Early 
 
 torature 
 
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STUDIES 
 
 IN 
 
 Early English Literature 
 
 BY 
 
 EMELYN W. WASHBURN 
 
 OCT 28 1832 , 
 
 'OFWASHl^ 
 
 NEW YORK 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 27 & 29 WEST 23D STREET 
 1882 
 
COPYRIGHT BY 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 1882 
 
 Press of 
 
 C. P. Putnam's Son 
 
 New York 
 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 
 
 I DO not purpose more in this book than a general 
 sketch of so wide a subject as Early English Litera- 
 ture. It is my aim to jot down some thoughts gath- 
 ered from my own reading, and to breathe into them 
 some of my love for the study of this subject. To 
 say any thing new I cannot hope, scarce to state any 
 thing freshly; one fears nowadays to criticise even the 
 simplest ballad, lest some one who loved it no better, 
 but who fortunately wrote fifty years sooner, should 
 have said the same things about it. And yet one is 
 always better for a breath of fresh air; and this may 
 perhaps excuse my venturing to speak of our earlier 
 literature. E. W. W. 
 

CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER. PAGE. 
 
 I. The Anglo-Saxon Time i 
 
 II. The Anglo-Norman Time 21 
 
 III. Early Ballad Poetry 39 
 
 IV. The Age of Chaucer 59 
 
 V. The Age of Spenser 85 
 
 VI. The English Drama no 
 
 VII. English Prose . . . * . . . . 143 
 
 VIII. Elizabethan Divines 158 
 
 IX. Francis Bacon 188 
 
 Periods in the History of the English Language and 
 
 Literature . . 221 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON TIME (600-1066). 
 
 It is not as lore of the literary antiquary, nor even as 
 a pastime for the amateur, charming as such rambles 
 among the poets may be, but for a higher end that we 
 prize the study of Anglo-Saxon letters. Literature is 
 more than the bright flowerage of a time. It is the 
 ripest fruit of its history. Its growth is the outcome of 
 a people's whole life, from childhood to manhood. 
 
 This is especially true of the old English literature. It 
 is a folio of many leaves, yet one book ; from the " dap- 
 pled dawn " of Saxon Alfred to the sunrise of Chaucer 
 it is one long day, deepening into the full noon of 
 Shakespeare. Each period is a phase of the great strug- 
 gles of English national life : the shaping of a rough folk 
 into a Christian people ; the stormy time of the Norman 
 Conquest ending in stronger unity; the awakening of 
 the Reformation ; the ripening of the whole past in the 
 reign of Elizabeth. Each English writer, from Caedmon, 
 who first sung the Creation, to Milton, from Aelfric to 
 Jeremy Taylor, from Alfred to Burke, is a living historian 
 of the English mind. 
 
 With this thought before us we should examine the 
 
2 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 beginning and the growth of Anglo-Saxon letters, the 
 true spring of our literature. We cannot understand it 
 otherwise. For us it is its charm, that in spite of all the 
 changes that have swept over the history of England, in 
 spite of all the foreign elements that have gone into the 
 body of its language ; it remains to-day a Saxon speech. 
 
 The Norman French and the other tongues that have 
 given it smoothness and fulness of utterance have sup- 
 plemented, not supplanted, our home-born growth. 
 
 It was for a long time the mistaken belief that the 
 English was mainly a piece of composite architecture, 
 and that French formed the largest and the best part of 
 it. We smile at this theory to-day. The English we 
 speak is three fifths Saxon, and nearly all that is strongest 
 and best is of that stock. For this reason we must 
 know something of the early history of that people, and 
 of their peculiar traits of mind and character as they 
 shaped this growth. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon speech, like the Anglo-Saxon race, 
 is a branch of the Teutonic stock. Other branches are 
 the Low German, embracing the Moeso-Gothic, the old 
 Saxon, the Dutch, and Flemish, the Frisian and other 
 dialects about the Baltic shores ; the Scandinavian, in- 
 cluding Icelandic, Old Norse, Swedish, and Danish ; and 
 the High German, with its Old, Middle, and New forms. 
 
 We know but little of the tribes who settled in Eng- 
 land. It is not even in our power to find any Low 
 German dialect just answering to the Anglo-Saxon. In 
 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON TIME (600-1066.) 3 
 
 many points, above all in construction, it seems nearest 
 to the Old Frisic. This likeness is very striking in the 
 following bit of Country Frisic of 1834, and the English 
 translation by the Countess of Blessington : 
 
 Dead ! hwat bist dou Death ! what beest thou 
 
 Tu hwaem alien bugje, To whom all bow, 
 
 Fen de scepterde kening tade slawe ? From the sceptered king to the slave ? 
 De laetste, bestfreon [O. F. friond], The last, best friend, 
 Ora uws soargen to eingjen, Our cares to end, 
 
 Dyn gebiet is yn't graef. Thine empire is in the grave. 
 
 But leaving these linguistic questions to our scholars, 
 we are mainly in search of the Anglo-Saxon likeness and 
 unlikeness to the character of their Teutonic fathers. It 
 is with the great Northern stock, out of which had come 
 the Edda, the wild Sagas, the heroic song, the mythology 
 so utterly unlike that of the Latin races, that they are 
 one, both in the original stamp of their mind, their social 
 habits, and their religion. 
 
 It was a land of cloudy skies and dark forests that gave 
 birth to the worship of Odin and Thor ; to the mystic 
 poetry of nature, unknown to the sunny growths of 
 classic soil, that deep fancy of the life-tree Ygdrasil, the 
 ash whose roots strike down to Hela, the giants of the 
 race of Ymir, the bright Baldur, the type of Northern 
 chivalry, the Loki, the dwarfs and elves, the original of the 
 Pucks and Robin Goodfellows. In his first haunts the 
 Saxon knew the same hero-worship of Odin, the same 
 life of battle, and sea-wandering song. Yet there is an 
 
4 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 unlikeness also, which has stamped itself on the different 
 branches of the race. 
 
 The Scandinavian and the High German have kept 
 more of the early traits of their Teutonic fathers. We 
 see in the ideal fancy of the German, in the wonderland 
 of his romance, in the mystical tone of his poetry, an- 
 other type than that of the Dutch or the English. In 
 the broad humor and the practical sense of Platt-Deutsch 
 writers like Fritz Reuter, there is a singular likeness to 
 the mind of England. 
 
 This idea of mental and moral heredity runs through 
 these riddles of history. The German of to-day can sel- 
 dom construct a novel ; but in a wild story like " Undine," 
 or the fantasies of Hoffman, he is a master. The Saxon 
 had, with his Teutonic blood, the practical understand- 
 ing, the genius for deeds more than words, which, after 
 he had crossed the Channel, made up the mental proto- 
 plasm of his children. England's strongest elements of 
 statesmanship, of letters, of life, have their origin in these 
 Saxon traits. 
 
 But the most faithful picture of the Anglo-Saxon in 
 this earlier time is still preserved for us in the fragments 
 of three striking poems which have happily survived. 
 
 Of these, the longest, " Beowulf," is a Saga of the 
 heroic age, worthy to be put side by side with those of 
 Scandinavian birth. The other two are the " Scop," or 
 " Gleeman's Tale," and the " Fight at Finnesburg." 
 
 They should be noticed here instead of later in this 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON TIME (600-1066). 5 
 
 sketch, because they belong to this time only. It is true 
 that the version of the "Beowulf" which comes down to 
 us is later, and indeed the whole poem has been turned 
 from a Pagan into a Christian one. Yet beneath the out- 
 ward acknowledgment of the God of heaven and the 
 church world, we feel the old Pagan spirit. We are borne 
 back to the shores of the Baltic, and to the heroic day 
 when life was an endless fight with wild beasts and sav- 
 age men. And still the soul of Northern chivalry, the 
 love of great deeds, the bond of friendship in arms, the 
 song of the gleeman, and the feast, all come before us as' 
 in this old Saga. It does not show the imaginative char- 
 acter of the Edda. There was never with the Saxon any 
 such epic cycle as with the Scandinavian. It is a grand 
 torso. But it is the very image of the time and the men. 
 The poem tells us at its opening of the renown of the 
 first kings of the Gar Danes, and the birth of Beowulf, 
 offspring of Scyld. He visits Hrothgar, whose hall is 
 laid waste by the monster Grendel, a kind of man-fiend 
 bred in the marshes, and slays him in deadly fight. It is 
 crowded with scenes of death, of feasting over the mead, 
 with the speech of the warriors and the tales of their 
 hardihood. There is a Homeric freedom only to be found 
 in such a day. It has not the sustained flow of the 
 Homeric line, nor the wonderful imagination of the 
 Norse poetry ; yet a sharp ringing utterance and a 
 bright fancy are in it. We hear the clash of spears in 
 a wild refrain to the voice of the harper. 
 
6 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Before reading the Saxon poetry, we should glance at 
 its structure. It is the same as that of all the Northern 
 verse of that time. It is made up of couplets of short 
 lines, a dactyle and trochee without rhyme. Allitera- 
 tion is the main feature of the couplet. Each first line has 
 one or two words beginning with the same letter, and in 
 the second line there must be at least one word repeating 
 the letter. 
 
 Oft Scyld Scefing 
 Scea)>ena )»reatum 
 Monegum maeg]?um 
 Meodu setla afteah. 
 
 In this alliteration we have the rude anticipation of 
 rhyme. It is suited to the Saxon character, like the 
 quick, following blows of Trior's hammer. A striking 
 proof it is of this home-born strength, that the allitera- 
 tive couplet lasted through all the after-growth of Anglo- 
 Saxon and Old English, down to the day of " Piers Plow- 
 man." 
 
 The following short but telling lines are from this old 
 Saga. The first is a picture of the funeral of Scyld, who, 
 after the grand manner of the Vikings, was set upon the 
 prow of his own ship in all the pride of his golden mail, 
 alone, without a comrade, his crown on his head, and his 
 weapons about him, and then launched into the sea to 
 find his own grave. 
 
 There at the hithe stood The Ethelings rover. 
 
 The ring-p rowed ship, There did they lay him 
 
 Ice girt and glad to go The chieftain they loved, 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON TIME (600-1066). 
 
 The brave ring bestower, 
 
 In the ship's bosom. 
 
 At the masthead the mighty 
 
 Sate with much treasure, 
 Gauds from all far away 
 Lands freely gathered, 
 Never a comelier 
 Keel have I counted. 
 Decked with war weapons 
 And weeds of the hero, 
 With bills and with byrnies ; 
 Lay on his bosom 
 Wealth without number, 
 With him to wander 
 
 Into the flood's sway 
 Far away floating. 
 
 Stately beside him 
 They set the gold banner 
 O'er his head blazing, 
 Let the sea bear him 
 To the great sea gave him. 
 Gloomy their minds were 
 Mournful and moody, 
 No man might ever 
 Say forsooth, or the 
 Sages in council hall, 
 Lordliest heroes, 
 Where landed that lading. 
 
 Beowulf hears of the ravages of Grendel in the coun- 
 try of his Danish allies, and sets forth to aid them. 
 
 The Visit of Beowulf. 
 
 Stone paved the street was, 
 Showing the strait way, 
 To the brave comrades, 
 Bright shown the byrnie, 
 Head and hand locked ; 
 Heavy ringed iron 
 Sang in their war sarks, 
 As they strode onward. 
 Then the sea weary ones 
 
 Set their broad shields down 
 Round and hard hammered, 
 Close by the house wall. 
 To a bench bending, 
 Brought they the byrnies. 
 In a ring stood there 
 Spears and stout war gear, 
 Gathered together 
 With the gray ashwood. 
 
 The Banquet. 
 
 Gay were the laughing guests, 
 
 Gladsome the greeting. 
 
 Beautiful Wealtheowe came, 
 
 Bride of King Hrothgar, 
 
 Gold crowned, she welcome gave 
 
 To the brave warriors. 
 
 Filled she the flagon 
 
 To the first of the East Danes, 
 
 Blithely she bade him cheer 
 
 At the mead banquet. 
 Hailed she through the hall 
 Youth and helmed nobles ; 
 Poured she to every one 
 From the bowl precious, 
 Then with bright-beaded arms 
 To Beowulf bore it, 
 Smiling he seized the cup, 
 Singing he drained it. 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Fight with the Mother of Grendel. 
 
 So with these bold words, 
 
 Went the Lord of the Weder Goths 
 
 Ocean wave held him, 
 
 The world famous warrior, 
 
 She who the flood's course. 
 
 Had for a hundred years 
 
 Harrowed, blood-thirsty, 
 
 Greedily she grasped him 
 
 In her grim clutches. 
 
 Bore him the sea wolf 
 
 Down to the bottom. 
 
 In the low ocean hall 
 
 In the pale firelight 
 
 Saw he the mere wife 
 
 Mightily struck he ; 
 
 Sang his good ringed sword 
 
 Fiercely its war song, 
 
 Grimly she grasped him 
 On the ground threw him*' 
 Brandished the dagger, 
 Broad and brown-edged. 
 Had not his byrnie helped 
 And God the Holy. 
 Saw he beside him 
 A doughty battle bill, 
 Glory of warriors, 
 Wrought by the giants ; 
 Seized he the knotted hilt. 
 Struck in his anger, 
 Broke he the bony neck, 
 Bore through the body. 
 Bloody the sword was, 
 Bright beamed the warrior 
 As stands the sun on high 
 Shining serenely. 
 
 The Burial Mound. 
 
 For nim then gathered they, 
 His own Goth people, 
 A proud burial mound, 
 On the earth builded, 
 Hung it with helmets, 
 War gear of heroes, 
 And his bright byrnie, 
 E'en as he bade them. 
 On the cold hill crest 
 Kindled the bale fires, 
 Swart from the Swedish pine 
 Sailed up the wood reek ; 
 Wildly the roaring flame 
 Blent with their weeping. 
 High and broad stood it 
 The mound on the hill-side, 
 Saw it from far and wide, 
 All the sea pilgrims. 
 
 In it they stored away, 
 Stones, jewels costly, 
 Treasures of great earls, 
 In the earth's keeping ; 
 Gold in the ground hid 
 Where it yet hideth, 
 Bootless to man now, 
 As 't was before time. 
 Then round the sad pile 
 Rode all the war beasts, 
 Ethelings, brave earls, 
 Their king bewailing ; 
 Dirges reciting ; 
 All his deeds praising, 
 Calling him always 
 King among world kings, 
 Of men the mildest, 
 Of kings the kindest, 
 Of his folk fondest. 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON TIME (600-1066). O, 
 
 The " Scop," or " Gleeman's Tale," is a curious portrait 
 of the learning of that rude age The bard unlocks his 
 " word hoard," and sings the lands and great men that he 
 has seen and heard of. Alexander and Attila are placed 
 together, and Caesar is King of the Greeks. He passes 
 then to the Goths and Saxons, and the courts he has 
 seen. " With the Israelite I was, with Hebrews and 
 Indians, and with the Egyptians." His last lines are a 
 good description of the "gaye science" of that day. 
 
 Thus do we wander 
 With our wise sayings. 
 We the gay gleemen 
 Thro' all lands going, 
 Southward or Northward 
 Glad of our song craft, 
 * * * * 
 
 Giving with bounty. 
 
 The " Finnesburg Fight " is a fragment, more striking 
 than " Beowulf," to judge by the few verses left us. It be- 
 gins with a speech of Fin, the Frisian prince, who sees a 
 gleam of light in his palace, fired by the Danes at night. 
 
 Then wildly cried he, See the moon shining, 
 
 The warrior king, In clouds she wanders, 
 
 This is no dawn of East, Waking the woful deeds 
 
 No flight of dragon ; Hates of the people ; 
 
 Nor burn the cressets Rouse ye, my heroes ! 
 
 Bright in the broad hall, Fight for your dear land, 
 
 Fierce is the flaming. Fight in the forefront. 
 
 Frightened the birds sing, * * * * 
 
 Wild chirps the cricket, Then in the hall rose 
 
 But wilder the war wood, Roar of the slaughter, 
 
 Shield and shaft meeting. Round mighty Guthlafsson 
 
IO ENGLISH LITERA TURE, 
 
 Lay many corpses. Blazed altogether. 
 
 Sailed then the raven, Battle I never heard, 
 
 Swart and brown sallow ; Nobler of heroes 
 
 In the fierce sword gleam, Fitter for mead feast. 
 Seemed it Fin's castle 
 
 Such are the fragments left us of the heroic Saxon 
 age. But in the broken torso, with these thews and 
 sinews, we can know the race. 
 
 We may now turn to its English history. It is the 
 record of a people who dwelt in the island six hundred 
 years, to the time of the Norman Conquest ; and who 
 became rooted in it so thoroughly as to leave hardly a 
 trace of those they uprooted, and to plant there a civili- 
 zation which at last swallowed up the Norman. 
 
 This persistent vital force of the Anglo-Saxon is the 
 wonder of his history and his literature. We need 
 not spend any time on the Celtic, or the Roman period, 
 so far as English civilization is concerned. Except in the 
 legends of the " Round Table," an epic doubtless woven 
 in Brittany by Armoric bards, but whose soil is Britain, 
 and a few place names still lingering on English soil, 
 there is no point of contact between the Briton and the 
 later civilization of England. 
 
 The Roman military sway reaches. from 43 A. D. to 
 412. After that stern domination we find the Celtic race 
 partly civilized, but weakened. The Anglo-Saxon in- 
 vasion followed. In one century the whole country was 
 settled by the new race. The characteristic feature of 
 this occupation was that the Anglo-Saxons were not 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON TIME (600-1066). II 
 
 military occupants like the Romans before them or the 
 Normans afterward ; they were colonists. Six hundred 
 years of slowly growing civilization followed with their 
 permanent settlement. It was a wild age of border feuds 
 between the different English tribes, with the Celt in 
 Scotland, Wales, and Southwest England, and raid on 
 raid of Danes on the East coast. 
 
 This long period, which Milton called the history of 
 the " battles of kites and crows," was followed by the 
 welding of the little kingdom into one under Alfred. 
 
 From this point begins a national life and national cult- 
 ure. It could not begin until one speech had become 
 dominant. Hitherto there had been the two leading di- 
 alects, the Anglian or Northumbrian, with which some 
 Scandinavian elements were mingled, and the Saxon of 
 the South. Besides these there were many local dialects. 
 
 Alfred was born in Berkshire, the West Saxon centre. 
 Under his sway rose the arts of peace, schools, churches, 
 books, trades. All the remains of the early learning have 
 reached us in manuscripts from that time. The oldest 
 copy of Caedmon, who was a West Angle, is later than 
 Alfred's day. With Alfred, then, in the beginning of the 
 ninth century, after three centuries and a half of strug- 
 gle, we see the first noontide of English civilization. It 
 was to last till the middle of the eleventh century, and 
 then, after setting in the Norman Conquest, to rise 
 again. 
 
 A slight idea of the language is perhaps the most 
 
12 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 weighty of our gains from research into the Anglo-Saxon 
 period. The study of the growth of a language is the 
 study of the brain and heart of the people. The Anglo- 
 Saxon is not a dead speech ; it is the heart and pith of 
 the English of to-day. Three fifths of the English we 
 use, and those three fifths the bulk of the words of our 
 household and social life : the words taken from the 
 outer world of sight (as sun, moon, tree, stream), words 
 borrowed from sound and living movement (crash, break, 
 split, crack, shake, whirl), words of the inner world 
 (thought, feeling, will, love, grief, good, bad, right, wrong), 
 words of action and suffering (walk, talk, smite, draw, 
 strike). 
 
 All these are Saxon words. Of all that are not Saxon, 
 the larger part have come from the Norman-French, a 
 language that has given us words to express our civiliza- 
 tion, — words of the more courtly class, the words that 
 describe our social life, our cookery, our dress. Our theo- 
 logical vocabulary is from the Latin Church ; our scien- 
 tific, mainly from the Greek. 
 
 Many of these alien words were of course needed, and 
 many of them are happy additions to our language. Yet' 
 it was not from any defect in the genius of the Saxon 
 speech, but because the incoming of the Norman held it 
 in abeyance, that it was compelled to leave untried its 
 own word-making gift. The Saxon, as we have seen, was 
 a Low German speech. It has, therefore, all the ele- 
 ments of its mother-tongue, being strong in sound, and 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON TIME (600-1066). 1 3 
 
 given to hard consonant endings more than vowel sounds. 
 
 But the feature most to be noted is the original com- 
 pounding power of the Saxon. It built, as the German 
 so happily does, all its words out of its own one-syllabled 
 roots. This compounding power, which gives such 
 beauty to Greek, such variety to German, was possessed 
 in a wonderful measure by the Saxon, and we yet have 
 it in many words, as whirlpool, thunderbolt, earthquake ; 
 in others we do not see their make-up, as a-corn, gospell, 
 gossip, island (ed, water). The loss to our language is 
 very great. The poetry of every tongue lies in this com- 
 pounding power. The German says, "star knowledge," 
 "morning land"; we say, "astronomy," "the orient." 
 We see this in Voss' " Homer," that master-work of 
 translation ; almost line for line it reproduces the form of 
 the Greek. Nor is this feature less important in philo- 
 sophic speech. Kant built his word-book, as Aristotle did, 
 out of the root-words of his German tongue. This is our 
 loss, for the Saxon had the compounding power to a 
 degree almost unthinkable now. The root mod — 
 " mood," for instance, is found in three verbs, six nouns, 
 nine adjectives, one adverb. This wealth of composition 
 still remains in such words as eyesight, foresight, insight ; 
 in word-endings, like ship — ivorship, clerkship; hed — 
 childhood, fatherhood; nes — business, kindness; dom — 
 kingdom, Christendom. It is lost in such prefixes, as sib- 
 unsib (kin), cenning — edcenning {new birth), 
 
 Again, the Saxon had a very rich inflection. Its nouns 
 
1 4 ENGLISH LITERATURE* 
 
 had three inflections and fouT cases, each distinguished 
 by its ending. Adjectives, pronouns, and articles had 
 the same inflection. There was a dual number in pro- 
 nouns of the first and second persons, wit — wetwo,gyt — ye 
 two. Gender, as in German, was applied to inanimate 
 as well as animate objects. The verbs had three conju- 
 gations, four moods, and two tenses, the present and the 
 imperfect, all marked in the same way by inflection. 
 
 The passive voice only was formed, as now, by the help 
 of the auxiliary. The infinitive was indicated by the 
 termination an and not by the sign to, which belonged to 
 the gerund, a form which we have lost, though it under- 
 lies such expressions as "this house to let," "he is to 
 blame." They could use two negatives to strengthen 
 the negation (nor saw never no man God). The syntax 
 again had certain features now lost. The structure was 
 more like the German. The words which gave the most 
 emphasis to the idea were put first in the sentence, and 
 the verb was held in suspense. This inversion gives 
 much poetic force to their prose, and is a marvellous 
 power in poetry. 
 
 These hints will give us an idea of the Saxon language. 
 It was like the people, strong, straightforward, a hearty 
 speech. Like the Greek and German, it had the power 
 to grow into richer forms. It has been called a rude 
 tongue, one that needed the amplification of the Norman 
 French. Yet the rudeness was partly that of the age. 
 It needed time for its own development. All languages 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON TIME (600-1066). 1 5 
 
 have been rude, Greek and German as well. If we would 
 know the wealth that we have inherited, we should learn 
 the Saxon. Speech and thought are more akin than we 
 are aware of, and the study of Anglo-Saxon is the study 
 of the intimate history of the English mind. 
 
 We must not expect to find more than the fragments 
 of the Saxon literature before Alfred. The learning of 
 that warlike England was in the keeping of the Christian 
 Church ; both prose and poetry naturally took the form 
 of homily, monkish chronicle, and moral essay. Yet a 
 few relics survive which show that the old heroic fire was 
 not all gone out ; that the gleeman still sung in the hall 
 of the thane as in the day of Beowulf. These are the 
 song of Athelstan's victory at Brunanburh, two pieces on 
 the crowning and death of Edgar, and a few more frag- 
 ments scattered through the dry Anglo-Saxon chroni- 
 cles ; they end with the death of Edward and the choosing 
 of Harold. Most striking of all these fragments is that 
 which describes the fall of Byrthnoth at Maldon. 
 
 The Battle of Brunanburh. 
 
 Here did King Athelstan, Lay in still slumber ; 
 
 Lord of the highborn earls, Then fled the foe away, 
 
 Ring-giver of heroes, Leaving behind them 
 
 He and his brother too, Bodies uncounted, 
 
 Edmund the Etheling, Meat for the sallow kite, 
 
 Earn in the battle And the swart raven, 
 
 Fame ever lasting, The horny-beaked prowler; 
 
 With their swords' edges. Meat for the war Tiawk, 
 
 On the fierce field lay And the fell gray wolf 
 
 Five of the young kings, Ranging the forest. 
 
 ********* 
 
l6 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 We pass to the literary history that more fully recalls 
 the ripe time of Alfred. The noticeable fact is that 
 while there are some writers in Latin who claim our 
 honor — above all, Bede, — yet even in the cloister the 
 Anglo-Saxon kept its hold. Aldhelm and Asser were men 
 of learning for their day. But it is perhaps proof of the 
 national type of the English Catholic Church, as well as 
 of the love of country, that the Latin did not prevail as 
 in the time of Alcuin and Erigena. We have a list of 
 very curious Anglo-Saxon works, that are the fruit of the 
 seventh and ninth centuries. There are many versions 
 of the Scriptures, as the Latin Psalter, with an interlined 
 translation. The " Psalms " by Aldhelm, and the " Hep- 
 tateuch " of Aelfric, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 
 tenth century, are books remarkable as next in date to 
 the Mceso-Gothic Gospels. There are eighty homilies 
 by Aelfric, and several treatises on geography, medicine, 
 and botany, that give an idea of the science of the 
 island. And we owe to these Saxon monks the Anglo- 
 Saxon Chronicle, made up of convent year-books, reach- 
 ing down to 1 1 54, and containing the sad and faithful 
 history of the bloom and decay of their natural life. 
 
 Very curious, too, are some of the moral writings of 
 the time, as the " Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn," and 
 a number of quaint riddles. Even the records of char- 
 ters, leases, and church laws, are of worth to show how the 
 home-born English ruled over the land. It is often said 
 that the Anglo-Saxon literature is dull. Yet this very 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON TIME (600-1066). 
 
 17 
 
 dulness presumes a comfortable civilization behind their 
 literature. The Anglo-Saxon had not the culture, the 
 learning, the romance of the Norman ; but he had a 
 more peaceful life at home. The earliest and best of 
 their poetry is the " Paraphrase " of Caedmon. In it are 
 passages of true imagination, which recall Milton so[ 
 strongly, that it is hard to believe he had never read the 
 " Paraphrase." The second part, beginning with the 
 council of fiends held by Lucifer, is especially remarka- 
 ble. The poem is long-spun, and has all the faults of 
 the Saxon, of ellipse, inversion, and uncouth line. But 
 it is worthy of our study. 
 
 A Description of Chaos. 
 
 Nothing created was 
 Save shadow of cavern ; 
 Naught was in being, 
 Only the broad abyss 
 Deep and dim standing, 
 Dark to the Maker, 
 Empty and idle. 
 On it his eyes looked ; 
 The monarch strong-hearted 
 Saw the sad void around 
 Dreadful and joyless ; 
 Saw the drear cloud descend, 
 In night unending, 
 Under the skies above 
 Wan lie and wasted, 
 Till came the world forth 
 
 Lurid the light gleamed 
 Half light, half shadow ; 
 
 By his own word shaped, 
 King of all glory. 
 
 Then came the second day : 
 Light of the darkness 
 Bade Life's guardian 
 On the sea flood to stand, 
 A glad heaven building. 
 The waters rent he, 
 He, our high Ruler ; 
 And soon he wrought 
 The skiey firmament ; 
 This reared the Mighty One 
 Above the round earth 
 By his own living word, 
 The Lord Almighty. 
 
 Satan. 
 
 Through the broad hall of hell, 
 Like the harsh thunder, 
 
1 8 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Rolled the far-piercing voice With his one footstep ; 
 
 Of the Fell Fiend king, Parted the billows red, 
 
 Calling the countless host As he passed over, 
 
 Of the accursed ones. Satan, the Hell Lord, 
 
 Shook the strong underworld Hater of holy things. 
 
 There is a rich collection of other poems of the seventh 
 and ninth centuries. The poems of Cynewulf have much 
 poetic worth, and that of " Judith " has much strength. 
 The allegory of the Phcenix, the short poem on death, 
 and the address of the departing soul to the body are 
 quaint bits of Saxon fancy, and there are still other frag- 
 ments of great value, although much, without doubt, has 
 perished of the poetry and prose of the Saxon time in 
 the wild storm of the Conquest. 
 
 The study of Anglo-Saxon must end with the greatest 
 of them all, the king and writer and Christian, Alfred. 
 It was a wonderful life, remembering all the strife of the 
 time, the steadfast toil, the long years before he built the 
 kingdom, and yet the love of learning, the wide knowl- 
 edge seen in his writings. 
 
 All that is wise in the England of that day is gathered 
 in Alfred. Bede's " Church History," St. Augustine's. 
 " Soliloquies" (Confessiones), Gregory the Great's ''Di- 
 rections to the Clergy," Orosius' " History," and Boethius' 
 " De Consolatione," made a library in those dark days. 
 His work was chiefly translation, yet it is so inlaid with 
 his own thought that you feel his personality. The 
 most valuable part of the " Orosius " is the careful report 
 he gives of the Northland, made by his best seaman. 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON TIME (600-1066). 
 
 J 9 
 
 In the " Boethius " we listen to the wise king, as he 
 writes the consolation given him in his own battle of life, 
 sometimes in hearty prose, sometimes in a poetic strophe 
 not without its charm of fancy. 
 
 " Well, O man, well ! Every one of you that be free, 
 tend to the good, and this happiness; and he that is in 
 bondage with the fruitless love of this world, let him seek 
 freedom. For this is the only rest of all our labors. This 
 is the only port always calm after the storms and billows 
 of our toil. The golden stones, the jewels of all kinds, 
 and all the earth boasteth will not enlighten the eyes of 
 the soul." 
 
 So oft the calm sea, 
 Clear as the grey glass, 
 Winds from the southward 
 Wildly are stirring ; 
 So oft a well spring, 
 From the hoar cliff wending 
 Cool and as crystal pure, 
 Creeps it right gladsome, 
 O'er the earth streaming. 
 But from the stony hill 
 Great crags have tumbled, 
 And in the troubled tide 
 
 Lie they together. 
 
 Dim is the water now, 
 
 Wild the brook wanders, 
 
 Turned by the rock aside 
 
 From the true channel. 
 
 So will the cloudiness 
 
 From thy heart creeping 
 
 Sadden the sunlight 
 
 In thy soul shining, 
 
 And the true flowing thoughts 
 
 Trouble how sorely. 
 
 We have now made a rapid, but, I think, a fair judg- 
 ment of the Saxon literature. Let it be remembered 
 that the Anglo-Saxon time is to be compared with the 
 same epoch in Continental Europe ; not with the time 
 that follows it. The Anglo-Norman had more of intel- 
 lectual culture ; but the Anglo-Norman time begins with 
 
20 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the Middle Age, the time when all Europe had its awaken- 
 ing in philosophy, romance, art. The Saxon period is 
 the dark age of Europe. If we compare France and Ger- 
 many during the same time with England, we shall find 
 that the culture of the Saxon is not of an inferior type. 
 
 With the reign of Alfred, the Anglo-Saxon growth 
 reached its first stage. Fifty years (849-901) had done 
 much for learning, art, order. This growth continued yet 
 another hundred and fifty years, and then sank into a 
 long sleep. A new rising was to come. The Anglo- 
 Saxon spirit was not to die. All that was strong in the 
 English character, all that made the freedom, the self 
 governed manhood of the State, much that was lasting 
 in the mind and the speech, was the fruit of those six 
 centuries of Saxon, but home-bred civilization ; and was 
 to outlive the Conquest, to take in new elments, and come 
 forth in its ripe manhood. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE ANGLO-NORMAN TIME (1066-1500). 
 
 We reach here the second period of English literature, 
 the time when it received the shaping influences of Nor- 
 man speech and life. It is a brilliant history. It is the 
 opening of the Middle Age. It is the time when Eng- 
 land first came into full knowledge of the wider world of 
 Europe, and thus felt the two great forces which molded 
 that age, — Feudalism and the Roman Papacy. Hitherto 
 England's growth had been only that of an insular com- 
 munity. The people still kept the free ways of their 
 Saxon ancestors, and of the Saxon church ; yet England 
 could not always remain apart from the life of Europe, it 
 must have for its own development this blending with 
 the civilization of the Continent. The Conquest was the 
 bridge from the mainland to the island. We are begin- 
 ning in our day fairly to read this fact, and the most valu- 
 able addition to our knowledge that has been made by 
 recent historians is to teach us that the Conquest was a 
 very important step in the development of England ; 
 and that it followed other steps as real although not so 
 sudden. Already in the day of Edward the Confessor, 
 the courtly tone, the manners and speech of Normandy 
 
22 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 had crossed the Channel. The French language was now 
 for three hundred years to reign at the court, in the castle 
 of the baron, in the church, the profession of law, the 
 schools. The Norman genius was to mold the English 
 life into a finer form, and the English speech into a fuller 
 beauty and grace. From this refining process the Saxon 
 speech emerges, no longer the Saxon of Alfred's time, 
 but greatly enlarged and enriched, and ready for a great 
 English literature. We are to study this transition time, 
 when all the wealth of fancy and story, of monkish chron- 
 icle, wild legend, chivalry, and song is made ready for 
 Chaucer and Spenser. Two lines of inquiry lie before 
 us : 
 
 1st. The changes wrought upon the language. 
 
 2d. Its literary history, especially that of the English 
 metrical romances. 
 
 We have found in our study of the language that the 
 English of to-day is a compound, rather than intimate 
 grammatical fusion of the earlier speech with the Nor- 
 man-French. Its grammatical base is Saxon, though 
 many of its words are French. Recalling the chief feat- 
 ures of the Saxon, the inflection, the harsh admixture of 
 consonants, the word-making power, the inversion and 
 complex shape of the sentence, let us follow the leading 
 steps in the changes that were wrought upon it by the 
 Conquest. 
 
 a. Many old Saxon words are now lost. This was 
 natural. French was spoken by the gentry, Saxon only 
 
THE ANGLO-NORMAN TIME '1066-1500). 2$ 
 
 by the peasantry and the monks of the old church. The 
 homely words of the " lewd folk " remained. But those 
 which pertain to the court, the banquet, dress, ornament, 
 pleasure, literature, drove them out ; as the barons seized 
 the old lands and built their castles. Thus the whole 
 refined vocabulary arose — garden, flower, terrace, cham- 
 ber, mansion, venison, mutton, beef, veal, gentle, peasant, 
 art, poesy, pen, lesson, reason, sentiment, memory, — an 
 unnumbered host of words like these usurped the rights 
 of the home-born speech. 
 
 And thus the creative power of word-making, which we 
 have seen in the Saxon, was almost wholly lost. Eng- 
 lishmen, when the Norman day had gone, found the 
 words already supplied that would have naturally grown 
 out of the elements of their own speech. 
 
 Natural changes in the inflection of noun, verb, and 
 adjective took place. It is wholly like the change of 
 French and Italian from the Latin. A half-taught monk, 
 an Englishman among Normans, in the lapse of years lost 
 knowledge of the nicer shades of Saxon speech, and in- 
 stead of the old endings used the particles. The case- 
 inflection of nouns was indicated by prepositions — of, to, 
 for, with, in. Only the genitive retained the inflection. 
 The plural had already its later form of s. The adjec- 
 tives lost the inflection altogether. The pronouns were 
 docked in the same way. The dual was dropped, the 
 only trace left to us is in between and betwixt, — " amidst 
 two." Gender was given up in the nouns that stand for 
 
24 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 inanimate things. This doubtless was a gain, although 
 we lose much of the old life of the language. The defi- 
 nite and indefinite declension of adjectives is lost; the 
 feminine endings of adjectives and pronouns disappear. 
 Many final vowels are given up. The verbs lose their in- 
 flections, and they are filled out by the auxiliaries have 
 and be. The old change of vowel in preterite and parti- 
 ciple is supplied by the weak ending in ed, wox, waxed. 
 In the syntax and prosody, too, there were changes. 
 The French structure of the sentence, less periodic and 
 involved, took by degrees the place of the Saxon style. 
 This change is specially to be seen in the poetry. 
 Rhyme, though sometimes found in Saxon before the 
 Conquest, now becomes common, chiefly the feminine 
 rhyme. 
 
 Such are the general features of the changes wrought 
 by the Norman Conquest upon Anglo-Saxon speech. Of 
 course they took place by slow degrees. It has been the 
 aim of some of our learned Saxonists to mark the whole 
 time from the Conquest to modern English into certain 
 great divisions, as: 1st. The Semi-Saxon period from 1066 
 to 1250, — the time when the language was in its state of 
 disintegration. 2d. The Old English, from 1250 to 1500, 
 — the time of restoration., This, again, is divided into 
 Early English, horn 1250 to 1350; and Middle English, 
 from 1350 to 1500, — the age of Chaucer. 
 
 We cannot separate the eras of these linguistic changes 
 as we do the strata of different geological epochs. They 
 
THE ANGLO-NORMAN TIME (1066-1500). 25 
 
 merge into each other ; yet in the main the classification 
 is borne out by the literary remains of the time. During 
 the whole Anglo-Norman period the language of the 
 gentry is French. The old speech lingers among the 
 people and the monks of Saxon cloisters. To them we 
 owe the preservation of all that is left to us of their 
 speech. 
 
 Some of the best landmarks of the Semi-Saxon period 
 are the " English Chronicle " to 11 54; the " Ormulum," 
 a metrical paraphrase of part of the Gospels; and Laya- 
 mon's " Brut," a rhymed version of Wace's " Chronicle." 
 It is from Geoffrey of Monmouth's " Latin History " that 
 the French of Wace is taken, and the poet has added 
 some Breton legends to the original Welsh story of Geof- 
 frey. The " Brut " is the work of an English priest in 
 Worcestershire; its date is about 1205 " 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 Earnly, a noble 
 church on the banks of Severn, near Radstone, where he 
 read books. It came in mind to him and in his chiefest 
 thought that he would tell the noble deeds of England, 
 what the men were named, and whence they came who 
 first had English land." 
 
 It was indeed a great work. It gave a past history to 
 the island, and though it was fictitious it formed a bond 
 of interest between Norman and Englishman. In its 
 32,000 lines there are not more than fifty words of 
 
26 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 French. But the changes we have marked in the lan- 
 guage are found already. The old alliterative metre is 
 kept up, and there are a few rare rhymes. Layamon is 
 the last of the old Saxon poets, with all their rude 
 strength and simple but telling metaphor. 
 
 King Leir and his Daughters. 
 
 Bladud hafde enne sune, ha asldeste dohter haihte Gornoille, 
 
 Leir was ihaten, ha o5er Regau, 
 
 Efter his fader daie, ha hridde Cordoille, 
 
 He heold bis drihliche lond, Heo wes ha 3ungeste suster, 
 
 Somed an his liue, A wliten aire uairest ; 
 
 Sixti winter. Heo wes hire fader al swa leof 
 
 he king hefde hreo dohtren Swa his a3ene lif. 
 
 Bi his drihliche quen. 
 
 Coming a hundred years further down, we find a work 
 which marks the beginning of Early English. It is 
 Robert of Gloucester's rhymed " Chronicle," about 1280. 
 
 " Syr King," quo Merlin tho, " gif thu wolt her caste, 
 
 In the honour of hem, a werk that ever schal y laste, 
 
 To the hul of Kuldar send in Irlond, 
 
 After the noble stones that ther habbet lenge y stonde, 
 
 That the treche of geands, for a quoynte werk ther ys, 
 
 Of stones al wyth art imad, in the world such non ys. 
 
 Ne ther nys nothing that me scholde myd strength adown caste." 
 
 The king somedel to lyghe, tho he herd this tale. 
 
 " How myste," he seyd, "such stone so grete and so fale 
 
 Be y bro3t of so far lond ? " 
 
 " Syre Kyng" quoth Merlin, " ne make noght in ydel such lyghing, 
 
 Far in the farrest stude of Afric geandes while fette, 
 
 Thike stones for medycine, and in Irlond hem sette." 
 
THE ANGLO-NORMAN TIME (1066-1500). 
 
 27 
 
 But the best memorial of Saxon poetic life is from a 
 poem by an unknown writer, toward the end of Henry 
 the Third's reign, " The Owl and Nightingale," a long 
 poem in rhymed couplets of eight syllables. The verse 
 flows with wonderful ease, and displays much fine fancy • 
 we meet with nothing like it again until we come to 
 Chaucer. 
 
 The Owl and Nightingale. 
 
 Hule thu axest me, ho seide, 
 Gif ich kan ene other dede, 
 Bute singen in summer tide 
 And bringen blisse far and wide 
 Wi axestu of craf tes mine ? 
 Betere is min on than alle thine. 
 And iyst, ich telle the ware-vore 
 VVostu to than man war ibore ? 
 To thare blisse of hovene-riche. 
 
 Thar ever is song and murthe iliche. 
 Vor the man singeth in holi chirche 
 And clerkes ginnath songes wriche 
 He riseth up to midel nighte 
 And singeth of the hovene lighte 
 And prostes upe londe singeth 
 Wane the liht of daie springeth 
 And ich hom helpe wot I mai 
 Ich singe mid hem niht and dai. 
 
 1230. 
 
 Lenten is come with love to toune, 
 With tlossmen and with briddes 
 roune, 
 
 That all this blisse bringeth, 
 Dayeseyes in this dales, 
 Notes swete of nightingales, 
 
 Vch fowl song singeth. 
 
 The throstle coc him threteth 00 
 Awaye is huere winter wo 
 
 When wode rove springeth. 
 This foules singeth ferly fele 
 And whyleth on huere winter wele 
 
 That all the wode singeth. 
 
 We are now at the threshold of Chaucer's time ; and 
 we may fairly sum up the changes, the gain and the loss 
 in the development of our tongue. We have seen that 
 the English is the Saxon in its substance, with only such 
 modifications as came from its new growth. The words 
 that form the body of our speech, those which describe 
 
28 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 nature, household life, thought, feeling, and deed, are the 
 same. Our chief elements of word-building are Saxon. 
 The genitive and plural of nouns, the comparative and 
 superlative of adjectives, the irregular forms of these, the 
 inflection of pronouns, the second and third persons 
 present and imperfect of the verb ; the preterites and par- 
 ticiples, regular and irregular ; the auxiliaries, the irregu- 
 lar verbs ; the ending of adverbs, ly ; the articles and defini- 
 tives, a, an, the, that, these, those, many, few, one, none : 
 the prepositions and conjunctions, — all these are the old 
 Saxon. We have no doubt lost some of its traits that 
 we may deeply mourn. Many of the old words are gone 
 forever. But by an interesting survival many of the 
 archaic words are not wholly lost, but are coming back to 
 us. Since the time of Coleridge it has been the ten- 
 dency to restore them, and we are indebted to our best 
 writers for the recovery of many of these treasures. 
 
 French authors are making systematic efforts for the 
 rehabilitation of their old words. While gladly acknowl- 
 edging that our English has gained on the whole many 
 elements of grace and strength by the fusion, we must 
 bear in mind that the best writers of each time are those 
 who have most of Saxon ; nor can we wholly accept Cam- 
 den's judgment, much as one may enjoy it. 
 
 " Whereas our tongue is mixed, it is no disgrace. The 
 Italian is pleasant, but without sinewcs, as a still floating 
 water. The French delicate, but ever nice as a woman, 
 scarce daring to open her lippes, for fear of marring her 
 
THE ANGLO-NORMAN TIME (1066-1500). 29 
 
 countenance. The Spanish majesticall, but fulsome, 
 running too much on the O, and terrible like the Divell 
 in a play. The Dutch manlike, but withal very harsh, as 
 one ready at every word to pick a quarrel. Now we, in 
 borrowing, give the strength of consonant to the Italian, 
 the full sound of words to the French, the variety of ter- 
 minations to the Spanish, and the mollifying of more 
 vowels to the Dutch ; and so, like bees, we gather the 
 honey of their good properties, and leave the dregs to 
 themselves. And thus where substantialnesse can unite 
 with delightfulnesse, fulnesse with finenesse, seamlinesse 
 with portlinesse, how can the language which consisteth 
 of these sound other than full of all sweetnesse." — Cam- 
 den s Remains, ed., 1623. 
 
 Let us now ask, What was the general tendency of 
 learning in this Anglo-Norman time ? It was in two 
 main directions that the mind of the Middle Age was 
 turned. One was the theology of the Church ; the other, 
 the romance that sprang out of feudal chivalry. Each 
 of these had its influence in England. After the first 
 fifty years of mental stagnation, following the Conquest, 
 we see a fresh life beginning with Henry the Beauclerc. 
 In the twelfth century were built the schools of Oxford. 
 The Church created some strong thinkers and famous 
 scholars ; it was the time of the scholastic philosophy. 
 In the latter half of the twelfth century England had 
 the high honor of being the home of Anselm. Both he 
 and Lanfranc were Lombards, but their life was spent 
 
30 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 in England. In the next age, when the rationalistic 
 school of Abelard came into deadly conflict with the 
 realism of the Church, England was the birthplace of two 
 of the most famous of those Church gladiators, Alexander 
 de Hales, and Duns Scotus. It is proof enough that 
 there was no lack of intellect and strength. But greater 
 than all was a true herald of the age of science, to be in a 
 few centuries established by his namesake. Roger Bacon 
 was a wonder indeed in this thirteenth century. It is 
 impossible to read his remains to-day without acknowl- 
 edging that he was already master of the principia of the 
 inductive philosophy. His practical sense, his earnest- 
 ness in natural study, his early discoveries are the first 
 fruits of the English growth. These names are illustra- 
 tive of the national culture. Let us glance, in passing, at 
 the monkish historians, — William of Malmesbury, Mat- 
 thew Paris, and dear old Geoffrey of Monmouth, the 
 wonderful Munchausen who in his Latin pages embalmed 
 all the legends, and fed half the romances. His history 
 leads us at once, and by the most pleasant of cross-roads, 
 to the other branch of Anglo-Norman literature. In 
 sooth there was no history then. All was romance. His- 
 tory was not born ; yet before speaking of the romance, 
 we should not forget one branch of the Anglo-Norman 
 literature, of special value for the living portraiture of 
 this fermenting time. It was a time when the monks 
 were writing Latin poetry, and, in utter recklessness of 
 classic rules, introducing rhyme and accent. The mediae- 
 
THE ANGLO-NORMAN TIME (1066-1500). 3 1 
 
 vai poems were the cradle of some of the most curious 
 and varied song-measures of modern time. 
 
 Among these Latin rhymers there were in England, at 
 the end of the twelfth century, several who claim our 
 notice. We care nothing now for the dull classic poem 
 of " Joseph of Exeter," or " The 3d Crusade," the " Antio- 
 chus." But the " Mirror of Fools," by Nigel Wircker, 
 and the " Golias " poems of Walter Mapes are indeed 
 signs of the times. We have in them the very prelude 
 of the Reformation. These works are the most biting 
 satirists of the Church from pope to friar. 
 
 In the " Mirror of Fools " an ass goes through the 
 scholastic course, takes his degree as a finished scholar, 
 and then, after reaching the end of Church learning, re- 
 turns gladly to his old asinine form. 
 
 But even this is outdone by the humor of Mapes. It 
 is marvellous with what a lash he flogs the Church ; and 
 his mastery of the Latin rhymes is a remarkable feat. 
 
 Est Leo pontifex summus, qui devorat ; 
 Qui libras sitiens libros impignorat ; 
 Marcam respiciens, Marcum dedecorat ; 
 In summis navigans, in nummis anchorat. 
 
 Est aquila, quae sic alis innititur ; 
 Archidiaconus, qui praedo dicitur ; 
 Qui videt a longe prsedam quam sequitur 
 Et cum circumvolat ex rapto vivitur. 
 
 Omnis a clericis fluit enormitas ! 
 Cum Deo debeant mentes sollicitas, 
 Tractant negotia mercesque vetitas. 
 Et rerum turpium vices indebitas. 
 
32 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Dialogus inter Corpus et Animatn. 
 
 Ego quae tam nobilis fueram creata, 
 Ad similitudinem Domini formata, 
 Et ab omni crimine baptismo mundata, 
 Iterum criminibus sic cum denigrata 
 Per te, caro misera, sumque reprobata, 
 Vere possum dicere, heu, quod fui nata ! 
 Utinam ex utero fuissam translata 
 Protinus ad tumulum ! et sic liberata 
 A poena tartarea mihi jam parata. 
 
 Let us turn now to the romances ; there are the mind, 
 the manners, the fantastic life of the Middle Age. The 
 feudal period has reached its bloom. The crusades were 
 the awakening of all Europe ; and for the first time it had 
 drunk deep of the knowledge of the wonderland of the 
 East. It was intoxication, — this incoming flood of wild 
 legend, of Arabian and Moorish fancies, of strange stories 
 of Greece and Rome, giant and Paynim and enchanter, 
 — the most grotesque medley in the world. It was out of 
 the whirlpool of history and fable that the literature of 
 the time was shaped. 
 
 We have many collections of the tales of that time. 
 There is the " Gesta Romanorum," a pile of stories of 
 Greece and Rome, where Alexander the Great appears 
 with Aristotle, and Virgil is a great magician, mixed 
 with parables and such legends as furnished the " Pericles 
 of Tyre " and the " Merchant of Venice.'' 
 
 There were some Indian stories, as the " Seven Wise 
 Masters " ; and stories from the south of Europe. 
 
 Normandy was one of the chief places where these 
 
THE ANGLO-NORMAN TIME (1066-1500). 33 
 
 were gathered and put into charming fabliaux, like the 
 " Lais " of Marie of France. 
 
 But it is in the form of metrical romance that they first 
 appeared. There are four great epic cycles into which 
 the mass may be divided. 
 
 1st. The Norse, drawn originally from the Edda, and 
 coming down through the " Nibelungen Lied " into a 
 Christian and continental form. 
 
 2d. The Carlovingian, of Frank descent, whence come 
 the legends of Roland and Charlemagne. 
 
 3d. The Spanish, whose centre is the Cid, and which 
 is richest in Moorish story. 
 
 4th. The Round Table epic, of British growth, and 
 shaped in Armorica. 
 
 There can be little doubt that the history of the growth 
 of these epics is what has been claimed. The stories 
 grew out of the early legend, were then taken up by the 
 minstrels, and turned into song for the baronial hall and 
 cottage. 
 
 Ministrelsy was the " gaye science." They received 
 and enlarged these legends, and so after a time the whole 
 was rounded into epic form. At first they were not com- 
 mitted to writing, but were learned by heart and repeated ; 
 at last they were converted on one hand into the popu- 
 lar ballad, and on the other were written down in big 
 quartos by the prose romancer. 
 
 Such was the metrical romance of the feudal time, and 
 we can now learn somewhat of its English history. 
 
34 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 We have first the Round Table poem, of British birth : 
 the scene is laid in the Cornwall which the Welsh kept so 
 long. 
 
 Its kinship to the soil made it dear to England. 
 Spenser breathes much of its romance into the " Faerie 
 Queene." Tennyson has made the phantoms of the 
 Round Table live again. Even as we have it, in the 
 book of Sir Thomas Malory, 1432-1476, it has a rare and 
 rich charm. It is perhaps the finest picture of chivalry : 
 its devout faith, its strange superstition, its loose morals, 
 and yet its grand ideal of heroism. Next to this come 
 the English romances. 
 
 Two of the oldest, the " Littell Geste of King Horn " 
 and the "Lay of Havelok the Dane," come from the 
 North. In the latter the spirit and descriptions of the 
 poem are still marked as old English work. "Havelok, 
 the orphan child of a Danish king, is by his faithless 
 guardian given to a fisherman named Grim, to be 
 drowned. Grim saves the child, and flies with him to 
 England, where he lands on the coast of Lincolnshire, 
 and founds the town of Grimsby. An English princess 
 is forced, by a guardian as false as that of Havelok's, 
 to marry the fisherman's foster-child, whose royal de- 
 scent is then revealed, and he wins back his father's king- 
 dom." 
 
 The plot is simple, but the poem is full of interest as 
 a faithful picture of the manners and customs of the 
 time, as in the knighting of Havelok. 
 
THE ANGLO-NORMAN TIME (1066-1500). 35 
 
 Hwan he hauede manrede and oth, 
 
 Taken of lef and of loth, 
 
 Ubbe dubbede him to knith, 
 
 With a swerd so swithe brith, 
 
 And the folk of all the lond, 
 
 Bitauhte him al in his hond, 
 
 The cunnriche everil del, 
 
 And made him king heylike and wel. 
 
 Hwan he was king, ther mouthe men se, 
 
 The moste ioie that mouhte be. 
 
 Buttinge with sharpe speres, 
 
 Skirming with taleuaces, that men beres, 
 
 "Wrastiing with laddes, putting of ston, 
 
 Harping and piping, ful god won 
 
 Leyk of mine, of hasard ok, 
 
 Romanz reding on the bok ; 
 
 Ther mouthe men here the gestes singe, 
 
 The gleymen on the tabour dinge ; 
 
 Ther mouthe men se the boles beyte, 
 
 And the bores, with hundes teyte, 
 
 Was neuere ioie more 
 
 In al this werd, than tho was thore. 
 
 Many of the romances are of French origin and are 
 steeped in the colors of French romantic poetry, with its 
 magic wonders, its manners and feasts and battles of 
 chivalry. Of these is the Greek romance of " King 
 Alisaunder " ; the romances of " Florice and Blanche- 
 fleur," " Roland and Ferragus," " Sir Eglamour," "Amys 
 and Amiloun." 
 
 Sir Isumbras. 
 
 The Sowdane sawe that lady thare, 
 Hym thoghte als scho an angelle ware, 
 
 That ware commene owte of hevene. 
 He saide : " Wille thou selle thi wyffe to me ? 
 And I will gyff the golde and fee 
 
36 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Zaa more than thou kane nevene. 
 I salle the gyffe tene thowsand pownde 
 Of florence that bene rede and rownde 
 
 And gud robes sevene. 
 And scho salle be lady of alle my lande, 
 And alle salle bowe hir to fote and hande 
 
 And noghte withstande hir stevene." 
 Sir Ysambrace sayd thane schortly : " Naye, 
 My wyfe wille I nott selle awaye, 
 
 Bot mene me for hir slaa; 
 I wedded hir in Goddes laye, 
 To halde hir to myne endyng daye, 
 
 Zaa bothe in wele and waa." 
 The gold thane on his mantille thay talde, 
 And tille hyme-selfene thay gane it falde, 
 
 His wyefe thay tuke hym fraa ; 
 And appone the lande thay him kaste, 
 And bett hym till his rybbis braste, 
 
 And made his flesche fulle blaa ! 
 
 Sir Degrevant. 
 
 Lord Gode in Trynite, 
 Yeff home hevene ffor to se 
 That lovethe gamene and gle 
 And gestys to ffede. 
 
 Ther ffolke sitis in ffere, 
 Shulde mene herkene and here 
 Of gode that beffore hem were 
 That levede on arthede. 
 
 And y schalle karpe off a knyght, 
 That was both hardy and wygth, 
 Sire Degrevaunt that hend hygth, 
 That dowgthy was of dede. 
 
 Was nevere kyngh that he ffond, 
 In ffraunce ne in Englond 
 Mygth sette a schafft of hys hond 
 
 One a stythe stede ! 
 ***** 
 
 Thrytty wyntur and mare 
 Thei lyvede to-gydur without care, 
 And sevene chyldur she hym bare. 
 That worthy in wede ; 
 
 And sene sche dyed, y undurstond, 
 He seysed hys eyre with hys hond, 
 And went into the Holy Lond, 
 Hevene be hys mede ! 
 
 At Port-gaff was he slone, 
 Ffor-justyd with a Soudone ; 
 Thus to Gode is he gone 
 Thus-doughty in dede. 
 
 Lord Gode in Trinite, 
 Gyff hem Heven for to see, 
 That loves gamene and gle 
 And gestes to fede ! 
 
THE ANGLO-NORMAN TIME (1066-1500). 37 
 
 But the stories dearest to the English heart were those 
 of British-born champions. Among them were " Guy of 
 Warwick," and " Bevis of Hamptoun "; and, greatest of 
 all, " Richard of the Lion Heart," the idol of the people. 
 It is wonderful how this knight of history had grown to 
 be the mythic hero in that time. 
 
 Bevis of Hamptoun. 
 
 This geaunt was mighty and strong, 
 
 And full thirty feet was long. 
 
 He was bristled like a sow, 
 
 A foot had he between each brow, 
 
 His lips were great, and hung aside, 
 
 His eyen were hollow, his mouth was wide. 
 
 Lothly he was to look on than, 
 
 And liker a devil than a man. 
 
 His staff was a young oak, 
 
 Hard and heavy was his stroke. 
 
 Sir Bevis wondered as him might, 
 
 And him asked what he hight. 
 
 " My name," he said, " is Ascapard, 
 
 Sir Grassey sent me hitherward." 
 
 Richard Cozur de Lion. 
 
 i 
 
 King Richard spake to an old man .* 
 
 " Wendes home to your Soudan. 
 
 Say him it shall nought avail, 
 
 That he forbars us our vitayle. 
 
 Bread, wine, fish, flesh, salmon, and conger* 
 
 Of us none shall die of hunger, 
 
 While we may wenden to fight, 
 
 And slay the Saracens downright, 
 
 King Richard shall warrant 
 
 There is no flesh so nourrissant 
 
 Unto an English man, 
 
 Partridge, plover, heron ne swan, 
 
38 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. ' 
 
 Cow ne ox, sheep ne swine, 
 As the head of a Saracen. 
 There is he fat and thereto tender, 
 And my men be lean and slender." 
 
 Richard fights with the Soudan, eats Saracens' head, is put in a 
 cage in Austria, and kills the lion. 
 
 King Richard, I understand, 
 
 Or he went out of Engeland, 
 
 Let him make an ax for the nones, 
 
 To break therewith the Sarazyns' bones. > 
 
 The hede was wrought right wele, 
 
 Therein was twenty pound of stele, 
 
 All that he hit he all to-frapped, 
 
 The griphons away fast rapped ; 
 
 And the prisoun, where he came to 
 
 With his ax he smote right thro' 1 
 
 In this slight sketch I trust we have seen somewhat of 
 the character of the whole age as it is mirrored in its 
 literature. It is the age of new formation ; all the mental 
 and moral features of England, the old Saxon strength, 
 the Norman chivalry, the learning of the Church, and 
 with it the first whispers of reformation, the feudal pride 
 and with it the glimpses of national freedom — all are here. 
 In another century this bold satire of the monk will be 
 heard from the pulpit of Wyclif. This Saxon freedom 
 will wrest England from the feudal grasp. This romance 
 will bloom in the poetry of Chaucer, and the old home- 
 speech, the home-born manhood, enlarged and enriched 
 by three hundred years of growth, will come forth in a 
 ripe national life. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 EARLY BALLAD POETRY. 
 
 It may seem to many an unworthy beginning of an 
 English literature which boasts its Milton and Shakes- 
 peare to go back to the early rhymers of the ballad day. 
 When Dr. Johnson wrote the " Lives of English Poets," 
 he thought it enough to herald the bright succession with 
 Cowley and Donne. But a change has come over the 
 spirit of criticism. It is a fact worth noting, that with 
 the awakening in the day of Cowper and Burns of a more 
 home-born poetry there revived also the love of old Eng- 
 lish ; men dared to speak of the golden age of Elizabeth ; 
 the critics opened anew the rich rhymes of Spenser, Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher, Herbert and Jeremy Taylor ; soon 
 they would fain push back to Dan Chaucer, and the 
 forgotten fathers. To-day the love of old English is re- 
 newed ; and if we will call back a little of our child-like 
 spirit, the older ballads, the fanciful romaunts of chivalry, 
 and the " Round Table," will be as fresh for us as the 
 recovered mosaics of Pompeii. 
 
 It is no worthless task that we undertake in this study; 
 in the ballad literature of old England, as of other na- 
 tions, we recognize the mother-speech, the fruitful germ 
 ol all that has been written. 
 
 39 
 
40 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 We must understand in its full meaning the truth that 
 the literature of all lands begins with poetry. This prin- 
 ciple lies at the root of our studies in history and literary 
 criticism. There is in the life of every people an age of 
 spontaneous, fresh intellect, when first the national charac- 
 ter develops into speech, but has not attained the ripeness 
 of reflective thought. It has not yet any philosophic sci- 
 ence, any well-ascertained historic annals, any refined prose, 
 any criticism. Prose is the result of long culture. But 
 poetry is the first natural utterance of a people. It is the 
 child not of art, but of nature. Thus primitive history- 
 is always poetry ; it exists in the shape of wild legend, of 
 warlike and social tradition ; and its scattered material is 
 afterward collected by the more accurate annalist. Thus 
 again, the truths of religion always begin with mythology, 
 and the bard is at once the prophet and the minstrel. 
 The valuable discoveries of rude science, the hints of 
 philosophy and morals are expressed in verse. Every 
 age, every nation has thus its poetry. The rhymer of 
 later days may be a solitary dilettante ; the rhymer of 
 the first ages must be the representative of his people. 
 The whole world would speak, but cannot, " being of slow 
 speech and a slow tongue " ; and the poet is as Aaron the 
 Levite to Moses, " thy spokesman unto the people, and 
 he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou to him 
 instead of a God." But as the world grows older it 
 passes from this state of spontaneous life to that of indi- 
 vidual reflection ; prose and poetry are severed. Poetry 
 
EARLY BALLAD POETRY. 4 1 
 
 becomes an art, " which was before a rage." The poet is 
 driven out from the real world into an ideal one of his 
 own making. The historian becomes, or seeks to become, 
 a chronicler of facts. The philosopher banishes, as Plato 
 did from his Republic, the mythological fancies of the first 
 age. The moralist and the man of letters speak no 
 longer, but write in well-compacted essays for a reading 
 public. Primitive literature is all blended in one color- 
 ing; that of later days is grouped in severed masses, with 
 many varieties of light and shade. The one is a single 
 beam of white light, the other has the bands and the di- 
 vided lines of the spectrum. 
 
 The fact of this necessary transition from the age of 
 unconscious, spontaneous life to that of reflective 
 thought, and of this poetic character of the early litera- 
 ture among all peoples, is one of the utmost moment to 
 us in our study. In proportion as we have clearly 
 grasped this principle, we shall see the significance of 
 ballad literature. In it we may read the fresh and life- 
 like record of the past, of religion, law, philosophy, war 
 and peace, science and social manners. We are not idle 
 loiterers in a garden of beauty; there is a deeper meaning 
 lurking amidst these flowers of poesy. 
 
 "That song I heard was of a higher mood." Poetry 
 is no lifeless thing ; it is more than a jingling of words, 
 a nice skill of metre and rhythm. " Many content them- 
 selves with admiring its delicate branches, its leaves, and 
 blossoms, not heeding that this fair array is put forth 
 
42 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 through roots, which run down deep into the soil of our 
 humanity, and are watered by its nether springs. That 
 state of society least congenial with poetry, is most un- 
 favorable to human nature itself." Thus it is in Homer 
 we read, not Homer merely, but the Greek mind. We 
 need not to settle the long brawl as to the identity of 
 Homer the man ; we have there the storehouse of that 
 ancient and beautiful world, and so do we open the 
 scroll of old English poetry. It came from the heart 
 of the people ; it shaped and moulded the rough-hewn 
 mass of the English mind. English literature, from the 
 ballads of war and love, the rhymed histories, the ro- 
 maunts of chivalry, down to the biting satire of Chaucer 
 and Piers Plowman, and to the mysteries and moralities 
 is an unbroken chain of history. 
 
 English history is dead and dry to the reader of the 
 " standard " works. How painfully and in what forced 
 marches we haste across the early periods, over the 
 Heptarchy, and the wars of Briton, Saxon, and Dane! 
 How gladly we snatch at the story of Arthur and his 
 Knights of the Round Table ! It is the love of living 
 men that makes the romance of history dearer than the 
 octavos of classic scholars. One ballad is worth all 
 Hume. We had rather, with good Douglas, hear the 
 cricket chirp than the mouse squeak. It were a curi- 
 ous thing to examine, philosophically, how far Romance 
 is a better guide to historic truth than History itself, 
 Aristotle's well-known aphorism reveals the reason of 
 
EARLY BALLAD POETRY. 43 
 
 this: "that the superiority of poetry over history con- 
 sists in its possessing a higher truth and a higher serious- 
 ness." The ideal truth is always nearer than the dry 
 chronicle. 
 
 Such is old English history. It lives in tradition and 
 song more than in rolls of parchment ; in the voices of un- 
 lettered bards more than in folios of clerkly lore, than in an- 
 nals of parliaments and commerce ; in the huts of peas- 
 ants, in old baronial castles, in moss-grown, haunted 
 towers ; in the lowly burial-ground amidst half decayed 
 monuments, in the wizard's cavern overhung with night- 
 shade, in the green-wood of Robin Hood, on the hill-top 
 amidst piping shepherds, in moonlit glens with Oberon 
 and Puck and the dancing elves, in the hall of wassail, 
 in knightly tournaments and rustic sport, in crowded 
 highways, in holydays and feast days of Yule and Martin- 
 mas, at wedding, christening, and funeral ; in fair and 
 market, in kirk and theatre and hostelrie, in the lofty 
 buskin of tragedy and the laughing step of comedy, in 
 mass-book and song-book, among lords and ladies, 
 squires, pages, serfs, thieves, and honest men ; under the 
 helmet of the soldier, under the hood of the monk, under 
 the cap and bells of the jester, the palmer's scrip, and 
 the beggar's gown ; it resounds from the harp and merry 
 pipe, the shrill tempest of war, and the chant of the 
 cathedral. It is the living voice of living men, coming 
 up from all corners and by-ways of their thought and 
 feeling, their action and suffering. 
 
44 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. 
 
 But as we thus recognize in early poetry the proper ex- 
 pression of a primitive age, so in poetry itself we must 
 distinguish the same process of change. Every age has 
 its own poetry. There could not be a Homer in the day 
 of Sophocles, or a Shakespeare in the age of Chaucer. 
 The poetic element is always the same, but its manner is 
 fashioned by time and place. The earliest poetry must 
 be the ballad. It is the natural utterance of an age 
 where there is as yet no art of words ; where the poet is 
 no literary man, no student of the aesthetic laws of beauty, 
 the harmonies and sweet mysteries of language ; where 
 he does not write for the magazines, or print in i2mos, 
 but sings at the court of the great and in the cottage. 
 But when the age of reflective thought has come, when 
 literary culture is a fixed fact, then we have the begin- 
 nings of an art in poetry ; we have a Chaucer and a 
 Wyatt, then a Spenser, a Milton, and at last a Words- 
 worth, a Shelley. As the philosophy of the first age 
 was poetic ; so the poetry of the later age is becoming 
 more and more philosophical. The various divisions of 
 the poetic art are each the outgrowth of this social cult- 
 ure. Epic, lyric, pastoral, didactic, dramatic poetry are 
 gradually distinguished. Epic poetry, in the sense which 
 we commonly give to it, is the artificial structure of an 
 after-day. Virgil, Tasso, Milton, are poets of a highly 
 cultivated time. They live after the heroic age has gone ; 
 their poems are constructed by plan, have a unity, not 
 of ideas only, but of parts, and the proportions of archi- 
 tecture. 
 
EARLY BALLAD POETRY. 45 
 
 But Homer is not an epic poet in this sense ; he lived 
 nearer to the rude time of heroic Greece ; he has no art 
 by the Aristotelian canon ; unity of idea, certainly of 
 legend, but no more. He is a ballad-singer, the most 
 glorious of them all ; and the " Iliad " is to be classed with 
 the " Cid," with the " Nibelungen-Lied," and with the 
 metrical romances of England. This is the true, original 
 epos, only to be found in the heroic age. If we compare 
 Homer and Virgil, we see at once that the one speaks 
 the living poetry of his people and time, the other com- 
 pacts a beautiful historic work, to be read by Roman 
 wits, not sung at the head of armies and at the festal 
 board. Thus Spenser gives us an elaborate picture of 
 the days of chivalry and romance ; but his great poem is 
 a long allegory ; already the reality of that age is gone ; 
 and his knights and ladies are only spectral images that 
 "point a moral," not flesh and blood, as they came forth 
 in the quaint old verses of Arthur or Charlemagne. All 
 true poetry is the birth of its age, and epic poetry can 
 only be the utterance of an epic time. But the proper 
 poetry of an after-day is the lyric, the expression of per- 
 sonal, individual feeling; the pastoral, which describes 
 nature, and makes it an object of meditative study; the 
 didactic, which has to do with refined social life, as satire, 
 or moral sentiment ; and most of all, the dramatic. The 
 dramatic is the proper expression of social life, with its 
 varied, complex relations, from the gravest to the light- 
 est ; like painting, it presents in its masses of light and 
 
46 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 shade the infinite forces of the world. Philosophy, re- 
 ligion, polity, social life, individual thought and action, 
 were all expressed in Shakespeare. Every literature has 
 thus begun with the ballad. Greece had in Homer the 
 greatest singer of them all. Doubtless the Roman had 
 his ballad literature, the legendary lore, from which Livy 
 drew the material of his history (as an early monk of 
 Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth from the old 
 romance). The literature of Southern Europe began 
 with the romance and lyric verses of the Trouvere and 
 the Troubadour ; and Ariosto, like our Spenser, is the 
 later singer, who marks the transition from the bard 
 to the artist. The scald of Scandinavia, the gleeman of 
 Saxony, the minstrel of later days was, like Homer, a 
 wandering singer. His poetry was unwritten, until some 
 Pisistratus of after-days gathered it into books. He sang 
 as Goethe's minstrel: " Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt." 
 But before examining the ballad poetry now left us, we 
 must glance briefly at that English age and its most im- 
 portant landmarks. It is a broad field, this of unwritten 
 poetry. Its true introduction is in the study of the Met- 
 rical Romance which came with the influence of Nor- 
 man chivalry. Our ballad poetry is to be looked on as 
 the proper child of the Romance. Those marvellous and 
 long-winded legends of Sir Launcelot and Gawain, which 
 formed the entertainment of the court, passed among the 
 people, and were broken into shorter fragments of song. 
 It has been the theory of some that instead of the ballad 
 
EARLY BALLAD POETRY. 47 
 
 coming from the Romance, the Romance is itself de- 
 rived from the old heroic ballad. After all there need be 
 no dispute, for the two theories are not contradictory. 
 From the time of the Anglo-Saxon to the decline of the 
 Norman era, there were many suchballads. The min- 
 strel and the gleeman at first could not probably retain 
 the whole of the interminable romance narratives ; and 
 shorter narratives in ballad form were the result. Of 
 these early ballads in that form there are few left us. 
 When minstrelsy became an order like the Homeridse, 
 these fragmentary songs were recombined into the ro- 
 mance. Again, when the romance died out, its remains 
 passed anew into later ballads, and became the property 
 of the common people. We may then call the whole 
 period to Chaucer that of ballad literature. By degrees 
 there arose a more classic day ; and the minstrel sank from 
 the joculator regis, the professional singer to the buffoon, 
 and the wandering piper, " who gave a fitt of mirth for a 
 groat," to the crowd in country taverns ; and at last, num- 
 bered among " rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars," 
 at the close of Elizabeth's reign, he passed away. The 
 singer was succeeded by the later ballad writer, and the 
 heroic song was mingled on the printed " broad-side " 
 with the host of " Sweet Williams," and " George Barn- 
 wells," with madrigals and ditties, and published in Gar- 
 lands and like popular collections. We thus possess them 
 now, and they yet " stir the heart as with the sound of 
 the trumpet." But "what must be our delight compared 
 
4$ ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 with that real age of ancient minstrelsy, when king, 
 knight, lady at the festal board listened to the heroic 
 song, as it swelled from the voice*of a renowned singer, 
 echoed by the harps of those glorious gleemen ! " 
 
 The English ballad is distinctly expressive of the na- 
 tional character. German poetry has more of the weird 
 and mysterious view of nature, the charm which has been 
 caught by Uhland and Fouque. The French is more the 
 song of country and sentiment. The Spanish is loftier, 
 and seldom doffs -its armor. But the English is natural 
 and homeborn ; full of household love and pastoral life, of 
 fun and frolic, as well as of the " higher mood.'* 
 
 We may divide the Ballad poetry yet left us into four 
 distinct classes: I. The heroic ballad of chivalry, such as 
 the " Boy and Mantle," "Syr Cauline," " Child of Elle ; 
 and with them " Robin Hood." 2. The ballads of the 
 border life, including " Chevy Chase," and the larger pro- 
 portion of Sir W. Scott's minstrelsy. This is a most 
 prolific source. It has been shewn that the ballads lin- 
 gered longer across the Tweed than south of it. Its 
 cause doubtless was, that the prosaic process of a modern 
 civilization had not been felt there, and the songs still 
 lived with the old manners. 3. The popular and didactic 
 household ballad. 4. The later published ballad. Of 
 these last I say nothing. " Edwin and Emma," " Poor 
 Bessy," and all the sentimental effusions of higher or 
 lower bards are poor attempts to renew the childhood of 
 the past. 
 
EARLY BALLAD POETRY. 49 
 
 It is time here to say a word of the ballad rhyme. It 
 would be impossible to give a full criticism of it ; a few 
 specimens must suffice. The Anglo-Saxon verse gener- 
 ally had four accents with alliteration, — sometimes five 
 and six accents. Guest supposes that the early rhymed 
 couplets of our English verse were derived from these. 
 Rhyme, however, doubtless came from the French. The 
 common form of rhythm was the eight syllable couplet, 
 with four accents. 
 
 At the bridge end stood a town 
 Painted with gold and with azure. 
 
 Another form is the alternate verse. 
 
 Richard raught him with a bar of brass, 
 That he caught at the gate. 
 
 The common form of our heroic ballad has four 
 accents. 
 
 Now Christ thee save, thou proud porter, 
 Now Christ thee save and see. 
 
 But the common measure is often varied by the triple, 
 in which two unaccented syllables separate the accents, 
 
 And Scarlette he was flyinge a foote 
 Faste over stocke and stone. 
 
 As to the rhythm of the later ballad it is impossible to 
 name more than the few more common forms. Every 
 variety of mixed rhyme is found there. The favorite 
 ones are perhaps the tail rhyme as in *' Gammer Gurton," 
 
50 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 or "The Nut Browne Maid," or in the Psalmetre of Arch- 
 bishop Parker: 
 
 To fede my nede he will me lede 
 
 To pastures greene and fat ; 
 He forth brought me in libertee 
 
 To waters delicate. 
 
 Others are the " Burthen," the return of the same words 
 at the close of each stave ; and the " Wheel " a return of 
 some peculiar rhythm; the "Bob-wheel" is a short, 
 abrupt form of this. The " Roundelay" and " Virelay " 
 are other forms of the " Burthen " ; the first the repeti- 
 tion of the opening couplet at the close of the stanza. 
 Besides these there are all sorts of broken staves. 
 
 I cannot eat but little meat 
 
 My stomach is not good, 
 
 But sure I think that I can drink 
 
 With him that wears a hood, 
 
 Though I go bare, take you no care 
 
 I nothing am a colde, 
 
 I stuffte my skin so full within, 
 
 With jolly good ale and olde. 
 
 Chorus. 
 
 Backe and side go bare, go bare, 
 
 Both foot and hande go colde, 
 
 But belly, God send thee good ale ynoughe 
 
 Whether it be new or olde. 
 
 But we must pass on to the point of most interest to 
 us, the poetic criticism of the ballad. We shall not, of 
 course, attempt to place the rude singers of an unformed 
 age beside the masters of art. And yet we may freely 
 say that there are certain features of that early poetry, 
 
EARLY BALLAD POETRY. 5 I 
 
 which to any true scholar must always have their pecu- 
 liar charm. The best proof of this is found in the fre- 
 quent examples of its imitators. Burns, Campbell, Scott, 
 and yet more, Goethe and Schiller, have written nothing 
 that so speaks to the heart as their simple ballads. The 
 world loves to return to its childhood. Yet it is simply 
 impossible for our later poets to be true, children. Com- 
 pare any modern ballad with the original, and we see 
 the hand of the artist. The flowers are not of nature's 
 making, but of painted tissue paper. The ballad litera- 
 ture of the first age is in this respect inimitable. It is to 
 the poetry of art as the carol of the lark to an opera. If 
 we approach them with the canon of Aristotle in one 
 hand, with our taste formed by aesthetic models, we can- 
 not enjoy them. Goethe says that the innermost law of 
 art is that we know the work of the artist from his own 
 standpoint. Only then may we read the meaning of 
 St. Peters, and Stonehenge. We must rid ourselves of 
 time and place, and be Englishmen of the days of 
 Richard and Robin Hood. The faults of the ballad, of 
 course, are rudeness of thought and expression. Their 
 charm is simple truth to nature. If with such a view we 
 read them, we shall find their childlike beauty. We have 
 space but for a passing glimpse of their features, seizing 
 here and there a gem : as in the fine opening of " Robin 
 Hood:" 
 
 When shaws been sheene and shraddes full fayne, 
 And leaves beth large and long, 
 
5 2 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 'T is merrye walking in the fayre forest 
 To hear the small bride's song. 
 
 The woodweele sang, and would not cease 
 
 Sitting upon the spraye, 
 Soe lcude, he wakened Robin Hood 
 
 In Grenewood where he lay." 
 
 The Gay Gosshawk. 
 
 The red, that 's in my true love's cheek, 
 Is like blood-drops on the snaw ; 
 The white, that is on her breast bare, 
 Like the down o' the white sea-maw. 
 
 And even at my love's bouer-door 
 There grows a flowering birk ; 
 And ye maun sit, and sing thereon, 
 As she gangs to the kirk. 
 
 Johnie of Breadislee. 
 
 There 's no bird in a' this forest 
 
 Will do as mickle for me, 
 As dip its wing in the wan water, 
 
 And sh-aik it on my e'e bree. 
 
 O is there nae a bonny bird, 
 
 Can sing as I can say ? — 
 Could flee to my mother's bower 
 
 And tell to fetch Johnie away?" 
 
 The starling flew to his mother's window stane, 
 
 It whistled and it sang ; 
 And aye the ower word o' the tune 
 
 Was — " Johnie tarries lang \ " 
 
 Bothwick of North Berwick Law, 
 Wons in his Seaward Tower, — 
 
 Which looketh on to the German Sea, 
 A wild and lanely Bower. 
 
EARLY BALLAD POETRY. 53 
 
 The sea mew and the shrieking gull, 
 
 May sing him to his sleep, 
 For the wash o' the wave comes oure the top 
 
 Of Eothwick's auncient keep. 
 
 The Damon Lover. 
 
 " O hold your tongue of your weeping, says he, 
 " Of your weeping now let me be ; j 
 
 I will shew you how the lilies grow 
 On the banks of Italy." — 
 
 M O what hills are yon, yon pleasant hills, 
 
 That the sun shines sweetly on ?" 
 " O yon are the hills of heaven," he said, 
 " Where you will never win." — 
 
 " O whaten mountain is yon," she said 
 " All so dreary wi' frost and snow ? " 
 " O yon is the mountain of hell," he cried, 
 Where you and I will go." 
 
 And aye she turned her round about, 
 
 Aye taller he seemed to be ; 
 Until that the tops o' that gallant ship 
 
 Nae taller were than he. 
 
 The clouds grew dark, and the wind grew loud, 
 
 And the levin filled her ee ; 
 And waesome wailed the snaw-white sprites 
 
 Upon the gurlie sea. 
 
 He strack the top-mast wi' his hand, 
 
 The foremast wi' his knee ; 
 And he brake that gallant ship in twain, 
 
 And sank her in the sea. 
 
 The Broom o' the Cowden-Knowes. 
 
 O the broom, and the bonny bonny broom, 
 And the broom of the Cowden-Knowes ! 
 And aye sae sweet as the lassie sang, 
 I' the bought milking the ewes. 
 
54 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. 
 
 The hills were high on ilka side, 
 An' the bought i' the lirk o' the hill 
 
 And aye, as she sang her voice it rang. 
 Out o'er the head o' yon hill. 
 
 There is here no elaborate description of nature ; no 
 over niceness of touch, nor any artificial, vague idealizing, 
 but honest simplicity. There is the charm of natural de- 
 scription in the ballad. It has been often asked whether 
 the ancients had any appreciation of nature. The poetry 
 of the pastoral, of description, of sentimental landscape 
 painting is the product of a later day. It belongs to a 
 time, when society has grown old, and man is no longer 
 the chief object of interest ; then the poet retires to soli- 
 tude ; he idealizes the forms of nature, he admires with a 
 passionate morbid feeling a world untouched by the sins 
 of society ; he raves, apostrophises, and adores. But in 
 the first age nature is but the background of poetry; man 
 the prominent object. There is no minute science of tree 
 and leaf and rock. There is no passionate soliloquizing 
 of a Byron, nor sentimental idealizing of a Wordsworth. 
 But there is natural and healthy sight, and love of out- 
 ward beauty. The groves are groves, not haunts of the 
 muses ; the skies are skies, not rose color ; tempest and 
 sunshine, oak and flower, are genuine. 
 
 And so, again, in the deeper realities of human feeling, 
 of life, there is the same reality. The modern poet has 
 learned to philosophize about the passions ; he gives you 
 the anatomy of the human heart ; he describes every 
 
EARLY BALLAD POETRY. 55 
 
 agony of love, every nicest shade of emotion from the 
 chemical analysis of a sigh to the last stage of senti- 
 mental insanity. Each namby-pamby song is a piece of 
 metaphysics done into rhyme. This is not nature. It 
 may please us in some subtle forms, as a fine specimen 
 of morbid anatomy, or as a well polished conceit, but it 
 is not nature. There is no such method in the true mad- 
 ness. The lover does not hold a watch to count the 
 beats of his pulse, or turn a Harvey to make discoveries 
 about the circulation of his blood. The characteristic of 
 the modern lyrist is subjectivity, of the older and truer 
 objectivity ; he simply felt, and spoke as he felt. Thus 
 a modern poet would describe to you all the emotions 
 from surprise to sadness, that passed through Sir Patrick's 
 mind, the ballad singer gives you Sir Patrick himself : 
 
 The first word that Sir Patrick read, 
 Sae loud, loud laughed he ; 
 The neist word that Sir Patrick read, 
 The tear blinded his e'e. 
 
 A Moore will give us through the voice of some forlorn 
 fair one the most musical, most melancholy autobiogra- 
 phy of all the moods she has gone through, from the first 
 tremulous whisper of the heart to the last accurately meas- 
 ured crescendo and diminuendo of despair. But the 
 ballad tells it in a simple picture or a natural image. 
 
 O waly, waly up the bank, 
 And waly, waly doun the brae, 
 And waly, waly yon burn-side, 
 Where I and my love were wont to gae 
 
56 ENGLISH LITERATURE, 
 
 I leaned my back unto an aik, 
 
 I thocht it was a trustie tree ; 
 But first it bow'd, and syne it brak, 
 
 Sae my true love did lichtly me. 
 
 4 '0 hold your hand, Lord William ! " she said, 
 
 " For your strokes are wondrous sair ; 
 True lovers I can get many a ane, 
 
 But a father I can never get mair." 
 
 I send him the rings from my white fingers. 
 
 The garlands off my hair ; 
 I send him the heart that 's in my breast ; 
 
 What would my love have mair ? 
 
 Edom O' Gordon, 
 
 bonnie, bonnie was her mouth. 
 And cherry were her cheeks, 
 
 And clear, clear was her yellow hair, 
 Whereon the red bluid dreeps ; 
 
 Then wi' his spear he turned her owre, 
 
 gin her face was wan ! . 
 
 He sayd, ' ' Ye are the first that e'er 
 
 1 wisht alive again." 
 
 He "turned her owre and owre againe, 
 
 O gin her skin was whyte ! 
 " I might have spared that bonnie face 
 
 To have been sum man's delight. 
 
 " Busk and boun, my merry men a' 
 For ill dooms I doe gesse ; — 
 
 1 cannot luik on that bonnie face 
 As it lies on the grass." 
 
 Such poetry abounds in the happy touches of nature ; 
 not the curiosa felicitas of art. There is hardly a simple 
 
EARLY BALLAD POETRY. 57 
 
 feeling of the heart, of maternal tenderness, of joy and 
 sadness, of penitence and remorse, but is found in these 
 ballads. But they are touches ; the master's single stroke 
 of the brush ; not a labored finish of every daisy and 
 every rose petal. 
 
 It is true that in this ballad poety its very beauty is 
 linked with a certain defect. There could not be that 
 variety of thought, of weird feeling and life so character- 
 istic of modern days ; as the serf's music cannot give you 
 the harmonies of the opera. All ballads are therefore 
 within a narrow range of action. Love and war are the 
 themes. The maidens go through the same adventures, 
 escape behind the knight, are imprisoned or murdered, 
 and rise out of their graves at midnight, and weep under 
 a thorn. Every cavalier has the same weapons, and risks 
 his neck in the same way. But it is still nature ; simple 
 and true to its original. 
 
 But after all, it is impossible to gain any adequate idea 
 of the subject by such specimen bricks from the building. 
 Indeed this is the very character of the old ballad that it 
 is a whole. Modern poets spend their artistic labor on 
 details, and work up passages for quotation. But here it 
 is the totality of impression ; it is action ; it is life in all 
 its natural overflowing, onward movement. You cannot 
 stay to analyze " fayre Emmeline's " emotions, or to hear 
 the imprisoned warrior delight himself with lofty, moral 
 soliloquies. It is the fable without the moral — now, as 
 formerly, to my childish thought, the best fable ; as when 
 
58 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 I read of ^Esop's lambs and wolves, and birds, and lions, 
 but forgot the conclusion, or rather drew it without its 
 being drawn for me. This is nature. This is true art ; 
 and the last, homely lesson of criticism of the ballad is 
 this, that he who would enjoy it must be a child again. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 
 
 The history of English literature is in no way as at- 
 tractive as the study of the men who are the flower of 
 its life. The annals of poetry, as we read them in our 
 antiquaries, are a heavy mass of bibliography ; but when 
 we turn to a Chaucer, a Spenser, or Ben Jonson, it is 
 like studying the family pedigree, not in the herald's of- 
 fice, but in a marked group of portraits, which give in 
 every quaint costume the features of living men. We 
 place foremost that name, the daystar of our literature, 
 Chaucer, to whom we may better apply the praise Cow- 
 ley has written of Virgil : 
 
 The wise, 
 "Whose verse walks highest, tho' not flies, 
 Who brought green poesy to her ripest age, 
 And made that art, which was a rage. 
 
 It was common in the day of past criticism, when 
 our elder English was an unknown tongue to many, 
 to regard Chaucer as a dull and illegible rhymer; and 
 even Byron could say that " his celebrity lay in his an- 
 tiquity " ; but now our best writers agree in calling him 
 one of the creative minds of the past. In him we have the 
 best introduction to the language, in its great transition 
 
 59 
 
60 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 time, when our English was slowly forming out of its 
 motley material. And yet more, in him we have the 
 mind of England, as it passed out of the romantic sea- 
 son of Norman chivalry to its ripe, national manhood, 
 and drew into it all the influences, social and religious, 
 which then began to blossom over Europe. It is neces- 
 sary for us to epitomize in a few words the changes 
 which had passed over the social life of England and 
 gone to shape its literature. There had been as yet no 
 age of national culture. It was slowly developing from 
 the chaos of the Conquest. There must be first an Eng- 
 lish people. 
 
 The age of Alfred, of a proper Saxon culture, had 
 passed away ; and while the rude speech and the strong 
 elements of character remained among the people, these 
 had little utterance. The spirit of the Norman court 
 gave tone to poetry, learning, and manners; but it 
 reached no further. Social liberty lay prostrate under a 
 mailed nobility and a despotic church. The land was 
 torn by endless wars. No law, no freedom, no national 
 education could bloom amidst these evils. But with the 
 Edwards we see the coming of a real social growth, a 
 middle class rise in London ; its merchants bought their 
 rights in Parliament ; its rich guilds held at bay king and 
 baron. Crecy taught England that her bows and bills 
 were as strong in war as her knights in gilded mail. 
 These changes came slowly, yet it could be seen that 
 there was to be an English people as well as a court ; a 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 6 1 
 
 home-born speech, thought, life, a home-born Protestant 
 faith. It was not, however, a return to the Saxon type ; 
 it was to be that rich blending which makes the com- 
 posite of modern England, and which should unite the 
 Saxon strength with the refined beauty of the Norman. 
 That era reaches its ripe manhood with Elizabeth, when 
 a Shakespeare, a Bacon, a Raleigh arise. The. age of 
 Chaucer is that of its childhood. 
 
 But already before him for fifty years there are signs 
 of this mental fermentation ; and the best portrait is 
 given in literature. 
 
 At this period the literature of England was repre- 
 sented almost wholly by a class of writers, the rhyming 
 chroniclers, who were busy with some rifaccimenti of 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth, or those quaint stories of Troy 
 and Thebes, gotten out of mediaeval Latin. The prose 
 romance had now taken the place of the rhymed, and 
 the living spirit of the old romance had vanished. The 
 minstrels, who had sung at the court and in the market- 
 place, were succeeded by the dull tribe of bookmakers, 
 like Robert de Brunne with his " Chronykil of England," 
 and Adam Davie with his " Life of Alisaunder." In 
 their folios, wit and grace and passion are seen no longer, 
 unless we except Barbour's " Bruce," which has the ring 
 of the Round Table. 
 
 A ! freedome is a nobill thinge ! 
 Freedome mayes man to haiff liking ; 
 Freedome all solace to man gyffes ; 
 He levys at ese that freely levys. 
 
62 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Now and then in these endless books there are rare 
 gems, like the story of Macbeth, which the genius of a 
 Shakespeare could recreate into his mighty drama. But 
 we read there the change of the popular mind. Other 
 thoughts began to stir it ; and the ballads of Sir Bevis 
 and Sir Guy could no longer satisfy it. 
 
 It was the revival of the English tongue that led the 
 way, or rather showed the ground already gained. In 
 1380 the Bible of Wyclif saw the light. The truths 
 which the Reformation was to ripen were sown in the 
 heart of the people, while as yet they had not reached 
 the court or the university. The Bible of Wyclif is the 
 marvel of that day. It not only opened the sealed 
 Gospel, but it gave its truth a living, national utterance. 
 The English tongue, which had had no pure writers since 
 1 155, and which for three centuries had been banished 
 from the palace, the courts of law, and the song of the 
 minstrel, now came forth in its power. Literary men 
 recognized its power, and in 1385 it was spoken and 
 taught in the schools. It was no longer indeed the old 
 Saxon, as we have seen ; it had gone through many 
 modifications. But it was at last a national tongue, fit 
 for the uses both of the scholar and the people. 
 
 The day of chivalry had set. Literature was no longer 
 an affair mainly of the palace, the tournament, the belted 
 knight ; it must represent London, with its new life in 
 many forms ; its merchants in their velvets and gold 
 chains, the man of law who could speak of the rights of 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 63 
 
 the people, the " doctour of phisik," — the scientist and 
 sceptic of his day, — the shipman, and the jovial innkeeper. 
 There was to come out of this a Chaucer, and " the 
 bright consummate flower " of an Elizabethan age. 
 
 The intellectual beginning came with the dawn of the 
 fourteenth century. It was among the people, the " lewed 
 folk," that this mighty fermentation of thought began. 
 The worn-out ceremonial of the Roman Church had 
 grown tiresome, and over the whole land appeared a flood 
 of popular ballads, dialogues, lampoons, whose burthen 
 was the lazy monk and the luxurious prelate. Wyclif 
 had already thundered from his pulpit at Lutterworth 
 and in the halls of Oxford ; but his learned pamphlets 
 were too heavy for the people. Their power lay in the 
 rude, strong literature of satire. It was the lively voice 
 of popular Protestantism, the common-sense logic, more 
 telling than all the theses of Oxford. Nor was it the keen 
 rapier of a Juvenal or a Pope, but the hard, well-wielded 
 flail in the hand of the peasant. Many of these pieces 
 remain in the early collections ; and you read in these 
 " Reformers before the Reformation " the best history of 
 the time. Even a century before we have a most amusing 
 relic of this popular satire, " The Land of Cockayne." 
 
 Farre in sea by Weste Spaine And of pasties beth the walles ; 
 
 Is a land y-hate Cockayne ; Of flesh and fishe and a riche mete, 
 
 Tho' Paradis be mery and brighte, The rikefullest that men may ete ; 
 
 Yet Cockayne is of fairer sighte. The geese yrosted on the spit, 
 
 There is a wel faire Abbaye, Flee to that Abbaye, God wot, 
 
 Of white monkes and of greye ; And gridath : geese all hot, all hot. 
 There beth bowers and halles, 
 
64 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 But the work of this time which best illustrates the 
 English mind is the " Vision of Piers Plowman," by 
 Langland (1362, but not completed until after 1378). In 
 a literary view it is very notable as a specimen of the old, 
 alliterative Saxon poetry. We see in it the proof that 
 the Saxon yet lingered among the people, and it was 
 chosen by its author as the best garb for his satire. It is 
 a bold picture of that freshly-awakened religious thought. 
 The poem is a series of visions. Asleep on Malvern 
 Hills, the poet sees a crowd in the vast meadow beneath ; 
 on one hand is the town of Truth, on the other the dun- 
 geon of Wrong. A fair lady, " Holy Church," appears ; 
 then Lady Mede (Reward), and with her all the vices and 
 virtues, falsehood, flattery, peace, war, faith, hope, con- 
 science. Each passus is a lively quarrel between these 
 characters; Scripture and fathers and homilies are mixed 
 in strange medley with the bitterest scorn of the monks, 
 the corruption of the cloister, the follies of worship. 
 Piers the Plowman, an honest Englishman, represents the 
 English religion of old time. 
 
 In a somer seson I seigh a toune on the toft, 
 
 Whan softe was the sonne, Trichliche ymaked. 
 
 I shoop me into shroudes, A deep dale bynethe, 
 
 As I a sheep weere. A dungeon therinne. 
 
 Ac on a May morwenynge A fayre field full of folke 
 
 On Malvern e Hilles Fond I ther bitwene, 
 
 Mi bifel a ferly Of alle manere of men, 
 
 Of fairye me thoghte. The meene and the riche, 
 
 * * * * Werchynge and wandeiynge, 
 
 As I behield unto the east As the world asketb. 
 An heigh to thesonne, * * * * 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 
 
 65 
 
 In preeris and in penaunces 
 
 Pultur hem manye, 
 
 Alle for the loue of our Lorde, 
 
 Lyveden full streighte, 
 
 In hope to have after, 
 
 Hevyn, liche blisse. 
 
 Pilgrymes and palmeres 
 
 Plighten hem togidere, 
 
 For to seken Saint Jame 
 
 And seintes at Rome. 
 
 They wenten forth in hire way, 
 
 With many wise tales, 
 And hadden leve to lyen 
 All hire lyfe after. 
 * * * * 
 
 Ther preched a pardoner, 
 As he a preest were, 
 Broughte forth a bulle 
 With many bishopes seeles, 
 And seide that hymself mighte 
 Assoilen hem alien 
 Of falsehede, of fastynge, 
 Of vowes ybroken. 
 
 Such was the Saxon strength that heralded Chaucer. 
 It will give us the greater idea of his genius, when we 
 compare the rudeness of his time. He was to be the 
 poet, who should face this speech of the people with the 
 grace of the Norman. But we must touch on another of 
 the influences which shaped the age of Chaucer. In the 
 thirteenth century, especially the latter half, the mind of 
 continental Europe began to awake in the spring tide of 
 a fresh literature. Italy led the way ; Dante, Petrarch, 
 Boccaccio became masters of the new intellectual world. 
 The treasures of classic poetry and philosophy were 
 opened to eager eyes ; monkish Latin, and dull legends 
 were consigned to their dust. It is clear that the spirit 
 of the Italian movement was felt in England. We trace 
 in Chaucer not only the home-born thoughts of his own 
 land, but the bloom of the continental. His scholarship 
 was enriched and refined from these sources. There can 
 be no doubt, as in the case of Shakespeare, that he was 
 skilled in foreign tongues. His own books show it, and 
 
66 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 disciples like Lydgate speak of him almost with wonder, 
 as " master of all knowledge," and indeed you find in 
 him legends from Boccaccio : you read Dante in these 
 lines from the " Assembly of Foules." 
 
 Thro' me men goe into the blissful place. 
 Thro me men goe (then spake the other side) 
 Unto the mortell strokes of the spear. 
 
 And you hear him confessing himself a borrower in an- 
 other legend. 
 
 Therefor Petrarch writeth 
 
 This storie, which with high stile he enditeth. 
 
 Many of his tales are taken from the " Fabliaux." The 
 " Romaunt of the Rose " is a translation, or rather para- 
 phrase. 
 
 His " Troilus and Creseide " is borrowed from the " Fil- 
 ostrato " of Boccaccio, and his " Legend of Good Women " 
 from Ovid's " Epistles." The " Hous of Fame " is after the 
 new allegoric model. Even the " Canterbury Tales " are, 
 while his own, plainly inspired by Boccaccio's idea of a gath- 
 ering of story-tellers. I do not say this to take from his orig- 
 inality. There is no perfect originality, since the first 
 writer published the first thought. All are borrowers and 
 lenders. Goethe says : " Originality is the assimilative 
 power, which takes all the materials of the time, but di- 
 gests and forms them into its own life." 
 
 English literature did not become the copy of Italian. 
 Chaucer was no Dante, and no Boccaccio, although more 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 6? 
 
 like that genial improvisatore than any other; but he is a 
 hearty home-bred Englishman. 
 
 In or about the year 1340 Geoffrey Chaucer was born. 
 His life extends through the reign of Edward III and 
 Richard II into that of Henry, and, beyond that of most 
 literary men, it is mingled with the stirring action of his 
 day. 
 
 A native of London, of good family, he was educated 
 at Cambridge, and, perhaps, if tradition be true, he was 
 awhile at Oxford when Wyclif, in the shade of Lutter- 
 worth, was meditating the thought so soon to shake 
 England. He possessed in the highest sense all the 
 culture of his time, and his genius brought him early 
 honors (1367) at the court of Edward. As ambassador 
 he visited the Continent ; was familiar with the men of 
 letters and the great ; and probably met Petrarch, then 
 the glory of European scholars. At home he held posts 
 of honor. He had an office in the Custom House — an 
 honor in that time. We are told, too, of another singu- 
 lar perquisite of the laureate, a " pitcher " of wine to be 
 daily provided for him (1374). 
 
 But there is in the life of Chaucer a nobler close than 
 these years of courtly renown. It was a life of manly ac- 
 tion in defence of truth. We know little of the incidents 
 of it, but we gather that the poet was the friend and 
 favorer of that movement which with Wyclif and after 
 him stirred the heart of England. 
 
 Not only in the riot of Wat Tyler, but on every hand 
 
6 8 ENGLISH LI TERA T URE. 
 
 in the day of Richard II there was an uprising of Eng- 
 lish freedom against the oppression of State and Church. 
 It broke out in London, the centre then of social move- 
 ments, and probably the election of John of Northamp- 
 ton as Mayor was the immediate cause. Chaucer, as one 
 of the defenders of liberty, was thrown into prison ; and 
 though in after years restored in part to honors, he seems 
 never again to have been a courtier. His life is ennobled 
 by this trial. No servile heart was in him ; he did not 
 prostitute his genius to be the minstrel of a despot. But 
 to the last he remained the free, high-minded English- 
 man. He died in 1400, on the threshold of that next 
 century which was to see the birth of Luther. 
 
 We have thus seen in this one mind the culture of his 
 age, its courtly grace, its best elements of learning ; and 
 united with this, the keen eyesight of the man of the 
 people, love of freedom, hatred of superstition, and the 
 broadest sympathies. In such a mind England could in- 
 deed have its interpreter. 
 
 And here, before passing to Chaucer's poetry, we must 
 consider what he did for the formation of an English 
 language. It is of deep interest to trace even briefly the 
 steps from the rude Anglo-Norman dialect to that rich 
 stately " tongue which Shakespeare spake." The Saxon 
 speech, although in the long interval, even from Edward 
 the Confessor, it had decayed at the court, and was 
 scorned by the Norman gentry as the patois of the peas- 
 ant, remained in reality the speech of England. It held 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 69 
 
 in it the elements of masculine strength, the words of the 
 house, the field, the market. By degrees the foreign 
 tongue lost its mastery ; and, as we have seen, the com- 
 posite English began to be spoken and taught in the 
 schools. But in this process it came forth by no means 
 the original Saxon. It did not become an incorporation 
 of French and English. The body of it was Saxon, but it 
 became refined and enlarged by many changes, which added 
 the dialect of the court, the castle, of fashion, and wit, and 
 poetry. These changes must be looked on as a growth 
 which did much to make it the vehicle of a great litera- 
 ture. It passed from its rude orthography, its hard versi- 
 fication, and took something of the mellow grace of 
 Southern tongues, to become the English of prince and 
 people, of the statesman, the dramatist, the historian. 
 
 We may now briefly note these changes as our Saxon 
 scholars have traced them, although they are far from 
 exact agreement. The Saxon chronicle of 1 1 55 is the 
 best standard of the pure undefiled original in its last 
 stage. The language as it reappears in the last half of 
 the 14th century has gone through its first stage of disin- 
 tegration, called semi-Saxon, and its next stage of - early 
 English. It has now reached the age called middle Eng- 
 lish. The changes have been great. Its rude orthog- 
 raphy has been systematized ; the inflection of verb and 
 noun quite gone. Its inversion of the syntax has been 
 modified. Above all, many Norman words have been 
 introduced, so that it may have seemed the Babel of con- 
 
/O ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 fused speech. It was another hundred years before the 
 euphuism of the court could give place to the plain Eng- 
 lish of' Ascham and More. 
 
 It is in this middle English period that Chaucer appears. 
 He is the linguistic mirror of the time. He abounds in 
 Anglo-Norman words to us obsolete, and with their deriv- 
 atives from the classic sources, with long polysyllabic 
 words, melancolius, dominatioiin, gentilesse. He uses the 
 vowel endings that are found in the poetry of the Ro- 
 mance languages, and that have been mostly disused by 
 our stronger voices ; and he accents the last syllable. 
 
 This feste was, and greater of cortage, 
 
 Than was the revel of hir mariage. 
 
 That with gret sleight and gret difficultee. 
 
 Yet with all these Norman elements, Chaucer is a 
 treasure-house of Saxon speech. No writer gives us 
 with more homely ease the very talk of the stout miller, 
 or of the smith at the anvil ; and if you compare him 
 with the Gowers or Lydgates of that age, you feel that 
 he had far less of its pedantry. Indeed in reading him 
 the task is not in mastering the foreign words, but the 
 old, primitive ones now lost ; an eighth of his poetry 
 probably is obsolete Saxon. Many curious traces of this 
 middle English are to be found in him. There is the 
 original infinitive an y in its later form en. 
 
 Him wolde he snibben sharply for the nones. 
 
 There is the original and plural es, retaining in poetry 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 7 1 
 
 its syllabic value ; with the plural inflection of the ad- 
 jective. 
 
 And for our faith at Tramissene 
 In lestes thries and ay slain his fo. 
 
 The verbal and participial terminations are frequent, 
 
 His berd was wel begunnen for to spring, 
 Armed they weren, as I have you told ; 
 They gloweden betwixen yelwe and gold. 
 
 Many Saxon forms are there, as, for instance, lope, cor- 
 ven ; yaf for gave ; adradde for afraid ; ystrangled, 
 ystorven for starved, etc. 
 
 We have thus in Chaucer, despite his outlandish 
 Anglo-Norman, the writer who, more than all others, 
 fused the language into a purer type. His grace, his 
 flexibility, his choice of words are beyond all of his time. 
 The chaos passed with him into the first creative day. 
 His work was harder than that of Dante and Petrarch : 
 they had only to make classic a most harmonious tongue ; 
 he must mingle these jarring elements into one. 
 
 He is the first great master of the lofty rhyme. It is 
 to him, that we owe the heroic verse of ten syllables and 
 five accents. We have indeed specimens of it in ro- 
 mance poetry at the close of the twelfth century, as in 
 the mystery of the " Foolish Virgins.' Richard of Ham- 
 pole in the fourteenth century, forty or fifty years before 
 the "Canterbury Tales," wrote in this his "Stimulus 
 Conscientiae." But in Chaucer's age the regular romance 
 rhyme of eight syllables and four accents, and the 
 
72 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. 
 
 " royall rhythm " of fourteen syllables, which Chapman 
 immortalized in his " Homer," were the favorites. 
 
 Minerva wrapt her in the robe that curiously she wove 
 With glorious colours as she sate on th' azure floor of Jove. 
 And wove the arms that he put on, bent to the tearful field. 
 About his broad spread shoulders hung his huge and horrid shield. 
 
 Chapnan. 
 
 Chaucer saw the power of the ten syllable verse, and 
 made it henceforth the classic. It is curious, however, 
 to trace its destiny. Even after his day it is spoken of 
 by Gascoyne as the riding rhyme (from the mounted 
 pilgrims of the Tales) " which our Master and Father 
 Chaucer used in his ' Canterbury Tales ' and divers other 
 delectable and light enterprises " ; but he adds, that 
 " rhythm royall is fitted for a grave discourse." At the 
 beginning of the seventeenth century it gains new dig- 
 nity ; Jonson designed an epic in couplets, and Dryden 
 established it as the " heroic verse." 
 
 But we must pass from the verse to the character of 
 Chaucer's poetry. England has given birth to no more 
 many-sided genius in literature. Although best known 
 in the " Canterbury Tales," we have every form of the 
 culture of that age in poetry, and there is no better prose 
 till the day of More. It is curious to hear him at the 
 close of the Tales speak of his translation of Boethius, 
 and a few such duller works of a religious cast, as his 
 " Consolation," and beg pardon for the light stories of 
 love and humor 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 73 
 
 In his " Romaunt of the Rose," " Hous of Fame," 
 " Assembly of Foules," " Flower and Leaf," we have the 
 most exquisite type of the romantic and allegorical fancy 
 of that day. They abound in delicate humor, in fair 
 pictures of nature, and in the best features of that chiv- 
 alric spirit of courtesy which Anglo-Norman culture 
 could give. There are rare passages in each of them. 
 They are only dull reading now, because we have lost 
 the fantastic tone of that day. 
 
 But the " Canterbury Tales " are always his master- 
 work. They reproduce the very form in which the rich, 
 dramatic life of society had its full expression. Precise- 
 ly so the literature of Italy had its popular beginnings 
 with the " Decameron " of Boccaccio. The story-teller 
 was the homely nurse of the people ; the inspiration was 
 drawn no longer from the metrical romance, but from 
 the real world, as in a later day Fielding succeeded to 
 Richardson's stately Sir Charles Grandison. In the story 
 all the thoughts and fancies of that motley world, — its 
 grave moods and its jests, its shrewd criticism, its biting 
 satire, its heresies under a pleasant mask, — all had their 
 utterance; all the strange marvels of the day, Cathay 
 and Prester John, dwarfs and anthropophagi, were told 
 to open ears ; all the late found treasures of classic lore, 
 the history of " Duk Theseus," of " the enchantment of 
 Medea and Circe," are mingled in quaint anachronism 
 with the faces and manners of the Middle Age. 
 
 I think, however, that Chaucer was happier than Boc- 
 
74 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. 
 
 caccio in his choice of a plan. In the Italian novelist there 
 is something inhuman in the carelessness of the laughing 
 tellers of stories amidst the plague of Florence. In the 
 group of pilgrims you have the very picture of English 
 life. There is nothing even out of keeping in the relig- 
 ious pilgrimage to St. Thomas a. Becket's shrine, for 
 the religious pilgrims of the Middle Age were quite as 
 much at home at the Tabard Inn in Southwark ; and 
 mine host is in his way a sound Christian man, though 
 a coarse jester. We have all England in that gathering. 
 All the world was imaged there, not only knights and 
 ladies, but "men of lawes," "doctours of physik," good 
 wives of Bath, rascal friars, indulgence-sellers, tavern- 
 keepers, and godly parsons; the living, breathing, bar- 
 gaining, swearing, drinking, quarrelling, joking, praying 
 England. 
 
 We have here the character of Chaucer's poetry. His 
 charm is truth of nature. We may distinguish him from 
 the early ballad-writers of the Romance age. With him 
 poetry is no longer a simple minstrelsy; it is an art. But 
 it is art in its first, fresh stage, before it has become ideal. 
 You have not in him, as in Spenser, a poet's fairyland 
 of fancy, " both what they half create and what perceive," 
 nor the gorgeous imaginings of Milton ; and in this 
 higher sphere of creative genius we cannot place him. It 
 is the poetry of faithful, objective vision ; the art of the 
 photograph. There is, indeed, a yet higher truth of nat- 
 ure than this ; Shakespeare is at once real and ideal ; his 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 7$ 
 
 Macbeth and Iago are eternal types of the human heart, 
 the deeper reality that outlives all change of costume. 
 Chaucer only gives us the scenes, the men of his time. 
 But there is a charm in such poetry which nothing else 
 can give. 
 
 We may draw an illustration from every life-like page. 
 We turn to his description of natural scenery. He is the 
 most exquisite of landscape painters, with an eye for all 
 that is rich in form or coloring ; but it is no dainty para- 
 dise he draws, it is his own island — its graceful hills, its 
 green hedgerows, its oaks and primroses. In a later day 
 descriptive poetry becomes mere fancy or sentiment, and 
 loses this simple reality. The landscape of Claude has 
 " a light that never was on sea or land " ; the shepherds 
 and shepherdesses of Poussin are Arcadian beauties. If 
 you look at some of our modern landscapes, you are 
 struck with their vagueness ; there are Gothic temples, 
 and groves, and rivers, but you cannot tell whether the 
 trees are oaks or elms, or the flowers genuine ; and you 
 find that the artist painted his bowers of beauty in his 
 studio, with no look at nature save through his skylight. 
 It is so with poetry. Ninetenths of descriptive, pastoral 
 verse is this effusion of sentimentalities about nature. 
 Chaucer is a pre-Raphaelite. There is a particularity in 
 every scene, and it was shrewdly guessed by Pope that 
 each was a copy of some original. Each garden is one 
 in which he has walked; each flower is a primrose or 
 a columbine. 
 
?6 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 And to a pleasaunt grove I gan passe, 
 Long er the brighte sunne up-risen was, 
 In which were okes greate, streight as a line, 
 Under the which the grasse so fresh of hewe 
 Was newly sprong, and an eight foot or nine 
 Every tree wel fro his fellow grew. 
 With branches brode, laden with leves newe, 
 That sprongen out agen the sunne-shine, 
 Some very red, and some a glad light grene. 
 On every bowgh the briddes herde I synge, 
 With voys of aungel in her armony, 
 That besyed hem her briddes forthe to bringe ; 
 ********* 
 
 A ravysshinge swetnesse, 
 That God, that maker ys of al and Lorde, 
 Ne herde never bettir, as I gesse ; 
 Therewith a wynde, unnethe hyt myghte lesse, 
 Made in the leves grene a noyse softe, 
 Accordant to the foulys songe on lofte. 
 
 — Assembly of Foules. 
 
 We are much struck by the likeness between our poet 
 and Dante, in their fondness for the effects of light on 
 the landscape. Chaucer's sunrises are the most glowing 
 pictures in the language. He is an early riser, and has 
 seen the very glories that flame in his verse. 
 
 Uproos the sonne, and uproos Emelye. 
 
 The busy larke, messager of day, 
 Salueth in hire song the morwe gray ; 
 And fyry Phebus ryseth up so bright, 
 That al the orient laugheth of the light, 
 And with his stremes dryeth in the greves 
 The silver dropes, hongyng on the leeves. 
 
 — Knightes Tale. 
 
 Ther sat I doune amonge the feire floures. 
 And saw the briddes crepe out of her boures, 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. J? 
 
 Ther as they had rested hem al the nyght ; 
 They were so joyful of the dayes lyght, 
 That they beganne of Mayes ben ther houres. 
 
 They could that servise alle bye rote ; 
 Ther was also many a lovely note ! 
 Somme songe loude as they hadde pleyned, 
 And somme in other maner voys yfeyned, 
 And somme al oute with a lowde throte. 
 
 They pruned hem, and made hem ryght gay, 
 And daunseden and leuten on the spray ; 
 And evermore two and two in fere. 
 
 — The Cuckow and the Nightingale. 
 
 But we see this truth of nature yet more in what is his 
 proper field, the description of men and manners. He is 
 no historic painter like Tasso, nor can he draw a Raffaelle 
 or a Satan ; but he is a portrait-painter of the keenest 
 eye and nicest hand. His heroes are flesh and blood. 
 For him every man, as every garden, is an individual ; 
 and there is the richest variety in his studies. Each 
 character, from the knight to the serving-man, is com- 
 pletely finished. His Franckeleyn, his Knight, his Doctor 
 and Merchant, are portraits. His Wife of Bath and 
 Prior esse are perfect. Yet, when we turn to the coarser 
 side and examine the sharp-cut features of the motley 
 crowd, we see what infinite humor he has. We should 
 know the Reve or the Pardonere if we saw them walking 
 in Broadway. There is no slashing caricature, but each 
 stroke tells the artist. It is Flemish painting, where you 
 may catch the foam of the beer tumbling into the brown 
 
7% ENGLISH LITERA TURE. 
 
 jug and smell the pipes. There is coarseness enough in 
 many of his tales, as in all of that day, when women were 
 not readers ; but it is not coarseness of heart. We can 
 find nowhere more exquisite pictures of womanly virtue 
 and maternal tenderness. The old story of " Griselda " 
 has a charm that never tires. More and better : with all 
 his shrewd humor, his biting satire, there is never a sneer 
 at piety. He paints some lecherous or smooth rascal of 
 a monk ; but he gives you also the matchless face of the 
 good parish priest. 
 
 In brief, he pictures human nature, English nature, as 
 it was in the day of Richard and Henry ; its graver 
 thought and its comedy, its nobleness and -its vice, its 
 friar and its Lollard, its prince and its yeomanry. 
 
 The Country Squire. 
 
 A Frankeleyn ther was in his companye ; 
 Whit was his berde, as is the dayesye. 
 
 An househaldere, and that a gret, was he ; 
 Seynt Julian he was in his countre. 
 
 Withoute bake mete was never his hous, 
 Of fleissch and fissch, and that so plentyvous, 
 It snewed in his hous of mete and drinke, 
 Of alle deyntees that men cowde thynke. 
 
 His table dormant in his halle alway 
 Stood redy covered al the longe day. 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. Jg 
 
 The Clerk. 
 
 A clerk ther was of Oxenford also, 
 That unto logik hackle longe tyme i-go, 
 Al-so lene was his hors as is a rake, 
 And he was not right fat, I undertake ; 
 But lokede holwe and therto soburly, 
 Ful thredbar was his overest courtepy, 
 
 ****** 
 
 For him was lever have at his beddes heed 
 Twenty bookes, clothed in blak and reed, 
 Of Aristotil, and of his philosophic, 
 Then robus riche, or fithul, or sawtrie. 
 
 The Doctour of Phtsik. 
 
 For he was groundud in astronomye ; 
 
 He kepte his pacient wondurly wel 
 
 In houres by his magik naturel. 
 
 He knew the cause of every maladye, 
 
 Were it of cold, or hete, or moyst or drie, 
 
 ****** 
 
 Wel knew he the olde Esculapius, 
 
 And Deiscorides, and eeke Rufus ; 
 
 Averrois, Damascen, and Constantyn ; 
 Bernard, and Gatisden, and Gilbertyn. 
 
 His studie was but litel on the Bible. 
 
 The Prior esse. 
 
 And sche was clept madame Englentyne. 
 
 Ful wel sche sang the servise devyne, 
 
 Entuned in hire nose ful semyly ; 
 
 And Frensch sche spak ful faire and fetysly, 
 
 ****** 
 
SO ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 At mete wel i-taught was sche withalle ; 
 Sche leet no morsel from hire lippes falle, 
 Ne wette hire fyngres in hire sauce deepe. 
 
 But for to speken of hire conscience, 
 Sche was so charitable and so pitous, 
 Sche wolde weepe if that sche saw a mous 
 Caught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde. 
 Of smale houndes hadde sche, that sche fedde 
 "With rostud fleissch, and mylk, and wastel breed. 
 But sore wepte sche if oon of hem were deed, 
 Or if men smot it with a yerde smerte : 
 And al was conscience and tendre herte. 
 
 The Wif of Bathe. 
 
 Hire keverchefs weren ful fyne of grounde ; 
 
 I durste swere they weyghede ten pounde, 
 
 That on a Sonday were upon hire heed. 
 
 Hire hosen were of fyn Scarlett reed. 
 
 Ful streyte y-teyed, and schoos ful moyste and newe. 
 
 Bold was hire face, and fair, and reed of hewe. 
 
 Sche was a worthy womman al hire lyfe, 
 
 Housbondes atte chirche dore hadde sche fyfe. 
 
 The Marchaunt. 
 
 A Marchaunt was ther with a forked berd, 
 In motteleye and high on hors he sat, 
 Uppon his heed a Flaundrisch bever hat ; 
 His resons he spak full solempnely, 
 Sownynge alway the encres of his wynning. 
 
 The Monk. 
 
 A manly man, to ben an abbot able, 
 
 Ful many a deynte hors hadde he in stable : 
 
 He yaf not of the text a pulled hen, 
 
 That seith, that hunters been noon holy men ; 
 
 What ! schulde he studie, and make himselven wood, 
 
 Uppon a book in cloystre alway to powre, 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 8 1 
 
 Or swynke with his handes, and laboure, 
 
 As Austyn byt ? How schal the world be served ? 
 
 Lat Austyn have his swynk to him reserved. 
 
 I saw his sieves purfiled atte hond 
 
 With grys, and that the fynest of a lond. 
 
 His bootes souple, his hors in gret estat. 
 
 Now certainly he was a fair prelat ; 
 
 He was not pale as a for-pyned goost, 
 
 A fat swan loved he best of eny roost. 
 
 The Frere. 
 
 Ful wel beloved and famulier was he 
 With frankeleyns overal in his cuntrie, 
 And eek with worthy wommen of the toun : 
 Full sweetly herde he confessioun, 
 And pleasant was his absolucioun ; 
 He was an esy man to yeve penance 
 Ther as he wiste to han a good pitance. 
 
 The Pardoner. 
 ****** 
 That streyt was comen from the court of Rome. 
 His walet lay byforne him in his lappe, 
 Bret-ful of pardoun come from Rome al hoot. 
 He seide, he hadde a gobet of the sey 
 That Seynt Peter hadde, whan that he wente 
 Upon the see, til Jhesu Crist him hente. 
 He hadde a cros of latoun ful of stones, 
 And in a glas he hadde pigges bones. 
 And thus with feyned flaterie and japes, 
 He made the persoune and the people his apes. 
 
 The Persoun. 
 
 But riche he was of holy thought and werk. 
 He was also a lerned man, a clerk 
 That Cristes gospel gladly wolde preche ; 
 Wyd was his parisch, and houses fer asondur, 
 But he ne lafte not for reyne ne thondur, 
 In sikenesse ne in meschief to visite 
 
82 ENGLISH LITERATURE, 
 
 The ferrest in his parissche, moche and lite, 
 He waytud after no pompe ne reverence, 
 Ne maked him a spiced conscience, 
 But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve, 
 He taught, and ferst he folwed it himselve. 
 
 We have made but a slight study of the first great poet 
 of England ; yet it may shew us that we shall prize his 
 genius more highly the more we become acquainted with 
 him, and that Chaucer is indeed among the chief masters 
 of his art in any age ; a healthier satirist than Pope, and 
 without a rival in the charm of perfect truthfulness. To 
 him more than any other, until we reach the golden age 
 of Elizabeth, we owe the growth of English literature 
 into its fuller strength and grace. 
 
 Although he was a scholar and a favorite of the court, 
 he had the courage to choose the speech of the people ; 
 he led it out of its rude youth to manhood, and gave it a 
 place among the tongues of cultured Europe. We may 
 estimate his influence when we remember that all Eng- 
 lish poetry until the time of Surrey, just on the eve of the 
 Elizabethan period, is little else than the imitation of 
 Chaucer's style of thought and verse. We speak to-day 
 the language he moulded. Poetry was to have more crea- 
 tive and more perfect inspiration than his, but the mind 
 of Chaucer is the heart of oak, out of which were to 
 be hewn the massive beams and carved the rich orna- 
 ments of the building. 
 
 But it is in a far higher rank than that of the maker of 
 polished verse that Chaucer must be placed, when we 
 
THE AGE OF CHAUCER. 83 
 
 have thus read him by the light of English history. We 
 are not to think of the great poet as if he were only the 
 singer born to amuse men. It was with the truest sense 
 of his calling that the old Saxon styled him the scop, the 
 mind that shapes ; and that not merely a world of imagi- 
 nation, but the mighty thoughts, the faith and hope of 
 the world of men in which they live. An age of dillet an- 
 te ism may have its scholars and elegant verse-makers. 
 But it is during great periods of social movement that 
 the great poets have been born ; and in every such time 
 it has been ideal minds, an ^Eschylus, a Dante, a Milton, 
 who stood foremost as the prophets of their generation. 
 Literature has no feature so noble as this, that its men of 
 genius have been so often the champions of freedom, of 
 human right, of social good. And it was especially so in 
 this day of our English poet. We think of the Reforma- 
 tion as the work of Luther and of Wyclif before him ; 
 but it was Dante in the heart of a corrupt Italy who 
 spoke with indignant tones of Pontiff and Church ; it was 
 Petrarch who shared the love of freedom with Savonarola, 
 and Chaucer whose verse helped on the cause of a purer 
 faith in his own land, as truly as the preacher of Lutter- 
 worth. We have already noticed some incidents in his 
 life which prove that he was on the side of the " Reform- 
 ers before the Reformation," as they are well called ; of 
 the earnest souls of that mediaeval church that already 
 hailed the coming of the day. But whether he was in di- 
 rect union with the Lollards, as has been claimed, his 
 
84 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 poems are enough to shew that his influence was on the 
 conscience and life of his time. It was not merely the 
 doctor of theology in his theses before the university, 
 it was this keen painter, who held up the picture of the 
 obscene monk, or the worldly prelate by the side of the 
 honest parson, and taught the people to fear God and 
 hate hypocrisy, to whom England owed that education 
 of the national mind without which the work of Cranmer 
 and Ridley would have been in vain. An age when mer- 
 chant and scholar read " The Canterbury Tales " was al- 
 ready far advanced toward.its ripe manhood. It was of this 
 age that Chaucer was the herald ; and he remains for us 
 and all English time one of the keenest of the seers 
 into the future. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE AGE OF SPENSER. 
 
 It is to the poet who stands, after Chaucer, foremost 
 among the masters of early English literature, until we 
 reach the drama of Shakespeare and the epic of Milton, 
 that our attention is now drawn. The " Faerie Queene " 
 of Edmund Spenser is not read to-day, because for most 
 minds its allegorical costume is now as faded as the huge 
 ruff and head-gear of the Elizabethan time ; and only 
 the lovers of our mother speech know what wealth of 
 fancy is hidden in its cantos, or what a power it had in 
 shaping the beauty of our verse for after time. For that 
 reason we can choose no name which shall better bring 
 before us the spirit of that age. 
 
 Our best introduction to his poetry is in a glance at 
 that grand period of English history in which he appears, 
 and the causes which ripened its intellectual growth. 
 
 It was a marvellous time. If we recall the swiftness 
 with which the mind of England passed from its crude 
 beginnings to such culture, or its manifold fruit in every 
 field, in the drama or the romantic epic or lyric verse, in 
 history and essay, we may well say that it has no like- 
 ness before or after it. There had been little hitherto of 
 
 35 
 
86 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 strictly English literature. English prose was not born 
 at all, save in a few monkish chronicles and polemic 
 treatises. The " Utopia" of More was written in Latin, 
 and his historic fragment stands alone, as a model of 
 strong, keen Saxon speech. We have in poetry only the 
 great name of Chaucer, followed by a crowd of dull imi- 
 tators, whose relation to the work of our nobler artist we 
 shall presently see. The drama had not passed beyond 
 the rude " moralities" or a few stiff academic pieces like 
 " Gorboduc." But all at once we see the dawning of 
 the new age. It is, as if, like the first voyagers over the 
 Atlantic, after picking up in the waste a bough or two 
 laden with spring blossoms, and hearing the voice of a 
 stray landbird, we had suddenly come on the vision of a 
 fresh continent. It is the time of Spenser and Sidney, 
 Raleigh and Bacon, Marlowe and Decker, Herbert and 
 Hooker, and of Shakespeare, king of English poets. Yet 
 to explain so wonderful a flowering of genius is not so 
 hard, if we remember always the living law of literature, 
 that it is the outgrowth of the whole people. Hazlitt, in 
 his brilliant lectures on that age, has handled this topic 
 with great power. I would, however, put first the cause 
 which he puts last, I mean the influence of the English 
 Reformation. It is a shallow view of that history, if we 
 look on it as only a change of religious ideas. It was 
 the new birth of the whole national life, and because 
 England then awoke in the consciousness of her intel- 
 lectual and moral personality, she was capable of a home- 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. 87 
 
 born literature in all its fresh and varied utterance. 
 None can read the essays of Bacon or the poetry of 
 Spenser, without feeling how the sense of freedom from 
 the intellectual fetters of the past breathes in the manly 
 thought of the age. That influence was strong, again, in 
 the shaping of the English tongue. There had been a 
 gradual growth of the language, out of its semi-Norman 
 form ; and we perceive already in the prose of More 
 and the poetry of Surrey, that the cumbrous dialect was 
 giving way to the simpler, home-bred speech. But the 
 opening of the Bible, in the tongue " understanded of 
 the people," from divine to ploughman, with the Book of 
 Common Prayer, did more than any thing else for the 
 unity of the national life. Literature as well as faith 
 passed out of the tutelage of the Church. It did not, as 
 in a later time, lose its Christian spirit in the change; 
 but the Latin language was no longer the despot over 
 the style of the scholar, any more than the Latin creed 
 over the worshipper. 
 
 But if this national awakening were the chief cause of 
 such literary life, we cannot pass by others that blended 
 largely with it. We should name chiefly the knowledge 
 of the ancient classic authors and that of romance and 
 Italian literature, already in its full bloom. There had 
 be.en in the time of Chaucer an opening of these rich 
 sources ; indeed half of his materials is taken directly 
 from the French, and a good deal from the Italian ; but 
 in the main the parchments of the monkish cloister 
 
88 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and the floating stories of French romance made up the 
 learning of scholars. They were now thrilling through 
 all their pulses with the new wine of the age, and read 
 Plato, Tully, Plutarch, Virgil, and Tacitus in the better 
 text. There was a divine intoxication in the first 
 draught. The poet painted Caesar and Coriolanus, and 
 Duke Theseus; and the divine garnished his homilies 
 with Greek and Latin. We can see, of course, a vein of 
 pedantic affectation in many writers of this time, yet the 
 strong English genius was not lost, and the style grew 
 richer by the study of such great masters. 
 
 We have in Chapman's " Homer " a more Homeric 
 music than Pope could give us ; and the " Tasso" of 
 Fairfax is richer than the tame paraphrase of Hoole. 
 Nor can any reader of Shakespeare or Ben Jonson fail to 
 see what wealth of material was drawn by the genius of 
 that time from the newer literature of the Continent. It 
 was an age of eager scholarship, and even the half-let- 
 tered caught much of its spirit from the translations, 
 which brought home foreign thought and life. 
 
 All these elements entered into the national mind, and 
 made that period at the same time one of original yet 
 varied power. It is only within a generation, since the 
 day of Coleridge, that we have begun to study the old 
 English literature. We have passed from neglect to hero 
 worship ; and now, amidst the many noble critics to whom 
 we owe our knowledge of the past, from Caedmon to the 
 early drama, we find a host of dilettanti, who praise with 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. 89 
 
 as little judgment as in the day of Johnson or Gay they 
 scorned the fathers. There is a rage for the antique. It 
 is sought after in rare editions, as the grotesques of old 
 oak are copied in our furniture shops. All this is absurd 
 enough. We need not worship the Elizabethan age. It 
 was not a time when the language or the literary taste 
 was fully ripened. Style is always a slower and later 
 grace, which seldom comes with the first age of pregnant 
 thought. Poetry had not then cast off its involutions 
 and stiff conceits. Prose is never perfected till after 
 poetry. If we compare the " Reflections " of Burke with 
 the long-spun sentences of Hooker or the "Areopagitica " 
 of Milton, we see how much more perfect the constructive 
 grace of the first than the heavy cloth of gold which en- 
 cumbers the rich thought of the older masters. But the 
 real power of that early literature lies in its fresh, original 
 life. The language was just at that point of formation 
 where, with all the unsmelted mass of Anglo-Norman 
 words, and the later pedantry of classic learning, it kept 
 the pithy, homely strength of the Saxon. We find in 
 Bacon, or Raleigh, or Hooker, and even later in the quaint 
 grandiloquence of Sir Thomas Browne, more of the rich 
 music of the English speech than in any time after them. 
 But more than this, the English genius was so strong in 
 home-born life, that even when it came into so large con- 
 tact with foreign sources it received into itself all that it 
 borrowed. Spenser is not another Ariosto. Shakespeare 
 makes Coriolanus or Hamlet an Englishman. Daniel, 
 
90 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Davies, Drayton, are of a type of philosophical poets, born 
 only in their own island. Bacon, with his world-wide knowl- 
 edge, belongs to his nation as well in his grand diction as 
 in his practical aim. English humor has its distinct type 
 as truly as English statesmanship. This is the charm of 
 that period. We cannot reproduce it, for the mould was 
 broken in the casting of the work. Other influences with 
 the day of the Restoration weakened the manhood of 
 the literature as well as the national life. There is a 
 broad chasm between Milton and Dryden, Shakespeare 
 and Congreve. But we have happily outgrown the taste 
 of the time when a history of the lives of the poets be- 
 gan with Cowley, and Addison's Cato was preferred 
 to Hamlet ; and we can know to-day " the thewes and 
 sinews of our ancestors." 
 
 First of the great names of this great age stands that of 
 Spenser, because he links the historic growth of English 
 poetry with the time of Chaucer. The " Faerie Queene" 
 is in its day what the " iEneid " was to the Augustan 
 literature. And for this reason we should glance briefly 
 at the poets who filled the interval, not so much to recall 
 them from the tomb where most of them are well buried, 
 as to show the steps to the poetic art which led to the 
 Elizabethan epic. In Chaucer we have the master, to 
 whom we owe the earliest model of a smooth, harmo- 
 nious verse. 
 
 He made the Englishe swete upon his tonge. 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. 9 1 
 
 Yet he was in the best sense a realist ; a Boccaccio in 
 rhyme, who painted English character and English life 
 with a keen, homely strength. In Spenser we have the 
 idealist, with a richer constructive fancy and a higher 
 form of art. The genius of Chaucer created a school, 
 which followed him in the same style of versified story- 
 telling, and the flowing measure he had given them, but 
 with little of his real power. We may unearth a few of 
 these intermediate poets from their sleep in the old 
 English texts. Occleve is one of these imitators, a 
 Chaucer " sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans every 
 thing." His " Lament for Chaucer " is a happy blending 
 of pathos and bathos. 
 
 But wele awaye, so is myn herte wo, 
 
 That the honour of Englishe tounge is deed, 
 
 Of which I was wonte have counseil and rede ! 
 
 O maister dere and fader reverent ! 
 
 My maister Chaucer, fioure of eloquence ; 
 
 O universal fadir in science ! 
 
 Alias ! that thou thyne excellent prudence 
 
 In thy bedde mortel myghtest not bequethe ; 
 
 What eyled Dethe ? Alias ! why wolde he sle the ? 
 
 O Dethe ! that didest not harme singulere 
 
 In slaughtre of hym, but alle this lond it smerteth, 
 
 But natheles yit hastowe no powere 
 
 His name to slee ; his hye vertu asterteth 
 
 Unslayne from the, which aye as lifely herteth 
 
 With bookes of his ornat endityng. 
 
 In Lydgate of Bury, however, we have some veins of 
 poetic beauty, although he lacks the wit and the fresh- 
 ness of Chaucer ; it is a long journey through his " Fall 
 of Troy," and " Thebaid." These old rhymers sat 
 
92 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 down at their work as the Greeks to the siege of Troy 
 town, and gloried in huge historic epics. Yet there are 
 passages of rich description, as well as gathered strength, 
 that recall the best of his master. 
 
 God hath a thousand handes to chastyse j 
 
 A thousand dartes of punicioun, 
 A thousand bowes made in divers wyse, 
 
 A thousand arc-blasts bent in his donjon. 
 
 When Aurora the sylver droppes shene, 
 Her teares, had shedde upon the fresh greene, 
 Complayning aye in weepynge and in sorrowe 
 Her chyldren's dethe in everye somer morowe. 
 
 But the poet who gives us, far more than his English 
 copyists, the national charm of Chaucer, is of Scottish 
 and royal blood. We pass by other Scots of the same 
 time to remember King James I, who wrote the " King's 
 Quhair," a rare gem of art. We find no sweeter bit of 
 landscape painting in early verse than this : 
 
 So thick the beuis and the leves grene 
 Beschadit all the allyes that there were, * 
 And myddis every herbere mycht be sene 
 The scharpe, grene, suete jenepere, 
 Growing so fair with branchis here and there, 
 That, as it seymt to a lyf without, 
 The bewis spred the herbere all about 
 And on the smale, grene twistis sat 
 The lytil suete nyghtingale and song 
 So loud and clere, the ympnis consecrat 
 Of luvis use, now soft, now lowd among, 
 That all the gardynis and the wallis rong 
 Ryght of thaire song. 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. 93 
 
 In hir was youthe, beautee with humble aport, 
 Bountee, richesse and womanly faiture ; 
 In worde, in dede, in schap, in contenance, 
 That nature mycht no more hir childe auance. 
 
 At this point a dearth of poetry begins, and lasts for 
 more than a half century. The civil wars left no time 
 for letters, until, under Henry VII, England gained a little 
 repose. Scotland as before leads the way. We cannot 
 more than name Dunbar, in 1465, a poet of rare power 
 in description and in satire. His " Dance of Deadly 
 Sins" gives an idea of his genius. Gawin Douglas is 
 worth noting, as the first translator of classic verse, yet 
 he wears the stiff plate armor of the time. Barclay's 
 " Ship of Fooles " is a clumsy satire. But the poem we 
 should specially note is Hawe's " Pastime of Pleasure." 
 It is the most amazing pile of allegory, after the same 
 structure as the " Temple of Glas," by Lydgate, of in- 
 finite tediousness, although with touches of fancy. But 
 the interest it has for us here, is that it foreshadows Spen- 
 ser; we read in it the tendency to allegorical writing, 
 found more and more in all these poets, but here pushed 
 to its last excess. Imagine such a time when men could 
 read a poem of forty-three books, where the whole sys- 
 tem of Middle Age education was imaged under the guise 
 of knights and maidens and giants of romance ; where 
 Graund Amoure, the mind in search of Wisdom, goes on 
 his adventures, enters the Tower of Doctrine, is pre- 
 sented to Mistresse Logike, Rhetorike, and Musike, then 
 to Dame Geometrie and Astronomie, talks with them of 
 
94 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. 
 
 their lore, and so proceeds to the town of Chivalry, 
 where he is nursed by Fortitude and Perseverance, and 
 after slaying allegoric monsters, exploring the marvels 
 of the five internal wittes and " supernal bodies," mar- 
 ries la Belle Pucelle, and lives happily till Age and Death 
 arrest him, whereon Remembrance makes his epitaph, 
 and Time, Fame, and Eternitye close up the grand phan- 
 tasmagory of life. 
 
 " Madame," quod I, " forasmuche as there be 
 
 Eight parts of speeche, I would knowe right fayne 
 
 What a nowne substantive is in his degree, 
 
 And wherefore it is called so certayne." 
 
 To whom she answered, right quietly agayne ; 
 
 Saying alwaye, that a nowne substantive 
 
 Might stand without helpe of an adjective. 
 
 In this quaint grotesque poetry we know the mind of 
 the time. Allegory is the early, picturesque form, in 
 which its imagination builds in these " shews of sense " 
 the ideas of science, religion, human history, which it 
 has not yet clearly grasped. All minds were steeped in 
 it, and indeed the historian Leo struck the keynote of 
 the whole Middle Age, when he called it the age of fan- 
 tasy. The divine turned Scripture into allegory ; and 
 the man of science saw occult mysteries in the stars and 
 planets ; the satirist of the church clothed his wit in the 
 shape of the moral virtues and vices ; and the poet gave 
 voice to the common thought. And therefore we may 
 find a real pleasure, as we do in the rich oaken grotesques 
 of the cathedral, in even the cumbrous rhythm, the 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. 95 
 
 " linked sweetness, long drawn out " of these allegorical 
 masters. It was out of material like this that the poet 
 of the " Faerie Queene," was to weave his more perfect 
 creation, and Milton to build his grander epic of Par- 
 adise. 
 
 There is still another period which had its influence 
 on the poetic form of English verse. With the age of 
 Henry VIII the school of Chaucer gave way to the more 
 courtly style made fashionable by Surrey and Wyatt. 
 Of the lesser stars of that day, are Roy, Heywood the Epi- 
 grammatist, and Sir David Lyndsay, a very dull Trouba- 
 dour. More important than all others, from his origi- 
 nality, is the strange laureate, John Skelton. It is to him 
 we owe the macaronic verse. Yet under the doggerel 
 there is not only a wonderful strength of Saxon speech, 
 but a rollicking Rabelaisian satire, which made Skelton 
 the mouth-piece of the people and the scourge of all from 
 Wolsey to the strolling friar. 
 
 My name is Colyn Cloute, It hath in it some pyth. 
 
 I purpose to shake oute 
 
 All my connyng bagge, But Doctour Bullatus, 
 
 Like a clerkely hagge ; Parum litteratus, 
 
 For though my ryme be ragged, As wyse as Waltom's calfe, 
 
 Tattered and iagged, Must preche, a Goddes halfe, 
 
 Rudely rayne beaten, In the pulpyt solempnely ; 
 
 Rusty and moth eaten, More mete in the pillory. 
 
 If ye take well therwith 
 
 In Surrey and Wyatt English poetry received from 
 Italy a new form of graceful expression. We cannot 
 praise them as some critics have done in a day when 
 
9°" < ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 poetry was held to be chiefly an art of nice rhyming. As 
 young, courtly wits, they had travelled abroad, when the 
 fame of Petrarch had created a tribe of sonneteers ; and 
 they reproduced all the cold concetti of the time. Their 
 graceful madrigals became the delight of lords and 
 ladies. Each Petrarch had his Laura; and love sighed in 
 the most witty, frigid, sugar-coated verses. But if they 
 are unreal lovers they are natural harmonists. English 
 poetry had thus far borrowed the rhymed couplet from the 
 Norman-French, with the alternate versification by the in- 
 troduction of middle rhyme, and afterward dividing the 
 line. The Latin monkish poems had supplied Chaucer's he- 
 roic verse and the Alexandrine. Many ballad stanzas, 
 mixed rhymes, and song rhymes had been added. But the 
 Italians in their musical tongue had carried this art much 
 further. Surrey tried his skill in the terza rima of Dante, 
 in the sonnet, and in the ottava rima, which Spenser fol- 
 lowed. 
 
 The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings, 
 
 With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale. 
 The nightingale with feathers new she sings ; 
 
 The turtle to her mate hath told her tale. 
 Summer is come, for every spray now springs ; 
 
 The hart hath hung his old head on the pale ; 
 The buck in brake his winter coat he sings ; 
 
 The fishes flete with new repaired scale ; 
 The adder all her slough away she slings ; 
 
 The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale ; 
 The busy bee her honey now she myngs ; 
 
 Winter is worn that was the flowers bale. 
 And thus I see among these pleasant things 
 Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs ! 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. 97 
 
 Of Beauty. 
 
 Ah, bitter sweet, infecting is the poison, 
 
 Thou farest as fruit, that with the frost is taken, 
 
 To-day redy ripe, to-morrow all beshaken. 
 
 Where beauty so her perfect seed hath sown, 
 
 Of other graces follow needs there must. 
 
 I could rehearse, if that I would, 
 
 The whole effect of Nature's plaint, 
 
 When she had lost the perfect mould, 
 
 The like to whom she could not paint. 
 
 With wringing hands how she did cry, 
 
 And what she said I know it, aye ! 
 
 We are now ready to understand the poetry of Spenser 
 as the ripe fruit of all this growth. Our study here will 
 be chiefly of his great poem. It is the mark of his 
 genius, that his was not the gift of the lighter lyric ; he 
 needed a wide world of fancy to play in, and to dwarf 
 him in small verses would be like putting Michael Angelo 
 to carve figures on an ivory fan. We have the key to 
 the " Faerie Queene " in the mind of the age. It may 
 be doubted if, even in this revival of old English letters, 
 more than the devoted few to-day read through this long 
 poem. We can hardly imagine how it could have been 
 the delight, not only of scholars, but of a court of fine 
 gentlemen and dames in the day of Elizabeth. But if 
 we now recall what we have seen of the allegorical feat- 
 ure of that early literature, we shall at once learn the 
 secret. The age of Elizabeth was the exodus of chivalric 
 romance. The modern world of science, of national law, 
 of commerce, was coming out of the feudal past. Prot- 
 
98 ENGLISH LITERA TURE, 
 
 estant thought had already stript away much of the 
 fantastic beauty of the old religion ; and science had 
 begun to doubt many of the legends of history. Arthur 
 and Launcelot, Charlemagne and Roland, were no longer 
 men of flesh and blood ; nor did any listen to the stories 
 of giant and dragon, with the childlike faith of former 
 men. All had become fancy, yet it was still a delightful 
 fancy. In the country of Cervantes chivalry had grown 
 ridiculous, and poor Don Quixote tilted at windmills. 
 Yet the sentiment of chivalry was not wholly dead ; in 
 the court of Elizabeth it was by no means ridiculous. 
 There still lingered about it somewhat of the old charm 
 of Norman romance; Sidney imaged the grace of the 
 " parfait, gentle knight"; Raleigh was crusader and 
 pilgrim ; and the maiden queen in her fantastic ruff kept 
 up the stately manners with the euphuistic speech of 
 her time. 
 
 Here we have the secret of Spenser's own conception 
 of its fitness to his readers. To us the " Fairie Queene " 
 is a tiresome allegory, because we have outlived all this 
 romantic feeling. But the poet reflected the setting 
 rays, still gorgeous on that horizon of the age of chivalry; 
 and as an earlier race read the metrical romances and be- 
 lieved them, so this read Spenser and dreamed with him. 
 They entered lovingly into the fiction, like the happy 
 Captain Jackson in " Elia," who served his mutton chop 
 as turtle, and his ale as Imperial Tokay. The life of the 
 court was a masquerade, and if we were dressed with 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. 99 
 
 roses on our shoes and marvellous headgear, we should 
 have perhaps the same style of speech that now seems so 
 fulsome. To the reader of Spenser's time that form 
 was not wearisome, its bewildering maze was its charm ; 
 each dame fancied herself the gentle Una, and each 
 cavalier mirrored himself in SirGuyon. It was a wonder- 
 land of romance. Yet another feature of that day gives 
 charm to the allegory. English commerce had already 
 opened a new world ; but it was not as now, when our 
 men of science measure to a hair the height of Cheops; 
 all that lay at a distance was surrounded by the penum- 
 bra of marvel, and the fancy painted a fairy land, where 
 as strange adventures might be met as in the poem. It 
 was thus that Spenser hit the very humor of his age. 
 Nay, it is a curious fact in illustration of this viev/, that 
 much of his poetic dialect is made up of words already- 
 archaic in his own day, which he chose as the rich, quaint 
 setting of his fancies. What were the design and struct- 
 ure of the " Faerie Queene " ? This is a question which 
 has led to the most amusing chaos of opinions. Some 
 censure the want of unity of the plan ; others find in the 
 allegory a fearful monster, as if, in Hazlitt's phrase, " it 
 would bite them." I would sooner read through the 
 whole poem than twenty pages of commentary. There 
 is no mystery in its ground plan. Spenser has told us in 
 his letter to Raleigh all we want. " The general end of 
 all the bookes is to fashion a gentleman or noble person 
 in vertuous and gentle discipline." "I labour to pour- 
 
100 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 traict in Arthure the image of a brave knight, perfected 
 in the twelve Morall Vertues." His design, then, was to 
 have twelve books, each of them giving the adventures 
 of one knight, who personifies a virtue, and all at last 
 united in Arthur, who is Magnificence or Magnanimity, 
 the crown of the twelve. Had he finished the work, the 
 last cantos would have brought them together and un- 
 locked the allegory. Six books and a fragment alone 
 remain. Elfin land is the scene of the story. The queen 
 holds her court, and sends out her knights, each on his 
 special journey. The first gives us the trial of Holiness, 
 in the person of the Red-Cross Knight, who wanders with 
 Una (Truth), and encounters Duessa (Deceit) and Arch- 
 imago (Giant and Paynim). The second is the trial of 
 Temperance, in the hero Sir Guyon. The third presents 
 Chastity; and Britomart, the Northern Athene, battles 
 in steel. The last three paint Friendship, Justice, 
 Courtesy. Each canto is thus a distinct work, but the 
 same characters appear here and there, and Prince 
 Arthur among them all. 
 
 Such is the general plan of the allegory. But a second- 
 ary meaning accompanies it ; and under the guise of 
 these symbolic persons we have certain men and women, 
 and events of his own time. Elizabeth is Gloriana and 
 Belphcebe ; Sidney, Sir Calidore ; Raleigh, Timias ; 
 Duessa, Rome ; and Una, the pure, struggling Church. It 
 is plain enough, that we have in such a poem no exact 
 unity, beyond the moral unity of the original idea. Yet 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. 10 1 
 
 what could we want more? An earlier critic suggests 
 that Spenser has sinned against the unities, and should 
 never have intermingled real and allegorical characters. 
 Another thinks the dress of the poem unsuited to the 
 time, because holiness is not won by the lance, and 
 chaste heroines do not wear plate armor. O rare critics ! 
 most delicate, nice monster! Imagine such an interpreter 
 under the shades of Strasburg minster, shaking his head 
 at the chaos of arches and mingling tracery; for that, 
 too, is an allegory in stone, as the " Faerie Queene " is a 
 minster, rising dream-like, multiform, yet with the unity 
 of one grand thought. It is the charm of the allegory 
 that we lose ourselves in its magic, that its faces and 
 forms cross each other, and we let the story carry us at 
 its will. We do not ask the exact solution of its mys- 
 tery. We are content to wander in Elfin land with 
 Spenser, and only know that wherever we go, we are in 
 the company of the twelve moral virtues. 
 
 Let us now turn to the poem; and although we can 
 gather only a few lumps of gold from this mine, let us so 
 choose them as to learn the character of his genius. We 
 must first glance at the form of his verse, since Spenser, 
 above all our earlier poets, is the master of English 
 rhythm in all its range of harmonious utterance. We have 
 already seen that in the time of Surrey verse was en- 
 riched by several new measures ; and the form which was 
 chosen for the " Faerie Queene" is a yet richer addition. 
 It is a new nine-line stanza with three rhymes, and closed 
 
102 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 by an Alexandrine : there are eight lines of ten syllables 
 each. The interweaving of the rhymes gives a subtle 
 unity to the stanza, and the closing line comes like the 
 gathered crest and slow breaking of a tenth wave along 
 the beach. It seems to my ear a greater triumph for our 
 English verse than Dante's terza rima, because the Ital- 
 ian is so much more flexible ; yet Spenser has made it the 
 " nimble servitor," in Milton's phrase, of his fancy, and so 
 Englished it, that Fletcher, Thomson, and Byron have 
 kept the type. Sometimes, however, there is a lameness 
 of rhyme, and the unwilling word is forced to obey the 
 music. It should be noticed here that Spenser's use of 
 many archaic words not only gives the antique coloring 
 so suited to the poem, but a richer fulness. We meet 
 with many phrases of Anglo-Norman romance, like 
 chevisaiuice, amenaunce, but the body of his speech is old, 
 hearty Saxon. There is not the same homely tongue we 
 find in Chaucer ; sometimes an almost wanton wealth, 
 sometimes an overwrought art of words, as in the many 
 cases of alliteration. Yet even here he followed the 
 very genius of the Saxon, for the first law of its poetry 
 was in this echo of the letters, and his ear is more per- 
 fect than even Milton's for the likeness of sense and 
 sound. 
 
 All sone the wound so wide and wonderous. 
 Fiercely he flew upon the fickle fiend. 
 And bowed his battered visor to his breast. 
 With living blood he those characters wrote, 
 Dredfully dropping from his dying hert. 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. IO3 
 
 We may well say that no English poet has a greater 
 mastery of all that is lofty, sweet, tender, bold, subtle, or 
 weird in his own tongue. The " Faerie Queene " is to- 
 day at once the most wonderful of paintings and of mu- 
 sical compositions ; nor have we a poet who has done so 
 much to ripen the language in this wealth of verse as 
 Spenser did in that early time. 
 
 But we must pass to higher traits than this of versifica- 
 tion. I have already said that the chief difference be- 
 tween him and Chaucer lay in the ideal spirit of his 
 poetry, and as we see that in the allegorical type of his 
 " Faerie Queene " we trace it in all the forms of its ex- 
 pression. The power of Spenser is in his fancy. This is 
 his realm. He is monarch of Elfin land ; we do not tread 
 the earth of England or any other soil, but the world of 
 his creation. It is not, however, that constructive imagi- 
 nation belonging to an epic poet like Milton, that we find 
 in our author. We are indebted to Coleridge for that 
 philosophical view of the distinction between imagination 
 and fancy, which has an illustration in the case before us. 
 In the " Paradise Lost " there is that grand unity of idea 
 which builds all the parts in just subordination to the 
 whole, so that we never lose in the luxuriance of detail 
 the oneness of the poem. There is this in Milton, in 
 spite of his marvellous finished variety of scenes, the 
 effect of an almost statuesque simplicity. 
 
 But with Spenser, as with Tennyson, there is no such 
 epic unity. We have in the " Faerie Queene " or the 
 
104 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ) 
 
 " Idyls of the King," a series of pictures, a world of won- 
 drous fancies, each perfect in its kind, yet in each we 
 rather dwell on the rich imagery, the specific face or 
 landscape, than the higher meaning. Yet if this compel 
 us to give both Spenser and Tennyson a lower rank than 
 that of a few monarchs of epic or dramatic poetry, still 
 we must acknowledge the ideal powers of Spenser. None 
 can surpass him in the endless creative life of invention, 
 the prismatic play, the sudden changes, the blending of 
 this magic of the fancy with all his pictures of nature or 
 human character. We see this ideal tone in all his de- 
 scriptions of natural scenery. Chaucer gives us the photo- 
 graph of each tree, each castle, or fair meadow, so 
 that you know he has taken his sketch as the sunlight 
 does on the metallic plate. With Spenser there is no 
 such plain copying ; his gardens and forest glens are 
 transfigured in a " light that never was on sea or land." 
 You feel that he was not a close observer, but a dreamy 
 lover of nature ; you are not sure what the tree may 
 be ; yet the ideal is after all the more perfect reality, 
 and his fancy has only thrown over the landscape its 
 purple glow, like that which you see, from the Hermit- 
 age, hovering and sleeping over the Bay of Naples. 
 
 We notice in Spenser what we seldom find elsewhere, 
 except in Shelley and Tennyson, — the use of an image 
 taken from the mental world to describe some natural 
 object, rather than the opposite. Nature with him is at 
 best the background of his ideal thought. 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. I05 
 
 Here is a picture of Una. 
 
 One day, nigh wearie of the yrkesome way, 
 
 From her unhastie beast she did alight ; 
 
 And on the grasse her dainty limbs did lay 
 
 In secrete shadow, far from all mens sight : 
 
 From her fayre head her fillet she undight, 
 
 And layd her stole aside. Her angels face, 
 
 As the great eye of heaven, shyned bright, 
 
 And made a sunshine in the shady place ; 
 Did never mortall eye behold such heavenly grace. 
 
 The Bower in the Idle Lake. 
 
 It was a chosen plott of fertile land, 
 
 Emongst wide waves sett, like a litle nest, 
 
 As if it had by Natures cunning hand 
 
 Bene choycely picked out from all the rest, 
 
 And laid forth for ensample of the best : 
 
 No daintie flowre or herbe that growes on grownd, 
 
 No arborett with painted blossomes drest 
 
 And smelling sweete, but there it might be fownd 
 To bud out faire, and throwe her sweete smells al arownd. 
 
 No tree, whose braunches did not bravely spring ; 
 No braunch whereon a fine bird did not sitt ; 
 No bird but did her shrill note sweetely sing ; 
 No song but did containe a lovely ditt. 
 Trees, braunches, birds, and songs were framed fitt 
 For to allure fraile mind to carelesse ease : 
 
 An Enchantress Asleep. 
 
 And her faire eyes, sweet smyling in delight, 
 Moystened their fierie beames, with which she thrild 
 Fraile harts, yet quenched not ; like starry light, 
 Which sparckling on the silent waves, does seeme more brigM. 
 
 The Cave of Mammon. 
 
 Both roofe, and floore, and walls were all of gold, 
 But overgrowne with dust and old decay, 
 
106 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 And hid in darknes, that none could behold 
 The hew thereof ; for vew of cherefull day 
 Did never in that house it selfe display, 
 But a faint shadow of uncertein light : 
 Such as a lamp, whose life does fade away, 
 Or as the Moone, cloathed in cloudy night, 
 Does shew to him that walkes in f eare and sad affright. 
 
 But this ideal tone of Spenser is equally well marked 
 in his portraiture of character. It is through a world 
 more wonderful than that of magic palaces and forests 
 that we wander in the " Faerie Queene," — the world of 
 all the passions, the lusts, the furies, and the graces of 
 human life. All appear, canto on canto, in their beauty 
 or ugliness; and the poet is master of every coloring, 
 from the purity of Una to the arts of Duessa, the bright 
 strength of Guyon to the loathsome form of Mammon or 
 the cave of Despair. It is one pilgrimage we recognize 
 through the " obscure wood," the gardens, and the dens 
 of life ; our own battle with vice that passes before us in 
 these preternatural shapes. There is always this moral 
 power in Spenser. Yet we feel that he has not in his 
 ideal portraiture of virtue and vice the real grasp of hu- 
 man nature. There is nothing in him of that insight 
 which belongs to the great dramatist. Shakespeare sees 
 the heart of man with the same clear eyes as Chaucer saw 
 the face of nature or social life ; and he gives us men, not 
 personified virtues or vices. Othello is not jealousy, but 
 a jealous lover; Macbeth is not remorse, but the human 
 murderer in all the real phases of his guilt. It is here 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. IO7 
 
 that we find the most striking defects in the poetry of 
 Spenser. There is too much of the ethical abstraction 
 of the pulpit, and too little of the real world of flesh and 
 blood. You see it in his tendency to paint exaggerated, 
 colossal forms of angel and fiend. It shows itself in his 
 utter lack of humor. The power of the great dramatist 
 or novelist lies in the quick eye for the tragi-comic in 
 actual life, the one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, 
 the jostling of the crown and the fool's bauble, of wisdom 
 and emptiness, mirth and tears. Don Quixote, the 
 brave, crazy, but high-minded knight, imitating the feats 
 of Amadis de Gaul, with Sancho, a comic type of the 
 age of prose, embodies the soul of humor. Lear, again, 
 does not make us laugh, yet his mad jokes give a strange 
 foil to the fearful and the tender picture of the heart- 
 broken king. But the grave fancy of Spenser can never 
 stoop even to the reality of a jest. Nor is it merely the alle- 
 gory that hampers him. Bunyan is " a fellow of infinite 
 jest/' and the characters in the "Pilgrim's Progress" 
 walk and talk, weep and laugh, are real saints and knaves 
 and hypocrites. But in Spenser, as in Milton, there is a 
 solemnity even in the effort at humor. His Braggadocio 
 is a coward, whom we would kick, but could never laugh 
 at, as at Falstaff ; and at times his description becomes 
 merely nauseous, although " his very nauseousness is 
 sublime." It is the same unreality of his fancy which 
 leads to the mingling of all images, the goddesses of 
 Greece, the elves and witches of Northern birth, Merlin 
 
108 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and the Paynims of the East, Tantalus and Pilate. That 
 was, in part, the anachronism of that chaotic age, and we 
 have a similar confusion in Shakespeare or Ariosto ; but 
 Spenser goes beyond them. The girdle of Florimell is 
 made by Vulcan, and worn already by the goddess of 
 love. Artegall goes to the temple of Venus, and the 
 British hero fights with Mahound. Yet if the poet has 
 annihilated time and place, he has left a romantic chaos. 
 We lose ourselves willingly in his mystery, as in those 
 old pieces of mediaeval tapestry, where there is no begin- 
 ning or ending, but a series of rich surprises, turbaned 
 heads, knights in full armor, court, garden, and huntsmen 
 and ladies, hawk on wrist, in the openings of the forest. 
 He is a plagiarist, and we find in him Virgil, Tasso, Ari- 
 osto, the Morte d' Arthure, all the romance of all time ; 
 but, in the phrase of Dryden, " he invaded authors like a 
 monarch, and what in others is theft, is in him victory." 
 His spoils stand, like the marbles of all heathendom, 
 gathered in Constantine's Santa Sophia, sustaining the 
 noble dome, and dwarfed in the grandeur of the Christian 
 building. 
 
 There is one last thought, with which I would close 
 this sketch of Spenser. It gives us the keynote of his 
 power. We have seen that the " Faerie Queene " was 
 only half of the work he designed ; yet, if a fragment, it 
 has fulfilled that moral design, which he sought from first 
 to last, to give the perfect portraiture of a Christian chiv- 
 alry. This is its highest charm. It is the ideal of all the 
 
THE AGE OF SPENSER. IO9 
 
 virtues, of faith, purity, honor, country, manhood. 
 There is no poet who has left a more stainless page, who 
 has been truer to his Christian ideal. If we seek the 
 fairest pictures of manly nobleness or womanly love, of 
 strength or grace, of brotherly friendship, of human ten- 
 derness or divine holiness, we may turn everywhere to 
 his writings. 
 
 And here, then, we find the abiding power of Spenser. 
 We may not have the taste for his long allegory that the 
 readers of the court of Elizabeth had ; we may search 
 vainly for the unities of person and scene, but this moral 
 unity is the best key. If the inspiration of his poetry 
 be caught, each random dip into his pages will discover 
 some new beauty. 
 
 For all that pleasing is to living ease, 
 
 Is there consorted in one harmonie ; 
 
 Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree. 
 
 The age of chivalry is never gone while we love the 
 poetry of Spenser. The stiff costume of the past, the 
 euphuism of the court, the quaint ceremony are faded ; 
 but so long as the soul of chivalry remain even in our 
 age of prose, and a Christian faith remain, the " Faerie 
 Queene " will live in our literature. And we can close 
 with no more fitting words than those written of it by an 
 American critic, that "he who at forty reads it again 
 with the same pleasure as at twenty, is very sure to be a 
 wise and happy man." 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 
 
 It is not only as a curious study for the lovers of old 
 English book lore, that we take up the beginnings of the 
 drama in the age before the great master of the art, but 
 because we cannot understand the genius of Shakespeare 
 himself, unless we examine the soil in which it was 
 nursed, and the ruder steps of its growth. 
 
 " The drama, beyond all other forms of literature, is the 
 fruit of a high degree of social culture. Early literature 
 is epic or lyric, because it has more simplicity of thought 
 and life. It is when it has reached its more complex 
 development, the dramatic richness where ' all the 
 world 's a stage,' that it is capable of the manifold play 
 of thought, feeling, action, scene, which reappear in the 
 mimic life of a Lear or a Wallenstein. We are not 
 therefore to look on this art as if it rose at once to its 
 highest stature in Shakespeare. We confess his un- 
 shared genius. The ' Interlude of the Marriage of Wit 
 and Wisdome,' * a primitive composition ' as Halliwell 
 calls it, yet a good average play, had not been written 
 twenty years when Shakespeare published several of his 
 works. But it is still true that even Shakespeare was 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 1 1 1 
 
 only the outcome of all that England had been and 
 was. Hazlitt well said that ' he overlooks and com- 
 mands the admiration of posterity, but he does it from 
 the table-land of the age in which he lived.' And not 
 only should we in this view study, as Hazlitt studied in 
 his brilliant sketch, the contemporary dramatists of the 
 Elizabethan time, but for the most faithful portrait of 
 the mind, the manners, the tragi-comic elements of the 
 English Middle Age, out of which the ripe drama came, 
 we must go back to the yet earlier play. 
 
 " The drama in England sprang directly out of the 
 religious pageants of the Middle Age, the 'mysteries 
 and miracle plays/ which were in use over all Europe. 
 One of the strangest chapters of literary history is here 
 opened to us. It is the fact that both the classic and 
 the romantic drama were the offspring of religion. 
 
 ^Eschylus stands at the point where the popular shows 
 held at the Grecian festivals and drawn out of the my- 
 thology passed into classic form in the ' Prometheus.' 
 We have a like growth in the Middle Age, that fantastic 
 childhood of Europe, where, under the surface of a 
 Catholic faith, were seething all the elements of thought 
 and half-formed social character. There had risen in the 
 Church a mythology as rich and strange as the heathen 
 Pantheon. It had been long the custom on the great 
 holy days, especially Easter and Whitsuntide, to repre- 
 sent dramatically the scenes of history, Scripture, and 
 the legends of saints ; nor, although some local councils 
 
1 1 2 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, 
 
 had stopped the representations, and a few stern censors 
 like William of Wadington had said that they were 
 
 1 more for the honour of the Devil than God,' could 
 they be suppressed. They were a sort of pictorial Bible, 
 in which the child-mind of the people loved to read its 
 religion. The earliest of these plays, now found, are 
 French, and of the twelfth century ; but by the next 
 century they became common over Europe. At first 
 they were acted in churches by bands of monks; but 
 soon on stages in the open air, where the huge crowd 
 could gather, and where there was room for the heavenly 
 and infernal persona, who played so large a part in these 
 pieces, to rise and fall by the trap-doors. By and by these 
 plays passed into the charge of the guilds or ' trades- 
 unions/ of the Middle Age ; and without doubt some 
 of the hard hits at ' Bysshape Cayaphas,' and popes 
 in limbo, came from the growing scepticism of the 
 
 ' lewed folk ' in charge of the laic stage. In the 
 Chester plays each new scene is called by the name of 
 a guild : the three kings, the Mercers' play, the Passion, 
 the Flechers', Bowyers', Coopers', and Stringers' play. 
 
 "There are two classes: the 'mystery,' or dramatic 
 paraphrase of the Old and New Testaments ; and the 
 
 1 miracle play,' taken from the legends of the saints. In 
 England, however, the mystery seems to have been some- 
 times called a miracle play. Some of the English are 
 borrowed from the French. Germany had rich treasures ; 
 their last relic still survives in the famous Ober-Ammergau 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 113 
 
 spectacle. In Spain this infant drama had the most hon- 
 orable fate ; probably because no Protestant Reformation 
 changed the popular taste ; but it ripened into the auto 
 sacramentale, and the genius of Calderon raised it to the 
 rank of Christian art. The mystery was suppressed at 
 Madrid by the royal order no earlier than 1856. \ 
 
 " But it is with the relics of the religious play in England 
 that we have here to do. There are no richer remains to 
 be found than those of the Towneley, Chester, and Cov- 
 entry collections ; and any who have visited these old 
 towns, still wearing such quaint traces of that very age, 
 can readily call up the scenes of the drama. 
 
 " The Coventry mysteries were the property of the fa- 
 mous Grey Friars, and were shown at Corpus Christi. ' Be- 
 fore the suppression of the monasteries,' says Dugdale, 
 1 this city was very famous for its pageants. The thea- 
 tres were large and high : and being placed on wheels, 
 were drawn to all the eminent places, for the better ad- 
 vantage of the spectators.' In many old writers we find 
 allusions to them. In Chaucer's time they were not out 
 of date, as appears, in his etching of Absalom." 
 
 Sometime to shew his lightnesse and maistrie, 
 He plaieth Herode on a scaffolde hie. 
 
 In 1456 Queen Margaret was at Coventry, when she 
 saw " alle the pagentes pleyde save domesdaye, which 
 mighte not be pleyde for lak of day." Even as late as 
 1575, " certain good-harted men of Coventree" had the 
 
1 14 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 honor of performing before Queen Elizabeth in the cele- 
 brated entertainment at Kenilworth, and "gained con- 
 siderable applause." And Heywood alludes to the devil 
 as a famous character in the old Coventry mysteries — 
 
 For as good happe wolde have it chaunce, 
 Thys devyll and I were of olde acqueyntaunce, 
 For oft, in the play of Corpus Christi, 
 He hath played the devyll at Coventry. 
 
 The costumes were in part conventional. Divine and 
 saintly characters were distinguished by gilt hair and 
 beards. The demons wore hideous heads ; the souls, ac- 
 cording to their kind, black and white coats ; and the an- 
 gels shone in gold skins and wings. Herod was clad as a 
 Saracen. Masks were also used, at least in the thirteenth 
 and fourteenth centuries, so that the whole performance 
 must have borne considerable analogy to the rude Greek 
 comedy in the days of Thespis. The extracts from old 
 parish and town registers relating to these plays, show us 
 what care was taken to give to such performances as 
 much stage effect as possible. The stage was placed on 
 a cart, and there were different partitions to represent 
 heaven, earth, and hell. Very intricate machinery must 
 have been used to produce different effects. We read of 
 charges for coal to keep up hell fire, and that on one 
 occasion hell itself took fire and was nearly burned down. 
 In the book of accounts we find among the articles of ex- 
 penditure : " Item, payd for mendyng hell mought, 
 wdy "Item, payd for kepyng of fyer at hell mothe, 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 1 1 5 
 
 l\d." ; and, " payd for settyng the world on fyer, 5^." 
 Certainly a cheap bargain compared with our modern 
 way of doing it. 
 
 There was a chorus by way of prologue, in which sev- 
 eral personages entered with banners, styled in the Cov- 
 entry plays, Vexillator primus, secundus, etc., who sang by 
 turns a description of the coming scenes. The play was 
 in rhyme, sometimes, as in the Chester text, the eight- 
 syllabled stanza, sometimes the long heroic, or the riding 
 rhyme, a rough measure, yet with a Saxon strength and 
 the alliteration belonging to the Saxon poetry. 
 
 Nowe, gracious God, grounded of all goodnesse, 
 
 As thy grete glorie no begynninge hadde, 
 Succoure and save alle the, that syth and sese, 
 
 And lysteneth oure talke, with sylence stille and sadde. 
 
 We may now read a few extracts from these plays. 
 There is the broadest range of subjects, from the crea- 
 tion to the judgment day, and the strangest blending of 
 devout faith, not seldom of poetic beauty, with the most 
 irreverent humor. Let us begin with a Coventry mystery 
 of the Creation. 
 
 The introduction is quite striking, borrowed, doubtless, 
 from the prologue of the Book of Job. 
 
 The Almighty comes on the stage in person. 
 
 Ego sum Alpha et Omega, principium et finis. 
 
 My name is knowyn, Gode and Kynge, 
 
 My werk for to make now wyl I wende, 
 In myselfe resteth my reynenge 
 
 It hath no gynning ne non ende. 
 
Il6 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 I am the trewe trenete, 
 
 Here walking in this wone 
 Thre personys myself I se, 
 
 Lokyn in me God alone. 
 
 Now wole I beggyne my werke to make 
 
 Ffyrst I make hevyn with sterres of lyth, 
 In myrth and joy evermore to wake, 
 
 In hevyn I bylde aungelle fful bryth, 
 My servaunts to be and for my sake, 
 
 With myrth and melodie wourshipe my myth. 
 
 Hie cantant angeli in cceli, " Tibi omnes angeli," etc. 
 
 Now Lucifer enters and interrupts the song. 
 
 To whos wourshipe synge ye this song? 
 
 To wourshipe God or reverence me ? 
 But ye me wourshipe ye do me wrong, 
 
 For I am the wurthyest that evyr may be. 
 
 Then comes a general dialogue between the good and 
 bad angels, ending with the condemnation of Lucifer; 
 and afterward God makes, in order, the world and its 
 creatures. 
 
 One of the most fantastic of these plays is that of 
 " Noah's Floode." It seems to have been a favorite with 
 the people, as it is alluded to in Chaucer, and the portrait 
 of Madame Noah recognized as a good likeness of the 
 wife of that day. 
 
 " Hast thou not herd how saved was Noe, 
 Whan that our Lord had warned him beforne, 
 That al the world with water shuld be lorne?" 
 " Yes," quod this carpenter, " ful yore ago." 
 " Hast thou not herd/' quod Nicholas, " also 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 1 17 
 
 The sorwe of Noewith his felawship, 
 Or that he mighte get his wif to ship ? 
 Him had be lever, I dare wel undertake, 
 At thilke time, than all his wethers blake, 
 That she had had a ship hire selfe alone." 
 
 "I shall * wale a portion with judicious care ' lest I may 
 seem irreverent, but we must not forget that without 
 such oddities we can never understand the mind of the 
 Middle Age. 
 
 " God appears and announces the flood. 
 
 I, God, that all this worlde hath wroughte 
 Heaven and earith and all of naughte, 
 I see my people in deede and thoughte 
 Are sette fowle in synne. 
 My ghoste shalle not linge in mone. 
 
 " Noah now gives orders to enter the ark. All his sons 
 with their wives answer in pleasant verse : one brings an 
 axe, another the pitch. Noah's wife alone refuses to go, 
 and he gives some very cynic criticism on the sex. 
 
 Lorde ! that women be crabbed aye, 
 And none are meke, I dare well say, 
 That is well seen by me to-daye. 
 
 " Now follows a catalogue of all the animals, sung by 
 the family: when Noah renews his entreaty: 
 
 Wiffe, come in ! why standes thou their ? 
 Thou art ever forwarde, I dare well sueare. 
 
 She. 
 
 Yes, sir ! sette up youer saile, 
 And row forth with eviil haille ; 
 
I 1 8 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 I will not oute of this towne ; 
 
 But I have my gossipes everyechone 
 
 They shall not drowne, by St. Johne ! 
 
 He. 
 
 Come in, wiffe, in twentye devilles waye 
 Or elles stand their all daye ! 
 
 Cam. 
 Shall we all feche her in ? 
 
 Noah.- 
 
 Yes, Sonnes ! in Christes blessynge and myne ! 
 I would you hied you be tyme, 
 For of this flude I am in doubte. 
 
 The Good Gossipes Song. 
 
 The flude comes flittynge in full faste ; 
 
 On every syde that spreades full farre 
 For feare of drowning I am agaste, 
 
 Good gossippes, let us drawe nere. 
 There is a pottill of Malmsine good and stronge, 
 
 It will rejoyce both harte and tonge, 
 Tho' Noye thinke us never so longe 
 
 Heare we will drink alike. 
 
 " At last Madame Noah is pulled in by all the sons, the 
 windows are shut, and the deluge rises/' Such comedy as 
 this may seem almost unintelligible to us in a time of re- 
 ligious belief. But in the first place, it is a mistake to 
 think that those were times of great reverence. The re- 
 ligion of the Church, while it kept its doctrinal and mys- 
 tical side for the lettered, had, in accommodating its wor- 
 ship to the vulgar, vulgarized its own character. There 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 1 19 
 
 was no such feeling of delicacy in handling these subjects 
 as with us. " We must remember, too, that much of the 
 absurd in all this came from the ignorance of Bible lands 
 and history and language It did not make men laugh 
 to see Queen Esther clad in a huge hoop, or Abraham in 
 a peaked beard and slashed doublet. All persons and 
 places are jumbled together without any sense of the 
 anachronism. Noah swears by St. John, and Herod by 
 Mahound, Balaam's ass holds a scholastic argument with 
 the prophet, and the rabbis in the temple talk church 
 Latin. Yet amidst so much that is grotesque, there are 
 passages of deep religious pathos, and even poetic beauty. 
 In the ' Sacrifice of Isaac ' there is a rude yet tender 
 dialogue between the son and the father." 
 
 " Father, tell me of this case, 
 
 Why you your sworde drawne have ? " 
 
 " Izaak, sone, pease, I thee praie, 
 
 Thou breakes my harte in twaie." 
 
 " Would God my mother were here with me I 
 
 She would knele downe upon her kne, 
 
 Prayinge you, father, if yt maye be 
 
 For to save my liffe." 
 
 44 O ! coroely creatur, but I the kille, 
 
 I grieve my God, and that ful ylle, 
 
 I may not worke against his wille," 
 
 44 Marye, father, God forbydde, 
 
 But you doe your offerynge ! 
 
 Gif you must doe Godes byddynge, 
 
 Father, tell my mother for no thynge." 
 
 44 My deare sonne Izaak, speke no more, 
 
 Thy wordes make my harte full sore." 
 
 " Father, I pray you hyde my eyne, 
 
 That I see not the sworde so keyne, 
 
 Youre stroke, father, I woulde not se, 
 
 Leste I against yt grille." 
 
120 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 We have in the scenes from the New Testament the 
 same blending of the devout with the grotesque. The An- 
 nunciation, the Nativity, the Temptation, the Raising of 
 Lazarus and the Crucifixion are dramatized. . The fine 
 legend of the three kings is a favorite theme. Perhaps 
 the scene on the hills of Bethlehem is as good an in- 
 stance as any of the strange mixture of ideal and real. 
 " The shepherds in this ' Bedlem mystery ' are not Arcad- 
 ian minstrels, but talk the coarse dialect of English 
 peasants. 
 
 Heavy ale of Hatton I have, 
 
 And whotte meats have I to my hier ; 
 A puddinge may no man deprave, 
 
 And a jannacke of Lancaster shire. 
 Loe ! heares a sheepes heade sawsed in ale, 
 
 And a grayne to laye on the greene, 
 And sower mylke my wife hade ordened, 
 
 A noble supper as well is seene. 
 
 " Now follows the angels' song; the shepherds listen in 
 wonder, and then walk to the manger. All adore the 
 child, and as they go homeward lift up a new chant of 
 praise. 
 
 Brethren, let us all three 
 
 Singinge walk whomwardes ; 
 Unkinde will I in no case be, 
 
 But preache ever that I can and crye, 
 As Gabryll taught by his grace me, 
 
 Singinge away hense will I. 
 
 "In the 'Crucifixion,' a Coventry mystery, there is a 
 very touching prayer of Mary at the cross: 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 121 
 
 O my sone ! my sone ! my derlyng dere \ 
 
 What have I defended the ? 
 Thou hast spoken to alle tho that ben here 
 
 And not a word thou spekyst to me ! 
 
 To the Jewes thou art ful kende. 
 
 Thou hast forgeve al here mysdede ; 
 And the thef thou hast in mende, 
 
 For onys haskyng mercy hefne is his mede. 
 
 A ! my sovereyn Lord, why whylt thou not speke, 
 To me that am thi modyr in peyn for thi wrong? 
 
 A ! hert ! hert ! why whylt thou not breke ? 
 That I were out of this sorwe so stronge ! 
 
 Jesus 
 
 A ! woman, woman, behold ther thi sone ! 
 And thou Jon take her for thi modyr ! 
 
 " One of the most striking pictures of the religious creed 
 is the ' Harrowing of Hell.' The universal faith of that 
 day was in the descent of Christ to free the worthies of 
 the old dispensation. In the Chester play, Adam ap- 
 pears, beholding a light, which, by the stage notice, is in- 
 troduced in a ' cunning machine.' 
 
 O Lorde and soveraigne Savyour, 
 Our comforte and our counsceloure, 
 Of this lighte thou art auctour, 
 Me thou madeste, Lorde, of claye, 
 And gave me Parradice in to plaie, 
 But through my synne, the south to saie, 
 Deprived was I therfroo. 
 
 " Now enter Esayas, Simeon, Seith, David, all praising 
 God. Presently Satan comes, seated in Cathedra, and the 
 demons cry out : 
 
122 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Sir Sathanas, what man is he 
 
 That shoulde thee prive of thy postie ? 
 
 " Jesus now enters, with a huge noise sounding through 
 the underworld. 
 
 Open up hell gates anon, 
 You princes of pyne everye eichone, 
 That Godes sonne maie in gone, 
 And the kinge of blisse. 
 
 " After a quarrel Michael leads out the patriarchs and 
 the pardoned thief, leaving Sathanas lamenting. 
 
 Out alas ! nowe goes awaie 
 All my prisoneres and my praie. 
 
 "The * Anti-Christ and Domesdaye' throw much light 
 on the fantastic religion of the time. Anti-Christ appears 
 sitting on a throne, writing chapters from prophecy to 
 confirm his Messiahship. The kings come before him ; he 
 does miracles, descends to the grave, and rises again ; and 
 then having received homage, distributes the kingdoms 
 of the earth. 
 
 I am vereye God of mighte, 
 Sonne and mone, daie and nighte, 
 To blesse I maie you bringe ; 
 And the giftes that I beheighte, 
 You shall have as is good righte: 
 To thee I geve Lombardye, 
 And to thee Denmarke & Hongarye, 
 And take thou Ponthous and Italye, 
 And Rome yt shalbe thyne. 
 
 "Next Enoch and Elias enter, and confront Anti-Christ. 
 They demand his proofs ; two dead men rise, and are 
 
 J 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 1 23 
 
 convicted of being counterfeits. Anti-Christ kills the 
 two prophets ; at last Michael comes, and two demons 
 bear off the pretender. 
 
 " But the wildest of all is the ' Domesdaye ' in the Ches- 
 ter plays. God summons his angels, and gives them 
 trumpets. The dead rise ; first come a pardoned pope, 
 an emperor, and a queen ; after them a condemned pope, 
 an emperor, a jurist, and a merchant, bewailing their fate. 
 Christ appears in clouds, angels around him with his 
 cross, thorny crown, spear and nails. 
 
 " The pope's lament recalls Dante. 
 
 Now bootless is to aske mercye, 
 
 For livinge higheste in eairth was I, 
 
 And cuninge chosen in cleargye, 
 
 Also silver and symoneye 
 
 Made me pope unworthye, 
 
 That bornes me nowe full witterlye, 
 
 For of blesse I am full bare. 
 
 Alas ! why spende I wronge my witte, 
 
 Harde and hotte nowe feele I it, 
 
 Of sorowe must I never be shutte, 
 
 Nowe helpes no praier. 
 
 " Some may think such rude work unworthy a place in 
 literary annals. Yet if we are studying the growth of 
 the literary mind, these pieces are of great interest in 
 giving us the elements of the more polished poetry of 
 later days, as a naturalist finds the diamond sleeping in 
 the carbon. We have seen in these rough mysteries 
 some features of imagination and tender feeling: beyond 
 this there is one characteristic which shows us the very 
 
124 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 origin of the English drama. Tragi-comedy (although 
 the artificial rules of former days called it barbarous) is, 
 in the plays of Shakespeare, the noblest type of dramatic 
 expression ; because it makes the stage a complete pict- 
 ure of human life. In its representation of grandeur 
 and littleness, the noble passions and the base smiles and 
 tears, the king and the king's jester, it is capable of dis- 
 playing the largest range of character. Sophocles could 
 not have written a play like Lear ; for the modern world 
 is more varied than his in its complex range of action, 
 its lights and shades, its contrasts of social humanity. 
 
 Now, it is this tragi-comic feature which is stamped on 
 the early religious drama. It grew out of the very life 
 of the Middle Age. We can only understand it by sup- 
 posing that under the grave surface of the ecclesiastical 
 life all the new ideas, the latent doubt, the smothered 
 freedom, the social fancy, found their only vent in bub- 
 bling out through these humors of art. The strange 
 mingling of the grotesque with the most sacred of things 
 cannot be overlooked. You see in the cathedral, amidst 
 the carved saints, a grinning head, or, as in the porch at 
 Rheims, a new-risen body with its head in its hand, or 
 the dwarfs squatting on the columns of the side chapel 
 at Lincoln, or the apes staring from the Antwerp pulpit. 
 There is the same grim humor in the frescoes of Orcagna 
 in the Campo Santo, in the ' Dance of Death,' and in a 
 hundred forms of painting and poetry. 
 
 In like way the tragi-comedy of England grew, in its 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 1 25 
 
 time, from these mysteries ; and as the great dramatic 
 age flowered so soon after in the reign of Elizabeth, 
 Shakespeare cast his work in this vital form. This carica- 
 ture of Scripture, this odd jumble of angel and fiend, 
 Herod and the shepherds, Noah and Noah's roystering 
 wife, is the crude germ of that tragi-comic genius which 
 could draw Prospero and Caliban, Othello and Bottom. 
 
 "But there is another aspect from which those quaint 
 relics deserve our thought. It is natural enough, that 
 one modern Prynnes should turn away with devout dis- 
 gust from such gross superstition. But we must not 
 forget that we are to judge those strange products by the 
 canons of time and place. Tyrwhitt, in a thoughtful 
 essay on Ober-Ammergau and the Symbolic Christianity, 1 
 compares the Passion play with the mosaics of Ravenna. 
 In a day when there was no Bible society, the rich 
 Byzantine pictures and the ' mysteries ' were the illu- 
 minated Bible of the people, and although mixed with 
 legend and gross in expression, we cannot doubt their 
 good intent in spite of all their irreverence. It is pre- 
 cisely here that we learn their worth to us as a most 
 faithful portrait of the past. We shall certainly find no 
 better antidote to the still worse superstitions of our 
 mole-eyed churchmen, who sigh after those * ages of 
 faith.' We cannot even reproduce the art or poetry. 
 Our scholars, like Longfellow, who tried in his ' Divine 
 Tragedy ' to restore an ideal . copy of the ' mystery,' 
 
 1 Contemporary Review, 1871. 
 
126 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 can only produce a curious grotesque. The Passion play 
 at Ober-Ammergau,has been so toned down in the hands 
 of managers at Munich, that it is no more than a tame, 
 over-refined phantom of the original. If we would know 
 what the Christian mythology was that swayed the mind 
 of the Middle Age, we shall read it far better in this litera- 
 ture of the people, than in the octavos of Latin Chris- 
 tianity, and better yet than in the ideal treatises of 
 Roman and Anglo-Catholic divines. In this fantastic 
 world crowding the stage of Coventry, in Herod and his 
 knights, Bishop Cayaphas, the doctor and the begging 
 friar, we study the wrinkles and gray hair of that decay- 
 ing time. The old faith in priestly power and pagan 
 fancies, and the new thought, the half-whispered doubt, 
 are seething together in the brain of the people ; and we 
 perceive the need of a Reformation which gave them 
 instead of a dramatic legend the English Bible and the 
 truth of Christ. 
 
 " From this point we can pass clearly to the next step 
 in the development of the drama. It has the same strik- 
 ing interest as directly linked it with social history. The 
 old pageants died out with the growth of the Reforma- 
 tion ; and although here and there traces of them linger, 
 after Elizabeth they are hardly heard of. But in place 
 of the Scriptural or saintly legend, appears the quaintest 
 type of the allegorical play, called the " Morality." Its 
 earliest examples date from the eve of the Reformation ; 
 and it must have been a favorite with the court in the 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. \2J 
 
 day of Sir Thomas More. It was still a fashion among 
 the people in the time of James, although supplanted 
 among the gentle by the nobler poetry. The ' Morality ' 
 was a satirical comedy. All the virtues and vices : wis- 
 om, truthfulness, temperance, folly, hypocrisy, wanton- 
 ness, strut on the stage and mouth their dark sayings. 
 
 " It is a curious question, how such plays grew out of 
 the social state of that time. We have seen that the mys- 
 tery and miracle play naturally faded away, when the 
 gross mythology of the Church lost its hold on the peo- 
 ple. When the Bible of Wyclif and Tyndale was read in 
 cottage as well as hall, there was left no taste for such 
 caricature. There followed a time of stern criticism, and 
 the stage took its part as the vehicle of the popular 
 satire. The growing dislike of prelate and monk vented 
 itself in the keenest humor. But the stage was not yet 
 capable of real comedy ; the form of allegory or fable 
 was just fitted to the intellectual fancy of the crowd. 
 We might compare an English audience of that time 
 with the Greek, who laughed at seeing the wisdom of 
 even a Socrates turned into fun, or the frogs croaking 
 their satire at the bidding of their comedian. But the 
 likeness is closer between the literature of the time and 
 this grotesque ' Morality.' We have seen in our study 
 of Spenser, what a common feature the allegory was of 
 all writing. But it was specially as the form of religious 
 or social satire it was then chosen. The Reformation 
 was in its earlier stage ; it had enlisted most of the sharp 
 
1 2 8 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 wit as well as the religious fervor ; but a too open attack 
 was still dangerous in a day when the satirist's ears might 
 be nailed up for a fling at archbishop or noble, and there- 
 fore the stern Protestant humor, most dangerous in its 
 jesting mood, revelled in the allegory. The satirist chose 
 this form as his mask ; and more than all, the stage in its 
 ' Moralities ' became the foremost teacher. It drew the 
 personages of the day as a school-boy draws Master 
 Birch on his slate, but in dread of the rod forbears to 
 write the name, and only chalks some portentous figure 
 with huge spectacles and stiff cravat ; so the actor ap- 
 peared as Pride with * an unbridled stomach,' and the 
 larger school-boy knew it meant Wolsey ; he put bigotry 
 in a friar's gown, and Gospell Libertee in a plain plough- 
 man's smock, and the sermon was as telling as one of 
 Latimer's at Paul's Cross." 
 
 We have from the literary scraps of the time the 
 names of several of the favorite plays, as the " Four Ps," 
 " Dives and Lazarus," " Hit Nail o' th' Head," " Lusty 
 Juventus," " The Marriage of Wit and Wisdome." The 
 following specimen of the style is from the last-named 
 play. Its full title is : " The contract of a manage be- 
 tweene wit and wisdome, very frutefull and mixed full 
 of pleasant mirth as well for the beholders as the hearers 
 and readers." The characters are Idleness, Wantonness, 
 Fancy, Dolle, Severity, Irksomeness, Snatch, Honest 
 Recreation, Indulgence, Wisdome, Mother Bee, Witt, 
 Search, Inquisition, Good Nurture, Catch, Lob. Its 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 1 29 
 
 date is 1579. Severity and Indulgence appear, and 
 talk of marrying their son Wit to Wisdome. Wit goes 
 in search of her, but on his way meets with Idleness, 
 who calls himself Honest Recreation, and after falling 
 into many hard adventures with Wantonness and other 
 vices, is at last rescued. The play is in a rambling rhyme, | 
 sometimes doggerel, but with much comic effect. Idle- 
 ness, the vice or buffoon introduces himself : 
 
 A, sirra, my masters ! 
 
 How fare you at' this blessed day ? 
 
 What, I wen, all this company 
 
 Are come to see a play. 
 
 What lackest the, good fellow, 
 
 Didst the nere se man before ? 
 
 Here is gasing ! I 'm the best man in the company, 
 
 "Where there is no more. 
 
 My name is Idlenes, the flower 
 
 Of the frying-pan ! 
 
 I am always troubled with the litherlurden, 
 
 I love so to linger ; 
 
 I am so lasy, the mosse groweth an 
 
 Inch thick on the top of my finger ! 
 
 In his disguise as a French doctor and as a priest there 
 are good touches of English humor. 
 
 Ah ! by Got, me be the Doctor, 
 Me have the excellent medicine 
 For the blaines and blister. 
 Ah ! me am the knave 
 To give the fair maid the glister ! 
 
 The clergy of that day are well touched in this 
 verse : 
 
I30 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 I am of that condition 
 That I cane turne unto all 
 Coullers like the commillion,- 
 Although some doe refuse me, 
 And some leden-heeled 
 Lubber will not refraine me, 
 And when men hath done with me, 
 Women will retaine me ! 
 
 It may seem a crude time, when scholars like Sir 
 Thomas More could be amused with comedy like this. 
 But after all, there was more robust sense and reality of 
 character with all the long-spun allegory than in much of 
 the pointless farce of later days ; and spite of its coarse- 
 ness, its morality was always noble, by the side of the 
 best in the unclean comedy of the Caroline time. One 
 more example will show us the transition from the 
 " Morality " to the historic play. It is the " Kynge 
 Johan " of Bishop Bale, written about 1540. Bale was a 
 strong Protestant, and to defend the Reformation he put 
 the popular story of King John into drama. The play 
 has no poetic merit at all, although here and there are 
 passages of strong satire ; but in it there are mingled 
 the real characters of that past age : John, Pope Innocent, 
 Pandulphus, Stephen Langton, and the allegorical per- 
 sons, Sedition, the Vice, a jester, nobility, clergy, Civil 
 Order, Treason, England as a widow, and Imperial Maj- 
 esty. There is no unity of place or time ; the pope ap- 
 pears in person in a scene on English ground, and seven 
 years elapse between the papal interdict in the earlier 
 part of the play and the submission of John. The king 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 13 I 
 
 comes forward in the opening scene as the most virtuous 
 of monarchs, who designs 
 
 By practyse and by stodye 
 To reforme the lawes and sett men in good order, 
 That trew justice may be had in every border. 
 
 Widow England then presents her cause against the 
 clergy : 
 
 For they are the trees that God dyd never plant, 
 
 And as Christ dothe saye, blynd leaders of the blynd, 
 
 Suche lubbers as hathe dysgysed heads in their hoodes, 
 
 Which in ydelnes do lyve by other menns goodes, 
 
 Monks, chanons, and nones in dyvers coloure and shappe, 
 
 Both whyght, blacke, and pyed, God send their increase yll happe. 
 
 Sedycyon enters, and claims the right of the Church 
 over nobility and clergy. 
 
 King Johan. 
 Why giveth he no credence to Christes holy gospell? 
 
 Sedycyon. 
 
 No, ser, by the messe, but he calleth them heretickes, 
 
 That preche the Gospell, and sedyycyous scysmatyckes, 
 
 He tache them, vex them, from prison to prison he turne them, 
 
 Heindygeth them, juge them, and in conclusyon he burne them. 
 
 Sedycyon goes out presently to dress for Syvyll 
 Order. 
 
 Nobility, clergy, and Syvyll Order have a long quarrel 
 with the king, which seems to end in submission to him ; 
 but Dissymulation enters syngyng of the litany, and lays 
 
I3 2 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 a plot with Private Wealth and Usurped Power. At last 
 it is agreed to excommunicate John. The Pope appears 
 with Langton and Pandulphus, and proclaims : 
 
 For as much as Kyng Johan doth Holy Church so handle, 
 Here do I curse hym, wyth crosse, boke, bell, and candle. 
 
 The Primus Actus closes with a speech by the Inter- 
 pretour, a dignified and dull epilogue. The Second Part 
 gives us, in the same style, the submission of John, his 
 supposed death by poison, the death of Sedycyon the 
 poisoner, and the restoration of the kingdom by Imperial 
 Majesty, who pronounces the true doctrine of royal su- 
 premacy against all " Anticristes whelpes," the Papistes, 
 and Anabaptistes " with their subtle allegoryes." 
 
 " We can understand clearly, in this transition form of 
 the early drama, how the historic and the ideal play of 
 the Shakespearian time arose. It was out of the 
 1 Morality,' as artistic culture increased, that a real 
 tragedy and comedy were to come. The shadowy virt- 
 ues and vices vanished, and in their stead an Edward 
 Second walked in the sounding lines of Marlowe ; yet as 
 we saw in the ' mystery ' the germ of the tragi-comedy, 
 so here we see the moral power, the grave humor, the 
 insight into character, the English robustness that make 
 the later drama a home-born product. It is curious to 
 find traces of this rude play even in Shakespeare, who 
 gives the comic ghost of the old Vice, a jester with his 
 long coat and dagger of lath." 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 1 33 
 
 We are here, at last, on the border line of the Eliza- 
 bethan drama. It is but a few years to the birth of its 
 great master. We need not pause at the names that 
 complete this period. Our purpose has been fulfilled if 
 we have seen these steps of the historic growth. The fame 
 of " Gammer Gurton's Needle," and " Ralph Royster Doy- 
 ster," which is still older (1 5 5 1), are not worth quoting, save 
 as a transition to more regular comedy. John Heywood, 
 the king's jester, in his " Four Ps," has left some biting 
 satire, which gives us an idea of the popular fun over the 
 superstitions of the time. The earliest regular tragedy 
 yet found is the Gorboduc of Sackville. It is, however, 
 a stiff, academic piece, made by classic rule, with nothing 
 either of English freedom or early extravagance to give 
 it a place in the drama which foreshadows the age of 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 We come now to a host of playwrights. The " Span- 
 ish Tragedy " of Kyd is a mass of incredible bombast. 
 The " David and Bethsabe " of Poole is a confection of 
 bad sugar. We have the most comic proof, however, of 
 the speedy growth of the art out of this ranting style in 
 the plays of Shakespeare, who puts into the mouth of 
 Ancient Pistol many of these sounding lines of the older 
 tragedy. 
 
 Die men like dogs, 
 
 Merry Tricks, 1611. 
 
 Feed and be fat, my fair Calipolis. 
 
 The Battle of Alcazar. 
 
1 34 ENGLISH L1TERA TURE. 
 
 abridge my doleful days ! 
 
 Why then, let grievous, ghastly gaping wounds 
 Untwine the Sisters Three ! Come, Atropos, I say. 
 
 King Henry IV, 2d Part. 
 
 But what may boote to stay the Sisters Three ! 
 When Atropos perforce will cut the thred, 
 The doleful day was come when you might see. 
 
 Mirrour for Magistrates. 
 
 But in Marlowe we begin to see the must of the frothy 
 vat working into the sound wine. There is still a vast 
 deal of the rhodomontade which is so deliciously mocked 
 by Shakespeare in his own words. 
 
 Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia. 
 
 Very few of his plays are not surcharged with this 
 " parlous stuff." /Vet we find here and there grand pas- 
 sages, which confirm Ben Jonson's praise of Marlowe's 
 " mighty line." His Dr. Faustus, with all its faults, has 
 the traits of that sombre, sceptical genius. The artistic 
 form of Marlowe is far inferior to that of Goethe ; yet 
 he finds in the old story the same haunting riddle of the 
 knowledge of good and evil. 
 
 Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin 
 
 To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess : 
 
 Bene disserere est finis Logices. 
 
 Is to dispute well, Logic's chiefest end ? 
 
 Affords this art no greater miracle ? 
 
 Then read no more ; thou hast attained that end. 
 
 Bid Economy farewell : and Galen come. 
 
 Be a physician, Faustus, heap up gold, 
 
 And be eterniz'd for some wondrous cure. 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 1 35 
 
 Why, Faustus : hast thou not attained that end! 
 
 Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man. 
 
 Couldst thou make man but live eternally, 
 
 Or being dead raise men to life again, 
 
 Then this profession were to be esteem'd. 
 
 Physic, farewell. Where is Justinian ? 
 
 Si una eademque res legatur duobus, &°c. 
 
 A pretty case of paltry legacies. 
 
 This study fits a mercenary drudge. 
 
 When all is done, Divinity is best. 
 
 Jerome's Bible, Faustus : view it well. 
 
 Stipendium peccati mors est ; ha! Stipendium, <5rV. 
 
 What doctrine call you this ? Che sera sera ; 
 
 What will be shall be. Divinity, adieu ! 
 
 These Metaphysics of Magicians, 
 
 And necromantic books, are heavenly. 
 
 Aye, these are those that Faustus most desires. 
 
 All things that move between.the quiet poles 
 
 Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings 
 
 Are but obey'd in their several provinces : 
 
 But his dominion that exceeds in this, 
 
 Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man : 
 
 A sound Magician is a Demigod. 
 
 Shall I make Spirits fetch me what I please ? 
 
 Perform what desperate enterprise I will ? 
 
 I '11 have them fly to India for gold, 
 
 Ransack the ocean for the orient pearl, 
 
 And search all corners of the new-found world 
 
 For pleasjvnt fruits and princely delicates. 
 
 But the great praise of Marlowe is to have been the 
 first English writer of the regular historic tragedy. It is 
 in his " Edward II," when he leaves the borrowed fancies, 
 the Tamburlanes and Moors, to tread English ground, 
 that for the first time he leaves his mock sublimities, and 
 gives us simple, natural, grand poetry. It is here that we 
 have the true growth of the English drama. 
 
136 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Edw. Leister, if gentle words might comfort me, 
 
 Thy speeches long ago had eas'd my sorrows ; 
 
 The griefs of private men are soon allay'd, 
 
 But not of kings. The forest deer being struck, 
 
 Runs to an herb that closeth up the wounds ; 
 
 But when the imperial lion's flesh is gored, 
 
 He rends and tears it with his wrathful paw, 
 
 And highly scorning that the lowly earth 
 
 Should drink his blood, mounts up to th' air. 
 Lei. My lord, why waste you thus the time away? 
 
 They stay your answer, will you yield your crown ? 
 Edw. Ah, Leister, weigh how hardly I can brook 
 
 To lose my crown and kingdom without cause ; 
 
 But what the heav'ns appoint, I must obey. 
 
 Here, take my crown ; the life of Edward too ; 
 
 Two kings in England cannot reign at once — 
 
 But stay awhile, let me be king till night, 
 
 That I may gaze upon this glittering crown, 
 
 So shall my eyes receive their last content. 
 
 Continue ever, thou celestial sun ; 
 
 Let never silent night possess this clime , 
 
 Stand still, you watches of the element ; 
 
 That Edward may be still fair England's king. 
 
 We reach now the threshold of the Shakespearian 
 time. With Marlowe the true model of the English play 
 began to take the place of these raw playwrights, and 
 there appears a group of artists who deserve our notice. 
 
 Thomas Heywood, Dekker, Chapman, Marston, and 
 Webster are the noblest of these. Marston and Webster 
 were poets of rare tragic genius, and they often have pas- 
 sages of lofty fancy, of dark or tender passion, which are 
 " preludings " of Shakespeare. But they, too, often draw 
 unnatural characters and scenes that shock the taste ; they 
 mistake the horrible for the sublime too readily, and love 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 1 37 
 
 " White Devils" and " Insatiate Countesses" too well for 
 great dramatic art. The foulness of Marston's fancy is 
 often loathsome, even to a critic without squeamishness. 
 It is still a long step in development, if not in time, from 
 him to the ideal tragedy of Hamlet or Othello ; to mistake 
 these " preludings " for his music is like the blunder of 
 the Siamese amateur at the opera, who thanked the or- 
 chestra on the tuning of their instruments. But when 
 the Elizabethan writers, instead of hunting on Italian 
 soil for colossal villains, tyrants, and feminine devils, draw 
 for us the men and women of their own land, they draw 
 genuine and moving pictures. To my homely taste 
 the historic play and the comedy are the best work of 
 that time. There are, especially in some of the dramas 
 of Dekker and Thomas Heywood, portraitures never 
 surpassed even by Shakespeare himself. Indeed it is 
 here far more, in my view, than in the more startling 
 tragedies that we shall find the true progress of the art. 
 "The Woman Killed by Kindness" is one of the most 
 touching in its portraiture of the noble heart of the wrong- 
 ed husband and the penitence of the dying Mrs. Frank- 
 ford. The " Eastward Hoe " of Marston is far beyond 
 any of his stilted tragedies, and freer than the others of 
 wanton offences against decent speech. And it is in the 
 reality of the best of these early English plays that we 
 find their real superiority to those of the after age of 
 Charles. The fashionable comedy of Congreve and 
 Wycherly does not present the genuine picture of Eng- 
 
1 38 ENGLISH LITERA TURE. 
 
 lish life, but the life of a witty court and a licentious 
 time. 
 
 We need not excuse the coarseness of too much of the 
 Elizabethan drama, even in Shakespeare. But though it 
 was coarse, the stage was not essentially corrupt. It 
 painted the rude manners, the unpurged speech of the 
 "lewed folk," the vices of the courtier; but it loved to 
 paint also the Christian manhood, the chastity of woman, 
 the triumph of virtue, the saintliness of true religion. 
 Its guise was often repulsive, but its heart was clean. 
 
 It is but a passing sketch we have made of the early 
 drama. If, however, we have gained from it some idea 
 of the steps of its growth, the knowledge will be of aid in 
 a study of the most striking chapter in English literature. 
 It may be accepted as a chief article in the critical faith 
 of our time, that the modern romantic drama is the 
 noblest product of literary art. And it is one of those 
 strange facts of criticism, that for a long time this verdict 
 was delayed. England as well as France worshiped the 
 classic model. The artificial taste of all the oracles, down 
 to Boileau and Voltaire, pronounced the plays of Shakes- 
 peare a semi-barbarous violation of the principles of 
 dramatic poetry. We owe to German genius, to Schlegel 
 and to Goethe, the appreciation of the great English mas- 
 ter. No one now ventures to deny the rank of Macbeth, 
 Lear, Othello, Hamlet. And since the profound criticisms 
 of Ulrici, the artistic analysis of Goethe, and others, it is 
 seen that the cause of this grandeur of the Shakespearian 
 
THE ENGLISH- DRAMA. 1 39 
 
 drama lies in the very change from the conception and 
 the structure of the classic play. We have already noted 
 this in our study of the tragi-comic feature of the " mys- 
 tery " ; we may now glance at the whole case as it is linked 
 with this history. The strict division between tragedy 
 and comedy, the simplicity of the plot, the small num- 
 ber of actors on the stage, the unity of place and time, 
 were in accordance with the simplicity of all early life. 
 The Shakespearian stage, as it represents a far wider 
 and more complex social life, required a greater freedom 
 in each of these features. Its type is not so severe, but 
 it is far richer. The difference is analogous to that in all 
 branches of art. The ancient music was in unison, ours 
 is in harmony. The Greek was perfect in sculpture, in 
 pure form, but incapable of the deeper and more sug- 
 gestive expression of painting. And thus in the drama 
 there is a many-sided life, not to be shut within the classic 
 unities. It is the tragi-comedy of life, that Shakespeare 
 gives us, blending its grave and gay ; there is somewhat 
 for mirth in the most solemn scenes, somewhat of grand- 
 eur in its common, every-day humanity. Only this char- 
 acter of his art could bring out the universality of his 
 genius. All the noblest drama has followed him. We 
 notice in Schiller, that in his earlier manner we have 
 the pure tragedy ; but in Wallenstein he draws the rude 
 humor of the soldiers by the camp fire, yet the grand, 
 solitary spirit of the Duke, and the sad fate of Thekla. 
 Such a work required a larger number of dramatis per sonce, 
 
140 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 a more life-like shifting of scenes ; it required, too, varie- 
 ty of place and time. We need not defend all the in- 
 congruities found even in Shakespeare, but if the effects 
 of the drama are an illusion, it is difficult to show why 
 we should not be allowed to pass as in a dream from 
 London to Bosworth Field, or to forget months as well as 
 minutes. 
 
 Now in this fact of the growth of the Shakespearian 
 drama out of the character of modern life, we have the 
 link between him and this history. Shakespeare did not 
 invent these peculiar features. He found them all ready. 
 It was his work to take the rich but crude material, and 
 shape it to perfection. We do not rob him in this of a jot of 
 his supreme power ; but rather this is his power, that he 
 was no copier, like Racine or Alfieri, of any classic model, 
 but he drew directly from English real life, and therefore 
 wrought into his own web all these bold and novel 
 features which had sprung out of the natural dramatic 
 liberties of early time. Every one of the new elements 
 of his great plays we have traced in that early literature. 
 We have not only the tragi-comedy, but the immense 
 variety of characters, the fantastic shifting of scenes, the 
 rapid changes of time and place. There was, of course, 
 a defiance of all rule in some of them. In the " myste- 
 ries " God and man blend in the dialogue, and in the 
 " moralities," real persons and abstract personifications 
 jest or scold together. In " Kynge Johan " we leap over 
 seven years. In Heywood's " Fair Maid of the West," 
 
THE ENGLISH DRAMA. 141 
 
 one scene is laid in an English inn ; and presently we 
 find ourselves in the court of Mullisheg, the mighty king 
 of Fez. But the materials of the freest, richest power 
 were here, and it only needed a master to shape them. 
 It is precisely at this point of English development that 
 the age of Shakespeare comes. 
 
 And thus we learn why England was capable of it, and 
 why she gave in that early time the finest model of the 
 European drama. Italy with the Renaissance was fettered 
 by a classic past. France had no grand period of na- 
 tional letters till long after the Reformation, and then 
 the reign of an artificial school made her incapable of 
 more than the polished copy of the Greek by Racine. 
 Germany was forced to wait long for Lessing and 
 Goethe and Schiller. But in England the whole intel- 
 lectual movement, which ripened with Elizabeth's time, 
 came when the national brain was yet fresh, original, un- 
 fettered by precedent ; and the dramatic genius caught 
 all this reality of English life, all the fermentation, the 
 extravagance, but with it the humor, the fancy, the 
 courtly wit and the homely speech, the household man- 
 ners and the historic grandeur of the time. Had the 
 stage waited for a great master till the day of Charles or 
 Anne, it would never have risen higher than the inflated 
 heroics of Dryden, or the cold grace of Addison. Its 
 happy lot was to have such a dramatist, and a group of 
 dramatists at the hour when they knew no school be- 
 yond English history and the real life of their time. 
 
I4 2 ENGLISH LITERATURE, 
 
 And here, in conclusion, we have what will always give 
 us the true interest in this early drama. Even as a 
 purely literary study it is full of curions hints to a 
 scholar who loves to trace in such relics the living 
 growth of a people. But of the study we have made, be 
 what it should, it will be more than a literary criticism. 
 We shall read in these sketches of English passion and 
 English humor a truer history than in Hume or Ma- 
 caulay. We shall perceive the shifting scenes of the 
 vast drama which the nation played through its long 
 childhood ; the tragi-comedy enacted in the palace and 
 the cottage, at the banquet and on the scaffold, where 
 king and bishop, scholar and yeoman, had their parts, 
 and left their memories in this most living chapter of 
 English letters. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ENGLISH PROSE. 
 
 OUR way has lain hitherto amidst the fair fields of 
 English poetry ; we now turn to the great masters of its 
 prose. It is not merely for entertainment with the 
 drama and the lyric that we left in the background the 
 graver writers of history, divinity, and " divine philoso- 
 phy," but because we follow the sequence of literary 
 growth. Prose literature is always the fruit of a later 
 culture, and, indeed, in any day a classic history or essay 
 is rarer than a poem. The chief reason is that poetry is 
 the first, natural utterance in which genius expresses its 
 thoughts ; history is epic, and philosophy, the lofty 
 intuition of a Pythagoras or a Simonides. Prose, in- 
 deed, may rise to the fullest poetic height ; but ordina- 
 rily it is only the vehicle of common life and thought. 
 But when science and history and philosophy are devel- 
 oped with the larger culture of a people, then they 
 demand a fitting language ; and thus out of the rude 
 talk of men come the varied, subtle, and expressive 
 speech .of the scholar and the man of science. As an art, 
 poetry, indeed, is as truly as prose the fruit of this riper 
 study ; but there may be and is a virgin age of song, which 
 
 143 
 
144 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 breathes the first inspirations of genius ; while prose can 
 have no such earlier season of beauty, but must be devel- 
 oped by slow, careful steps. Poetry springs like the 
 tropic flower in a moment out of the glowing soil ; prose 
 is the bloom of a colder intellectual climate. 
 
 It is the mountain streams that feed 
 The fair green plain's amenities . 
 
 This striking fact is found in all literary history. An 
 " Iliad " precedes by ages the work of a Thucydides and a 
 Plato. Chaucer gave English verse its classic beginning, 
 a century before Sir Thomas More our first classic in 
 prose. It is for this reason that before the great age of 
 Elizabeth we have but a scanty list of writers whose 
 names are worth our thought. There were, indeed, 
 books and bookmakers ; but they were either scholars, 
 who wrote in Latin, or the rude sermons of the parish 
 priest. An English prose was not yet ripe. But it will 
 be of interest to us to trace even these early steps ; not 
 only to recall here and there a now neglected work, but 
 more because we may see how the noble tongue was 
 framed which became " the large utterance of the early 
 gods," and recorded the thought of a Bacon and a 
 Raleigh. 
 
 What a theme, indeed, for a scholar is this of the 
 growth of a language ! to open the pages of the " De 
 Augmentis," where invention and wit and learning seem 
 to have found such perfect utterance, or the " Fairie 
 
ENGLISH PROSE. 1 45 
 
 Queene," where the verse like the colors of Rubens pours 
 itself out lavishly in gorgeous fancy, in excess of beauty ; 
 then to go back to the banks of the Elbe or the rough 
 shores of Britain to hear it as it was spoken by a Hen- 
 gist in those short ringing monosyllables fit only for the 
 battle-field ; and then to imagine what centuries of men-, 
 tal and moral change must have passed between ; how 
 words at first expressing some rude conception had been 
 repeated from lip to lip, and refined, and placed in new 
 combinations ; how a harsh and crabbed word has be- 
 come sweet as Apollo's lute ; a sound that for the Saxon 
 meant only a sensuous thing, has become refined till it 
 conveys the subtlest thought of philosophy. 
 
 An Alfred musing on divine things in a rude day 
 struggled to convey some new thought, until the effort 
 created the word ; and in this eternal generation the 
 spirit of a people has gone forward, shaping and mould- 
 ing its elements, inserting in its stock the grafts of other 
 tongues, until at length we have the English of to-day. 
 
 In these earlier studies we have gained some idea of 
 the sources of our English literature, and of the peculiar 
 changes which the tongue underwent in its passage to 
 the English of a classic day. There was a proper classic 
 age of Saxon prose in the age of Alfred ; meagre, in- 
 deed, and rude, yet important as marking an epoch. But 
 from the decline of the Saxon power the language was 
 passing through that great process of fusion with the 
 French. No true English prose thenceforward is written 
 
I46 ENGLISH LITERATURE, 
 
 until the fourteenth century, and before that time we 
 find a writer only here and there. Hitherto all works of 
 history and divinity had been written in Latin. 
 
 There was no standard in English. The dialect of the 
 court was a piebald of fashionable Anglo-French. The 
 law employed that strange composite of French and Mid- 
 dle-Age Latin, which we yet read in the statutes of the 
 ancient realm. No writer who affected nicety of literary 
 merit would descend to the " volgare " of common life. 
 It is curious to notice here as in Italy, how slowly the 
 scholar learned the riches of his mother-tongue. Even 
 More wrote his " Utopia " in Latin. 
 
 It is'at this point that the first germs of English prose 
 appear. Chaucer in several compositions made that 
 prose melodious : as in his " Testament of Love," and 
 " Tale of Melibeus." Fortescue ennobled the language 
 with his treatise on " Monarchy." The printing-press of 
 Caxton opened to England that exhaustless fund of 
 translations from the French : the " History of Geoffrey," 
 the " Golden Legend of Saints," the " Morte d' Arthure," 
 and the " Book of Chivalry." 
 
 As yet, indeed, there was no master-work in history, in 
 essay, in any sphere of letters. But we see in the move- 
 ment the English language struggling into full articulate 
 expression. 
 
 The first great work which was the fruit of that past 
 and the promise of the future, is More's historic frag- 
 ment. But a little before this is one work, the very first 
 
ENGLISH PROSE. 1 47 
 
 prose of our language, which I name, both for its date, 
 and because it has a curious interest for us as the great 
 wonder-book of that first age of travel. It is the richest 
 curiosity shop of all the legends and fables of the East, 
 brought by the early pilgrims. Sir John Maundeville set 
 out from England in 1322, and wrote his " Travels " in 
 1356, in Norman-French. It was translated into Latin 
 and Italian, but the English version is his own after-work.. 
 The great name of Wyclif appears in 1350. It opens at 
 once the Protestant Reformation and the new age of let- 
 ters. The birth of religious freedom demanded the free 
 word. And it is, indeed, a striking fact that the same 
 movement which kindled the mind of England supplied; 
 its instrument Not the scholar but the people gave it 
 utterance. The Reformation could have been nothing 
 without the Scripture ; and this again had no power in 
 its Latin cere-cloths. It must speak to all ; and it chose 
 the Saxon. 
 
 And thus, again, the homely speech became the oracle 
 of God ; it gained a classic grandeur from the very 
 thoughts it uttered, and rose at once to be the language 
 of England. Already, indeed, there had been before 
 translations of this and that portion of the New Testa- 
 ment into English ; but they were in manuscript, and 
 little known. Wyclif s translation became the standard 
 speech. It is rude, indeed, but its value is not in its 
 nicety of translation, although for its day it was the 
 work of a master in learning. It teaches that letters 
 themselves spring from a nobler root. 
 
I48 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 And next follows the first real classic of English prose, 
 Sir Thomas More's " History of Richard III." It still re- 
 mains a model of strong, clear, scholarly English. But it 
 marks an epoch also. 
 
 The new learning of Italy began to influence the 
 scholars of the island, a riper culture appeared, and from 
 this point the names begin to multiply through the 
 reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. 
 
 We need not linger in them. Cranmer and Gardiner, 
 Barlow and others in theology. Foxe and Holinshed in 
 history, or Sir J. Cheke and Roger Ascham. To us .at 
 this day they seem of little worth, but we must not for- 
 get that they did much for letters. To Cheke and Smith 
 learning is indebted for its noblest growth. Ascham's 
 " Scholemaster " is a piece of homely, clear English. 
 
 And now the language had reached that point when it 
 becomes at last fitted to be the vehicle of a literature; 
 and as we have seen the growth of our early prose, we 
 have now before us another and a most captivating view 
 of our subject. It is as the proper preface to the great 
 masters who follow that I speak of the general features 
 of this English tongue in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries. What made it so great, so rich, so much 
 superior to the emasculated writing of a later time? 
 Why does it draw the scholar, not as an antiquary, but 
 as a lover of beauty, away from Addison or Hume to the 
 music of Taylor or Sidney? 
 
 If we would name the features, good and bad, which 
 
ENGLISH PROSE. I49 
 
 mark that culminating literary period, — and we should 
 not forget its faults, — we should give the first place to 
 the fresh and overflowing strength of its thought. For 
 it surely is the highest canon of criticism, that the style 
 of any age is not to be considered as independent from its 
 material. It is when literature becomes predominantly 
 an art, and busies itself, above all things with style, 
 that we trace the first step in degeneracy. There is in 
 this, as in architecture, a Doric period, when the outward 
 form is nothing more than the severe expression of the 
 spirit ; and a later Corinthian, when the luxuriance of 
 the acanthus leaf overruns the pure lines of form, and 
 we feel that the age seeks beauty in preference to truth. 
 And so with the elder literature ; while it has far less of 
 the finished grace of a later day, it is the writing of men 
 who were so full of fresh thought that beneath all the 
 stiffness and rudeness of style we see the power of the 
 original English mind. The historian began for the first 
 time to weave the materials of English annals. The 
 theologian handled the most earnest questions of the 
 Christian faith. It is amazing to see what a ponderous 
 mass of learning is given us in those books of every 
 sort. 
 
 All the treasures of scholarship are brought forth and 
 poured out in their writing, and with earnest, thorough, 
 and indefatigable labor. There is not a great work which 
 is not exhaustive in its richness. We have had much 
 new discovery since in many lines of science and of criti- 
 
150 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 cism, but the English people have had few such giants of 
 learning. Where is the writer in polity since Hooker ? 
 where the work that takes the place of Field ? where such 
 a coronal of learned gems as in the " De Augmentis " ? 
 Latimer cannot preach a sermon at Paul's Cross, or 
 Donne before the king, or Sir Thomas Browne or Burton 
 write an essay, but it bristles with rare learning. Their 
 works remind us of conquerors who exhibit in their 
 triumph all the spoils of war. 
 
 It is this fulness that makes at once the vice and 
 charm of their style. The defect of almost all of them 
 is over-elaboration, seeming pedantry of learning. We 
 cannot call this pedantry a merit ; it was the sign of an 
 unripe taste. But we must remember that to them this 
 classic learning was an intoxication ; it was not pedantry 
 for them, but the newly awakened love of all past wis- 
 dom. And their scholarship was solid and thorough. 
 In them it implies no want of intellectual power. But 
 we wonder more at the muscle which wields, like the 
 heavy plate-armor of the Crusader, all this learning. 
 We are entertained by it as in some baronial hall hung 
 with the iron trophies of war ; not as in a modern dining- 
 room, among the more tasteful refinements of our day. 
 
 If I am not mistaken, the Greek was then more culti- 
 vated than in after-days, when the Latin tongue became 
 the model of every scholar, from the prize poet to Gib- 
 bon, Bolingbroke, and Johnson. This age produced the 
 readers of Plato and of Aristotle : scholars who can sel- 
 
ENGLISH PROSE. 15 I 
 
 dom be matched unless in modern Germany ; and I 
 think the fact explains to a great degree that more life- 
 like and original vein so marked in their noblest writing. 
 For the Greek was the language of a people who did not 
 borrow as the Roman borrowed, but whose thought 
 sprang out of the fresh mind and the independent life. 
 We pass here more directly to the English style of the 
 seventeenth century. The first great feature to be 
 marked is the predominance of Saxon words and Saxon 
 idiom. I do not mean by this that there was no mixture 
 of classic phrase ; on the contrary there may be found in 
 these writers much, in this regard, that we should call 
 pedantic ; many words that have not since been natural- 
 ized, and forms of expression that are uncouth and semi- 
 barbarous. There was no exact and nice taste. But 
 any one who opens the page of Sidney, of Raleigh, of 
 More, of Taylor, will be struck with the vast proportion 
 of home-born words ; and paradox though it be, we may 
 venture to say, that even in Sir Thomas Browne there is 
 more of rich, strong, nervous English than in Steele or 
 Tillotson. 
 
 The spirit of that day was yet near its fountain-head. 
 There are instances of this on every hand. The noblest 
 example is given in that translation of the Bible, which 
 to this day, like that of Luther, remains unsurpassed. 
 The Bishops' Bible, of which we have still the remains in 
 our Psalter, is a yet finer proof of this Saxon power. 
 
 It may be said without exaggeration that our English 
 
1 5 2 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 Bible has been the book as well of the scholar as of the 
 " lewed folk " ; has not only inspired the faith, but has 
 been the great classic of our mother-speech, Nor must 
 we pass by in this connection that Book of Common 
 Prayer, which we cannot read without feeling that the 
 inspiration of the holy word breathes in its pages and 
 offices. We notice with what care the compilers, learned 
 divines, yet home-born Englishmen, combined in it the 
 dialect of the scholar with that of the people. 
 
 It is the Saxon element that gives their peculiar rich- 
 ness to the writers of this age. With every language, 
 the nearer we are to the sources, the nearer we are to 
 what makes the poetic power, the words that photograph 
 the image of living objects, as they were when first used. 
 But this poetic power is yet more striking in the Saxon, 
 which abounds in those words that incarnate the strength 
 and beauty, the manly thought, the warm feeling, of this 
 great race. 
 
 There is thus a striking affinity between the poetry 
 and the prose dialect of the seventeenth century. In 
 this respect we have an advantage over the classic 
 tongues in the fact that our poetry is measured by 
 accent and not by quantity. In the Latin the law of 
 quantity excluded many of the words of prose from use 
 in poetry. But with us, as accent imposes no such re- 
 striction, the language of prose or verse is of equal scope. 
 We often praise, and with reason, the great superiority 
 of the classic rhythm in other respects. Yet we may 
 
ENGLISH PROSE. 1 53 
 
 hold the chief reason of the poetic character of our 
 prose to lie deeper still, in the Saxon genius itself. 
 When we praise this poetic feature of this early writing, 
 we mean no mere fanciful or fluid grace ; but all that 
 gives strength to language, its bone and muscle, as well 
 as its fresh hue and childlike form ; that gives the power 
 of a Rembrandt to a page of Clarendon, or in a sentence 
 of Bacon the essence of long modern essays. In this 
 regard, therefore, we must always prize this English prose. 
 We may find more eloquence of dialect, more refinement 
 of words, a larger and fuller vocabulary in later days, 
 but we must go back to them for the home-born speech. 
 We may hold it the sign of a sure decay in culture when a 
 people lose their native dialect ; and there are few more 
 marked proofs of the half education which we are get- 
 ting in America than this. A Yorkshire man will often 
 recall to you in his rough homespun talk the English of 
 Raleigh ; but a New Englander comes out of his com- 
 mon school with a conversation made up of all the 
 largest centipedal words in Webster; never a good, 
 homely, telling monosyllable. Indeed it is here the 
 mark of a scholar to talk in simple English, and of the 
 people in Latin derivations. A peddler will always 
 " negotiate," instead of buy or sell ; and I heard a lad, a 
 day since, telling another on the way to his skating to 
 take a less " circuitous route." 
 
 Let us now turn to another feature of English prose, — 
 the construction of the sentence. It is the general modern 
 
154 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 idea that the syntax of the old writers is rude, clumsy, 
 and unnatural ; and even many who love them well will 
 admit this. The long, tortuous sentences of Taylor or of 
 Milton weary our ears ; we prefer the brief, well-rounded, 
 epigrammatic phrase of Macaulay. Doubtless there is a 
 defect here in the prose of the seventeenth century. It 
 is very often, in the best, cumbrous and involved so as to 
 darken the sense as well as to destroy the unity of ex- 
 pression. Syntax is always a later elaboration. But 
 there are two points to be noted, which for a genuine 
 lover of the English may make it doubtful whether our 
 gain is not alike a loss. The first is the ancient order 
 of the sentence. The present position of the noun, just 
 before the verb, is a form borrowed from the French, a 
 language of different syntactical genius from the Saxon. 
 But the earlier Saxon involution seems more accordant 
 with the genius of the language, and however often 
 weakened, it as often gives a wonderful force and poetic 
 beauty. But, again, the long sentence, tedious as it is in 
 many hands, is with a genius like Milton or Hooker most 
 fitted to bring out the stately rhythm of our language. 
 Rhyme is not necessary to constitute verse with us, as 
 in the French. The grandest of our poetic forms, the 
 blank verse, is a rhythmical prose ; and in the highest 
 prose there is a rhythmus, a harmonious flow and cadence, 
 appealing to the poetic ear, and making the difference 
 between a barrister's brief and the eloquence of a Burke. 
 This rhythmic quality of our Saxon tongue demands the 
 
ENGLISH PROSE. I 55 
 
 long sentence. But our late style, in avoiding this earlier 
 cumbrousness, has gone to excess in disjointed and arti- 
 ficial neatness. We can take no better instance than 
 Macaulay. His sentences are all epigrams. " There is 
 no union between them," to use the phrase of Coleridge, 
 " more than of marbles in a bag, each round, hard, and 
 glittering." But this, so far from a true style, is surely a 
 bad one ; not only because it spoils rhythm, but because 
 it destroys all natural expression ; it leads the writer to 
 be hunting at every moment for an antithesis, a witty 
 turn, and to sacrifice for a brilliant touch the truth of 
 history or character. Morality and literary taste are 
 more akin than we suppose. We turn with delight from 
 this poor staccato of a Macaulay to the music of those 
 old writers, even though it be over-stately, to those ma- 
 jestic sentences of Milton or Hooker, rising, clause on 
 clause, in a volume of growing music, the development 
 of the main thought sustained by other related thoughts 
 that express many moods, and in a voice now strong, 
 now soft and plaintive, until it bursts on us in a final har- 
 mony like the chorus of a cathedral anthem. 
 
 Having studied the features of English prose as it 
 grew in the seventeenth century, we can understand its 
 power as the expression of the English mind, and the 
 manifold forms of literature in which it was embodied, 
 which arose because they were fitted to its genius. It 
 was a language whose roots and trunk were Saxon, 
 which had grafted upon it many derivations from French 
 
1 5^ ENGLISH LITERA TURE 
 
 and from the classic learning ; but it had incorporated 
 them into itself, without greatly changing the native 
 stock. The Saxon had given it strength, solidity, poetic 
 beauty ; the French had contributed range of diction, 
 colloquial ease, and elegance ; the Latin, the sonorous 
 and lofty diction of the schools. It was a tongue which 
 suited the character of the people, massive, weighty, rich, 
 yet flexible. In poetry its stately line could sustain the 
 march of Shakespeare, and the wing of Milton at heaven's 
 gate ; yet it was capable of the lightest madrigal of 
 Surrey. In prose, whatever was grave, solid, deep, and 
 rich had its natural utterance. These characteristics 
 both guided its path, and appear in each classic depart- 
 ment of our English prose. The history may be named 
 first. It grew out of the statesmanlike genius of Eng- 
 land, her regulated liberty, her solid, practical intellect. 
 More opened its literature with his powerful fragment of 
 Edward and Richard. Bacon in his " Henry VII " gave 
 the model of a clear, solid, sagacious criticism ; and Clar- 
 endon closed the period with a history which remains, 
 whatever its faults, the model of such writing, to this 
 day. History is the specialty of England ; not the 
 subtle learning of a Niebuhr, but the practical history, 
 dignified by the moral tone of a Christian state, as in Dr. 
 Arnold's writings. The English pulpit exhibits the 
 same character, from the homely fervor of a Latimer to 
 the scholarly sense of a Sanderson ; it always uses a 
 sonorous, grave, effective eloquence, but it seldom rises 
 to the impassioned power of a Bossuet. 
 
ENGLISH PROSE. 1 57 
 
 In philosophy it has little speculative power. The 
 language has not the subtlety of the Greek or modern 
 German ; and it is as impossible to translate Plato into 
 it, as into the Latin, which stands over against the text 
 of an Ast or of a Bekker like a Russian hut opposite a 
 palace. Even Cudworth could not mould it, or Cole- 
 ridge naturalize reason and understanding, perception, 
 and conception ; but the stubborn practical genius re- 
 fuses to admit such niceties of thought. But within the 
 English range of practical and social ethics, it is a lan- 
 guage of power. And the English essay, as in Bacon, is 
 natural and " to the manor born." 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. 
 
 ItJs significant that the first name of our classic Eng- 
 lish prose is that of Richard Hooker. For it proves that 
 " Theology is not only the queen and witness of all wis- 
 dom, but that it ministers the nourishment and life of 
 that literature, which most men think the idle pastime of 
 the mind " ; and, more nearly to our subject, " that thus 
 our English mind hath been fed from these deeper 
 sources, and thereby gained the stately thought and de- 
 vout heart which mark that golden prime of the seven- 
 teenth century." 
 
 Though we leave the delectable mountains of drama 
 and epic, we are not led into the dry waste of homiletics 
 when we propose to bring before us the greatest of the 
 names which have immortalized the pulpit. It were not 
 easy to name all of these giants of learning and power, 
 who have upheld the Church against Pope and Puritan, 
 and who cannot be forgotten by the historian. But ours 
 is a more genial task, to choose the selecter few who 
 stand beside Spenser and Raleigh and Milton, a Hooker, 
 an Andrewes, a Hall, a Donne, and best beloved of all — 
 Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 158 
 
ELIZA BE THAN DIVINES. 1 5 9 
 
 These writers form a family group in which each mem- 
 ber differs from another ; yet they are alike in the grand 
 features that make the type of old English divinity. 
 The same profound theology, the same reverent heart, 
 the same saintly expression, are found in this, the fairest 
 type beyond that of Geneva or of Rome, which a Chris- 
 tian land has produced. In the pages of a Walton, the 
 poems of a Herbert, the rich treasures remain to us 
 which we study here. 
 
 Let us glance, at the outset, at the influence of English 
 theology on its letters, and there see the characteristics 
 of that age. And first, that wondrous age which bloomed 
 under Elizabeth sprang out of the Reformation. Relig- 
 ious ideas in England then, as in the noblest epochs of 
 all lands, first awakened the national mind, which had 
 slept long in superstition ; and the impulse given by that 
 spiritual life communicated itself to every branch of 
 science and letters, as the wave which washes one spot 
 breaks at the same time along the shore. The Bible of 
 Wyclif opened the mother-tongue. The truth uttered 
 by Latimer ripened in the after-age ; and without this, 
 no Bacon had given new laws to science, and no Spenser 
 had painted the wandering of Una and the arts of 
 Duessa. 
 
 In all the earlier essays of literature, in " Piers Plow- 
 man," in the drama, even in Chaucer himself we see this 
 fermentation of the popular thought. 
 
 It is impossible to read the literature of this great cent- 
 
l6o ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ury, without perceiving, in comparison with the belles- 
 lettres of the age of Anne, the colder spirit, the loose 
 morality, the* literary idleness of the later time. It is the 
 difference between an age of elegant leisure and one of 
 earnest thought. The grave sentiment of a Daniel and a 
 Marvell, the devout humor of a Browne, the large pro- 
 portion of religious poetry, like Herbert's and Wither's, 
 all show that literature had not become mere art. And 
 hence we find often a common quality in the divines and 
 the men of letters ; we have the drama in Latimer, and 
 sermons in Shakespeare. In a later day the pulpit grew 
 less vital, and the poetry less religious. When, with 
 Charles and Gallic license, the heart of religious faith 
 died out, the literature of the seventeenth century died 
 also. 
 
 And hence we feel the immense influence of these 
 divines on that literature. The pulpit in after years 
 waxed cold, as it became the representative of a settled 
 Protestantism : the tame eloquence of Stillingfleet, the 
 half-sanctified wit of South, and the learned stateliness 
 of Barrow succeeded to the earnest eloquence of the 
 elder fathers. But then the pulpit was a burning as well 
 as a shining light ; its teachers were men in the very van 
 of the religious conflict ; their vast erudition, their theo- 
 logical discourse were weapons, not hung in the armory, 
 but worn night and day ; and an English people read 
 and listened, because both were animated with the same 
 faith. It was a day when even the courtier was a student 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. l6l 
 
 of theology, a day of serious-minded, Christian men. Sir 
 Henry Wotton read Bellarmine, while mingling in the 
 gaieties of an Italian court. 
 
 We turn now to the characteristics of that old English 
 divinity. It was an age of polemics, and the Christianity 
 of the whole period took mainly that direction. The, 
 later time had not yet come, when the vital questions of 
 theology had become matters of indifference, and the 
 Church put forth only treatises on the " External Evi- 
 dences of Christianity," or on " Natural Theology," and 
 the cold morality of a Paley. There was a living faith 
 with Churchman and Puritan. The question on one hand 
 was with a dexterous Bellarmine, a Fisher, or the priests 
 of Roman pretension ; and on the other with a Cart- 
 wright and a Travers. That English Reformation was at 
 its beginning a protest against Rome, but not, as on the 
 Continent, the impulse of here and there an individual 
 mind ; it was the organic, collective life of the Church ; 
 and therefore, in the words of Jewel, " it took the pat- 
 tern of reforming religion from whence the ground of 
 religion was first taken : the Church of the Apostles, and 
 old Catholic Fathers." And hence its theology embod- 
 ied this spirit. The Reformation of the Continent crys- 
 tallized around the notions of a Luther or a Calvin ; it 
 became only the embodied shape of their own intellect — 
 fiery, strong, but one-sided, angular, distorted. Scouting 
 all authority, the Protestant was as malignant against a 
 church window or a surplice as against the mass. He 
 
1 62 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 forged the links of his logic until in its fetters Christi- 
 anity became a " Quinquarticular " controversy. In their 
 zeal for the doctrines of election and irresistible grace, 
 men forgot the ethical side of religion, while, in the words 
 of a clever Italian, "the women and shopkeepers were 
 able to judge of Predestination, and the most ignorant 
 of the common people were mad for a super- or re-Ref- 
 ormation of Religion, like the man who would not cease 
 to whet and whet his knife till there was no steel to 
 make it useful." 
 
 But it was not so with the English Church. Although 
 thoroughly Protestant, it had within itself larger, more 
 harmonious, more genial elements. It kept alive a rev- 
 erence for a Christian Past, for sacred learning, and for 
 the beauty of a Christian art. It held a moderate 
 theology, a wiser and larger charity. 
 
 When the Calvinist urged that the admittance of the 
 notion of merit excluded the Romanist from the pos- 
 sibility of salvation, Hooker, while he clearly defined 
 Justification, said : " Let me die, if it be ever proved that 
 simply an error doth exclude Pope or Cardinal utterly 
 from hope of life." 
 
 It pursued that practical tone which never forgot in 
 speculative questions the faith that maketh by love the 
 relations of outward duty. The living heart of its pulpit 
 spake in that stately sermon of Cudworth : " We have 
 no warrant in Scripture to peep into these hidden rolls 
 and volumes of eternity, and make it our first thing that 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. 1 63 
 
 we do, when we come to Christ, to spell out our names 
 in the stars, and to persuade ourselves that we are cer- 
 tainly elected to everlasting happiness, before we see the 
 image of God in righteousness and true holiness, shaped 
 in our hearts." 
 
 There is a difference, in some regards, between the ear- 
 lier divines, as Cranmer, Jewel, Rogers, and their suc- 
 cessors of Elizabeth and James. The first Reformers 
 were more Calvinistic in their opinions, friendlier to the 
 teachers of the Continent: while later, the separating 
 lines were more clearly drawn. We hear Bishop Jewel 
 writing to Peter Martyr as " my Father," and Grindal, in 
 1568, to Bega and to Bullinger: " Commend both us and 
 our ministry to the Lord in your prayers " ; but it must 
 be remembered that at the outset both were busy with 
 the same strife against Rome. It was only when that 
 strife was over, and Calvinism began to carry out its 
 logical and theological spirit, against all moderate faith, 
 all reverent worship, that this first alliance was broken. 
 This is the only true solution of the fact. It is false to 
 assume that the English Church as a body changed its 
 divinity or its church principles. We grant readily that 
 there were ultra Calvinists then as now, and an extreme 
 right of Churchmen, as Laud. But in the main the 
 theology of the Church has been the same. Nothing 
 can be more marked than the contrast between the 
 great Nonconformist writers, even to Home and Bax- 
 ter, and those of whom we speak. The spiritual power, 
 
164 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the eloquence and piety of the former are saturated 
 with Calvinism. But with the latter, that wise spirit 
 which joined freedom of thought to the metaphys- 
 ics of Christian doctrine, kept the balance between Cal- 
 vin and Arminius, and held the minds of men to the 
 plain duties of piety. The ethical tone, so marked in 
 the English pulpit, as in Barrow and Butler, is seen in the 
 spirit of our Articles as well as in the sermons of all these 
 great men. 
 
 We turn to another striking point — the devotional 
 character of that literature. It is the most beautiful 
 trait of that day, that amidst all the stir and strife of 
 controversy, such treasures of meditative piety remain, — 
 books of prayer, holy lyrics, manuals of self-discipline. 
 Scattered amidst folios of polemics or treatises of divinity 
 we find them wherever we look ; and we turn back with 
 a feeling of surprise at the barrenness of our time to the 
 devotions of Andrewes, to the meditations of Hall, and 
 the "Holy Living and Dying" of Taylor. There is a saintly 
 fervor in them ; a rich glow not only of expression, but 
 of thought, that marks them as coming from the very 
 heart of that English time. This tone is distinct from 
 the devotional writing of the Puritan ; less self-conscious, 
 less gloomy, it is the devotion of calm, still, lowly minds ; 
 while, on the other hand, it is distinct from the proper 
 type of Romish asceticism, from the cloistered, ghostly 
 meditation of a Kempis, or the ecstasies of Francois de 
 Sales. There is about it the quiet beauty of an English 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. 1 65 
 
 rural parsonage ; a holiness, deep as that of the recluse, 
 but which has grown in the sweet relations of home life, 
 which knows the cares and joys of the heart, and has 
 mingled with the world while above it. We know noth- 
 ing fairer than that old English type of religion. We 
 learn the power of that age, when we see its intellectual 
 strength mingled with such a spirit. We turn in that 
 most exquisite of books, the "Lives" of Walton, to the 
 picture of Hooker, when after his battles with Travers, 
 he resigns the mastership of the Temple, and goes to his 
 little parish, " where I may study and pray for God's 
 blessing upon my endeavors, and keep myself in peace 
 and privacy, and behold God's blessing spring out of my 
 mother-earth, and eat my bread without opposition " ; 
 we see Sanderson, the greatest of casuists, living forty 
 years in Boothby Pannell, studying and fulfilling his pas- 
 toral duties, so bashful that he could not lift his eyes 
 from his sermon, which "happy infirmity" proved so 
 " like the radical moisture in man's body, that it pre- 
 served the life of virtue in his soul"; or Herbert, the 
 nobleman and scholar, a country parson in the sweet re- 
 treat of Bemerton, kneeling in his empty church at his 
 prayers, and " composing divine Hymns which he set and 
 sang to his lute or viol," and a daily angel at the sick- 
 bed or in the cottage of the poor. This was the heart 
 that produced that steadfast strength of the English 
 Church. 
 
 But I must hasten to speak of the style of that old 
 
1 66 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 English prose, and here I know well that I shall find 
 many who will hold me little else than a worshiper of a 
 clumsy Elizabethan architecture. But I do not for a 
 moment deny the faults of that prose. The cumbrous 
 sentence, the overloading of classic and Patristic learning, 
 the mixture of quaint conceits, are evident enough. But 
 surely to allow these to hide from us the nobler features 
 would be false ; a very shallow criticism is enough to dis- 
 close the surface defects, as the critical cobbler could 
 find mistakes in the sandal of the statue, but could not 
 see the godlike beauty of the face. Perhaps, however, 
 if we examine the higher qualities we may see the faults 
 diminish. 
 
 We should notice first, the fulness, the overflowing 
 strength of that English divinity. It is the writing of 
 men who are so fully charged with the thoughts of the 
 great subjects that they handled, that they pour into the 
 least channel the whole tide of their learning and their 
 logic. When we open those books we are amazed at 
 their riches, the treasures hid in the sand of the driest 
 theology. Since then we have had much discovery in 
 every field of Scriptural criticism and doctrinal truth ; 
 but no age has such learning. The pulpit of that time 
 gives us the best features of the English Church. In 
 later days it became more refined and more academic ; 
 but the stateliness of Barrow, the tame eloquence of 
 Tillotson, do not give it such power over us. In the 
 earlier time it spoke in the tongue of the people. The 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. 1 67 
 
 sermon was no rhetorical essay on some general topic of 
 morality, or scrap of Christian sentiment; it handled 
 questions that concerned the very life of the Church and 
 the nation. If we look on those discourses as tedious 
 and dull, it is because we do not put ourselves into the 
 place of the hearers. These sermons expressed the very 
 fulness of those rich brains, in which not a subtle 
 analogy, not a glowing thought was lost. They were 
 often pedantic and cumbrous, and yet compared with 
 those of a later day, they have much more of plain and 
 pungent expression. There is no finer English. The 
 tongue of a grave, solid, rich, strong mind found its 
 noblest utterance in the pulpit, with every variety from 
 the homely power of a Latimer to the sustained music 
 of a Taylor ; in all, a sonorous, mighty eloquence. In 
 their writing is that hearty, home-born Saxon which be- 
 longs to the early prose. It is by no means pure ; on 
 the contrary they have, as " great learned clerkes," a 
 large proportion of foreign, half-naturalized words ; but 
 yet there are no sources of genuine English richer than 
 our divines. Their speech was near the fountain-head. 
 And here we have the secret of that poetic power which 
 we see in them. If we take up Hooker on " Justifica- 
 tion," or Donne, and compare their pages at random 
 with Tillotson or Sherlock, we may note the strength of 
 those Saxon words, the happy choice of a single phrase, 
 the richness of a home-bred idiom. 
 
 There are two great periods which we may distinguish 
 
1 68 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 in these early divines. The first extends through the 
 age of Henry VIII and Edward VI; the second, from 
 Elizabeth to the Revolution. The age of Henry and 
 Edward has left a host of worthies ; but it was a time 
 too busy with the immediate strifes of the Church for the 
 literary culture of an after-day. Jewel may exhibit the 
 character of its scholarly learning, and Latimer the 
 homely preacher, who spoke the burning Gospel to king 
 and artisan. 
 
 Jewel : " Apology." — The Popish Authority. 
 
 They will say to this, I guess, civil princes have learned 
 to govern a commonwealth and to order matters of war, 
 but they understand not the secret mysteries of relig- 
 ion. If that be so, what, I pray you, is the Pope, at 
 this day, other than a monarch or a prince? or what be 
 the cardinals, who must be no other nowadays but 
 princes and kings' sons? What be they else at this 
 present in the Pope's kingdom but worklikely princes, 
 but dukes and earls, gorgeously accompanied with bands 
 of men, whithersoever they go ; oftentimes also gaily 
 arrayed with chains and collars of gold ? They have at 
 times, too, certain ornaments by themselves, as crosses, 
 pillows, hats, mitres, and palls ; which pomp the ancient 
 Bishops, Chrysostom, Augustine, and Ambrose never 
 had. Setting these things aside, what teach they? what 
 say they ? what do they ? how live they — I say not as 
 may become a bishop, but as may become a Christian 
 man ? Is it so great a matter to have a vain title, or by 
 changing a garment only, to have the name of a Bishop ? 
 
 Why, I pray you, may Caiaphas and Annas understand 
 these matters, and may not David and Esekias do the 
 same ? 
 
 C. 16, 17. For tho' we have departed from that 
 church, which these men call Catholic, and by these 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES- 1 69 
 
 means get us envy amongst them that want skill to 
 judge, yet is this enough for us, that we have gone from 
 that church which had power to err ; which Christ, who 
 cannot err, told so long before ; and which we ourselves 
 did evidently see with our own eyes to have gone both 
 from the holy Fathers, and from the Apostles, and from 
 Christ his own self; and from the Primitive and Catholic 
 Church ; and we are come, as near as we possibly could, 
 to the Church of the Apostles and of the old Catholic 
 Bishops and Fathers. For we thought it meet to take 
 the pattern of reforming religion, from whence the ground 
 of religion was first taken ; as with the ancient Father 
 Tertullian : " Look, whatsoever was first, that is pure ; 
 and whatsoever is latter, that is corrupt." Why return 
 we not to the pattern of the old churches ? Why may we 
 not hear amongst us at this time the same saying, which 
 was freely pronounced in times past in the Council of 
 Nice, with so many Bishops and Catholic fathers, and 
 nobody once speaking against it "" * * that is to say, 
 hold still the old customs ? When Esdras went about to 
 repair the ruins of the Temple of God, he went not to 
 Ephesus, although the most beautiful and gorgeous 
 temple of Diana was there ; and when he proposed to 
 restore the sacrifices and ceremonies of God, he went not 
 to Rome, although peradventure he had heard that in 
 that place were the solemn sacrifices called Hecatombse 
 and others, and Numa Pompilius' ceremonial books ; he 
 thought it enough to follow the pattern of the old 
 Temple. 
 
 Peter, Old and New. 
 
 Tell us, hath the Pope alone succeeded Peter? and 
 wherein, I pray you ? in what religion? in what office? 
 in what piece of his life hath he succeeded him ? What 
 one thing (tell me) had Peter ever like unto the Pope, or 
 the Pope like unto Peter ? Except peradventure they 
 will say thus : that Peter, when he was at Rome, never 
 taught the gospel, never fed the flock, took away the 
 keys of the kingdom of heaven, sate him down only in 
 
I ;o ENGLISH tlTERA TURE. 
 
 his castle in S. John Lateran, and pointed out with his 
 finger all the places of purgatory ; or that he gave order 
 to say masses in every corner; or that he mumbled up the 
 holy service with a low voice, and in an unknown lan- 
 guage ; and that he hanged up the sacrament in every 
 temple and on every altar, and carried the same about 
 before him whithersoever he went, upon an ambling 
 jennet, with lights and bells ; and that he consecrated 
 with his holy breath oil, wax, wood, bells, chalices, 
 churches, and altars; and that he sold jubilees, graces, 
 liberties, palls, * * * indulgences and pardons, * * * 
 and that he called himself by the name of head of the 
 church, Bishop of Bishops, alone most holy; or took on 
 him the right over other folks' churches ; or that he main- 
 tained wars; or that he, sitting in his chair, with his triple 
 crown full of labels, with sumptuous gorgeousness, with 
 his royal sceptre, with the diadem of gold, and glittering 
 with stones, was carried about, not on a palfrey, but on 
 the shoulders of men. These things, no doubt,' did Peter 
 at Rome in times past, and left them in charge to his 
 successors, as you would say, from hand to hand ; for 
 these things be nowadays done at Rome by the popes, 
 and be so done, as though nothing else ought to be done. 
 
 And now listen to Latimer, and hear what the Church 
 of England spake in the day when her clergy were 
 
 — no Sabbath, drawlers of old saws 
 Distilled from some worm-cankered homily, 
 But spurred at heart with fiercest energy 
 To embattail and to wall about their cause 
 With iron-worded proof. 
 
 We imagine him as he is described on his trial before 
 the Bishop of London. 
 
 Master Latimer, having a kerchief on his head, and a 
 great cap, such as townsmen use, with two broad flaps to 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. I^I 
 
 button under his chin, wearing an old thread-bare Bristol 
 frieze gown girded to his body with a penny leather gir- 
 dle, at the which hanged by a long string of leather his 
 Testament ; and his spectacles, without case, depending 
 about his neck upon his breast. 
 
 There is in him an extreme homeliness ; often an even 
 coarser vein, yet oftener the simple power of true elo- 
 quence ; never affectation, never rant, never the rancid 
 diatribe of a Spurgeon, but the power that moves the 
 heart of men. He would not suit a fashionable modern 
 church, but we must not so measure him. 
 
 Sermon o?t St. John Evangelist's Day. 
 Luke ii, 8-12. 
 
 " And there were shepherds abiding in the field and 
 watching their flock by night." 
 
 I shewed you yesterday, right worshipful, what was 
 the occasion that Mary, the mother of Christ, came to 
 Bethlehem ; where it was prophesied he should be born. 
 
 The occasion was this, Octavius, being emperor over 
 that great empire of Rome at that time, when Christ 
 should be born, sent out a general proclamation that all 
 countries underneath his dominion should be taxed. Now 
 God intended another thing. Octavius sought but to 
 fill his purse and make money ; but God sought occasion 
 to fulfill his prophecy. 
 
 A wonderful thing to consider the works of God ! 
 The emperor Octavius served God's purpose ; and yet he 
 knew nothing of him. 
 
 We have here to consider the great benefits of God, 
 the Almighty Father, that it hath pleased him, thro' 
 his great goodness and love which he bare toward us, 
 who were his enemies, that it hath pleased him, I say, to 
 
172 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 give unto us for our sakes his only Son into these miser- 
 ies and calamities. 
 
 Now for to come to the knowledge of this benefit, you 
 
 must consider, first: what he was before he was incarnate 
 
 and made man, for when we know what he was before he 
 
 was made man, then we know what he hath done for us. 
 
 x * * ■& * w * 
 
 Now, let us go forward, and consider his extreme 
 poverty. They came to Bethlehem where they could get 
 never a lodging in no inn, and so were compelled to lie 
 in a stable. Some will say now : oh, what a wicked city 
 was this! what a cruel people v/as this! But when we 
 consider all things well, we shall find that we be even as 
 wicked as they were. For are not we given nowadays 
 to covetousness, so that we regard not the poor and 
 miserable people ? Therefore, if thou wilt cry out upon 
 the Bethlehemites, then cry out on thyself ; for thou art 
 as wicked, yea — more, more wicked than they were. 
 
 But I warrant you there was many a jolly damsel at 
 that time in Bethlehem, yet amongst them all there was 
 not one found that would humble herself so much as 
 once to go see poor Mary in the stable, and to comfort her. 
 No, no, they were too fine to take so much pains. I 
 warrant you they had bracelets and vardingals ; and were 
 trimmed with all manner of fine raiment, like as there 
 be many nowadays amongst us which study nothing else 
 but how they may devise fine raiment ; and in the same 
 season they suffer poor Mary to lie in the stable ; that is 
 to say, the poor people of God they suffer to perish for 
 lack of necessaries. But what was her swaddling clothes, 
 wherein she laid the king of heaven and earth? No 
 doubt it was poor gear ; peradventure it was her kerchef, 
 which she took from her head, or such like gear; for I 
 think Mary had not much fine linen ; she was not 
 trimmed up as our women be nowadays ; I think, indeed, 
 Mary had never a vardingal, for in the old time women 
 were content with honest and single garments ; now they 
 have found out these roundabouts. 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. 1 73 
 
 Now followeth in the text, " And there were shep- 
 herds." I pray you, to whom was the nativity of Christ 
 first opened ? To the Bishops, or great lords, which were 
 at that time in Bethlehem? or to those jolly damsels 
 with their bracelets, their vardingals, or with their 
 roundabouts? No, no, they had too many lets to trim 
 and dress themselves, that they could have no time to 
 hear of the Nativity of Christ. But his nativity was 
 revealed to the shepherds ; and it was revealed unto 
 them in the night time, when everybody was at rest ; 
 and here note the diligence of those shepherds ; for if 
 they had been deceitful fellows, that when their masters 
 had put them in trust to keep their sheep, they had been 
 drinking in the ale house all night, as some of our ser- 
 vants do nowadays, surely the angels had not appeared 
 to them, to have told them this great joy and good tid- 
 ings. Here by these shepherds all men may learn to attend 
 upon their office and calling. For I tell you these poor, 
 unlearned shepherds condemn many a stout and great 
 learned clerk ; for these had but charge over brute beasts, 
 and the others have the cure over God's lambs, and yet 
 they are so careless, yea — and most part intendeth not 
 to feed the sheep but to be fed of the sheep. Indeed 
 there be some ministers in England which do no good 
 at all, and therefore it were better for them to leave the 
 benefices and make room for others. Therefore let him 
 not be ashamed to learn of these shepherds; God doth 
 consecrate every vocation : that he that feareth God 
 shall be acceptable, though he be a poor shepherd, or 
 cobbler, that is not the matter. 
 
 And so it appeareth that we may not seek Christ in 
 the glistering of this world, for what is so common as 
 water?- or bread and wine? Yet he promised to be 
 found there, when he is sought with a faithful heart. 
 So will you have Christ ? Where shall you find him ? 
 Not in the jollities of this world, but in rags in the poor 
 people. Have you any poor people in your town or 
 city ? Seek there among the rags, there shall you find 
 him. But you must understand when I speak of poverty, 
 
174 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 I speak not of this wilful poverty of the monks and 
 friars ; for that same was an hypocritical poverty, that 
 same poverty was full of all manner of delicate things. 
 
 * * * * ^ 
 
 But I speak of the very poor and needy flock of Christ 
 which have not wherewith to live in this world. 
 
 Now to make an end, consider what I have said how 
 Christ was born, in what poverty and in what misery. 
 Remember wliat manner of Saviour he is ; namely a per- 
 fect Saviour, which healeth all our sorrows, when we 
 believe in Him. 
 
 The Almighty God give us grace to live and believe 
 so that we may attain to that felicity, which he hath 
 promised by his Son our Saviour! To whom, with God 
 the Father and the Holy Ghost, be honour world without 
 end. Amen. 
 
 For the great age of Elizabeth and James, reaching 
 to the time of Charles, we have Hooker, the statesman of 
 the Church ; Hall, the moralist : Donne, the pulpit schol- 
 ar ; and Jeremy Taylor, the saint and poet in one. 
 
 Hooker, to my mind, is, in many regards, the great 
 type of the English Church ; " no greater in learning, less 
 subtle than Andrewes, less lofty than Cudworth." But 
 he represents that stately, massive, harmonious mind 
 which upbuilded it. The work of " Ecclesiastical Polity " 
 remains to this day like the Pyramids, alone amidst the 
 barren sands of church polemics. 
 
 It was a marvel even then. Clement VIII uttered 
 what his age and ours must repeat. " There is no learn, 
 ing that this man hath not searched into ; nothing too 
 hard for his understanding ; his books will get reverence 
 
.ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. 1 75 
 
 by age ; for there is in them such seeds of eternity, that 
 they shall last till the last fire shall consume all learn- 
 ing." 
 
 A quiet student in his parsonage, he pondered the idea 
 of the Church, as builded on the Divine Law, until it 
 grew not, as with the Roman, a mechanical, external 
 fabric, nor with the Puritan, a formless faith, but a deep, 
 large, Catholic structure. His first book unfolds the 
 principle of Law; he traces it to God, and upturns the 
 Calvinistic idea of an arbitrary will ; his God is one of 
 Law rooted in Holiness ; he discourses of angelic law as if 
 he heard the music of the spheres ; then the law of man, 
 rational, free ; then the nature of all social institutions 
 as rooted in law ; then the Church as the perfection of 
 social harmony. In the second book he overturns, with 
 clear logic, the theory of the Puritan, demanding the 
 rigid prescript word of Scripture. But here he opposes 
 to it no traditionary theory of modern Oxford, no devel- 
 opment notion of Newman ; but a Church authority, 
 subordinate to the Divine and clearly defined. The re- 
 maining books are the application of these principles. 
 Everywhere is the same grandeur of thought. He can- 
 not speak of a Church vestment, but he bases custom on 
 law. Here and there are overstrained notions of sacra- 
 mental grace, but in these he is never rigid, never vague, 
 always large, always judicious. In that day of tradition 
 and petty strifes he stood not as a Puritan, nor as Arch- 
 Bishop Laud, a verbal Anglican, but a (Broad) Church- 
 
I76 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 man. Yet he is never a speculative thinker. He is Eng- 
 lish ; he seeks the idea in its real form. It is a work for 
 the Churchman to study in this day of fragmentary 
 thought and party shibboleth. It is a work for the 
 statesman and the jurist. The book rises like a cathe- 
 dral, with the unity of one thought, yet in all the har- 
 mony of its vast proportions ; every part finished, the 
 solid stone wrought, as it towers up, into the richest 
 tracery, and in every niche a statue. I think the style 
 of Hooker the noblest in our language. " It is the very 
 incarnation of his thought ; if sometimes it is involved, 
 artificial, yet it is a glorious art. Its great feature is maj- 
 esty ; yet it abounds with pathos, with delicacy, with the 
 nicest, rarest touches of beauty. There is in him the 
 sweep of an eagle, who never dashes at once upon his 
 object, but soars as if he loved to soar, circling around 
 the thought, gradually approaching, until at last he stoops 
 to bear it away." 
 
 Hooker : Book First. 
 
 Now, if Nature 'should intermit her course, and leave 
 altogether, though it were but for a while, the observa- 
 tion of her own laws ; if those principal and mother ele- 
 ments of the world, whereof all things in this lower world 
 are made, should lose the qualities which now they have ; 
 if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our head 
 should loosen and dissolve itself ; if celestial spheres 
 should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular 
 volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen ; 
 if the prince of the lights of heaven, who now as a giant 
 doth run his course unwearied, should, as it were, through 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. I J J 
 
 a languishing faintness, begin to stand and rest himself ; 
 if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the 
 times and seasons of the year blend themselves by dis- 
 ordered and confused mixtures, and the winds breathe at 
 their last gasp, the clouds yield no rain, the earth be de- 
 feated of heavenly influence, the fruits of the earth pine 
 away, as children at the withered breasts of their mother, 
 no longer able to yield them relief; what would become* 
 of man himself, whom these things do now all serve? 
 
 Appetite is the Will's solicitor, and Will is Appetite's 
 controller. 
 
 We hope, therefore, that to reform ourselves, if at 
 any time we have done amiss, is not to sever ourselves 
 from the church we were of before. In the church we 
 were, and we are so still. 
 
 Whatsoever is unto salvation termed necessary, all 
 such things if Scripture did not comprehend, the church 
 of God should not be able to measure out the length and 
 breadth of that way wherein she forever is to walk. But 
 as to those things, which are accessory hereunto, to alter 
 is no otherwise to change that way, than a path is 
 changed by altering only the uppermost face thereof; 
 which be it laid with gravel, or set with grass, or paved 
 with stones, remaineth still the same path. 
 
 They err, therefore, who think that of the will of God 
 to do this or that there is no reason bridles his will. 
 
 But so it is, the name of the light of nature is made 
 hateful with men ; the star of reason and learning and all 
 other such like helps, beginning to be no otherwise 
 thought of than if it were an unlucky comet ; or as if 
 God had so accursed it, that it should never shine or give 
 light in things concerning our duty any way toward him, 
 but to be esteemed as that star in the Revelation, called 
 
1/8 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Wormwood ; which being fallen from heaven, maketh 
 rivers and waters in which it falleth so bitter, that men 
 tasting them die therof. 
 
 Reform. 
 
 He who will take away extreme heat by setting the 
 body in extremity of cold, shall undoubtedly remove the 
 disease, but together with it the diseased too. The first 
 thing, therefore, in skilful cures is the knowledge of the 
 part affected ; the next is of the evil which doth affect 
 it ; the last is not only of the kind, but also of the meas- 
 ure of contrary things whereby to remove it. 
 
 Hall is the moral essayist of that day ; he is a satirist, 
 a wit, but his gifts are hallowed by a saintly grace. His 
 ''Contemplations" and "Meditations" brim with con- 
 ceits, but conceit is not there. His fancy is less gor- 
 geous, less sustained than Taylor's ; sharp, glancing, it 
 sparkles over every homeliest object, finds sermons in 
 stones, and subtle analogies in an insect ; his wit is not 
 broad, or slashing, like South, but keen, subtle, reflective. 
 
 Music by Night. 
 
 How sweetly the music sounds in this dead season ; 
 in the day-time it would not so much affect the ear; all 
 harmonious sounds are advanced by a silent darkness. 
 Thus the gospel never sounds so sweet as in the night of 
 persecution, or in our own private affliction. 
 
 Hypocrites. 
 
 There are many kinds of hypocrites. Of all birds, 
 the peacock makes the fairest shew, and the worst noise. 
 This, indeed, is a hypocrite to the eye. There are others, 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. 1 79 
 
 as the blackbird, that looks black and sooty, but sings 
 well. This is a hypocrite to the ear. Others please us 
 much both in shew and voice, but are unpleasant in their 
 carriage and condition, as the popinjay, whose colours 
 are beautiful, and notes are delightful, yet it is apt to do 
 mischief in scratching and biting any hand that comes 
 near it. For me, let my profession agree with my words, 
 my words with my actions, my actions with my heart. , 
 
 Winnowing. 
 
 See how in the winnowing of the wheat the fullest 
 and largest grains always lie the lowest, and the lightest 
 take up the highest place. It is no otherwise in reality. 
 They who are most humble are fullest of grace, and 
 oftentimes they are most conspicuous who have least 
 substance. 
 
 Conscience. 
 
 It is said of the elephant, that, aware of his own de- 
 formity, he cannot endure to see his own face in the 
 water, but seeks for troubled and muddy channels. This 
 we see well moralized in men of an evil conscience, who 
 know their souls so filthy they dare not so much as 
 view them, but shift off all checks of their former in- 
 iquity with a number of vain excuses. 
 
 Insects and Men. 
 
 When I look upon these flies and gnats, let me re- 
 flect what am I to my Infinite Creator more than these ? 
 And if these had reason, why would they not expostulate 
 with their Maker why they are only such ; why they live 
 to so little purpose, and die without notice and use? I 
 will thank my God for what I am, for what I have ; and 
 never quarrel with him for what I want. 
 
 Donne is at once the sublimest, the most touching, 
 yet most grotesque of orators. We wonder as we read, 
 
l8o ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 how such sermons could be listened to, mosaics full of 
 rabbinical fancies, sprinkled with Latin, stuffed with od- 
 dities ; yet, at the next turn we are bowed in tears and 
 awe by some grand sentence out of a heart " baptized 
 with the Holy Ghost and with fire. 
 
 St. Diuistan s. 
 
 In the house where we stand now, the house of God 
 and of his saints, God affords us a fair beam of this con- 
 solation in the phrase of this text also, "they were dead." 
 How applicable to you in this place is that which God 
 said to Moses: "Put off thy shoes, for thou treadest on 
 holy ground." Put off all confidence, all standing, all re- 
 lying on worldly assurances, and consider on what ground 
 you tread ; on ground so holy, as that all the ground is 
 made of the bodies of Christians, and therein hath re- 
 ceived a second consecration. Every puff of wind within 
 these walls may blow the father into the son's eyes, or 
 the wife into the husband's, or his into hers, or both into 
 the children's, or the children's into both. Every grain 
 of dust that flies here is a piece of a Christian ; you need 
 not distinguish your pews by figures ; you need not say 
 I sit within so many of such a neighbour, but I sit with- 
 in so many inches of my husband's, or wife's, or child's, 
 or friend's grave. 
 
 Faith. 
 
 As the soul is infused by God, but diffused over the 
 whole body, and so there is a man, so faith is infused 
 from God, but diffused into our works, and so there is a 
 saint. Practice is the incarnation of faith ; faith is incor- 
 porated in a body, by works. 
 
 Ignorant and Lettered Sin. 
 
 Truly when a weak or ignorant man departs into any 
 vicious way, tho' in that case he do adhere to the enemy, 
 and do serve the devil against God, yet he carries away, 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. l8l 
 
 but a single man, and serves but as a common soldier; 
 but he that hath good parts and a good education carries 
 a regiment in his person, and arms and ammunition for a 
 thousand in himself. 
 
 Conversion. 
 
 A house is not clean, tho' all the dust be swept to- 
 gether, if it lie still in a corner, within doors; and it is 
 not clean neither, tho' the dust be thrown out, if there 
 hang cobwebs around the walls, in how dark corners 
 soever; the conscience is not clean, tho' the sins be cast 
 upon God's mercy, by the merits of his Son, if there 
 remain in all, but a cobweb, a little lust, or sinful delight 
 in the memory of those sins which I had formerly com- 
 mitted. 
 
 Heaven and earth are a musical instrument; if you 
 touch a string below, the motion goes to the top ; any 
 good done to Christ's poor members upon earth, affects 
 Him in heaven. 
 
 We cannot omit Cudworth, the greatest name in elder 
 philosophy. Two sermons only are printed, but the first 
 of these has no fellow in English divinity. We may read 
 it a hundred times, when wearied with theological word 
 fights, and it bears us into a purer ether, a serener air. 
 It has thought enough, and splendor of word to set up a 
 hundred Melvilles. 
 
 We have much inquiry concerning knowledge in 
 these latter times. There be many that speak of new 
 glimpses and discoveries of truth, of dawnings of gospel 
 light, and no question but God hath reserved much of this 
 for the very evening and sunset of the world ; but yet T 
 wish we could meantime see that day to dawn, as the 
 apostle speaks of that daystar to arise in men's hearts. 
 
I 82 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Ink and paper can make us never Christians, can never 
 beget a new nature, a living principle in us, can never 
 form Christ, or any true notion of spiritual things in our 
 hearts. Cold theories and maxims, dry disputes, bare 
 syllogistical reasonings, could never yet of themselves 
 beget the least glimpse of true heavenly light, the least 
 sap of saving knowledge in any heart. 
 
 Would we know whether we know Christ aright, let us 
 consider if the life of Christ be in us. We are nowhere 
 commanded to pry into these secrets, but the wholesome 
 counsel given us is this, " to make our calling and election 
 sure." God's everlasting decree is too dazzling an object 
 for us to set our eyes upon. It is far easier and safer for 
 us to look upon the rays of his goodness, as they" are re- 
 flected in our hearts, and there to read the mild and 
 gentle characters of God's love to us, in our love to him 
 and hearty compliance in his will, as it is safer for us, if 
 we would see the sun, to look upon it here below in a 
 pail of water, than to cast up our daring eyes on the 
 body of the sun itself, which is too radiant and scorching 
 for us. 
 
 Let us not therefore make this our first attempt tow- 
 ard God and religion to persuade ourselves of these 
 everlasting decrees ; for if at our first flight we aim too 
 high, we shall haply but scorch our wings and be struck 
 back with lightning, as those giants of old that would 
 needs attempt to assault heaven. The way to obtain a 
 good assurance of our title to heaven, is not to clamber 
 up by a ladder of our own ungrounded persuasions, but 
 to dig as low as hell by humility and self-denial. 
 
 When our heart is once turned into a conformity with 
 the word of God, when we feel our will perfectly to con- 
 cur with his will, we shall then presently perceive a spirit 
 of adoption within ourselves, teaching us to say, Abba, 
 Father. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 The great mystery of the gospel is to establish a godlike 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. 1 83 
 
 frame and disposition of spirit in the hearts of men ; not 
 only to cover sin by spreading the purple robe of Christ's 
 death and suffering over it, while it still remaineth in us 
 with all its filth and noisomeness unremoved ; but to 
 cleanse and free us from it. 
 
 What then ! must we say that though he be willing, he 
 is unable to rescue his crucified son now bleeding on 
 the cross; then must sin be more powerful than God. 
 No, surely there is a weakness and impotency in all evil, 
 but a masculine strength and vigor in all goodness. Is 
 God powerful to kill and destroy, to damn and tor- 
 ment? and is he not powerful to save, nay, it is the 
 sweetest flower in the garland of his attributes, the 
 richest diadem in his crown of glory that he is mighty to 
 save, and this is far more magnificent than to be styled 
 mighty to destroy. For that, except it be in a way of 
 justice, speaks no power at all, for the root of all power 
 is goodness. 
 
 Or must we say, lastly, that God is indeed able to 
 rescue us out of the power of sin and Satan, but yet 
 sometimes to exercise his absolute authority, he delights 
 rather in plunging wretched souls down to infernal night 
 and everlasting darkness. What shall we then make of 
 the God of the whole world ? Nothing but a cruel and 
 dreadful Erinnys, with curled fiery snakes about his head, 
 and firebrands in his hands. 
 
 ***** 
 
 O divine Love ! the sweet harmony of souls ! the 
 music of angels ! the joy of God's own heart ! the very 
 darling of his bosom, the source of true happiness! the 
 pure quintessence of heaven ! that which reconciles the 
 jarring principles of the world, and makes them all 
 chime together ; that which melts men's hearts into one 
 another. Let us express this sweet, harmonious affection 
 in these jarring times, that so, if it be possible, we may 
 turn the world into better music. Let us follow truth in 
 love. It is not wrangling disputes that are the mighty 
 
1 84 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 pillars that underprop the truth ; if we would underset it 
 with the holiness of our hearts and lives, it should never 
 fail. 
 
 For truth is great, and stronger than all things ; all the 
 earth calleth upon truth, and the heaven blesseth it. All 
 works tremble and shake at it. The truth endureth, and 
 is always strong ; it liveth and conquereth for ever more. 
 It is the strength, kingdom, power, and majesty of all 
 ages. Blessed be the God of Truth ! 
 
 And what shall we say of Jeremy Taylor ? We can add 
 nothing, but only write down our love and reverence. He 
 is the very type of English goodness. It is not for the- 
 ology that we read him, although he is a noble instance 
 of the semi-Arminian of his day, acute, learned, yet of 
 the broadest sympathies. But it is in the " Life of 
 Christ," the " Holy Living and Dying," and the " Ser- 
 mons " that we read him. Poetic fancy, quickened 
 by love, and warmed by a meditative thought, that 
 " sleeps and broods on his own heart," are his graces. 
 It is false to call him the " Shakespeare of divines " ; 
 he has nothing of Shakespeare but his knowledge of the 
 human soul, his strength, his dramatic expression. Nor 
 is he the " Cicero of the pulpit." His is a beauty most 
 artless, always drawing you to the spiritual heights 
 above. His long sentences glide on, not sweeping as 
 Hooker's, but gentle, suggesting new relations of the 
 thought, playing with rich fancies, and then gathering 
 all into some solemn conclusion. We retire into his 
 sentences as into the long aisles of some open church, 
 where we may kneel and pray. We wind along as in 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. 1 85 
 
 the ascending steps of a tower, where at each flight 
 we pause and look out of a window, here a sunny 
 slope, and next the spires of a far city, there the 
 glimpse of the ocean, and there a river, sleeping in 
 sunshine, and on its bank a group of happy children. 
 
 For so I have seen a lark rising from his bed of 
 grass, and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes 
 to get to heaven, and climb above the clouds, but the 
 poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of 
 an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and 
 inconstant, descending more at every breath of the 
 tempest than it could recover by the vibration and fre- 
 quent weighing of his wings, till the little creature was 
 forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was 
 over ; and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise 
 and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an 
 angel, as he passed sometimes through the air, about 
 his ministers here below. So is the prayer of a good 
 man. 
 
 All the succession of time, all the changes in nature, 
 all the varieties of light and darkness, the thousand thou- 
 sands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to 
 every man, and to every creature, doth preach our 
 funeral sermon, and calls us to look and see how the old 
 sexton, Time, throws up the earth, and digs a grave 
 where we must lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our 
 bodies, till they rise again in a fair or in an intolerable 
 eternity. 
 
 Thus nature calls us to meditate of death by those 
 things which are the instruments of acting it ; and God 
 by all the variety of his providence makes us see death 
 everywhere, in all variety of circumstances, and dressed 
 up for all the fancies and expectation of every single 
 person. 
 
1 86 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 * * * And how many teeming mothers have re- 
 joiced over their swelling wombs,- and pleased them- 
 selves in becoming the channels of blessing to a family, 
 and the midwife hath quickly bound their heads and 
 feet, and carried them forth to burial. * * *. 
 
 You can go no whither but you tread upon a dead 
 man's bones. 
 
 # # # x * * * 
 
 But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the 
 clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, 
 and full with the dew of Heaven as a lamb's fleece ; 
 but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin 
 modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe re- 
 tirements, it began to put. on darkness, and to decline to 
 softness and the symptoms of a sickly age ; it bowed the 
 head, and broke its stalk, and at night having lost some 
 of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of 
 weeds and outworn faces. The same is the portion of 
 every man and every woman. 
 
 * ■& •# * * # * 
 
 Eternal God, Almighty Father of men and angels, by 
 whose care and providence I am preserved and blessed, 
 comforted and assisted, watch over me in my sleep, and 
 whether I sleep or wake, let me be Thy servant. Be 
 Thou first and last in all my thoughts, and the guide and 
 continual assistance of all my actions. Preserve my 
 body, pardon the sin of my soul, and sanctify my spirit. 
 Let me always live holily and soberly ; and when I die, 
 receive my soul into Thy hands ! 
 
 We may well cherish some knowledge of this old di- 
 vinity ; that with our poor efforts to reproduce the cos- 
 tume of the past, we may gain, besides its traditions, its 
 mysticism and its quaint grace, the secret of its true and 
 lasting strength. Our aim should not be to imitate, but 
 to learn the Christian, the English heart, which can 
 
ELIZABETHAN DIVINES. 1 87 
 
 create not another 17th century, but a 19th century as 
 strong, as wise, as fervent, as living, and which shall speak 
 not theirs, but other words as the spirit giveth utter- 
 ance. 
 
 Written in a Volume of Latimer's Sermons. 
 
 Chieftains of England's hero race ! whose life 
 
 Wrestled for Christ, and in the burning flame 
 
 Walked unconsumed ! Still have we kept your name, 
 But where the spirit that shall edge our strife ? 
 Within our halls to-day your armor hangs, 
 
 The rusted pride of the old battle-field, 
 
 The empty helm, the sleeping spear and shield ; 
 While ever and anon an echo clangs, 
 As if your stalwart hands the war-note pealed, 
 
 Then dies away, a hollow funeral wail. 
 
 Dwarfs of a little day ! that heavy mail, 
 That sword of God our lean arms cannot wield, 
 
 Only we view, awe-struck, the statue vast, 
 
 And giant thews of a forgotten Past. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 FRANCIS BACON. 
 
 THE name of Bacon stands alone, among the leaders 
 in the great age of Elizabeth, not merely as that of 
 one who has made England the home of letters and 
 eloquence, but who belongs to the world. It was his 
 genius that opened the pathway of modern science; and 
 although it has gone far beyond his beginnings, he shares 
 "the immortality and continuance," in his own words, of 
 the knowledge which wrought such wonders in our age. 
 And yet it is a strange irony of history that one whom 
 all rank among the Dii Major es should be even to-day a 
 riddle alike in his personal character and in his scientific 
 claims. In our own time we have had the most brilliant 
 essays from the pen of writers like Macaulay, and elabo- 
 rate critiques of his philosophy, from Playfair and 
 Lewes. 
 
 I do not propose to give more than a passing sketch ; it 
 would be egotism should I attempt to give in any sense a 
 thorough exposition of a subject that demands the range 
 of science. My purpose is rather with the first great 
 English prose writer. Yet I must be pardoned if I say 
 that after thoughtful study I am persuaded that a large 
 
 188 
 
FRANCIS BACON. ISO, 
 
 part of the criticism, and even the eulogy, only proves 
 how little he is understood. It seems to me one of the 
 most needed inquiries,,in a day when a materialistic school 
 has so often usurped the name of his science, and a poor 
 utilitarianism sneers at any education beyond that of 
 popular literature, popular art, and popular morals, to 
 show, in the spirit of Bacon himself, the unity and har- 
 mony of all real knowledge. 
 
 There are few great men in whom the scientific charac- 
 ter seems so utterly apart from other features. We honor 
 Bacon "the Chancellor of nature " more than the Chan- 
 cellor of England. Yet I think an intellectual judgment 
 of such a mind can hardly be' true, without a glance at 
 his biography. It is to me, I confess, a great relief that 
 modern history, among the many juster verdicts which it 
 has given on those much-abused names of the past, Crom- 
 well and Macchiavelli, has of late done somewhat to wipe 
 out the blots on Bacon's fame. I have always felt that 
 the famous line of Pope, 
 
 The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind, 
 
 was a paradox beyond belief. The highest reach even of 
 intellectual power cannot be coupled with the base vices 
 charged against the writer of the " Novum Organum." We 
 ought not indeed to allow our reverence for his genius to 
 blind us to his moral defects ; but even the most unspar- 
 ing critics owe him that justice which he begged in his last 
 testament, where he bequeathed his fame to posterity, and 
 
1 90 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 " after some time he passed away." I have read with 
 care the several works on this subject, from the earlier 
 charges to the brilliant and bitter eseay of Macaulay ; and, 
 on the other side, the careful writings of Spedding, with 
 the latest criticism of our time. My own conviction is, 
 that each of the positive charges against him is ground- 
 less. It is clear that he was no traitor to his friend 
 Essex, but did his best to shield him, and at last only 
 fulfilled his duty as the legal servant of the court in the 
 painful trial. It is clear that he was not, as Macaulay 
 has caricatured him, the base sycophant of the court, or 
 that a single proof can be found of his yielding to the 
 king more than the royal prerogative of that day could 
 claim. Nor is there any evidence that he accepted a 
 bribe, or sold an office. The utmost that can be brought 
 against him is, that he did not sternly reform the bad 
 custom which had crept into the courts, of receiving 
 gifts beyond the income of his office. It was a source of 
 corruption which he should have cleansed. We have the 
 right to blame him for his want of a higher morality, but 
 no right to find in it a personal defilement. He was no 
 better and no worse than most of the public men of his 
 time. It was his misfortune at last to be chosen as the 
 scapegoat, when the policy of the court put on one of its 
 occasional fits of righteousness, and he was handed down 
 to disgrace. 
 
 I believe that this is a fair estimate of his character. 
 If we judge him by his time, we shall have much to ex- 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 191 
 
 cuse. It was a court where a royal despotism and a 
 servile flattery were the fashion, even with good men, to 
 a degree that amazes us to-day. We read with disgust 
 the address of Bacon, in his "Advancement of Learning," 
 to the pedant on the theme: "There hath not been since 
 Christ's time any king or temporal monarch which hath 
 been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and 
 human." Yet if we turn to some of the addresses of 
 Cranmer to Henry, or even the style of the good Hooker, 
 touching God's " servant Elizabeth," and " the happy 
 days of her regiment," we may know the euphuism of 
 the age. 
 
 Macaulay, in his keen essay on Macchiavelli, has shown 
 the secret of the time when the same man could be a 
 republican yet write the " Prince." But he might, we 
 would think, be as just in his judgment of Bacon. Any 
 who have studied his political essays must have felt, with 
 all their insight into human nature, the Macchiavellian 
 element in them, the astute statecraft, the maxims of an 
 age when the public morality of England was far below 
 our own. In this light we may say to the critics of Bacon, 
 that they " are judging Manlius in sight of the Capitol." 
 He can never be placed in the highest rank of those, like 
 Plato and More, who blend with their intellectual gifts a 
 moral grandeur. There was in him the clear, cold brain, 
 such as may make the man of comprehensive science, the 
 statesman like Cavour, the artist like Goethe, but with a 
 far weaker share of the moral element. 
 
I9 2 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 We pass now to the life of Bacon as the reformer and 
 leader of science. It is, indeed, the most wonderful 
 feature of his career, that in the midst of such profes- 
 sional and public work he should have found leisure for 
 studies so apart from his occupation. We read that from 
 his early youth he had been absorbed in scientific enquir- 
 ies, and even before thirty had sketched the outlines of a 
 system, to which he gave the sounding name of the 
 "Greatest Birth of Time/' We cannot attempt here any 
 full analysis of his works, but such a general view as will 
 show his place and influence. He was a writer of most 
 versatile genius, historian, essayist, as well as scientist. 
 Were he to be regarded only as a master of English 
 style, the " Advancement of Learning," and the " Essays " 
 are the richest model of strength and grace in that fertile 
 age. But we must first give study to the philosophical 
 system on which his world-wide fame rests. 
 
 To understand the work of Bacon, then, we must 
 study aright the state of philosophy in his day. It is a 
 great mistake to claim, as has been so often done by his 
 English followers, that the first step in the change from 
 the abstract systems of the Middle Age, or the first dis- 
 covery of scientific laws is due to him. The reign of the 
 scholastic metaphysics had been already disputed. Yet 
 science had only begun to feel its way toward the knowl- 
 edge of its own capacities. The sole path in which it 
 had thus far achieved any great result, that of astronomy, 
 was one of mathematical hypothesis more than of exact 
 
FRANCIS BACON, 1 93 
 
 induction ; and it was not, as Whewell has well said, till 
 the laws of motion had been afterward proved by Galileo, 
 that the heliocentric system could be called science. 
 Astronomy itself till after Kepler was mingled with the 
 fancies of astrology. In other fields of natural inquiry 
 there was little or no advance. The metaphysical no-| 
 tions of substance and quality, matter and form, entered 
 into every system. 
 
 There were fragmentary hints of science, and guesses 
 at the dividing lines between the realms of pure reason 
 and that of nature. But there was needed a compre- 
 hensive mind, large and keen enough to map out the 
 whole terra incognita of knowledge, to show in this 
 chaotic change from the Middle Age to the modern 
 mind the method of real progress. 
 
 The scientific treatises of Bacon should be regarded as 
 parts of one whole; and indeed in the Latin original 
 they so appear. Of this stately building the " De Aug- 
 ments " forms the Propylaea, as a sketch of the state and 
 right method of human knowledge in his day ; the 
 " Novum Organum " states the laws of scientific study ; 
 and the third and last part is a collection of various 
 treatises on special branches of natural study. The two 
 books on the " Proficience and Advancement of Learn- 
 ing," first written in English and published in 1605, give 
 us, without doubt, the best idea of his comprehensive 
 genius, as well as his masterly style. It is hard to find 
 one writer in that early age who comes so near to the 
 
194 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 perfect English utterance. He blends with a keen wit 
 and a wealth of expression rising often to poetic fulness, 
 that clearness of thought, that massive strength which 
 kept him from any waste of words. The prose of Milton 
 pours like a torrent over the banks, but with Bacon it 
 rolls as a great river within its boundaries. Beyond 
 almost any other writer he can express a weighty idea in 
 a short sentence. He can be homely or sublime at will. 
 His power of statement is admirable, and each illustra- 
 tion is an argument. He has the usual faults of his time, 
 the tendency to verbal conceits, and a parade of classic 
 learning. Yet we feel them less with him because they 
 are lost in the greater breadth of his own thought. 
 
 No juster criticism, indeed, has been given us of the 
 " bent of those times toward copia more than weight," 
 the " rhetorical delicacies " of Car and Ascham, than 
 Bacon in this very treatise. No writer has more avoided 
 that first distemper of learning, when men study words 
 more than matter, yet reached more nearly the union of 
 matter with form. 
 
 But to pass now to the argument of the book. It is 
 not easy to give a condensed sketch, because it contains 
 at once so vast a range of learning for that time, yet at 
 each step such subtle suggestions in special branches of 
 knowledge. We may not regard his division of the 
 powers of the mind or the departments of science to-day 
 as thorough. But it is a complete picture of the state of 
 knowledge then, and its insight into the methods of dis- 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 1 95 
 
 covery since, is at times a marvellous foresight. He 
 opens with a discourse on the excellency of learning, 
 taking up the several charges against it. The divine 
 attacks human learning as leading to unbelief, especially 
 because the contemplation of second causes weakens the 
 dependence on God. Bacon answers, that true knowledge 
 is not to be refused because of false. There is " nothing 
 parcel of the world denied to man's inquiry." Although 
 the knowledge of a first cause is the highest, yet as God 
 works only by second causes, man must begin with these. 
 V A little knowledge may lead to Atheism, but further 
 proceeding bringeth back to religion." It is to be noted 
 here that many passages like this are repeated in the 
 " Essays" ; and in almost all cases, they seem choice and 
 favorite ideas of Bacon. He insists, again, in answer to 
 the next class of objectors, that knowledge does not mar 
 practical wisdom. The true scholar will never be a man. 
 of the antipodes, treading against the world we live in. 
 There are several noble thoughts here on the real in- 
 fluence of men of learning, compared with the baser 
 standard of the self-styled practical men. 
 
 Indeed, it is very hard to believe when we read Bacon's 
 high and almost Platonic ideal of the scholar, that we are 
 listening to a wily politician and a sordid judge. He re- 
 bukes the disposition of authors to ask favor of the great 
 in the words, " Books should have no patrons but truth, 
 and reason." But now he passes from the defence of 
 learning to its three special defects. He rebukes the 
 
I96 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 fantastical tendency of his time to spend too much on 
 words, a disease which came in with the revival of letters 
 and had affected English authors. He rebukes the con- 
 tentious spirit, the vice of the School-men, leading to those 
 " vermiculate" questions, that are like the spider's web, 
 spun out of her own bowels, with no profit for real learn- 
 ing. But more than all he unmasks the third disease, 
 that of untruth. Unlike modern philosophy, he holds 
 that " Truth of being and truth of knowing are one, 
 differing no more than the direct beam and the beam 
 reflected." All knowledge, which rests on mere tradition, 
 or things weakly warranted, legendary history, fanciful 
 science, come under this head. Let not " Time, the 
 Author of Authors, be deprived of his due, which is 
 further and further to discover truth." Other errors are 
 probed with the same keen hand. The false reverence 
 of antiquity, or the love of novelty, is an idle excess. 
 " Antiquitas sceculi juventus mundi." " Those are the 
 ancient times, when the world is ancient." But the 
 greatest error of all is the mistaking the end of knowl- 
 edge. And thus he concludes his first book by summing 
 from the Word of revelation and the proofs of human 
 history the dignity of learning ; and most of all " in that 
 whereunto man's nature doth most aspire, which is im- 
 mortality." "The verses of Homer have continued 
 twenty-five hundred years, or more without the loss of a 
 syllable or letter. It is not possible to have the true 
 pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar ; but the 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 1 97 
 
 images of men's wit and knowledge remain in books. 
 Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they 
 generate and cast their seeds in the minds of others " : 
 * * * and "if the invention of the ship was thought so 
 noble, which carrieth riches from place to place, how 
 much more letters, which, as ships, pass through the vast 
 seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of 
 the wisdom, illuminations, inventions, the all of the 
 other?" 
 
 In his second book, Bacon now enters on what he calls a 
 " general perambulation of learning." All knowledge 
 has three divisions, History, Poesy, Philosophy ; cor- 
 responding to the faculties of Memory, Imagination, and 
 Reason; and Divine Learning, like human, maybe said 
 to embrace History, Parables, Doctrine. Several critics, 
 like Stewart, have called this division arbitrary. It cer- 
 tainly does not correspond to the classification of modern 
 science ; yet the classification does not essentially affect 
 the worth of his reasoning. History is now regarded 
 under four heads, Natural, Civil, Ecclesiastical, and Liter- 
 ary, the last of which is deficient. In regard to the his- 
 tory of nature, he counsels more attention to the irregu- 
 lar phenomena, " as it were bounding nature in her 
 wanderings." " Small things discover great better than 
 great discover the small," as Aristotle searches for " the 
 nature of a commonwealth first in a family and the sim- 
 ple conjugations of man and wife, parent and child. 
 Even so the nature of this great city of the world must 
 
1 98 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 be first sought in small portions." Civil history in Bacon's 
 time was little more than legend ; and his criticism shows 
 the distance between his ideas and ours of historic sci- 
 ence. His verdict on church history is excellent. " I 
 would that the virtue and sincerity of it were according to 
 the mass and quantity." In his remarks on poetry there 
 is no thorough analysis. His saying is a fine one, that it 
 " doth raise and erect the mind by submitting the shews 
 of things to the desires of the mind, whereas reason doth 
 buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things." 
 He has here, too, a keen critique, which our modern 
 myth-hunters would do well to read, " that the fable was 
 first and the exposition then devised." 
 
 But it is when Bacon comes to the province of reason, 
 " the judicial place or palace of the mind," that we see 
 the clearness of his analysis. He divides philosophy into 
 divine, natural, and human. Before considering them, he 
 remarks that as all these parts are " like branches of a 
 tree, that meet in one stem," there should be one science, 
 Philosophia Prima, which embraces the common prin- 
 ciples of all. 
 
 It is not easy to know what was the exact province of 
 this Baconian science. The instances he gives us are 
 rather fanciful than real ; as a coincidence between 
 cumulative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and 
 geometrical proportion ; the musical principle of a solu- 
 tion of discords as " alike true in affection " ; and " the 
 delight of the quavering of a stop in music the same with 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 1 99 
 
 the playing of light on water." Yet the whole passage 
 is full of suggestion. It opens a field, even yet scantily 
 worked, of the metaphysics and physics, the unity of our 
 mental and moral conceptions with those of sense, which 
 might be our best antidote to the materialistic school of 
 Bain. 
 
 In his view of divine truth Bacon recognizes mysteries 
 beyond the contemplation of nature, or ground of human 
 knowledge ; and lays down the sober rule that we are 
 not " to draw them down to our reason," but " to advance 
 our reason to the divine light." In the sphere of 
 Natural Philosophy he distinguishes "the mine and the 
 furnace," the inquisition of laws and production of 
 effects. Science is physical and metaphysical. Physic 
 considers what is matter and therefore transitory ; Meta- 
 physic, what is form, and therefore abstracted and 
 fixed. This distinction of matter and form is Aristo- 
 telian : it corresponds to our own of phenomenal and real. 
 Physical science deals with efficient causes ; metaphys- 
 ical, with formal and final causes. He distinctly recog- 
 nizes the sphere of metaphysical knowledge, and its 
 benefit as teaching us the unity of truth, as well as the 
 freedom of the mind above the material. But he cen- 
 sures the intrusion of metaphysics into the proper study 
 of nature, in the inquiry into final causes ; and thinks 
 the method of Democritus truer in this respect than that 
 of Piato or Aristotle, who mixed one his theology and 
 the other his logic with physical science. It is with 
 
200 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 striking insight that Bacon has anticipated Kant in classi- 
 fying mathematics pure as a branch of metaphysics ; and 
 his remarks on geometry and arithmetic are worthy of 
 full study. He passes now to the third division of 
 human knowledge, or the study of man. All knowledge, 
 he says, is one light, of which the natural is the direct 
 ray, the divine the refracted, and the human the re- 
 flected. Human knowledge is but a portion in the 
 continent of nature ; and we should accept all such par- 
 titions as lines and veins, rather than sections and sepa- 
 rations. The study of the mind should therefore be 
 together with that of the body. In this part of his 
 treatise Bacon has given us the anticipation of the 
 methods of modern science. His observations on the 
 meagre knowledge in his day of medicine, anatomy, and 
 physiology are striking. The substance of the mind is 
 not to be known by philosophy, but its powers of under- 
 standing and reason, will, appetite, and affection are the 
 true objects of knowledge. 
 
 From this he passes to the practical side of human 
 knowledge. He considers first the exercise of the rational, 
 second of the moral powers. The arts of intellectual 
 training are invention, judgment, memory, tradition. 
 Under the head of invention comes the discussion of the 
 true nature and place of induction. Bacon maintains 
 that the induction of Aristotelian logic is fruitless so far 
 as real knowledge is concerned. Middle propositions 
 cannot be deduced from general principles in subject of 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 201 
 
 nature by syllogistic reasoning. The result is only that 
 of the academies, the denial of certainty in objects of 
 sense. Induction in science and judgment are the same art. 
 Logic has its true sphere in reasoning from general prin- 
 ciples to particulars in analytics. 
 
 We should give much time to this treatise, because it 
 alone shows us the harmony of Bacon's philosophy. The 
 misconceptions of it have come from the fact that the 
 " Novum Organum," which has only to do with the study 
 of nature, has been so interpreted as to obscure all other 
 parts of his system. We can now turn to the " Novum 
 Organum," a shorter treatise, divided into concise aphor- 
 isms. He examines the method of scientific study. 
 There are two mothods of reasoning, the a priori, which 
 descends from abstract ideas to particulars, the a posteriori, 
 which ascends from particulars to generals. Each has its 
 true place. But for the investigation of nature the 
 a priori method is useless. To begin with ideas of sub- 
 stance, quality, action, passion, can only end in abstract 
 results. Science must begin with the real objects. It is 
 on this then he rears his experimental method, or Induc- 
 tion. The process is, first, the accumulation of all the 
 facts ; next, these must be compared to discover their 
 form or the general and permanent quality. This inquiry 
 does not concern cause, which is metaphysical, but only 
 form. To find the form we begin by exclusion. Thus, if 
 we seek the quality of transparency, we exclude porosity 
 or fluidity, as the diamond is transparent yet solid. After 
 
202 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 exclusions have been made, enough to determine the 
 reckoning, one principle is assumed as the form, and we 
 then reason from it synthetically to account by it for the 
 phenomena. Such is the outline of the method. Bacon 
 adds a comparative sketch of the various classes of facts. 
 Some are of more value to determine the case. 
 
 But before passing to a summary of the Baconian 
 philosophy, we should touch at least on his other writ- 
 ings, which deserve a fuller sketch If his scientific 
 works had not made his name so great, these writings 
 would have still given him a foremost rank among Eng- 
 lish masters of thought and style. 
 
 His mind is equally at home in the laboratory, or in 
 the world of men ; and, indeed, it is in all the same order 
 of genius, the clear, keen, comprehensive brain. His 
 " History of Henry VII " is by far the best piece of such 
 writing in his time ; it is not so Rembrandt-like a portrait 
 as More's of Richard, but full of insight into English his- 
 toric life, and a grasp of constitutional law. But for most 
 readers it is in the " Essays " that he will live. In certain 
 features they stand alone in this field of writing. There 
 is nothing of the gay paradox of Montaigne, the sounding 
 verbiage of Seneca, or the witty sophistry of Rochefou- 
 cauld. They express the " practical reason " of the 
 English mind. Each sentence is beaten gold. One of 
 his observations on men and manners is like a chalk out- 
 line by Michael Angelo. And as a model of English 
 style, the " Essays " are unrivalled, although I think 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 203 
 
 they have less of stately eloquence than the " Advance- 
 ment of Learning." 
 
 A little philosophy inclineth men's minds to Atheism, 
 but depth in philosophy bringeth them about to religion. 
 
 There be two false peaces or unities : one when the 
 peace is grounded but in an implicit ignorance, for all 
 colours will agree in the dark ; the other, when it is pieced 
 up on a direct admission of contraries on fundamental 
 points, for truth and falsehood in such things are as the 
 iron and clay in Nebuchadnezzar's image, — they may 
 cleave, but they will not incorporate. 
 
 Time is the greatest innovator, which moveth so 
 round, that a froward retention of custom is as turbulent 
 a thing as innovation. 
 
 Revenge is a kind of wild justice. 
 
 Adversity is not without its comforts and hopes. 
 We see in needle-work and embroideries it is more pleas- 
 ing to have a lively work on a sad and solemn ground, 
 than to have a dark and melancholy work upon a light- 
 some ground. 
 
 Envy is as the sunbeams, which beat hotter on a 
 bank, or steep rising ground, than upon a plot. 
 
 It is the nature of self-lovers, as they will set an house 
 on fire, and it were but to roast their eggs. 
 
 It is good to commit the beginnings of all great 
 actions to Argus with his hundred eyes, and the ends to 
 Briareus with his hundred hands. 
 
 Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, 
 and wise men use them. 
 
 There is but one case when a man may commend him- 
 self with a good grace, and that is in commending virtue 
 in another, if it be such whereunto himself pretendeth. 
 
204 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Men rather discharge their minds than impart their 
 minds. 
 
 Neither is money the sinews of war, when the sinews 
 of men's arms in base and effeminate people are failing. 
 
 It is well, when nobles are not too great for sov- 
 ereignty nor for justice, and yet maintained in that 
 height, as the insolency of inferiors may be broken upon 
 them before it come too fast upon the majesty of kings. 
 
 The best composition and temperature is to have 
 openness in fame and opinion, secrecy in habit, dissimu- 
 lation in seasonable use, and a power to feign, if there be 
 no remedy. 
 
 If we have understood the spirit of Bacon's philosophy 
 in his own writings, we are ready not only to give it its 
 true worth in that age of dawning science, but to see the 
 strange mistake of so many critics, even to our own day. 
 It has been the fashion of the whole school of sensuous 
 philosophy, since the time of Condillac to Mill and Bain, 
 to claim him as the great mind to whom the modern 
 world owes its emancipation from the a priori methods 
 of metaphysics, and the beginning of the inductive 
 science. We hear this claim repeated in a more popular 
 way by a class of writers, of whom Macaulay is the most 
 popular oracle, who love to talk of the philosophy of 
 common-sense and the age of practical knowledge. Nor 
 is it less strange that this one-sided view of the Baconian 
 method has been very largely allowed by the opponents 
 of the sensuous school. We might expect it from a fierce 
 champion of Aquinas like De Maistre. But it is the 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 205 
 
 criticism of a sober historian like Ueberweg, who dis- 
 tinctly names Bacon as the father in philosophy of 
 Hobbes and the large family of materialists. We cannot 
 indeed call it so sad that he should be so slandered in his 
 intellectual as he was in his moral fame ; but it is a sore 
 wrong, and it is quite as due to him to defend him 
 against treachery to spiritual truth as treachery to his 
 friend Essex. 
 
 It was the design of Bacon in that early time of re- 
 vival in art and science " to make," in his own words, " a 
 small globe of the intellectual world, with a note and de- 
 scription of those parts which seem not constantly occu- 
 pate, or not well converted by the labour of men." He 
 pointed out the mutual relations of all knowledge, and 
 the laws that must govern the scholar in the study of 
 each. And as his own special aim lay in the study of 
 nature, and he saw clearly the boundless field just open- 
 ing for discovery in its hitherto unknown truth, he sought 
 to clear away the mistakes of the older philosophy in this 
 direction, and found the true method of experiment. 
 
 He was, in his own phrase, an " Instaurator of Science." 
 This is his just claim. The fruit of his genius is in the 
 whole gathered history of science since his time. His 
 opus majus, greater than his own written treatises, is in 
 the work of Newton, Davy, Lagrange, Agassiz, Faraday. 
 He was, to borrow again his prophetic words, " the ser- 
 vant of posterity " ; and posterity has acknowledged him 
 as the master, whose principles have guided them to the 
 
206 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 knowledge of the stars, the marvels of chemistry, the se- 
 cret of the Kosmos. That title of the most comprehensive 
 work of our time gives us the nearest likeness to Bacon. 
 It was his task, like Humboldt, to show the unity and 
 harmony of all the manifold aims of human knowledge 
 with the great whole of the Divine Maker, the correlation 
 of forces in the search after truth, which is as true a law 
 in the history of the mind as it is in nature. None can 
 rob him of this praise. There are men of science at this 
 day, who deny his exact knowledge in much of his own 
 experimental detail. It is true that, although no poor 
 student of nature, many have surpassed him in their 
 special inquiries. The habit of large generalization is 
 seldom found together with skill in the microscope. His 
 well-known doubt as to the truth of the Copernican 
 theory proves his lack of thorough astronomical study, 
 although we have the best evidence from his own words 
 that his doubt was by no means a denial, but based on 
 the fact, that it was as a mathematical hypothesis open to 
 difficulties, which were indeed only met by later discov- 
 eries in physical astronomy. Without doubt, his own in- 
 ductive method has been largely improved by science. 
 Yet it is enough that for his day he opened the way. 
 Indeed, in this respect he is far greater than Humboldt ; 
 for he not only gives us a larger map of human knowl- 
 edge than the survey of nature by the great German, 
 but he wrote at a time when there was needed the genius 
 to explore the unknown more than to gather the known. 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 207 
 
 His task in science was that of the discoverer who 
 started in his small caravel from the port of Palos across 
 the mysterious ocean, and planted the first colony of a 
 new world. 
 
 In this light we can justly meet the often-repeated 
 mistakes as to the philosophy of Bacon. To say that he 
 is the author of an inductive science which has taken 
 the place of metaphysical study, is to misunderstand the 
 character of both. The object of the Baconian method, 
 it is clear from his own statements and the drift of his 
 reasoning, is the exact knowledge of the world of nature. 
 It is as absurd to think that the science which explores 
 the unseen world of thought, the nature of God, the laws 
 of the mind and the moral being, has been displaced by 
 this just thinker, as to say that the progress of chemistry 
 has set aside civil history. Each has its sphere. There 
 is a method in the study of the mind. There is a method 
 in the study of the outward phenomena. We need only 
 turn to the writings of Bacon to show that his purpose 
 was to distinguish them, to guard against the intrusion of 
 scholastic notions into the field of fact. " The wit and 
 mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the con- 
 templation of the creatures of God, worketh according to 
 the stuff, and is limited thereby ; but if it work upon 
 itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, 
 and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable 
 for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance 
 or profit." — " Advancement of Learning," B. 1, o. ^o. 
 
208 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 It was against such "subtle, idle, unwholesome, and 
 vermiculate questions" as had usurped the place of 
 "good and sound knowledge " he wrote. But that he 
 in no sense denied the worth of metaphysical study, or 
 the truths it sought, is as plain from another sentence. 
 "For Metaphysic, we have assigned unto it the inquiry 
 of formal and final causes, which assignation as to the 
 former, may seem negatory and void, of which opinion 
 we will take this hold, that the invention [discovery] of 
 forms is of all other parts of knowledge the worthiest to 
 be sought, if it be possible to be found. As for the 
 possibility, they are ill discoverers that think there is no 
 land when they can see nothing but sea. But it is mani- 
 fest, that Plato in his opinion of ideas, as one that had a wit 
 of elevation situate as upon a cliff, did descry, that forms 
 were the true objects of knowledge, but lost the real fruits 
 of his opinion, by considering of forms as absolutely 
 abstracted from matter, and not confined and determined 
 by matter, and so turning his opinion upon Theology, 
 wherewith all his Natural Philosophy is infected. But 
 if any shall keep a continual watchful and severe eye 
 upon action, operation, and the use of knowledge, he 
 may advise and take notice, what are the forms, the dis- 
 closures of which are- fruitful and important to the state 
 of man." Nothing can be clearer than the distinction 
 here. Bacon held, as all true science holds to-day, that 
 the study of all the problems of knowledge must begin 
 with the facts, and that in this method an exact indue- 
 
t FRANCIS BACON. 209 
 
 tion in the range of physical fact would teach us the 
 border line of sure metaphysical knowledge. But he did 
 not hold fruitlessness of all knowledge beyond the physi- 
 cal. He declares " that Physic doth make inquiry only 
 as to the material and efficient causes," but that the 
 science, " which supposeth further in nature a reason,! 
 understanding, and platform," is " of all the worthiest to 
 be sought." We have here the true difference between 
 him and the whole school of Agnostic science, which 
 claims that the sphere of an inductive science is the only 
 one, and its result the utter denial of knowledge beyond 
 the phenomenal. This clear definition of the sphere of 
 physical and metaphysical inquiry settles the vexed 
 question concerning his method. 
 
 It has been often claimed, that Bacon set aside the 
 syllogistic logic of Aristotle, and put in its stead the in- 
 ductive reasoning. This is a mistake. He rejected the 
 syllogism as a fruitless process in scientific discovery. It 
 was useless to reason as Aristotle had done, from the gen- 
 eral conception of a circle to the motion of the planetary 
 bodies, without the exact physical induction of the facts ; 
 and thus he complained that the Greek sage had " made 
 the world out of his categories." Natural philosophy 
 had been only a guesswork. But he was so far from re- 
 jecting the syllogism in its true place, that he has himself 
 clearly defined its worth. " There are two ways of inves- 
 tigating truth : One from sense and particulars rises to 
 general axioms, and from these settled principles judges 
 
2IO ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and finds middle axioms. The other from sense and par- 
 ticulars calls out axioms by rising constantly and by de- 
 grees, and at last arrives at generals. This is the sure 
 way." Again, " there being but four kinds of demonstra- 
 tion, that is, by the immediate consent of the mind in 
 sense, by induction, by syllogism, and by congruity, every 
 one of these hath certain subjects in the matter of sciences, 
 in which respectively they have their chiefest use ; and 
 certain others from which they ought to be excluded." 
 Had the idea of Bacon been clearly grasped, the confused 
 notions of his method would have been easily escaped. 
 Induction is not a natural process, substituted for an arti- 
 ficial machine of Aristotelian logic. It is simply the cau- 
 tious process by which, in experimental inquiry we gather, 
 compare, and verify the facts to reach a conclusion in its 
 nature empiric and nothing more. Syllogism is the in- 
 tellectual process by which we apply the general and 
 known to the particular. It is the explicit form in which 
 all reasoning is logically cast ; and we may as well talk of 
 grammar as artificial, because, like Moliere's bourgeois 
 gentilhomme, we have been using grammar in our speech 
 without knowing it, as call the syllogism an invention of 
 the schools. 
 
 But I will not enlarge on what Whately has long ago 
 shown in his " Logic." I wish only to point out the 
 defect in the argument of Whately himself, as it touches 
 the Baconian method. Induction is, he insists, from 
 the idea of the formal logic in English schools, merely 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 2X1 
 
 the collecting of the facts from which we afterward reason. 
 We can put any induction into syllogism, by supplying 
 the major premise. Undoubtedly. But this does not 
 in the least explain why Bacon refused the syllogistic 
 and preferred the inductive form. It is readily under- 
 stood from his own sentence, already cited. The " sure 
 way" in experimental science was that which " rises con- 
 stantly and by degrees and at last arrives at generals." 
 I cannot better state it than in the words of Mr. Lewes, 
 because his admission reveals the very point where, as I 
 conceive, the positive philosophy he teaches is utterly in 
 contrast with the conclusions of Bacon. " It is in the 
 way the major premise is established that we must seek 
 the real difference between the syllogistic and inductive 
 methods: and that difference is between a priori and a 
 posteriori. Every one who has read Bacon, knows that 
 his scorn for the syllogism is not as a form of ratiocina- 
 tion, but as a means of investigation." This is to touch 
 the question with a needle. It was not the function of 
 physical science to search after the truths only knowable 
 by the a priori or synthetic reasoning ; it had nothing to 
 do with a final cause, substance, unity, infinity, but only 
 with efficient cause, phenomena, relativity, succession. 
 On this path it could not reach demonstration in the ab- 
 solute sense, but only the certitude of experience. A 
 logic, therefore, which by its very structure dealt with 
 universals, was always misleading. The metaphysics of 
 the schools, when they introduced the notions of abstract 
 
212 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 form, essence, quiddity, and the like, into the science of 
 nature, must end in barren theory. This is the true posi- 
 tion of the scientist. But it was not Bacon's design in 
 this to deny the function of a priori reasoning in its own 
 sphere. It is the right place of logic, because it deals 
 with universals, to be the organum of reason in all ques- 
 tions of deductive knowledge. Induction must give it 
 its material, its groundwork of empiric fact ; but the 
 truths of the unseen world are beyond its province. Such 
 was the design of Bacon. 
 
 And as his view was ayjust one as against the scholastic 
 systems of his time, which forced their theories on sci- 
 ence by a barren logic, so it is true against the science, 
 which by the same dogmatic process forces its induction 
 into the field of a priori thought. I do not know a 
 more striking proof of this than in the criticism of Mill 
 on the Baconian method. No one can deny that the in- 
 ductive method as he announced it has been greatly per- 
 fected at the hands of science. Its range is larger, and 
 its processes nicer at this day. But the chief objection 
 of Mill is that Bacon "has left no room for the discovery 
 of new principles by way of deduction at all." It is in 
 the deductive sciences of mechanics, astronomy, optics, 
 acoustics, he claims, that " the higher and middle prin- 
 ciples are by no means derived from the lowest, but the 
 reverse. In some of them the highest generalizations 
 were those earliest ascertained with any scientific exact- 
 ness; as, for instance (in mechanics), the laws of mo- 
 
FRANCIS BACON, 213 
 
 tion." Yet he grants that " these general laws had not 
 at first the acknowledged universality which they ac- 
 quired after having been successfully employed to ex- 
 plain many classes of phenomena, to which they were not 
 originally seen to be applicable." Now, this very admis- 
 sion seems to me enough to prove the principle of Bacon. 
 The Copernican hypothesis must wait, as we have said 
 before, for the inductive test of physical astronomy. The 
 application of geometry and algebra has led to a wide 
 range of scientific discovery, yet in every case the gen- 
 eralizations have been corrected and verified by the 
 inductive process. 
 
 We may now sum up our view of the great master of 
 science, and his influence on the after-time. It is utterly 
 to misread him, when he is classed with the school of 
 sensuous or materialistic philosophy in England. There 
 is nothing in his writings which allies him as a systematic 
 thinker with the movement of Hobbes in the days of 
 Charles, or with the yet later empiricism of Locke. All 
 the doctrines of this school, and its results at home in 
 the scepticism of Hume, or in France in the grosser 
 theories of Cabanis, rest on the notion that our senses 
 are the sole sources of knowledge, and our ideas only 
 " transformed sensations." Whatever may be the ques- 
 tion as to the fundamental truth or error of the " Essay 
 on the Understanding," it is an analysis of the human 
 mind, which sets aside by a subjective process all knowl- 
 edge beyond experience. The philosophy of Bacon, as 
 
214 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 we have seen, has nothing in common with such a method 
 of study. It distinctly admits truths above sense. It ac- 
 knowledges a reason in man that can know the ideas of 
 cause, unity, infinity ; and indeed we owe to Bacon that 
 distinct use of the words reason and understanding which 
 has been so laughed at in Coleridge. The only likeness 
 between him and the school of Locke is their common 
 dislike of abstract reasoning, and their appeal to expe- 
 rience. But the unlikeness is far greater. The one was 
 destructive ; the other constructive. The one made an- 
 other theory of metaphysics ; the other stood apart from 
 all theory. The one ended in Hume and D' Holbach ; 
 the other in Newton. Nor do we see any likeness in 
 Bacon to the later school of positive science, which has 
 its leaders in Mill, Spencer, and Bain. Undoubtedly 
 there are points of contact more than in the elder sensa- 
 tional school, from the fact that the growth of Positivism 
 has been connected with the marvellous advance of 
 physical discovery in our age. We claim, as the secret of 
 modern science, that so far as it has verified its researches 
 in the most fruitful fields of knowledge, in physiology, 
 chemistry, geology, biology, it has kept the sober prin- 
 ciple of Bacon. 
 
 Its influence has been vast, not only in the domain of 
 outward nature, but in helping toward a sounder study 
 of the mind ; and in social ethics, by teaching, as Bacon 
 did, the connection of soul and body.- But for this 
 very reason we can never allow Bacon to be classed with 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 215 
 
 the school of so-called positive science. There is not a 
 single principle which they have advanced that is not the 
 denial of his method. It is easy enough to find passages 
 in his books that can be tortured into a resemblance to 
 modern theories. We turn, for instance, to the chapter 
 in which he says, that the " natural philosophy of 
 Democritus and some others seemeth to me in par- 
 ticularities of physical causes more real and better in- 
 quired than that of Aristotle and Plato, whereof both 
 intermingled final causes, the one as a part of Theology, 
 and the other as a part of Logic." We might infer from 
 this that Bacon was an Atomist of the Atheistic school, 
 but turning to the next sentence we read : " Not be- 
 cause those final causes are not true, and worthy to be 
 inquired, being kept within their own province, but be- 
 cause their excursions into the limits of physical causes 
 hath had a vastness and solitude in that track." It was 
 the limit of physical certainty that he wished to fix, not 
 to deny the truth of a Divine Maker. In the same 
 spirit Cudworth, the Platonist, accepts the atomic theory 
 in physics. In the same spirit the author of the " New 
 Chemistry " is careful to show that atoms are the ulti- 
 mate point of his science, but cannot explain the unseen 
 cause. And it is precisely so we find at every step the 
 impassable chasm between the science of Bacon and the 
 dogmas of the modern positivist. Mr. Spencer declares, 
 that the last result of human knowledge is to find abso- 
 lute being, a homogeneous passing into heterogeneous. 
 
2 1 6 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 Bacon declares, that " in the entrance of philosophy, 
 where the second causes, next unto the senses, do offer 
 themselves to the mind, if it dwell and stay there, it may 
 induce some oblivion of the highest cause ; but when a 
 man passeth on farther and seeth the dependance of 
 causes and the works of Providence, then he, according 
 to the allegory, will easily believe that the highest link 
 of nature's chain must needs be tied to the foot of 
 Jupiter's chair." 
 
 But I cannot close this sketch without a word on a 
 point perhaps of more interest to the general mind than 
 more scientific questions. It is not merely the mistake 
 of the philosophy of Bacon by the physical dogmatists 
 that claims our criticism, but the more popular notion, 
 that he is the teacher of that self-styled wisdom of com- 
 mon-sense, of practical utility, of which we hear so much 
 in our day. We are told that our age is specially marked 
 by its scorn of speculative philosophy, its inventions of 
 useful arts, its commerce, its real discoveries ; and chief 
 among the sages to whom we point as the fathers of the 
 modern time is Bacon. I suppose that we are indebted 
 for this popular idea of the inductive philosophy to the 
 essay of Macaulay. Written in 1837, it has survived un- 
 til now, and persons who gather opinions as easily as pos- 
 sible have taken from him at once their impressions of 
 his bad character and his admirable practical spirit. It 
 may seem immodest in me to call in question so great a 
 master of rhetoric, but I can accept his opinion neither in 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 217 
 
 the one case nor the other. I am forced to say, that I 
 look on his criticism of Bacon's philosophy as one of the 
 most astounding pieces of glittering sophistry in the range 
 of modern essays. It is the claim of this writer, borrow- 
 ing a phrase from the " Novum Organum," that all men- 
 tal and moral science from Plato and Aristotle to the day 
 of the great Englishman was barren theory, and that the 
 work of Bacon is to have given us the philosophy of 
 fruit. Nor does he leave us in any doubt as to what 
 he means by fruit. He does not even care for the 
 science of Bacon as an addition to the intellectual 
 wealth. Even the method of induction was for Macau- 
 lay nothing new ; every man who had eaten mince-pie 
 and learned the cause of his indigestion, could reason 
 as well as Bacon. He passes in review the greatest 
 names of speculative thought, and he tells us that the 
 inventor of a good wine whey or of a hospital chair 
 is more useful than the verbiage of Socrates. We may 
 allow much for the rhetoric of a fine writer; we may not 
 even hold a scholar responsible for such nonsense ; but 
 we must not allow the wisdom of Bacon to be debased by 
 a utilitarianism so poor as this. What is utility? What 
 is fruit? There is, as we have shown in our whole criti- 
 cism, a noble spirit in the great author of the " Novum 
 Organum," which led him beyond the word-battles of the- 
 ory, into the aims of real knowledge ; but none would 
 have scorned more fully than he so vulgar a notion of 
 utility as this. 
 
2 1 8 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 I need only cite that most stately passage from the 
 '■• De Augmentis " to show his idea of the useful. " Men 
 have entered into a desire of knowledge, sometimes as a 
 natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite ; sometimes to 
 entertain their minds with variety ; and sometimes for 
 ornament and reputation ; and most times for lucre and 
 profession ; and seldom sincerely to give account of their 
 gift of reason to the benefit and use of man ; as if there 
 were more sought in knowledge a couch whereon to rest 
 a searching and restless spirit ; or a terrasse for a wander- 
 ing and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair 
 prospect ; or a tower of state for a proud mind to raise 
 itself upon ; or a fort on commanding ground for strife 
 and contention ; or a shop for profit or sale ; and not a 
 rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the re- 
 lief of man's estate." There is nothing in such an idea 
 of the useful akin to the spirit of Macaulay. It does 
 not lose sight of the higher good of knowledge in its 
 lower results. It can appreciate a wine whey, or a 
 popular history of England, without placing them above 
 the education of the mind and heart. We might indeed 
 take Macaulay's view on its moral side, and show that 
 the practical shrewdness he praises in the science of 
 Bacon would have been quite likely to produce the mer- 
 cenary character he so strangely assaults. We might go 
 back to the memorable story of Plato in the court of 
 Dionysius, and ask if a philosophy which kept the Greek 
 true to his ideal purity is not more fruitful than one that 
 
FRANCIS BACON. 2IO, 
 
 could range over nature, and prove the Chancellor of 
 England and of England's thought an earthworm. But 
 we will not accept his criticism on the one or the other. 
 The utilitarianism he boasts is the fruit of an age which 
 has turned the Baconian science into "'a shop for barter 
 and sale " ; which believes, as a modern sage said, only 
 in " the Trinity of bread, water, and fresh air " ; which 
 holds the eternal and immutable morality of " Poor Rich- 
 ard's Almanac " ; which worships Bentham as its sage, 
 Buckle as its historian, and Macaulay as its orator. 
 
 It is against such critics that I seek to justify the fame 
 of the great Englishman. For us at least they shall not 
 be the interpreters of him who was the first interpreter 
 of true science in England. 
 
 [THE END.] 
 
PERIODS IN THE HISTORY 
 
 ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon Period, 600-1066. 
 
 From the consolidation of the Saxon dialects to the Norman Conquest. 
 Noteworthy authors, or books, are : 
 
 Ccedmon. 
 
 Beowulf. 
 
 The Saxon Chronicle. 
 
 Alfred, 
 
 sElfric. 
 
 Good authorities on the language and literature of this period are , 
 Freeman's "Old English History " and " Norman Conquest"; Green's 
 "Making of England"; Kemble's "Saxons in England"; Hughes' 
 "Alfred the Great" ; Marsh's "Origin and History of the English Lan- 
 guage" ; Ten Brink's " Geschichte der Englischen Litteratur" ; Grein's 
 " Bibliothek der Angelsachsischen Poesie " ; Grein's " Dichtungen der 
 Angelsachsen " ; Dietrich's " Anglosaxonica " ; Kemble's "Anglo-Saxon 
 Poetry"; Thorpe's " Analecta Anglosaxonica"; Thorpe's " Beowulf " ; 
 Alfred's "Orosius" and "Boetius"; Earle's "Two of the Saxon 
 Chronicles" ; "Saxon Leechdoms," ed. O. Cockayne; "Aelfric's Homi- 
 lies," ed. Thorpe. 
 
 The Anglo-Norman Period, 1066— 1500. 
 
 Layamon's " Brut,"ed. Sir F. Madden. 
 
 " The Ormulum." 
 
 "The Ancren Riwle." 
 
 "The Surtees Psalter." 
 
 " Rhymed Chronicle " of Robert of Gloucester. 
 
 ' ' Rhymed Chronicle " of Robert of Brunne. 
 
222 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 " Golias Poems " of Walter Mapes. 
 
 Wright — " Political Songs of England." 
 
 Wrtght — " Specimens of Lyric Poetry." 
 
 Wright and Halliwell — " Reliquiae Antiquse." 
 
 Morris — " Old English Homilies." 
 
 Morris — " Old English Miscellany." 
 
 Morris — " Specimens of Early English." 
 
 Morris — '* Early English Alliterative Poems." 
 
 Morris — " Legends of the Holy Rood." 
 
 Early English Text Society's Publications. 
 
 Oliphant — "Old and Middle English." 
 
 Earle — " Philology of the English Tongue." 
 
 Morris — " Outlines of English Accidence." 
 
 Morley — " Writers before Chaucer." 
 
 Stubbs — "Select Charters." 
 
 Guest — " English Rhythms." 
 
 Malory — " Morte d' Arthur." 
 
 Ellis— "Early English Metrical Romances." 
 
 RiTSON — "Ancient English Metrical Romances." 
 
 " Thornton. Romances " — Camden Society. 
 
 Ludlow — " Popular Epics of the Middle Ages." 
 
 Percy — " Reliques of Ancient English Poetry." 
 
 Ritson — " Scotish Song." 
 
 Ritson — " Robin Hood Ballads." 
 
 Sir Walter Scott — " Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.' 
 
 Rinlock — " Ancient Scottish Ballads." 
 
 Motherwell — " Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern." 
 
 Child — " English and Scottish Ballads." 
 
 Publications of the Chaucer Society. 
 
 Clarendon Press Edition of " Piers Plowman." 
 
 A. J. Ellis — " Early English Pronunciation." 
 
 Morley — " English Writers from Chaucer to Dunbar." 
 
 Ward — " English Poets." 
 
 Gower — " Confessio Amantis. " 
 
 Warton — " History of English Poetry." 
 
 Barboure's — " Bruce." 
 
 Gawin Douglas — "Poetical Works." 
 
 James I — " The Kinges Quhair." 
 
 Skeat — " Specimens of Early English." 
 
 Lord Berner's " Froissart." 
 
 Wyclif — " Translation of New Testament." 
 
HISTORICAL PERIODS. 223 
 
 1500-1660. 
 
 Prose. 
 
 Tyndale — " Translation of the Bible." 
 
 Latimer — " Sermons." 
 
 Jewel — " Apology." 
 
 Cranmer — " Revision of the Bible." 
 
 More— History, " Richard III." 
 
 Roger Ascham — " Scholemaster." 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney — " The Arcadia," " The Defense of Poetry." 
 
 Hooker — " Ecclesiastical Polity." 
 
 Sir Walter Raleigh — " History of the World." 
 
 Francis Bacon — " Essays," " Advancement of Learning," etc. 
 
 Spedding — " Life and Times of Francis Bacon" ; " Letters and Life of 
 Francis Bacon." 
 
 Selden— " Table Talk." 
 
 " The English Bible," Authorized Version. 
 
 Fuller — •« Holy and Profane States." 
 
 Cudworth — " Works." 
 
 Jeremy Taylor — "Life of Christ," " Holy Living and Dying," " Ser- 
 mons." 
 
 Herbert— "The Temple." 
 
 Hall — "Contemplations and Meditations." 
 
 Donne — " Sermons." 
 
 Izaak Walton — " Lives," "The Complete Angler." 
 
 Sir Thomas Browne — " Religio Medici." 
 
 Clarendon — " History of the Rebellion." 
 
 Lord Herbert of Cherbury — " De Veritate," " Life of Henry VIII." 
 
 Poetry. 
 
 Hawes— " Pastime of Pleasure." 
 
 Skelton — " Political Satires." 
 
 Lyndesay— " The Dreme," " Thrie Estates," "The Monarchic" 
 
 Surrey and Wyatt — " Poetical Works." 
 
 Gascoigne— " The Steel Glass," etc. 
 
 Sackville— " The Mirror of Magistrates." 
 
 Spenser — " The Faerie Queene." 
 
 Sidney— "Astrophel and Stella." 
 
224 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 Fulke GREVILLE — " Poems of Monarchy and Religion." 
 Greene — " Lyrical Poems." 
 Marlowe — " Poetical Works." 
 Lodge — "Poetical Works." 
 
 Daniel — "Sonnets to Delia," "Epistle to the Countess of Cumber- 
 land." 
 
 Drayton — " Battle of Agincourt," " Odes," " Polyolbion." 
 
 Raleigh — " Poetical Works." 
 
 Chapman — "Iliad" and "Odyssey." 
 
 Donne — " Poetical Works." 
 
 Ben Jonson — " The Forest," " Underwoods." 
 
 Vaughan — " Poetical Works." 
 
 Drummond of Hawthornden — "Poetical Works." 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher — "Lyrical Poems." 
 
 Browne — " Pastorals." 
 
 Wither — Poetical Works." 
 
 Wotton — "Poetical Works." 
 
 Carew — " Poetical Works." 
 
 Suckling — " Poetical Works." 
 
 Marvell — " Poetical Works." 
 
 Herrick — " Hesperides." 
 
 Milton — " Poetical Works." 
 
 Drama. 
 
 " Miracle Plays," "Mysteries" — Chester, Coventry, Towneley Collections. 
 
 Bishop Bale — " Kynge Johan." 
 
 " Moralities — " Mariage of Wit and Wisdome." 
 
 John Heywood — " Interludes." (" The Four Ps.") 
 
 Nicholas Udall — " Ralph Roister Doister." 
 
 George Peele — " David and Bethsabe." 
 
 Thomas Kyd — "Spanish Tragedy." 
 
 Christopher Marlowe — "Doctor Faustus," "Edward II," " Tam- 
 burlaine," " The Rich Jew of Malta." 
 
 Thomas Dekker — " Old Fortunatus," " Satiro Mastix." 
 
 Dekker and Webster — " Westward Hoe." 
 
 John Marston — " Eastward Hoe," " Insatiate Countess." 
 
 John Webster — " Duchess of Malfy," " White Devil." 
 
 Thomas Heywood — " The Woman Killed by Kindness," " Fair Maid 
 of the West," " Royal King and Loyal Subject." 
 
HISTORICAL PERIODS. 
 
 225 
 
 George Chapman — " Caesar and Pompey," " Bussy d' Ambois." 
 John Ford— " The Broken Heart," " The Lady's Trial." 
 Philip Massinger — "A New Way to Pay Old Debts," "The City 
 Madam." 
 John Fletcher — " The Two Noble Kinsmen." 
 Francis Beaumont — " Triumph of Love." 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher — " Philaster," " The Faithful Shepherdess." 
 John Lyly — " Sappho and Phao," " Midas." 
 
PUBLICATIONS OF G. P. PUTNAM S SONS. 
 
 FOR LIBRARIES, TEACHERS, STUDENTS, AND FA MIL V USE. 
 
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 Tabular Views of Universal History. 
 Biographical Index, General. 
 
 The Same of Artists. 
 
 Schools of Painting in Chronological 
 
 Tables. 
 
 PART I 
 
 THE WORLD'S PROGRESS 
 
 A Dictionary of Dates, being a Chronological and Alphabetical Record 
 of all Essential facts in the Progress of Society, from the beginning of 
 History to August, 1877. With Chronological Tables, Biographical Index, 
 and a Chart of History, 
 
 By G. P. PUTNAM, A.M. 
 Revised and continued by F. B. Perkins. In one handsome octavo volume 
 of 1,000 pages, cloth extra, $4.50; half morocco, $7.00. 
 
 contents: 
 
 The World's Progress, 1867— 1877. 
 The Same 1851—1867. 
 
 The Same from the Beginning of His- 
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 New edition, revised and continued to August, 1877. Octavo, containing 
 1200 pages, cloth, $5.00 ; half morocco, $7.50. 
 
 The Publishers claim for this work that it presents an admirable combination of 
 compactness and comprehensiveness. The previous editions have recommended them- 
 selves to the public favor, as well for the fulness of their lists of essential names, as for 
 the accuracy of the material given. The present edition will, it is believed, be found still 
 more satisfactory as to these points, and possesses for American readers the specia! 
 advantage over similar English works, in the full proportion of space given to erai 
 aent American names. 
 
PUBLICATIONS OF G. P. PUTNAMS SONS. 
 
 Studies in German Literature. By Bayard Taylor. 
 Edited by Marie Taylor. With an introduction by the Hon. 
 Geo. H. Boker. Octavo, cloth extra, . . . . $2 
 
 " A thoroughly excellent work, admirably fulfilling the purpose for which 
 it was written. * * * It forms the best introduction to German literature the 
 English student can lay hands upon. Leaves nothing to be desired by the 
 aspiring student who wishes for a guide, or by the general reader who is desirous 
 of trustworthy and vigorous sketches of the leading features of the literature of 
 Germany. " — London Spectator. 
 
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 of an artist's scope and quality is something very rare." — Springfield Re- 
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 of Germany, and a more enticing one it would be hard to find." — N. Y. Heiald. 
 
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 a subtlety and depth of analytical power." — Detroit Free Press. 
 
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