pretended to have discovered in a muni-
ment room at Bristol, the Death of Sir Charles Bawdin
md other poems by an imaginary monk named Thomas
Rowley. Written with quaint spelling, and with a
great deal of lyrical invention, they raised around them
a great controversy. I may mention as an instance
of the same tendency, even before the Reliques, Gray's
translations from the Norse and British poetry, and
his poem of the Bard in which the bards of Wales
arc celebrated. i

133. Change of Style, — ^We have seen how the
natural style of the Elizabethan poets had ended by

"1 I

II I

I'.
ll

\^.

fl-

\- llli

t4£

ENGltSff UTERATURE,

tcttAP.

producing an unnatural style. In reaction from thi&
the critical poets set aside natural feeling as having
nothing to do with the expression of thought in verse,
and wrote according to rules of art which they had
painfully worked out. Their style in doing this lost life
and fire ; and losing these, lost art which has its roots
in emotion, and gained artifice which has its roots
in intellectual analysis. Being un warmed by any
natural feeling it became as unnatural, considered as
a poetic style, as mat of tl e later Elizabethan poets.
We may sum up then the whole history of the style
of poetry from Elizabeth to George I. — the style of
the first-rate poets being excepted — in these words :
Nature without Arty and Art without Nature^ ha-d
reached similar but not identical results in style.
But in the process two things had been learned.
First, that artistic rules were necessary and secondly,
that natural feeling was necessary, in order that poetry
should have a style fitted to express nobly tlie emo-
tions and thoughts of man. The way was therefore
now made ready for a style in which t^.e Art should
itself be Nature, and it sprang at once into being
in the work of the poets of this time. The style of
Gray and Collins is polished to the finest point, and
yet is instinct with natural feeling. Goldsmith is
natural even to simplicity, and yet his verse is even
more accurate than Pope's. Cowper's style, in such
poerr>s as the Lines to his Mother's Picture, and in
lyrics like the Loss of the Royal George^ arises out of
the simplest pathos, and yet is as pure in expression
as Greek poetry. The work was then done ; but as
yet the element of fervent passion did not enter
into poetry. We shall see how that came in after
1789-

134. Change of Subject. — Nature. — ^We have
said at the beginning of this Prirner that poets worked
on two great subjects, — Man and Nature. Up to th'* age
of Pope the subject of Man v;aa alone treated, and we

i m i I n >ii> ' i» ,

tcttAl>.

'onl this
i having
in verse,
hey had
s lost Ufe
its roots
its roots
by any
dered as
m poets,
the style
; style of
s words :
ture^ ha-d
in style.
learned,
secondly,
lat poetry
the emo-
therefore
rt should
ito being
z style of
)oint, and
dsmith is
;e is even
-, in such
■^, and in
ses out of
ixpression
e; but as
not enter
in after

-We have
ts worked
to th'^ age
:d, and we

Vlii.]

Pd^TRV Pl^OM 1730 TO 1832.

t43

have seen how many phases it went through. There
remained the subject of Nature and of man's relation
to it ; that is, of the visible landscape, sea, and sky,
and all that men feel in contact with them. Natural
scenery had been hitherto only used as a background
to the picture of human life. It now began to take
a much larger place in peltry and after a time grew to
occupy a distinct place of its own apart from Man.
It is the growth of this new subject which will engage
us now.

135. The Poetry of Natural Description.—
We have found already traces in the poets of a pleasure
in rural things and the emotions they awakened. This
appears chiefly among the Puritans, who because they
hated the politics of the Stuarts before the civil war
and the corruption of the court after it, lived apart
from the town in quietude. The best natural descrip-
tion we have before the time of Pope is that of two
Puritans, Marvel and Milton. But the first poem
devoted to natural description appeared while Pope
was yet alive in the very midst of a vigorous town
poetry. It was'the SeasojiSy 1726-30 ; and it is curious,
remembering what I have said about the peculiar
turn of the Scotch for natural description, that it
was the work of James Thomson, a Scotchman. It
described the scenery and country life of Spring, Sum-
mer, Autumn, and Winter. He wrote with his eye upon
their scenery, and even when he wrote of it in his
room, it was with " a recollected love." 1 he de-
scriptions were too much like catalogues, the very fault
of the previous Scotch poets, and his style wajs always
heavy and often cold, but he was the first poet who led
the English people into that new world of nature in
poetry, which has moved and enchanted us in the
work of Words.worth, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson,
but which was entirely impossible for Pope to under-
stand. The impulse he gave was soon followed. Men
left ^he town to visit the country and record their

<'l

•■If.

titll:

144

EMGUsn UTERATURE,

[c^MAP.

It )

■1.1

feelings. William Sonerville's Chase^ 1735, and John
Dyer's Grongar Hill, 1726, a descri^3tion of a journey
in South Wales, and \\\'i Fleece, i757» iire full of country
sights and scenes : even Akenside mingled his spurious
philosophy with pictures of solitary natural scenery.

Foreign travel now enlarged the love of nature.
Gray's letters, some of the best in the English language,
describe natural scenery with a minuteness quite new
in English Literature. In his poetry he used the de-
scription of nature as " its most graceful ornament," but
never made it the subject. In the ELgy in a Country
Cfiunhyard^ and in the Ode on a Distant Prospect oj
Eton College, natural scenery is interwoven with reflec-
tions on human life, and used to point its moral.
Collins observes the same method in his Oile on the
Passions and the Ode to Evening. There is then as
yet nx) love of nature for its own sake. A further step
was made by Oliver Goldsmith in his Traveller,
1764, a sketch of national manners and governments,
and in his Deserted Village, 1770. He describes na-
tural scenery with less emotion than Collins, and does
not moralize it Hke Gray. The scenes he paints are
pure pictures, and he has no personal interest in them.
The next steo was made by men like the two Wartons
and by John Logan, 1782. Their poems do not speak
of nature and human life, but of nature and them-
selves. They see the reflection of their own joys and
sorrows in the woods and streams, and for the first
time the pleasure of being alone with nature apart from
men became a distinct element in modern poetry. In
the later poets it becomes one of their main subjects.
These were the steps towards that love of nature for its
own sake which we shall find in the poets who followed
Cowper. One poem of the time almost anticipates it
It is the Minstrel, 177 1, of Thomas Beattie. This
poem represents a young poet educated almost alto-
gether by lonely communion with and love of nature,
«nd both in the spirit and treatment of the first part of

VIII.]

POETRY FROM 1730 TO 183a.

X45

the story resembles very closely Wordsworth's descrip-
tion of his own education by nature in the beginning
of the Freiude^ and the history of the pedler 'v\ the first
book of the Excursion.

136. Further Change of Subject — Man. —
During this time the interest in Mankind, that is, in
Man independent of nation, class and caste, wliich we
have seen in prose, and which was stimulated by the
works of Voltaire and Rousseau, began to influence
poetry. It broke out into a fierce extreme in the French
Revolution, but long before that event it entered into
poetry in various ways as it had entered into society
and politics. One form of it appeared in the interest
the poets began to take in men of other nations than
England \ another form of it — and this was increased
by the Methodist revival — was the interest in the lives
of the poor. Thomson speaks with sympathy of the
Siberian exile and the Mecca pilgrim, and the Trav-
vdler of Goldsmith enters into foreign interests. His
Deserted Village^ Shenstone's Schoolmistress ^ Gray's
Elegy celebrate the annals of the poor. Michael
Bruce in his Lochlroen praises the " secret prim-
rose path of rural life," and Dr. John Langhorne
in his Country Justice pleads the cause of the poor
and paints their sorrows. Connected with this new
element is ^he simple ballad of simple love, such as
Shenstone's Jemmy Dawson^ Mickle's Mariner's Wife,
Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina, poems which started
a new type of human poetry, afterwards worked out
more completely in the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth.
In a class apart I call attention to the Song of David,
a long poem written by Christopher Smart, a friend
of Johnson's. It will be found in Chambers' " Cyclo-
paedia of English Literature." Composed for the
most part in a madhouse, the song has a touch here
aHd there of the overforcefulness and the lapsing
thoughts of a half insane brain. But its power of
metre and of imaginative presentation of thoughts and

1 1

#1!

iff

h I

146

El^GLISH LITERATURE, v

[chap.

things, and its mingling of sweet and grand religious
poetry ought to make it better known. It is unique
in style and in character.

137. Scottish Poetry illustrates and anticipates
the poetry of the poor and the ballad. We have not
mentioned it since Sir David Lyndsay, for with the
exception of stray songs its voice was silent for a
century and a half. It revived in Allan Ramsay, a
friend of Pope and Gay. His light pieces of rustic
humour were followed by the Tea Table Miscellany and
the Ever-Green^ collections of existing Scottish songs
mixed up with some of his own. They carried on the
song of rural life and love and humour which Burns per-
fected. Ramsay's pastoral drama of the Gentle Shepherd^
1725, is a purejjtender and genuine picture of Scottish
life and love among the poor aind in the country.
Robert Ferguson deserves to be named because he
kindled the muse of Burns, and his occasional pieces,
1773. are chiefly concerned with the rude and hu-
mourous life of Edinburgh. The Ballad, always con-
tii>uous in Scotland, took a more modern but very
pathetic form in such productions as Auld RobiJi Gray
and the Flowers of the Forest^ a mourning for those who
fell at Flodden Field. The peculiarities I have dwelt
on already continue in this revival. There is the same
nationality, the same rough wit, the same love of
nature, but the love of colour has lessened. With
Robert Burns poetry written in the Scotch tiialect
may be said to say its last word of genius, though it
lingered on in James Hogg*s pretty poem of Kilmeny
in The Queen's Wake^ 18 13, and continues a song-
making existence to the present day.

138. The Second Period of the New Poetry.
' — The new elements and the changes on which I have
dwelt are expressed by three poets — Cowper, Crabbe
and Burns. But before these we must mention the
poems of William Blake, the artist, and for three
reasons, (i.) They represent the new elements. Thi

[CHAP.

iligious
unique

icipates
ave not
ith the
t for a

ASAY, a

if rustic
my and
h songs
[ on the
irns per-
hepherd^
Scottish
:ountry.
ause he
I pieces,
and hu-
lys con-
)ut very
'/;/ Gray
ose who
ve dwelt
;he same

love of
With

tlialect
hough it
Kibneny

a song-

k^oetry.
:h I have
Crabbe
ition the
for three
Its. Thi

VIII.]

POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832.

147

FottUal Sketches^ written in 1777, illustrate the new
study of the Elizabethan poets. Blake imitated Spenser,-
and in his short fragment oi Edward TIL we hear again
and again the note of Marlowe's violent imagination.
A short poem To the Muses is a cry for the restoration
to English poetry of the old poetic passion it had lost.
In some ballad poems we trace the iniluence repre-
sented by Ossian and given by the publication of
Percy's Reliques, (2.) We find also in his work
certain elements which belonged to the second
period of which I shall now speak. The love of
animals is one. A great love of children and the
poetry of home is another. He also anticipated in
1789 and 1794, when his Songs of hmocence and
Experience were written, the simple natural poetry of
ordinary life which Wordsworth perfected in the Lyrical
Ballads, 1798. Further still, we find in these poems
traces of the democratic element, of the hatred of
priestcraft, and of the war with social wrongs which
came much later into English poetry. We even find
traces of the mysticism and the search after the
problem of life that fill so much of our poetry after
1832. (3.) But that which is most special in Blake
is his extraordinary reproduction of the spirit, tone
and ring of the Elizabethan songs, of the inimitable
innocence and fearlessness which belongs to the child-
hood of a new literature. The little poems too in the
Songs of Innocence^ on infancy and first motherhood,
and on subjects like the Lamb^ are without rival in
our language for ideal simplicity and a perfection of
singing joy. Tht Songs of Experience gWQ the reverse
side of the So?igs of Innocence, and they see the evil
of the world as a child with a man's heart would see
it — with exaggerated and ghastly horror. Blake stands
alone in our poetry, and his work coming where it
did, between 1777 and 1794, makes it the more
remarkable. We turn now to William Cowper who
represents fully and more widely than eith^^r Crabbe

»r

I'll

■> ,

a a

I'^k

148

ENGLISH LITER A TURE.

[CHAR

or Bums the new elements oa which I have

dwelt. **■ =v 'r^s^SA'V-;'--:' ^v\\'-^Ov : ^f•;v^v^^;^ «^\Vi'C

139. William Cowper*s first poems were the
Ohiey HymnSy 1779, written along with John Newton-,
and in these the religious poetry of Charles VV^esley
was continued. The profound personal religion,
gloomy even to insanity as it often became, which
fills the whole of Cowper's poetry, introduced a theo-
logical element into English poetry which continually
increased till within the last ten years, when it has
gradually ceased. His didactic and satirical poems
in 1782 link him backwards to the last age. His
translation of Homer, 1791, and of shorter pieces
from the Latin and Greek, connects him with the
classical influence, his interest in Milton with the
revived study of the English Poets. The playful
and gentle vein of humour which he showed \n John
Gilpin and other poems reminds us of Addison, and
opened a new kind of verse to poets. With this
kind of humour is connected a simple pathos of which
Cowper is our greatest master. The Lines to Mary
Unwin and to his Mother's Picture prove, with the
work of Blake, that pure natural feeling wholly free
from artifice had returned to English song. A
wholly new element was also introduced by him and
Blake — the love of animals and the poetry of their
relation to man, a vein plentifully worked by after
poets. His greatest work was the Task^ i7^5' It
is mainly a description of himself and his fife in the
country, his home, his friends, his thoughts as he
walked, the quiet landscape of Olney, the life of the
poor people about him, mixed up with disquisitions
on political and social subjects, and at the end, a
prophecy of the victory of the Kingdom of God. The
change in it in relation to the subject of Nature is v.ery
great. Cowper is the first of the ooets who loves
Nature

itirely

own

paints only

he sees, but he paints it with the affection of a child

iieces

the

i the

ayful

Johfi

, and

this

i^hich

Mary

the

free

and

their

after

the

vni.]

POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832.

for a flower and with the minute observation of a man.
lyie change in relation to the subject of Man is equally
great, The idea of Mankind as a whole which wc
have seen growing up is fully formed in Cowpers
mind. The range of his interests is as wide as the
world, and all men form one brotherhood. All the
social questions of Education, Prisons, Hospitals, city
and country life, the state of the poor and their sor-
rows, the question of universal freedom and of slavery,
of human wrong and oppression, of just and free
government, of international intercourse and union,
and above all the entirely new question of the future
destiny of the whole race, as a whole, are introduced
by Cowper into English poetry. It is a wonderful
change ; a change so wonderful that it is like a new
world. It is in fact the concentration into one
retired poet's work of all the new thought on the
subject of mankind which was soon to take so fierce a
form in Paris. And though splendour and passion
were added by the poets who succeeded him to the
new poetry, yet they worked on the tlioughts he had
laid down, and he is their leader.

' 140. George Crabbe took up the side of the
poetry of Man which had to do witli the lives of the
poor in the Village, 1783, and in the Parish Register y
1807. In the short tales related in these books we
are brought face to face with the sternest pictures of
humble life, its sacrifices, temptations, righteousness,
love, and crimes. The prison, the workhouse, the
hospital and the miserable cottage are all sketched with
a truthfulness perhaps too unrelenting, and the effect of
this poetry in widening human sympathies was very great.
The Borough and Tales in Verse followed, and finally
the Tales of the Hall in 18 19. His work wanted the
humour of Cowper, and though often pathetic, and
always forcible, was too forcible for pure pathos.^ His
work on Nature is as minute and accurate, but as limited
in range of excellence as his work on Man, I may

ipi*

Jul .

I i

t50

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

[CHAK

;• \ ?*?

h ■ ■■

mention here in connection with the poetry of the
poor, the work of Robert Bloomfield, himself a poor
shoemaker. The Farmer's Boy^ 1798, and the Rural
TaleSy are poems as cheerful as Crabbe's were stern,
and his descriptions of rural life are brighter and not
less faithful. The kind of poetry thus started long
continued in our verse. Wordsworth took it up and
added to it new features, and Thomas Hood in short
pieces like the Song of the Shirt gave it a direct bearing
on social evils. ^ ^ ' ^ :-^^'i-:>\i? y :

' 141. One element, the passionate treatment of love,
had been on the whole absent from our poetry since
the Restoration. It was restored by Robert Burns.
In his love songs we hear again, only with greater
truth of natural feeling, the same music which in
the age of Elizabeth enchanted the world. It was
as a love-poet that he began to write, and the first
edition of his poems appeared in 1786. But he
was not only the poet of love, but also of the ne.w
excitement about Man. Himself poor, he sang the
poor. Neither poverty nor low birth made a man
the worse — the man was "a man for a' that." He
did the same work in Scotland in 1786 which
Crabbe began in England in 1783 and Cowper
in 1785, and it is worth remarking how the dates
run together. As in Cowper, so also in Burns, the
further widening of human sympathies is shown in
the new tenderness for animals. The birds, sheep,
cattle and wild creatures of the wood and field fill as
large a space in the poetry of Burns as in that of
Wordsworth and Coleridge. He carried on also the
Celtic C'Cments of Scotch poetry, but he mingled them
with others specially English. The rattling fun of the
/oily Beggars and of Tam o'Shanter is united to a life-
like painting of human character which is peculiarly
English. A certain large gentleness of feeling often
made his wit into that true humour which is more
English than Celtic, and the passionate pathos of such

a poor
Rural
stern,
id not
I long
p and
I short
earing

f love,
' since
urns,
greater
ich in
[t was
le first
lut he
e ne.w
g the
man
• He
which
owper
dates
, the
wn in
sheep,
fill as
hat of
so the
I them
of the
a life-
uliarly
often
more
)i such

viir.] •

POETRY MOM i'jzo TO 183a.

151

poems as Mary in Heaven is connected with this vein
of 1 umoui, and is also more English than Scotch.
The special nationality of Scotch poetry is as strong
in Burns as in any of his predecessors, but it is also
mingled with a larger view of man than the merely
national one. Nor did he fail to carry on the Scotch
love of nature, though he shows the English influence
in using natural description not for the love of nature
alone, but as a background for human love. It was
the strength of his passions and the weakness of
his moral will which made his poetry and spoilt his
life. Of the three men he had most genius, but the
poetical motives he supplied us with are fewer than
those supplied by Cowper.

142. The French Revolution and the Poets.
— Certain ideas relating to Mankind considered as a
whole had been growing up in Europe for more than
a century, and we have seen their influence on the work
of Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns. These ideas spoke of
natural rights that belonged to every man and which
united all men to one another. All men were by right
equal, and free, and brothers. There was therefore
only one class, the class of Man ; only one nation,
the nation of Man, of which all were equal citizens.
All the old divisions therefore which wealth and rank
and class and caste and national boundaries had
made were put aside as wrong and useless. Such ideas
had been for a long time expressed by France in her
literature. They were now waiting to be expressed
in action, and in the overthrow of the Bastille in 1789,
and in the proclamation of the new Constitution in
the following year France threw them abruptly into
popular and political form. Immediately they be-
came living powers in the world, and it is round the
excitement they kindled in England that the work
of the poets from 1790 to 1830 can best be grouped.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey accepted them with
joy but recod^d from them when they ended in the

;H'

f ■

i'f

tS2 MNGUSH LlTERAWkE. '■ [chkp:

violence of the Reign of Terror and in the imperialism
of Napoleon. Scott hated them, and in disgust at
the present turned to wiite of the romantic past.
Byron did not express them themselves, but he ex-
pressed the whole of the revolutionary spirit in its
action against old social opinions. Sh»illey took them
up after the reaction against them had begun to die
away, and re-expressed them. Two men, Rogers and
Keats, were wholly untouched by them. One special
thing they did for poetry. They brought back, by the
powerful feelings they kindled in men, passion into its
style, into all its work about Man, and through that,
into its work about Nature. m >

143. Robert Southey began his poetical life with
the revolutionary poem oi Wat Tyler, 1794; and be-
tween 1802 and 1 8 14 wrote Thalaba, Madoc, The Curse
of Kehama, and Roderick the Last of the Goths. His
Vision of Judgment, written on the death of George
Til., and ridiculed by Byron in another Vision, proves
him to have become a Tory of Tories. Samuel T.
Coleridge could not turn round so completely, but
the wild enthusiasm of his early poems was lessened
when in 1796 he wrote the Ode to the Departing Year
and the Ode to France, poems which nearly reach
sublimity. When France, however, ceasing to be
the champion of freedom, attacked Switzerland, Cole-
ridge as well as Wordsworth ceased to believe in
her and fell back on the old English ideas of
patriotism and of tranquil freedom. Still the disap-
pointment was bitter, and the Ode to Dejection is
instinct not only with his own wasted life, but with the
sorrow of one who has had golden ideals and found
them turn in his hands to clay. His best work is but
little, but of its kind it is perfect and unique. For
exquisite music of metrical movement and for an
imaginative phantasy, such as might belong to a world
where men always dreamt, there is nothing in our
language to be compared with Christabel^ 1905, and

Vlll.l

POErkV t^kOM 1730 To 1832.

iss

in
of
disap-
on is
h the
•ound
IS but
For
an
world
our

Kubla Khan^ and to th'e Ancient Mariner published as
one of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Ihe little poem
called Love is not so good, but it touches with great
grace that with which all sympathise. All that he did
excellently might be bound up in twenty pages, but
it should be bound m pure gold.

144. Of all the poets, misnamed Lake Poets,
William Wordsworth was the greatest. Born in
1770, educated on the banks of Esthwaite, he loved
the scenery of the Lakes as a boy, lived among it in
his manhood, and died in 1850 at Rydal Mount,
close to Rydal lake. He took his degree in ^791 at
Cambridge. The year before he had made a short tour
on the Continent and stepped on the French shore at
the very time when the whole land v^^as "mad with
joy." The end of 1791 saw him again in France
and living at Orleans. He threw himself eagerly into
the Revolution, joined the "patriot side," and came
to Paris just after the September massacre of 1792.
Narrowly escaping the fate of his friends the Brisso-
tins, he got home to England before the execution
of Louis XVL in 1793, and published his Desci-iptive
Sketches, His sympatliy with the Frencl; continued,
and he took their side against his own country,
bating the war that England now set on foot against
France. He was poor, but his friend Raisley Cal-
vert left him 900/. and enabled hi«m to live the
simple life he had now chosen, the life of a retired
poet. At first we find him at Racedown, wher^ in
1797 he made friendship with Coleridge, and then
at Alfoxden, in Somerset, where he and Coleridge
planned and published in 1798 the Lyrical Ballads,
After a winter in Germany with Coleridge, where the
Prelude waf begun, he took a small cottage at Gras-
mere, and there in 1805-6 finished the Prelude^ not
published till 1850. Another set of the Lyrical
BaUads appeared in 1802, and in 1 814 his philosopbi-
cal poem the Excursion, From that time till his

Ml'

I-:
i'

■(iH

ti4

ENGtISH LITER A TORE,

[CHAP.'

death he produced from his home at Rydal Mount
a great succession of poems.

145. Wordsworth and Nature. — The Prelude
is the history of Wordsworth's poetical growth from a
child till 1806. It reveals him as the poet of Nature
and of Man, His view of Nature was entirely different
from that which up to his time the poets had held.
They had believed that the visible universe was dead
matter set in motion like a machine and regulated by
fixed laws. Wordsworth, on the contrary, said that it
was alive. There is a soul, he said, in all the worlds \
" an active principle subsists" in Nature, and entering
into all things, gives to each of them a distinct life
of their own. But the life which varied itself in each
thing was at the same time One Life. He gave this
Oi-e Life person '^lity, and he called it Nature, out in
fact it was in his view the one living Spirit of God,
who in ceaseless action made at each moment the
outward universe. This soul of Nature was entirely
distinct from the mind of man, and acted upon it.
It had powers of its own, desires, feelings and thought
of ^'^s own, and by these it gave education, impulses,
CO ort and joy to the man who opened his heart
to receive them. The human mind receiving these
impressions, reflected on them and added to them
its own thoughts and feelings, and that union of the
mind of man to the mind in Nature then took place
which Wordsworth thought the true end of the pre-
arranged harmony he conceived between Nature and
Humanity. This is the idea which runs through all
his poetry, and one thing especially followed from it,
that he was the first who loved Nature with a personal
love. He could do that because he did not mix up
Nature with his own mind, nor make her the reflection
of himself, nor look upon her as dead matter. She
was a person to him, distinct from himself, and
therefore capable of being loved as a man loves a
woman^ He could brood on .^er character, her wavs.

CHAf.'

lount

Veliide
rom a
Mature
Terent
held.
> dead
ted by
[hat it
orlds ;
itering
ict life
n each
^re this
out in
f God,
nt the
Mitirely
Don it.
h ought
pulses,
heart
r these
o them
of the
k place
he pre-
ire and
ugh all
rom it,
ersonal
mix up
flection
She
jlf, and
Loves a

VIII.]

her

POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832.

tSS

words, her life, as he did on those of his wife or
sister. Hence arose his minute and loving observa-
tion of her and his passionate description of all her
forms. There was nothing, from the daisy's " star-
shaped shadow on the naked stone " to the vast
landscape seen at sunrise from the mountain top,
that he did not describe, that he has not made us
love.

146. Wordsworth and Man. — We have seen
the vivid interest that Wordsworth took in the new ideas
about man as they were shown in the French Revo-
lution. But even before that he relates in the Prelude
how he had been led through his love of Nature to
honour Man. The shepherds of the Lake hills, the
dalesmen, had been seen by him as part of the wild
scenery in which he lived, and he mixed up their life
with the grandeur of Nnure and came to honour them
as part of her l^eing. The love of Nature led him
to the love of Man. It was exactly the reverse order
to that of the previous poets. At Cambridge, and
afterwards in the crowd of London and in his first
tour on the Continent, he received new impressions
of the vast world of Man, but Nature still remained
the nrst. It was only during his life in France and
in the excitement of the new theories and their activity
that he was swept away from Nature and found him-
self thinking of Man as distinct from her, and first in
importance. But the hopes he had formed from the
Revolution broke down. AH his dreams about a new life
of man were made vile when France gave up liberty
for Napoleon • and he was left without love of Nature
or care for Man. It was then that his sister Dorothy,
herself worthy of mention in a history of literature, led
him back to his early love of Nature and restored
his mind. Living quietly at Grasmere, he sought
in the simple lives of the dalesmen round him for the
foundations of a truer view of mankind than the
theories of the Revolution afforded. And in thinking

I'M

'1:1 ■

fiii ■

\\\

III!

IS6

BHGUSH UTEkA TURE.

tcHAP.

and v/riting of the common duties and faith, kindnesses
and truth of lowly men, he found in Mar once more

"an object of delight,
Of pure iniagiiiatioii and of love."

With that he recovered also his interest in the larger
movements of mankind. His love of liberty and
hatred of oppression revived. He saw in Napoleon the
enemy of man. A whole series of sonnets followed
the events on the Coniinent. One recorded his horror
at the attack on the Swiss, another mourned the fate
of Venice, another the fate of Toussaint the negro
:hiet ; others celebrated the struggle of Hofer and the
r^rolese, others the struggle of Spain. Two thanks-
giving odes rejoiced in the overthrcvv of the oppressor
At Waterloo. He became conservative in his old
aige, but his interest in social and national movements
end not decay. He Wiott on Education, the Poor
Laws, and other subjects. When almost seventy he
took the side of the Carbonari, and sympathised
with the. Italian struggle. He was truly a poet of
Mankind. But his chief work was done in his own
country and among his own folk ; and he was the
first who threw around the lives of homely men and
women the glory and sweetness of song, and taught
us to know the brotherhood of all men in a more
beautiful way than the wild way of the Revolution.
He lies asleep now among the people he loved, in the
green churchyard of Grasmere, by the side of the
stream of Rothay,, in a place as quiet as his life. Few
spots on earth aie more sacred than his grave. ^ ^ -
147. Criticism must needs confess that much of his
work is prosaic in thought, but the form of it is always
poetic; that is, the thoughts are expressed in a way
prose never would express them. His theory about
poetic diction, that it should be the ordinary language
men use in strong emotion, may seem to contradict
this ; but as Coleridge has shown, Wordswcth did not

tcH\P.

Inesses
e more

i larger
ty and
eon the
)llowed

horror
the fate
! negro
ind the
thanks-
prciisor
his old
enients
e Poor
mty he
athised
poet of
is own
ras the
en and

taught

)lution.

in the

of the
Few

T of his
always
a way
about
nguage
itradict
lid not

VIII.] , ' POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 157

/Practise his theory, and where he did tl-w result was
not poetry. His style in blank verse is the likest ;o
Milton that we possess, but it is more feninine than
Milton's. He is like Milton also in this, that he ex-
celled in the Sonnet, which we may say he restored to
modern poetjy. Along with the rest of all the poets
of the time he revived old measures and invented new.
His philosophy of Nature we have explained : his
human i)hilosophy, of which the Excursion is the best
exam[)le, was no deeper than a lofty and grave morality
created, in union with an imaginative Christianity. He
believed in himself when all the world disbeheved in him,
and he has been proved right and the world wrong.

148. Sir Walter Scott was Wordsworth's dear
friend, and his career as a poet began when Wordsworth
firstcame to Grasmere, with theZ^^ of the Last Minstrel,
1805 Marmion followed in 1808, and the Lady of
the Lake m 1^10. These were his best poems; the
others, with the exception of some lyrics which touch
the sadness and brightness of life with equal power, do
not count in our estimate of him. He perfected the
narrative poem. In Marmion and the Lady of the
Lake his wonderful inventiveness in narration is at
its height, and it is matched by the vividness of
his natural description. No poet, and in this he
carries on the old Scotch quality, is a fmer colcurist.
His landscapes are painted in colour, and the colour
is always true. Nearly all his iiatural description
is Scotch, and he was the first who opened to the
delight of the world the wild scenery of the High-
lands and the Lowland moorland. He touched it all
.with a pencil so light, graceful, and true, that the
very names are made for ever romantic,

149. Scotland produced another poet in Thomas
Campbell. His earliest poem the Pleasures of Hope-y
1799, l^elonged in its formal rhythm and rhetoric, and in
its artificial feeling for Nature, to the time of Thomson
and Gray rather than to the newer time. His later

!!'

til,

|1:

inl

rs8

ENGLISH LITER A TURE,

[Cll AP. '

poems, such as Gertrude of Wyoming ^ndiO^ Connor's
Child, were far more natural, but they lost the superb
rhetoric so remarkable in the Pleasures of Hope,
Campbell will chiefly live by his lyrics. Hohenlinden,
the Battle of the Baltic, the Mariners of England, are
splendid specimens of the war poetry oi England ;
and the Song to the Evening, Star and Lord Ullins
Daughter are full of tender feeling, and mark the in-
fluence of the more natural style that Wordsworth
had brc^iihf- 1*^ perfection.

150. Rogers at. J Moore. — Samuel Rogers is
another poet whose work is apart from the great
movement of the Revolution. In his long life of
ninety years he produced two octavo volumes. The
Pleasures of Memory, 1792, his first poem, Hnks him
to the past generation and has its characters. The
later poems added to it in 181 2, and the Italy, 1822,
are the work of a slow and cultivated mind, and
contain some laboured but fine descriptions. The
curious thing is that, living apart in a courtly region
of culture, there is not a trace in all his work that
Europe and England and Society had passed during
his life though a convulsion of change. To that
convulsion the best work of Thomas Moore, an
Irishman, may be referred. Ireland during Moore's
youth endeavoured to exist under the dreadful and
wicked weight of its Penal Code. The excitement
of the French Revolution kindled the anger of
Ireland into the rebellion of 1798, and Moore's
genius, such as it was, into writing songs to the Irish
airs collected in 1796. The best of these have for
their hidden subject the struggle of Ireland against
Eng;land. They went everywhere with hlai into
society, and it is not too much to say that they helped
by the interest they stirred to further Catholic
Emancipation. Moore's Oriental tales in Lalla Rookh
are chiefly flash and glitter, but they are pleasant read-
ing. He had a slight, pretty, rarely true, lyrical power,

[chap. '

otinor's
superb
Hope.
ilindeUy
ndy are
gland ;
Ullhis
the in-
Isworth

;ers is

great

life of

The
cs him

The
1822,
d, and

The
■ region
rk that
during
'o that
>RE, an
Moore's
ful and
itement
ger of
Moore's
e Irish
ave for
against
11 into
helped
'atholic
I Rookh
It read-
power.

VIII.]

POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832.

159

and all the songs have this one excellence, they arc
truly things to be sung. -

151. The post- Revolution Poets. — ^We turn
to very different types of men when we come to

^Lord Byron, Shelley and Keats, whom we may call
post-Revolution poets. Childe Harold^ cantos i. ii.,
Byron's first true poem, appeared in 181 2, Shelley's
Queen Mab in 18 13, Keat's first volume in 18 17.

Of the three. Lord Byron had most of the quality
we may call force. Born in 1788, his Hours of Idleness ,
a collection of short poems, in 1807, was mercilessly
lashed in the Edinburgh Review, The attack only
served to awaken his genius, and he replied with as-
tonishing vigour in the satire of English Bards and
Scotch Revie^uers in 1809. Eastern travel gave birth to
the first two cantos of Childe Harold^ to the Giaour zx^A
the Bride of Abydosva 18 13, to the Corsair and Lara
in 1 8 14. The Siege of Corinth^ Parisina^ the Prisoner
of Chillony Manfred^ and Childe Harold were finished
before 18 19. In 181 8 he began a new style in Beppo^
which he developed fully in the successive issues of
Donjuan^ 1819-1823. During this time a number of
dramas came from him, partly historical, as his Marino
FalierOy partly imaginative, as the Cain. His life had
been wild and useless, but he died in trying to redeem
it for the sake of the freedom of Greece. At Misso-

Jonghi he was seized with fever, and passed away in
April 1824. f , . ;, .

i; 152. The position of Byron as a poet is a
curious one. He is partly of the past and partly of
the present. Something of the school of Pope clings
to him; in Childe Harold he imitates Spenser, yet
no one so completely broke away from old measures
and old manners to make his poetry individual, not
imitative. At first, he has no interest whatever in
the human questions which were so strongly felt by
Wordsworth and Shelley. His early work is chiefly
narrative poetry written that he might talk of himself

'•'I

It.'

iwi

i6o

ENGLISH LITER A TURE.

[CHAf.

'Jii

JiiJ:

and not of mankind. Nor has he any philosophy
except that which centres round the problem of his
own being. CVr/>/, the most thoughtful of his pro-
ductions, is in reality nothing more than the repre-
sentation of the way in which the doctrines of original
sin and final reprobation affected his own soul. We
feel naturally great interest in this strong person-
ality, put before us with such obstinate power, but
it wearies at last. Finally it wearitJ himself. As
he grew in thought, he escaped from ins morbid self,
and ran into the opposite extreme in Don Juan. It
is chiefly in it that he shows the influence of the revo-
lutionary spirit. It is written in bold revolt against all
the conventionality of social morality and religion and
politics. It claimed for himself and for others abso-
lute freedom of individifal act and thought in oppo-
sition to that force of society which tends to make all
men after one pattern. This was the best result of
his work, though the way in which it was done can
scarcely be approved. He escaped still more from
his diseased self when, fully seized on by the new spirit
of setting men free from oppression, he sacrificed his
life for the deliverance of Greece. '

As the poet of Nature he belongs also to the old and
the new school. We have mentioned those poets
before Cowper who had less a sympathy with Nature
than a sympathy with themselves as they forced her
to reflect them, men who followed the vein of Rous-
seau. Byron's poetry of natural description is often
of this class. But he also escapes from this posi-
tion of the iSth century poets, and with those of the
19th looks on Nature as she is, apart from himself; and
this escape is made, as in the case of his poetry of
Man, in his later poems. Lastly, it is his colossal
power and the ease that comes from it, in which he
resembles Dryden, that marks him specially. But it
is always more power of the intellect than of the
imagination.

VIII.]

POETRY FROM 1730 TO ^832

i6t

Li>

153. In Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the contrary,
the imagination is supreme and the intellect its servant.
He produced while yet a boy some utterly worthless
tales, but soon showed in Queen Mab, 18 13, the in-
fluence of the revolutionary era, combined in him with
a violent attack on the existing forms of religion.
The poem is a poor one, but its poverty prophesies
greatness. Its chief idea was the new one that had
come into literature — the idea of the destined perfec-
tion of mankind in a future golden age. The whole
heart of Shelley was absorbed in this conception, in
its fciith, and in the hopes it stirred. To help the
world towards it and to denounce and overthrow all
that stood in its way was the object of half of Shelley's
poetry. The other half was personal, an outpouring
of himself in his seeking after the perfect ideal he
could not find, and sadder still, could not even con-
ceive. Queen Mab is an example of the first, Alastor,
of the second. The hopes for man with which
Quee7i Mab was written grew cold; he himself fell
ill and looked for death; the world seemed chilled
to all the ideas he loved, and he turned from
writing about mankind to describe in Alastor the
life and wandering and death of a lonely poet. It
was himself he described, but Shelley was too stern
a moralist to allow that a fife lived apart from
human interests was a noble one, and the title of
the poem expresses this. It is Alastor—'' a spirit of
evil, a spirit of solitude." How wrong he fel-t such
a life is seen in his next poem, the Revolt of Islam,
181 7. He wrote it with the hope that men were
beginning to recover from the apathy and despair
into which the failure of the revolutionary ideas had
thrown them, and to show them what they should strive
and hope for, and destroy. But it is still only a mar-
tyrs hope that the poet possesses. The two chief

characters of the poem

slain in their struggle against tyranny

Laon and Cythna, are both
but their sacrifice

til

l62

ENGLISH LITERATURE,

[CHAP

is to bring forth hereafter the fruit of freedom. The
poem itself has finer passages in it than Aiastor, but
as a whole it is inferior to it. It is quite formless. The
same year Shelley went to Italy, and renewed Jiealth
and the climate gave him renewed power. Rosalmd
and Helen appeared, and in the beginning of \^iZ Julian
and Maddalo. The first tale circles round a social
subject that interested him, the second is a familiar
conversation on the story of a madman in San Lazzaro
at Venice. In it his poetry becomes more masculine,
and he has for the first time won mastery over his
art The new life and joy he had now gained brought
back his enthusiasm for mankind, and he broke out
into the splendid lyric drama of Prometheus Unbound,
Prometheus bound on his rock represents Humanity
suffering under the reign of Evil impersonated in
Jupiter. Asia, at the beginning of the drama separated
from Prometheus, is the all-pervading Love which in
loving makes the universe of nature. The time comes
when Evil is overthrown. Prometheus is then delivered
and united to Asia; that is, Man is wedded to the spirit
in Nature, and Good is all in all. The fourth act is the
choral song of the regenerated universe. It is the
finest example we have of the working out in poetry
of that idea of a glorious destiny for the whole of
Man which Cowper introduced into English poetry.
The marriage of Asia and Prometheus, of Nature
and Humanity, the distinct existence of each for that
purpose, is the same idea as Wordsworth's differently
expressed; and Shelley and he are the only two
poets who have touched it philosophically. Words ^
worth with most contemplation, Shelley with most
imagination. Shelley's poetry of Man reached its
height in Prometheus Unbound^ and he turned now
to try his matured power upon other subjects. Two
of these were neither personal nor for the sake of
man. The first was the drama of the Cenci^ the
gravest and noblest tragedy since Webster wrote,

VIII.1

POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1S32.

163

which we possess. It is as restrained in expression
as the previous poem is exuberant; yet there is no
poem of Shelley's in which passion and thought and
imagery are so wrought together. The second was the
AdanaiSy a lament for the death of John Keats. It is
a poem written by one who seems a spirit about a spirit,
belonging in expression, thought, and feeling to that
world above the senses in which Shelley habitually
lived. Of all this class of poems, to which many of
his lyrics belong, Epipsychidion is the most impalpable,
but, to those who care for Shelley's ethereal world, the
finest poem he ever wrote. No critic can ever com-
prehend it \ it is the artist's poem, and all Shelley's
philosophy of life is contained in it. Of the same
class is the Witch of Atlas, the poem in which he
has personified divine Imagination in her work in
poetry and all her attendants and all her doings
among men.

As a lyric poet, Shelley, on his own ground, is easily
great. Some of the lyrics are purely personal ; some,
as in the very finest, the Ode to the West Wind, mingle
together personal feehngs and prophetic hopes for
Man. Some are lyrics of Nature ; some are dedicated
to the rebuke of tyranny and the cause of liberty ;
others belong to the passion of love, and others are
written on the shadows of dim dreams of thought,
rhey form together the most sensitive, the most ima-
ginative, and the most musical, but the least tangible
lyrical poetry we possess.

As the poet of Nature, he had the same idea as
Wordsworth, that Nature was alive ; but while Words-
worth made the active principle which filled and made
Nature to be Thought, Shelley made it Love. As each
distinct thing in Nature had to Wordsworth a thinking
spirit in it, so each thing had to Shelley a loving spirit
in it ; even the invisible spheres of vapour sucked by
the sun from the forest pool had each their indwell-
ing spirit. We feel then that Shejley, as well as Words-

[^4

ENGLISH LITER A TURK,

[CHA?.

worth, and for a similar reason, could give a special
love to, and therefore describe vividly, each thing
he saw. He wants the closeness of grasp of nature
which Wordsworth and Keats had, but he had the
power in a far greater degree than t ley of describing
a vast landscape melting into indefinite distance.
In this he stands first among English poets, and is
in poetry what Turner was in landscape painting.
Along witii this special quaHty of vastness his colour
is as true as Scott's, but truer in this, that it is full
of half tones, while Scott's is laid out in broad
yellow, crimson, and blue, in black and white.

Towards the end of his life his poetry became
overloaded with mystical metaphysics. What ht;
might have been we cannot tell, for at the age of thirty
he left us, drowned in the sea he loved, washed up and
burned on the sandy spits near Pisa. His ashes lie
beneath the walls of Rome, and Cor cordium, " Heart
of hearts," written on his tomb, well says what all who
love poetry feel when they think of him.

154. John Keats lies near him, cut off like him
ere his genius ripened ; not so great, but possessing
perhaps greater possibilities of greatness ; not so ideal,
but for that very reason closer in his grasp of nature
than Shelley. In one thing he was entirely different
from Shelley — he had no care whatever for the great
human questions which stirred Shelley ; the present
was entirely without interest to him. He marks the
close of that poetic movement which the ideas of
the Revolution in France had started in England, as
Shelley marks the attempt to revive it. Keats, find-
ing nothing to move him in an age which had now
sunk into apathy on these points, went back to
Greek and medissval life to find his subjects, and
established, in doing so, that which has been called
the literarv toetrv of Eindand. His first sublect after
some minor poems in 18 17 was Fjidymion^ 1818, his
last Hyperion^ 1820. These, along with Lamia^ were

Viil.]

POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832.

16S

poems of Greek life. Endymion has all the faults and
all the promise of a great poet's early work, and no
one knew its faults better than Keats, whose preface
is a model of just self-judgment. Hyperion^ a frag-
ment of a tale of the overthrow of the Titans, is itself
like a Titanic torso, and in it the faults of Endymion
are repaired and its promise fulfilled. Both are filled
with that which was deepest in the mind of Keats,
the love of loveliness for its own sake, the sense of its
rightful and pre-eminent power ; and in the singleness
of worship which he gave to Beauty, Keats is especially
the artist, and the true father of the latest modem
school of poetry. Not content with carrying us into
Greek life, he took us back into mediasvai romance,
and in this also he started a new type of poetry.
There are two poems which mark this revival — Isabella^
and the Eve of St, Agnes. Isabella is a version of
Boccaccio's tale of the Pot of Basil ; St. Agnes'' Eve
is, as far as I know, original ; the former is purely
mediaeval, the latter is tinged with the conventional
mediaevalism of Spenser. Both poems are however
modern and individual. The overwrought daintiness of
style, the pure sensuousness, the subtle flavour of feel-
ing, belong to no one but Keats. Their originality has
caused much imitation of them, but they are too
original for imitation. In smaller poems, such as the
Ode to a Grecian Urn, the poem to Autumn, and
some sonnets, he is perhaps at his very best. In these
and in all, his painting of Nature is as close, as direct
as Wordsworth's ; less full of the imagination that links
human thought to Nature, but more full of the ima-
gination which broods upon enjoyment of beauty.
His career was short ; he had scarcely begun to write
when death took him away from the loveliaiess he
loved so keenly. Consumption drove him to Rome,
and there he died almost alone. He lies not far from
Shelley, near the pyramid of Caius Cest-ius.

155, Modern English Poetry.— Keats marks

i66

MNGLISH L^TERA TURE,

[CHA^.

''I

the exhaustion of the impulse which began with Bums
and Cowper. There was no longer novv' in Englaird
any large wave of pub'x thought or feeling such as
could awaken poetry. We have then, arising afier
his death, a number of pretty littl'e poems, having no
inward fire, no idea, no marked character. They
might be written by any versifier at any time, and
express pleasant indifferent thought in pleasant verse.
Such were Mrs. Hemans's poems, and those of L. E. L.,
and such were Tennyson's earliest poems, in 1830.
But with the Reform agitation, and the new religious
agitation at Oxford, which was of the same date, a
new excitement or a new form of the old, came on
England, and with it a new tribe of poets arose,
among whom we live. The elements of their poetry
were also new, though their germs were sown in the
previous poetry. It took up the theological, sceptical,
social, and political questions which disturbed Eng-
land. It gave itself to metaphysics and to analysis
of human character. It carried the love of natural
scenery into almost every county in England, and
described the whole land. Some of its best writers
are Robert Browning and his wife, Matthew Arnold,
and A. H. Clough. One of them, Alfred Tenny-
son, has for forty years remained the first. All the
great subjects of his time he has touched poetically^
and enlightened. His feeling for Nature is accurate,
loving, and of a wide range. His human sympathy
fills as wide a field. The large interests of mankind,
and of his own time, the lives of simple people, and
the subtler phases of thought and feeling which arise
in our overwrought society are wisely and tenderly
written of in his poems. His drawing of distinct
human characters is the best we have in pure poetry
since Chaucer wrote. He writes true songs, and he
has excelled all English writers in the pure Idyll. The
Idylls of *^he King are a kind of epic, and he has
lately tried the drama. In lyrical measures as in the

VIII.]

POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832.

167

form of his blank verse is as inventive as original. It
is by the breadth of his range that he most conclu-
sively takes the first place among the modern poets.

Within the last ten years, the impulse given
in '32 has died away. The vital interest in theo-
logical and social questions, in human questions of
the present, has decayed ; and the same thing which
we find in the case of Keats has again taken place.
A new class of literary poets has arisen, who have
no care for a present they think dull, for reli-
gious questions to which they see no end. They
too have gone back to Greek and mediaeval and old
Norse life for their subjects. They find much of their
inspiration in Italy and in Chaucer; but they con-
tinue the love poetry and the poetry of natural de-
scription. No English poetry exceeds Swinburne's in
varied melody ; and the poems of Rosetti, within their
limited range, are instinct with passion ?X once subtle and
intense. Of them all William Morris is the greatest,
and of him much more is to be expected. At present
he is our most delightful story-teller. He loses much
by being too long, but we pardon the length for the
gentle charm. The Death of Jason, and the stories
told month by month in the Earthly Paradise, a
Greek and a mediaeval story alternately, will long
live to give pleasure to the holiday times of men. It is
some pity that it is foreign and not English story, but
we can bear to hear alien tales, for Tennyson has
always kept us close to the scenery, the traditions, the
daily life and the history of England; and his last
poem, the drama of Queen Mary, 187 5, is written almost
exactly twelve hundred years since the date of our
first poem, Caedmon's Paraphrase, To think of one
and then of the other, and of the great and con-
tinuous stream of literature that has flowed between
them, is more than enough to make us all proud of
the name of Englishmen.