ENGLISH LITEBATUKE BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON A MANUAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL WITH AN APPENDIX OF ENGLISH METRES BY THOMAS ARNOLD, M.A. OF UNIV. COLL., OXFORD FELLOW OP THE ROYAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, AND PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE STEPHEN'S GREEN, DUBLIN SIXTH EDITION, REVISED r UFI7ER3XT7 LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. AND NEW YORK : 15 EAST 16 th STREET 1888 All rights reserved ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SIXTH EDITION. SOME omissions (see the names of Boyle, Hook, Izaak Walton, &c.) have been supplied, a few notices of writers either living or lately deceased have been added, and the whole work carefully revised. DUBLIN : September 1888. PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION. THIS work remains what it was at first, a mere sketch or ground -plan of the vast field of English Literature; but, as a sketch, the present edition will be found considerably less incomplete than those which have preceded it. Notices of more than two hundred additional authors have been incor- porated, and articles which have hitherto been missing have been supplied, e.g. on the * Paston Letters,' ' Eikon Basilike,' ' early Welsh literature,' &c. Many notices have been amended or remodelled, as those on Robert of Gloucester, Lydgate, Lamb, Cobbett, &c. Lastly, a new chapter, containing brief notes on many poets and novelists of recent times, or of the present day, has been added. In preparing this chapter I have been much assisted by my son William T. Arnold, the editor of 'Keats,' and two of my daughters, Julia Frances and Ethel Margaret Arnold,'; see notes to pages 447 and 455. It is high time that the description of the rise and progress of literature in England should be undertaken on an adequate scale, and by a staff of writers duly qualified. The Histoire Litteraire de la France, commenced by the Benedictines of St. vi PKEFACE. Maur, and continued by the Institut, has reached its twenty- eighth quarto volume, and is not yet out of the fourteenth century. No one in England seems to dream of anything of this kind. Yet the older universities could easily supply as many men as were needed, men in the prime of life and full of geniality and latent power, who, if once set to work, would quickly remove from us the reproach of imperfectly knowing and estimating ^our own literature. It is not capacity, nor zeal for letters, that is wanting, but organisation. Oxford and Cambridge, intent on examinations and athletic exercises, and still without constituted faculties, are wearing out the patience of the country, and letting the time of grace slip by. If they do not bestir themselves, this great work will even- tually be taken out of their hands, and done, more or less effectually, by the non-conformists and the new Universities. A volume of extracts published by Messrs. Longmans in 1882 as a companion volume to the * Manual,' under the title of * English Poetry and Prose,' is everywhere referred to in the notes to this work as ' Extract Book.' DUBLIN : November 1884. CONTENTS. HISTORICAL SECTION. PRELIMINARY CHAPTER. PART I. ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD : A.D. 449-1066. Character of Anglo-Saxon Literature. Works in Latin : Bede, Alcuin. Poetry : Gleeman's Song, Beowulf, Caedmon's Paraphrase, Andreas and Elene ; Cynewulf ; Judith, Brunanburg War-Song. Prose : Alfred, Saxon Chronicle ...... Pages 1-20 PART II. NORMAN PERIOD : 1066-1350. Decline of the Saxon tongue. 2. Later portion of the Saxon Chronicle. 4. Impulse given to Learning by the Moors. SCHOLASTIC PHILO- SOPHY : 6. St. Anselin ; Abelard ; St. Bernard ; 9. Peter Lombard ; Alexander Hales ; Duns Scotus ; William of Occam ; Burley. HISTORIANS AND CHRONICLERS, 11-30: Eadmer; Ingulfus; William of Malmesbury ; Ordericus Vitalis ; Geoffrey of Monmouth- ; Alfred of Beverley ; Symeon of Durham ; Florence of Worcester ; St. Ailred ; Henry of Huntingdon ; Benedictus Abbas ; William of New- burgh ; Diceto ; Giraldus de Barri ; Roger de Hoveden ; Roger de Wendover ; Matthew Paris ; Wikes ; Rishanger ; Trivet ; Higden. Monastic Chronicles, 30 : Jocelin de Brakelond. LAW ; MEDICINE ; MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS, 31-37 : Gratian's Decretum ; Glan- vile ; Salerno ; John of Salisbury ; Geoffrey Vinsauf ; Walter Map ; Saewulf ; Richard of Bury. SCIENCE, 38-40 : Adelard ; Roger Bacon. MEANS OF EDUCATION : Universities ; Monasteries ; In- vention of Paper* POETRY : Early English Fragments, 46-49 ; Canute's Song ; St. Godric's Hymn, &c. Leonine Verses, 50 : Latin Satires and Epics ; Vinsauf, Iscanus, Wireker, &c. French Poets, 56 ; Troubadours; Trouveres; French Romances ; the Arthur Cycle, 60 ; legend of the Saint Graal, 63-69 ; other epopees ; the Roman d'Alexandre, 71 ; Fabliaux, 72 ; Satires ; Historical Poems, 74 ; Wace, Benoit, Gaimar. Ancient Welsh poems, 74a. English Poets, 75-93 ; ' Havelok ' ; ' King Horn ' ; Riming Chroniclers ; Lajamon, 81 ; Robert of Gloucester, 84 ; Robert Manning, 85 ; Religious Poems ; ' Ormulum,' 86 ; ' Proverbs of Hendyng ' ; ' Cursor Mundi ' ; viii CONTENTS. Hampole's ' Pricke of Conscience.' Occasional Poems, 91 ; ' Battle of Lewes,' 'Owl and Nightingale,' Moral Poem. Early English Prose, 94 ; ' Ancren Riwle,' ' Ayenbite of Inwyt ' . Pages 21-83 CHAPTER I. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD: 1350-1450. Latin and French Compositions, 1-71; Froissart, Elmham, Avesbury, Knyghton, Walsingham, Fordun, Bradwardine, Wyclif, Walden. Growth of the English Language and Literature, 8 ; Alliterative Poems, 9-20 ; ' Sainte Marherete,' ' Joseph of Arimathie,' ' William of Palerne,' ' Geste Hystoriale, ' 'Clannesse,' 'Patience,' 'Plowman's Crede' ; connection between alliteration and irregularity of foersittca- tion, 16 ; Langland's 'Vision of Piers the Plowman,' 17. Chaucer : sketch of his life, 21 ; authenticity of his writings, 22-27 " chrono- logy of his writings, 28. His Early Poems, 29-35 : ' Romaunt of the Rose'; the new style; 'Assembly of Foules,' 'Boke of the Duchesse,' ' Queue Anelyda/ ' Chauceres ABC.' Poems of Middle Life, 36-40 : ' Troylus and Cryseyde,' ' Crfurt of Love,' ' House of Fame,' ' Pala- mon and Arcite.' His Later Poems, 41-64 : ' Legende of Good Women ' ; ballads and other short pieces, 43 ; ' Canterbury Tales ' ; their order, 45 ; Prologue, 46 ; ' Knightes Tale,' 'Milleres Tale,' &c. Gower, 65, 66 ; Occleve ; Lydgate, 68-72 ; Minot. SCOTTISH POETS, 74 : Barbour, James I., Wynton. PROSE WRITERS, 75 : Maundevile, Chaucer, Wyclif, Trevisa ; ' Promptorium Parvulorum,' 77 ; Lyndewode Pages 84-143 CHAPTER II. REVIVAL OF LEARNING : 1450-1558. Decline of Literature ; invention of Printing, 2 ; Caxton and his" work ; , foundation of Schools and Universities. POETRY AND ROMANCE, 3 : Hardyng, Shirley, Burgh, Malory, Hawes, Dame Berners, Barclay, Skelt'on, Surrey, Wy at ; the 'Mirrour for Magistrates'; first Poet Laureate. SCOTTISH POETS, 12-17 : Henryson, Blind Harry, Dunbar, Gawain Douglas* Lyndsay. LEARNING, 18-28 : Renaissance move- ment ; Grocyii ; Linacre ; Colet ; Lilye's Grammar ; Archbishop Warham ; More ; the Humanities ; state of the Universities. PROSE WRITERS, 29-39 : Pecock, Fortescue, Caxton, ' Paston Letters,' Leland, More: his 'Utopia.' Chroniclers, 33: Polydore Virgil, Mair, Capgrave, Fabyan, More, Hall, Grafton ; Bale's ' Sum- marium. Theological Writers, 34 : Latimer, Tyndale ; More, 36-7 ; Roger Ascham ; Lord Berners, Elyot . . . Pages 144-183 CHAPTER III. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD: 1558-1625. Brilliant Period of our Literature ; connected with the Social Prospe- rity of the Country. POETS, 3-24 : Spenser, Harvey, the ' Faerie Queene,' 5 ; shorter poems, 6, 7 ; Shakspere's Poems, 8 ; Southwell, CONTENTS. ix Hall, Constable, Warner, Daniel, Drayton, Donne, Davies, Lodge, * Chapman, Marston, Gascoigne, Sidney, Dyer, Tusser, Marlowe, y Raleigh, Lord Brooke. TRANSLATORS, 24 ; Rise and Progress of the English Drama, 25-58; Miracle-plays; Coven try Mysteries; Towneley Mysteries ; Moralities, 27 ; Earliest Comedies, 28-9 ; Heywood's Interludes; earliest Tragedy, 31 ; Plays of Marlowe ; Kyd; Dramatic Unities; Greene's Pamphlet. Shakspere, 35 : sketch of his life ; his Comedies, 37-8 ; his Tragedies, 39, 40 ; his Historical Plays, 41-2 ; 1 Pericles,' 43 ;' Titus Andronicus ' ; Doubtful Plays, 44. Ben Jonson, 45 ; Beaumont and Fletcher, 46 -, Greene, Peele, Nash, Massinger, Ford, Webster, Marston, Chapman, Dekker, T. Heywood, Middleton, Rowley, Tourneur, Randolph, Shirley ; ' Histriomastix ' ; Suppression of the Stage, 58. LEARNING : the Universities ; Sir H. Savile, Sir T. Bodley ; Bodleian Library, 58a. PROSE WRITERS, 59 : Novels ; Lodge ; Lyly's 'Euphues ' ; Sidney's ' Arcadia,' 62 ; Hall. Books of Travel, 64 ; Hakluyt, Purchas. Essays, 65 ; Bacon, Burton, Over- bury ; Criticism, 67 ; Gascoigne, Webbe, Puttenham ; Sir Philip Sidney. Ecirliest Newspaper. HISTORIANS, 69-75 : Holinshed, Stow, Campion, Knox, Camden, Bacon, Speed, Knolles, Raleigh ; Foxe's ' Martyrs.' THEOLOGIANS, ^6-80 : Jewel, Harding, Parker, Hooker, The * Mar- Prelate ' controversy, Parsons, Stapleton, Harpsfield, James I., A.ndrewes ; Translation of the Bible. PHILOSOPHY, 82 : Francis Bacon ; explanation of his Method ; his Philosophical Works, 84-5. Lord Herbert's ' De Veritate,' 85. Political Science, 86: Buchanan, Bellenden, Spenser, Raleigh, R. Scot Pages 184-265 CHAPTER IV. CIVIL WAR PERIOD : 1625-1700. I Sketch of the leading Political Events : ' Eikon Basilike ' and its authorship, 2a. POETRY BEFORE THE RESTORATION, 4-28 : Jonson ; the Fantastic School ; Cowley, 6-8 ; Waller, Crashaw. Song- writers, 10 : Herbert, Sandys, Wotton, Corbet, Randolph, Carew, Drummond, Cleveland, Suckling, Cartwright, Herrick, Lovelace, Denham, Ha- bin^ton, Quarles, K. Philips, Vaughan. Milton, 20-26 : sketch of his literary life ; Wither ; Marvell, lines on Charles I. attributed to him. POETRY AFTER THE RESTORATION, 29-39 : Dryden ; sketch of his literary life ; Roscommon, 37 ; Butler ; Davenant, Boyle, Oldham, Rochester, Dorset. THE DRAMA, 40-51: Heroic Plays : Dryden, Otway, Lee, Shadwell, Settle, Crowne, Behn. Comedy of Manners : Congreve, Etherege, Wycherley ; Jeremy Collier's ' Short View.' LEARNING, 52-4: Usher, Selden, Gale, Spelman, &c. PROSE FICTION : Bunyan, 55. HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY, 57-8 : Claren- don, Fuller, Milton, Ludlow, &c. ; Wood's ' Athense ' ; Fuller, Mrs. Hutchinson, Heylin, Pepys, Evelyn, &c. THEOLOGY, 59-69 : Hall, Chillingworth, Hales, Jeremy Taylor, Bull. Latitudinarian Divines, 66 : Leighton, Pearson, Lightfoot, Baxter, Sherlock, South, Ken, Prideaux, Fox, Barclay, William Penn, Burnet. PHILOSOPHY, 70-76: Hobbes, Cudworth, Cumberland, Locke, Harrington, A. Sidney, Earle, Howell, Barclay. ESSAY WRITERS, 77 : Hall, Fell- tham, Browne, the ' Compleat Angler,' Evelyn's ' Sylva ' : ' Killing no Murder ' ; Dryden, Philips, Langbaine, Rymer. SCIENCE : Newton, Boyle, Lydiat, Digby. MINOR AUTHORS, 80a . 266-344 x CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY : 1700-1800. Historical Sketch; general characteristics. POETRY from 1700 to 1745, 3-32 : Pope, 4-12 : sketch of his literary life ; Essay on Man,' 9 ; his politics, 11 ; Addison, Gay, Granville, Hughes, Sheffield, Par- nell, Swift, Thomson, Prior, Congreve, Montague, Garth, Blackmore, Defoe, Howe, Tickell, Savage, Dyer, Lady M. Wortley Montagu, A. Philips, J. Philips, Blair, Watts, Ramsay. THE DRAMA, same period, 33-8 : Addison, Rowe, Thomson, Young, Southern, Steele. Prose Comedy : Farquhar, Vanbrugh, Gibber, Centlivre, Gay, Brooke. LEARNING, same period, 39 : Bentley, Lardner, Hearne, Tanner. PROSE WRITERS, same period : Novelists, 41 : Swift, Defoe. Pamph- leteers, 43 : Swift ; ' Drapier's Letters ': Arbuthnot. Periodical Mis- cellany, 45 : Tatler, Spectator, Guardian, &c. Satirical Works, 47 : Swift's 'Tale of a Tub.' HISTORIANS : Burnet, Rapin, Kennett, North, Strype. POETRY, 1745-1800, 50-68 : Johnson, Gray, Young^- Churchill, Macpherson's ' Ossian,' 60 ; Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns ; Minor Poets ; the ' Rolliad,' Hannah More. THE DRAMA, same period, 69-71 : Home, Johnson, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and others. LEARNING : Person, Lowth, Horsley. PROSE WRITERS, same period : Novelists, 73 ; Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Johnson, Gold- smith, Miss Burney, Beckford, Godwin, &c. Oratory, 78 : Chatham, Burke, &c. Pamphleteers, 79 : Junius, Johnson, Burke, Home Tooke. Essayists, 82 : Johnson; Historians, 83 : Hume, Robert- son, Gibbon, &c. ; Warton, Sharon Turner. Biographers : Boswell, &c. THEOLOGY, from 1700 to 1800, 86-92: Sacheverell; the English Deists ; Bentley, Berkeley, Butler's 'Analogy,' Warburton ; Methodism : Middleton, Challoner ; Prideaux, Paley. PHILOSOPHY, same period, 93 : Berkeley, Shaftesbury, Hume, Reid, Butler, Paley, &c. Political Science, 97 : Bolingbroke, Hume, Burke, Godwin, Paine. Political Economy, 98 : Adam Smith. Criticism : J. Warton, Burke, Reynolds, &c. Chesterfield's 'Letters' 345-417 CHAPTER* VI. RECENT. TIMES: 1800-1850. Reaction against the Ideas of the Eighteenth Century : Theory of the Spontaneous in Poetry. POETRY, 3-22 : Sir Walter Scott : sketch of his literary life ; Keats, 9 ; Shelley, Byron, Crabbe, Coleridge, Southey, Campbell, Wordsworth : his Excursion, 18 ; Moore, Hood, Keble, Hogg, &c. THE DRAMA, 22: Sheridan Knowles, Joanna Baillie, Lord Lytton, &c. PROSE WRITERS : Summary account of ; Charles Lamb ........ Pages 418-449 CHAPTER VII. NINETEENTH CENTURY CONTINUED. Poets and Novelists : Lord Tennyson, Browning, M. Arnold, Landor, 4- Clough, Swinburne. Names chronologically arranged, 7-33 : Blake, / CONTENTS. xi Lady Morgan, Lcyden, Jane and Anna M. Porter, Mrs. Tighe, Peacock, Mrs. Holland, Miss Ferrier, Barry Cornwall, Hope, Beddoes, Gait, the Howitts, Cunningham, Wilson, De Quincey, Disraeli, Douglas Jerrold, Carleton, Griffin, Mrs. Norton, Warren, Elliott, Miss Martineau, Domett, Lever, Basil Hall, Ainsworth, Mackay, Sir H. Taylor, Eliz. B. Browning, 17 ; Talfourd, Dickens, 18 ; Lover, Praed, Mrs. Trollope, Bailey, Faber, Grattan, Lord J. Manners, Cooper, Davis, De Vere, Home, Patmore, Miss Sewell, Miss Yonge, Trench, Charlotte Bronte, 22 ; Aytoun, Mrs. Gaskell, C. Kingsley, Thackeray, 24; Dobell, McCarthy, A. Smith, Miss Kavanagh, Reade, Anthony Trollope, Lord Lytton, Locker, E. Arnold, Miss Craig, Macdonald, Hughes, Miss Mulock, George Eliot, 28 ; W. Morris, W. W. Collins, Miss Procter, H. Kingsley, Borrow, Dixon, Barnes, Miss C. Rossetti, Jean Ingelow, Dobson, L. Morris, D. Rossetti, Thomson, Mrs. Oliphant, Miss Broughton ; Card. Wise- man, 34 ; Lord Macaulay, 35 ; Carlyle, 36 ; Card. Newman, 37 ; Darwin, Hamilton, Spencer, 38 ; Maine, Freeman, Stubbs, Green, 39 ; Tyndall, Huxley, 40 Pages 450-481 CRITICAL SECTION. CHAPTER I. Definition of Literature : Poetry and Prose Writings : Classification of Poetical Compositions. EPIC POETRY, 3-7; the Paradise Lost. DRAMATIC POETRY, 8-10 : its kinds ; Shakspere, Addison. HEROIC POETRY, 11-13 ; The Bruce ; The Campaign. Mock Heroic Poems : Pope's Rape of the Lock. NARRATIVE POETRY, 14-30: 1. Romances, Sir Isumbras ; 2. Tales, Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, Falconer, Crabbe ; 3. Allegories ; Vision of Piers Plowman, Flower and the Leaf, The Thistle and the Rose, Spenser's Faerie Queene, 22 ; Castle of Indolence; Fables: Gay, Mrs. Thrale, Meyrick; 4. Romantic Poems; Scott's Lay and others ; Byron's Oriental Tales ; Lalla Rookh ; 5. Historical Poems ; Riming Chroniclers, Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. DIDACTIC POETRY, 31-4 : The Hind and Panther; Essay on Man, Essay on Criticism. SATIRICAL POETRY, 35-41 :* of three kinds, moral, personal, political ; Satires of Donne, Hall, and Swift ; Pope's Satires ; Moral Essays, 36 ; The Dunciad ; English Bards and Scotch Reviewers ; Hudibras ; Absalom and Achitophel, 37 ; Churchill, Peter Pindar; Moore's Satires; The Vicar of Bray. PASTORAL POETRY, 42.: Spenser, Browne, Pope, Shenstone. DESCRIPTIVE POETRY, 44 : Poly-olbion, Cooper's Hill, The Seasons. LYRICAL POETRY, 48-63 : its kinds; devotional, loyal, patriotic, amatory, bacchanalian, martial ; specimens of each kind. ELEGIAC POETRY, 64 : Fidele, The Castaway, Lycidas, Adonais. MISCELLANEOUS POETRY, 68 : 1. Poems founded on the Passions and Affections; 'Michael'; 2. Poems of Sentiment and Reflection ; Childe Harold, Wordsworth's ' Ode ' ; 3. Poems of Imagination and Fancy ; Shelley's 'Skylark ' and * Cloud ' ; 4. Philosophical Poetry .... Pages 482-560 CONTENTS. CHAPTER II. Prose Writings : 1. PROSE FICTION : Classification of Works of Fic- tion ; Historical Novels, Scott ; Novels of high life, Richardson ; Novels of middle life, Fielding, Miss Austen ; Novels of low life, Dickens, Smollett. 2. WORKS OF SATIRE, WIT, AND HUMOUR, 6-11 : Tale of a Tub ; Battle of the Books ; The Anti- Jacobin ; Sterne ; Sydney Smith. 3. ORATORY, 12 : its kinds ; Jeremy Taylor; Burke. Journalism, 15. Pamphleteering, 16 ; illustrated from Milton, Swift, and Byron. 4. HISTORY, 19-29 : contemporary and retrospective ; Clarendon, Raleigh, Gibbon, Bacon, Arnold, &c. Biography, 30 ; its Divisions ; Diaries, Letters. 5. THEOLOGY, 32-42: its Branches; leading Works in each. 6. PHILOSOPHY, 43-55: Logic: Bacon, Whately, Mill, Hamilton. Psychology : 1. Moral Philosophy ; Butler, &c. ; 2. Intellectual Philosophy ; Locke, Reid, Hamilton. Metaphysics : Cudworth, More, Berkeley, 45 ; Hume, Coleridge. Political Science : Filmer, Hobbes, Milton, Burke, 49. ESSAYS : Bacon, Felltham, Foster, &c. CRITICISM : 1. Philosophical : Bacon's Advancement of Learning ; 2. Literary : Sidney, Fielding, Hallam, &c. ; 3. Artistic : Ruskin, Sir Joshua Reynolds Pages 561-605 APPENDIX. ON ENGLISH METRES 607 INDEX . . . . .. . . 619 LIST OF EXTRACTS . , 634 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PRELIMINARY CHAPTER. PAKT I. ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. 1. ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE forms of itself a special de- partment of study. It is one of those exceptional products of the human mind, working with scanty materials, imperfect tools, and under adverse circumstances, which, like stars scattered over a dark portion of the sky, stud the dreary period that intervenes between the break-up of the ancient civilisation and literature, and the rise of those of modern times. It is a thing apart, like the Irish or the Icelandic literature, and re- quires to be studied in connection with the fossil remains of other extinct cognate languages, such as the Old Saxon, the Moesogothic, and the Frisian. It is a chapter in Palaeontology. Yet, since the present English tongue is in its essential ele- ments derived from the Anglo-Saxon, and since the existence of an Anglo-Saxon literature probably stimulated our earliest English writers to persist in the use of the vernacular, when interest, fashion, and the torrent of literary example would have led them to adopt the Norman French, it seems desirable to commence with a brief sketch of that literature. 2. We know of no Anglo-Saxon composition, produced in England, that can be traced back with certainty to the times of Paganism. We must not look to the dwellers on the muddy Elbe, or the inhabitants of the plains of Holstein, for the teem- 2 ^ HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. PEEL. CH. ing imagination which characterised the Northmen of Iceland and Scandinavia, and which ages before the stirring stimulus of Christianity was applied to them produced the wonderful mythology of the Edda. In 596, St. Augustine, sent by Gregory the Great, brought the faith to the Anglo-Saxon tribes ; and the moral ferment which the introduction of this new spiritual ele- ment occasioned, acting upon a towardly and capable race, full of dormant power and energy of every kind, induced also such intellectual exertion as the times permitted, and as the partial communication by the missionaries of the literature of the ancient world tended to enkindle and to sustain. The Angles of Northumbria received Christianity, not from Kome, but from lona, the island-monastery of the Culdees, or ' servants of God,' founded by Columba, an Irish saint, in 565. Aidan, a monk of lona, having come into Northumbria about the year 635, at the invitation of the pious king Oswald, converted great numbers of the Angles, and fixed his episcopal see at Lindisfarne or Holy Isle. 1 From this period until the Norman Conquest (and in one memorable instance beyond it), the Anglo- Saxon mind was ever labouring, so far as intestine war and Banish inroad would allow, and executed a very creditable amount of work. Its chief successes, it is true, were obtained through the medium of the Latin, which was then and long afterwards the common language of Europe, and which a gene- rous and expansive mind, sick of irrational or semi-rational local usages, and material isolation, would rejoice to employ. 3. The Venerable Beda (673-735), in whom the Saxon in- tellect culminated, wrote all his extant works in Latin. Incom- parably the most valuable of these is his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, which gives us professedly a connected history of the Church and religion of England down to his own times, and incidentally throws a flood of light upon the secular his- tory also. Among his other works may be named, De Ratione Temporuni) a Martyrology, the Life of St. Cuthbert in prose and verse, a poem in leonine verse on St. Justin's martyrdom, Com- mentaries both on the Old and on the New Testament, and a sort of chronicle of universal history called De Sex ^Etatibus Sceculi. Alcuin, Eddi Stephanus, and Ethelwerd also wrote in Latin. But the rough vernacular was employed in popular poetry, and in all such prose writings as had a didactic purpose which included the laity within its scope. Such writings were naturally for the most part translations, since it was evidently safer and wiser to gain an insight into, and acquaintance with, 1 Beda, Ecd. Hist., book iii. ch. 5. PAKT I. ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. 3 the wisdom of antiquity, before essaying, under less favourable conditions, to make conquests in the realm of original thought. 3a, Alcuin. born at York in 732, three years before the death of Beda, was solidly educated in the great monastic school of that city. In time he became its ' scholasticus ' or head-master, and the fame of his learning spread far and wide. Being in Lombardy in 781, he came under the notice of Charlemagne, at whose invitation he took charge of the palace school at Aix-la-Chapelle. Thence he removed to Tours some years later, and having established a school of great efficiency, ,died there in 802. His works were ably edited in the last century by Froben, abbot of St. Emmeran at Ratisbon. His letters, nearly three hundred in number, are interesting and historically important ; among his corre- spondents were two popes, Adrian I. and Leo III., Charlemagne and his son, many English kings, many bishops both of English and foreign sees, and several women ; to these may be added Rabanus Maurus, his pupil, Colcu the lector, a celebrated Irish scholar, and St. Benedict of Aniane. His Biblical commentaries, educational works, and dogmatic treatises can hardly be said to live ; the last-named, however, are of some import- ance as throwing a clear light on the controversy about Adoptionism. He also wrote Lives of St. Willibrord (infra, 10) and two French saints, Vedast and Riquier. Among his numerous poems, the most interesting is one in 1650 hexameter lines, 'On the Bishops and Saints of the Church of York.' John Scotus Erigena, whose name sufficiently proves his Irish birth, but on the details of whose life scarcely anything is known, was one of the ornaments of the court of Charles the Bald, in the second half of the ninth century. Of the subtlety and strength of his intellect we can judge from two of his extant works, De Division* Natures and De Predestinatione. At his patron's request, he translated from Greek into Latin the mystical work of the pseudo-Dionysius on the Celestial Hierarchies. He is believed to have died about 885. 4. I. Poetry. Of Anglo-Saxon poetry there remains to us on the whole a considerable mass. By far the larger portion of it dates, both in original conception and in extant form, from a period subsequent to the introduction of Christianity. One poem, of 143 lines, The Gleeman's Song, bears on the face of it that the writer lived in the time of Attila, in the early part of the fifth century ; nor does there seem any sufficient reason to doubt that such was the fact. Another, Beowulf, the longest and most important of all, though in its present form manifestly the composition of a Christian writer, points to, and proves the existence of, earlier Sa'gas and songs, containing the sub- stance of the narrative, which must have been produced in pre-Christian times. In others, again, as Andreas, Elene, and Judith, although the narrative itself deals with a Christian subject-matter, the zeal of Grimm in the investigation of the old Teutonic world has elicited numerous traces of heathen customs and modes of thought, which to us, and to all Teutonic races, possess the deepest historical interest. The last and 4 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PREL. CH. least interesting class consists of metrical translations from the Psalms, and other parts of the Bible, the chief value of which lies in any additional illustration which they may bring to the study of the language. 5. The earliest in date of all the Anglo-Saxon poems appears to be The Gleeman's Song. It forms a part of the well-known Exeter MS., given to the cathedral of that city by Bishop Leofric in the time of Edward the Confessor. 1 In this poem (printed by Mr. Kemble, together with Beowulf, in 1833, by Dr. Guest in his History of English Rhythms, and by Mr. Thorpe, along with Beowulf , in 1855), we undoubtedly possess, to pass over the mere mention of the name of the Angli by Tacitus, 2 the earliest existing notices of the country, govern- ment, and political relations of our Angle progenitors. When the Gleeman has to speak of * Ongle,' the land of the ' Engle,' he tells us that it was ruled over by a king named Offa ; that this king, with the help of the Myrgings (apparently a tribe bear- ing kindred to the Angles, the poet himself was a Myrging, see 1. 87), enlarged his borders after the battle of Fif el-dor (a name for the Eider literally ' gate of terror ') ; and that the Engle and Swsefe (Suevi) held their respective lands thence- forward, as Offa appointed to them. The Angles, at the date of the poem, still lived in Germany ; the abode of the great Eormanric or Hermanric, King of the East Goths, was to be sought for ' eastan of Ongle ; ' it lay in and around ' Wistla- wudu,' the forest of the Vistula, where the Gothic warriors, with their hard swords, turned to bay in defence of their ancient seats against the hordes of Attila : 3 heardum sweordum Ymb Wistla-wudu wergan sceoldon Ealdne eSel-stol ^Etlan leodum. Again, the nations under the sway of the empire are designated by the singular name of Rum-walas strangers of Eome, and part of the dominions of the ' Caser,' or emperor, is called Walarice. Evidently we have here the Wa'lsch, Walschland, 1 The Codex Exoniensis was printed for the Society of Antiquaries in 1842, under the editorship of Mr. Thorpe.- 2 Germania, xl. 3 It seems a difficulty at first sight to understand how Hermanric (see Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chs. xxv. and xxvi. ) and Attila could be brought in conjunction as contemporaries of the same poet. But this was perfectly possible ; Hermanric was assassinated in the year 375, and Attila, though not known in the Roman world till many years later, succeeded his uncle as ruler, jointly with his brother Blseda, of the Hunnish tribes, in 403. Now the whole tenor of the poem points to a long course of wanderings continued through many years, so that the Gleeman, at different parts of his career, may easily have known both Hermanric and Attila. PART I. ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. 5 Walloon, Welsh, of the Teutonic tribes ; names by which they described the races, strange to themselves in blood and language, by which they were surrounded, and especially the inhabitants of Italy. But the Anglo-Saxon, after his conversion at the end of the seventh century, never again applied this name to the subjects of the Roman empire ; Rome was then too near and dear a name to him to allow of his using any term import- ing estrangement with reference to her people. Here again, then, we have an evidence of the early date of the present poem. But it may be objected that the author speaks of 4 heathens ' (1. 73), and therefore may be presumed to have been a Christian ; and if there were Angle Christians early in the fifth century, how came it that at the time of their trans- migration to Britain, and for more than a century after, they are represented to us as purely Pagan ? Many lines of thought and inquiry suggest themselves in reply, which cannot here be followed up. But it may be observed that Christianity admits of many degrees ; that of the Peruvians, after the Spanish conquest, bore but a faint resemblance to that of the Jesuit converts in Paraguay ; and the thin varnish of Arian Chris- tianity thrown over the barbarism of Alaric and his Visigoths, shares the name, but not the influence or the durability, of the religious system which softened the manners and the hearts of Ethelbert and Edwin. Besides the East and West Goths, the Burgundians, and many other Teutonic races, professed Chris- tianity in the fifth century; and there is nothing ;im probable in the conjecture that the Angles may have derived from their neighbourhood to the Goths of East Prussia the same kind of nominal Christianity which the latter possessed. This loose profession they may easily have lost, after their colonizing enterprise had established them firmly in Britain ; nor would the circumstance that the Britons were Christians have tended at all to attach them to Christianity, but rather the contrary. For, besides the proverbial ' odisse quern laeseris,' no fact is more certain than that the Angles thoroughly despised the Celts whom they dislodged ; and as the latter carefully re- frained from imparting to their conquerors that faith, without which they believed them to be under the sentence of eternal perdition, so the former must have been disposed to involve the religion of the Britons in the same ^sweeping contempt which they entertained for themselves. 6. The essential charm of the Anglo-Saxon, as of the Ice- landic poetry though it appertains to the former in a lower degree is in the glimpses which it gives us into the old Teutonic world, when Odin was still worshipped in the sacred 6 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITEEATURE. PREL. CH. wood, when the wolf, the eagle, and the raven were held in reverence as noble and fearless creatures, bringers of good luck, and specially dear to the gods ; and when the battle and the banquet were the only forms of life in which the hero could or cared to shine. In this Gleeman's Song, though in the main a mere catalogue of the nations and persons visited by the writer, traces of this primitive state of things may be gathered. From the following lines it would seem that the Goths knew not as yet how to coin money : And ic waes mid Eormanrice : ealle J>rage ; l paer me Gotena cyning : gode dohte, Se me beag forgeaf : burg-warena fruma. On J>am siex hund waes : smaetes goldes Gescyred sceatta : scilling-rime. pone ic Eadgilse : on aeht sealde, Minum hleo-drihtne : Ja ic to ham bicwom, Leofum to leane : ]>ses J>e he me lond forgeaf, Mines fseder eftel : frea Myrginga. And I was with Eormanric a whole season ; There the King of the Goths endowed me with good things : He chief of the burgh-dwellers gave me a ring : 2 For it were cut off six hundred shots [i.e. pieces] Of beaten gold, reckoning by shillings. 3 That ring I delivered into the possession of Eadgils My sheltering lord [lit. ' lee-lord '], when I came home, As a gift to the dear one ; for which he gave me land, The native place of my father he, Lord of the Myrgings. 7. But the features of the antique world are more distinctly and variously exhibited to us in the poem of Beowulf. Un- fortunately the single manuscript on which we are dependent for the text was injured in the fire at the Cotton Library in 1731, and a not inconsiderable number of lines remain from this cause more or less unintelligible. The MS. was first edited, in 1815, by Thorkelin, keeper of the Koyal Archives at Copenhagen. In 1833 the text with annotations, and in 1837 a translation with a learned introduction, were produced by J. M. Kemble, under the auspices of the English Historical Society. The poem has been studied most attentively by German scholars, as Grimm, Ettmiiller, Leo, and others, for the sake of the light which it throws upon the origins of the Teutonic race. Many different theories have been advanced 1 On the metre see Appendix, 5. 2 The ring of metal, large or small, was a customary form of present among the Germans. Tacitus (Germ, xv.) mentions 'torques ' among the gifts which they delighted to receive from neighbouring nations. 3 The 'sceat ' (a word that still survives in the phrase 'scot and lot') seems to have been equivalent to the smaller penny, twelve of which went to the * scilling.' 600 sceatta then were equal to 50 scillingas. PART I. ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. 7 respecting its age and import of which I have elsewhere given an account. 1 After explaining what the poem is about, I shall briefly state my own view of its origin. 8. The main actions of the poem are three : first, the fight of the hero, Beowulf, with the fiendish monster, Grendel, who had long infested the approaches to Heorot, 2 the palace of Hrothgar, king of Denmark, and killed many noble Danes ; secondly, the "fight of the same hero with GrendePs mother, whom he kills ; thirdly, the deadly conflict between Beowulf, now an old man, and king both of Denmark and Gautland, and a huge dragon, keeper of a large treasure -hoard by the sea-shore. Beowulf, who was a prince of the Geatas (the people of Gaut- land or Gotland in the south of Sweden), came by sea to the aid of Hrothgar, attacked Grendel, and after a tremendous struggle, compelled him to flee, leaving one of his arms torn off in Beowulf's hands, to his home at the bottom of a pool, where he soon afterwards died. His mother, to revenge his defeat, visited Heorot by night, and carried off ^Eschere, Hrothgar's favourite thane. Beowulf goes in pursuit, traces the creature to her watery abode, goes down into the pool, and after a hard fight despatches her. Returning to his own land, he succeeds after a while to the kingdom, and reigns for many years in all prosperity. In his old age, hearing of the ravages of a fiery dragon on the sea-board of his kingdom, he undertakes the perilous adventure, shunned by all but himself, of attacking and destroying him. He succeeds, but receives in the struggle a mortal wound. The plundering of the dragon-hoard, the burning of Beowulf's body on a funeral pile by the sea-shore, and the raising of a large beacon-mound over his ashes, ' easy to behold by the sailors over the waves,' are the concluding events of the story. 9. The following view of the origin and relations of the poem is briefly summarized from the Introduction to the edition above cited. The date of composition was the early part of the eighth" century. This conclusion arises from a number of converging considerations, such as (1) the language, which in its general cast, and also in certain peculiar terms and expres- sions, closely resembles that of Guftlac, Andreas, and Elene, poems which must be unquestionably referred to that century ; (2) certain historical allusions contained in the work. The most important of these refers to the expedition, mentioned several 1 See the Introduction to the author's Beowulf, a Heroic Poem of the Eighth Century ; Longmans, 1876. 2 The name of Heorot is thought to be preserved in Hjortholm, a village of Zealand, not far from Copenhagen. 8 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. On. times in Beowulf, of Hygelac king of the Geatas to Friesland, where he was slain by the Franks. This expedition has been satisfactorily identified with a marauding raid, described by the chronicler Gregory of Tours under the year 511, in which a king ' Chocilaicus ' (Frankish-Latin for Hygelac) met his death in Friesland under precisely similar circumstances. The poem itself contains incidents which are supposed to happen some sixty years after this expedition, and has expressions which indicate that after the latest of those incidents the writer con- ceived of a long period of time intervening between it and his own day. These facts completely demolish a theory which has been often advanced, that Beowulf was written in Anglen or Holstein before the Angles and Saxons had migrated to Britain in the fifth century. The poem contains another allusion helping to determine its date, in the words of the Geat, who, after mentioning Hygelac's raid, adds (1. 2921), * To us never after that was granted the favour of the Merovingians.' The Merovingian dynasty among the Franks became extinct in 752 ; and since the poem contains no mention whatever of the great family which succeeded it, the Carolingians or Karlings, it may be reasonably inferred that it was written before that date. Dr. Grein of Marburg, who by his Biblioihek der Angelsachsischen Poesie, and admirable Glossar, or Dictionary, accompanying it, has laid all students of old Teutonic literature under an in- estimable obligation, and also Ludwig Ettmiiller of Zurich, agree with the general result embodied in the above view, namely, that Beowulf must be placed in the eighth century. 10. With regard to the authorship, it must be premised that in the judgment of the best critics the poem apart from two or three passages, not necessary to the connection of the story, which may be the interpolations of a later age forms one whole, composed about the same time, and by one author. That author was undoubtedly a Christian. If the conclusion above given as to the date of the poem be sound, the re- flection at once arises that the early part of the eighth century was a period of great literary activity for the West Saxons (in whose language the work is written), as is proved by the writings of St. Aldhelm, and the letters of St. Boniface and others. It was also an age in which West-Saxon missionaries, led by SS. Wilfrid and Willibrord, were actively engaged in spreading the light of Christianity among the still Pagan nations of their own blood living to the eastward the Frisians, Old Saxons, and Danes. Alcuin, in his Vita S. Willibrordi, mentions that thirty young Danes were placed in the missionary's hands, in 695, and sent to be educated in Friesland. By means of some PART I. ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. 9 communication of this kind, it is conjectured that the legends and traditions of Scandinavia may have become known to a West-Saxon priest or clerk of a poetic turn, and by him worked up into the poem before us. 11. Another theory that of Mr. Thorpe is to this effect; that we have here no original Anglo-Saxon poem in any sense, but only a metrical paraphrase of an old Swedish poem of un- certain date, composed in England under the Danish dynasty, between the years 1010 and 1050, by some one who was of Danish parentage, but a native of England. Yet why any one should take so much trouble to make a translation which would be unintelligible to his Danish, and uninteresting to his English countrymen, it is not easy to understand. 1 12. Ccedmon's Paraphrase. The unique MS. containing this poem belonged to Archbishop Usher, and is now in the Bodleian library. No author's name is to be found in the MS. itself ; but Francis Junius, who published the first edition of the poem in 1655, observing the remarkable general agreement of its contents with the summary given by Beda 2 of the sub- stance of the religious poetry written by Csedmon, the lay brother of Whitby, who flourished about 680 A.D., assumed the identity of the two works. Later critics have generally held the contrary opinion. Hickes led the way, by maintaining that the language of the work published by Junius was full of Dano-Saxon peculiarities, and therefore could not be referred to so early a date as the seventh century. But he did not succeed in establishing the fact of these peculiarities ; and even if they existed, there is no reason why they should not be laid to the charge of some later transcriber, rather than of the author. Rask, however, the learned Dane to whom Anglo- Saxon scholars owe so much, was decidedly of opinion that the work was not written by Beda's Csedmon ; he always speaks of its author as the 'pseudo-Caedmon.' This also seems to be the general opinion in Germany. On the other hand, Thorpe 3 and Guest 4 are disposed to uphold the correctness of the desig- nation assigned by Junius. 13. If there were no means of trying the question, other than a comparison of Junius's poem with the meagre descrip- 1 Since this was written, many new views on the date and authorship of Beowulf have appeared in various English, German, American, and Danish publications. See particularly Prof. Earle's Sketch of Anglo-Saxon Literature. But none of them seem to me entirely conclusive, and therefore I leave the passage in the text unaltered. (1888.) 2 Hist. Eccl. iv. 24. 3 Thorpe's C&dmon, edited for the Society of Antiquaries, 1832. 4 History of English Rhythms, ii. 24. io HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. CH. tion of Csedmon given by Beda will furnish, I do not see why we should not hold with considerable confidence the opinion that the two are identical. But the reader shall judge for him- self. Beda writes of Caedmon thus : ' He sang of the creation of the world and the origin of the human race, and the whole history as found in Genesis, concerning the going forth of Israel out of Egypt, and their entrance into the land of promise ; of very many other narratives in Holy Scripture, of the Incarna- tion of our Lord, His Passion, Kesurrection, and Ascension into heaven ; of the descent of the Holy Ghost, and the teaching of the Apostles. He also composed many verses concerning the terror of the judgment to come, and the fearfulness of the punishments of hell, and the sweetness of the heavenly kingdom ; besides a great many others on the loving-kindnesses and judg- ments of God ; and in all his compositions he strove to wean men from the love of vice, and stimulate them to the love and right understanding of virtue.' 14. The following rough notes of the contents of the 'Para- phrase,' as printed by Mr. Thorpe, were made without any reference to the passage in Beda : 15. * Book I. The Creation ; Eevolt of the Angels ; they are hurled into hell ; the Fall ; Expulsion from Eden (pp. 1-59). From Cain and Abel to the Flood (pp. 59-93). From the Flood to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and thence regularly on to the sacrifice of Isaac (pp. 94-177). Here is a break ; Canto xlii. makes a fresh start on the subject of " Moyses d6mas," the Statutes of Moses ; but the story of Moses is told very concisely down to the passage of the Red Sea, on which the writer descants lengthily. The passage from page 200 to page 206 reads like an interpolation of later date ; it goes back again to Noah and Abraham's sacrifice. At page 207 the narrative of the passage of the Red Sea resumes, and continues to page 216. The remainder of the first book (pp. 216-263) is a paraphrase of parts of the Book of Daniel ; the Three Children in the Fiery Furnace; their Song; Daniel's Dream-wisdom ; Belshazzar. 16. ' Book II. The complaints of the fallen angels and other inhabitants of hell ; the descent of Christ ; his intercourse with the twelve before the Ascension ; his Ascension ; descrip- tion of the Last Judgment (pp. 264-313).' 17. From this analysis it is manifest that the contents of the MS. printed by Junius and Thorpe correspond very well as far as they go, allowing for gaps and omissions, with Beda's description of the writings of Caedmon. There is, however, some other evidence, which bears, though perhaps with no great PART I. ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. 11 force, the other way. Beda professes to give the substance, in Latin, of the opening of Csedmon's poem. After speaking of the manner in which the verses were, so to speak, given to the poet, he continues, ' quorum iste est sensus : Nunc laudare debemus auctorem regni coelestis, potentiam Creatoris, et consilium illius, facta patris glorise. Quomodo ille, cum sit eternus Deus, omnium miraculorum auctor extitit ; qui primo filiis hominum ccelum pro culmine tecti, dehinc terram custos humani generis omnipotens creavit. Hie est sensus,' he con- tinues, ' non autem ordo ipse verborum, quae dormiens 'ille canebat ; neque enini possunt carmina, quamvis optime compo- sita, ex alia in aliam linguam, ad verbum, sine detrimento sui decoris ac dignitatis, transferri.' In King Alfred's translation of Beda, a metrical rendering of the above Latin version of Caedmon's opening is given, introduced by the words, ]>ara ende^- byrdnes is ]>is, ' their order is this.' At the close of his version, Alfred, who, though he omits much, generally adheres closely to his original in the parts which he translates, forbears to translate the passage from ' Hie est sensus ' to * transferri.' This he would naturally do, if the lines which he had just written down were really known by him to have been taken from the actual work of Caedmon ; for in that case he had given the ' ordo ipse verborum ' ; and it would seem absurd to insert in his translation words importing the exact contrary. But if the lines inserted were, as some suppose, his own compo- sition not the ipsissima verba of Caedmon at all, but a mere metrical rendering of Beda's Latin would he not have felt himself bound to append to them, though not the exact expres- sions of Beda, yet some analogous explanatory or justificatory statement 1 Again, the substitution of ' their order is this,' as introductory words, instead of ' their meaning is this ' (quorum iste est sensus), taken in connection with Beda's disclaimer of having given the ' ordo ipse,' certainly agrees better with the supposition that Alfred was quoting the very words of Caedmon, and knew it, than with any other. And yet if we adopt this conclusion, how can we any longer identify Caedmon with the Paraphrast 1 For the version of the opening of the poem, as given by Alfred, stands very far apart from that in the Para- phrase, though with a general agreement in tenor. The fol- lowing is a literal translation of Alfred's version : ' Now must we praise the warden of the heavenly king- dom, the might of the Creator, and his purpose, the work of the Father of glory ; how he, the eternal Lord, established the beginning of each one of his marvels. He first, the holy Creator, framed for the children of earth heaven to be their 12 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEEATUKE. FUEL. CH. roof ; then afterwards he, the eternal Lord, the King almighty, guardian of mankind, formed the earth, 1 for men of mould.' 18. On the other hand the opening of the Paraphrase runs as follows : Tor us it is very right that we praise with our words, love in our souls, the warden of the heavens, the glorious king of hosts ; he is of powers the essence, head of all high creations, the Kuler Almighty. There was never for him first beginning, nor cometh now end for the eternal Lord ; but he is in his kingdom above heaven-thrones, in high majesty, sooth-fast and very firm.' 19. To this it may be added, that in a very ancient and valuable MS. of the Historia Ecclesiastica, written in the eighth century, preserved in the University library at Cambridge, something like positive evidence to the genuineness of Alfred's version is on record. At the end of the history, on the back of the last leaf of the MS., occur, without any preface, some Anglo- Saxon lines, written in an eighth-century hand. They com- mence, ' ISTu scylun hergean hefaen-ricaes ward/ and end, ' firum foldu frea allmaectig.' Then come the words, ' Primo cantavit Csedmon istud carmen ' (Csedmon first sang this song, or poem). On comparing the lines with Alfred's version of the opening of Csedmon, we find that they exactly agree with it, the only difference being that this is in the Northumbrian, Alfred's in the "West-Saxon dialect. It certainly looks as if the writer of these lines had Caedmon's poem before him, or was setting them down from memory. But it is very unfortunate that he stops just where Beda stops ; one more line of Anglo-Saxon, followed by the Latin note quoted above, would have left it out of doubt that we were reading Csedmon' s own words. As it is, there is just the possibility that this writer was only translating from Beda, and that Alfred adopted his translation, merely putting it into the West-Saxon dialect ; but I think that the probability lies the other way, and that we must dis- tinguish the real Csedmon from the author of the Paraphrase. 20. Andreas and Elene constitute the principal portion of the poetry of the Codex Vercellensis, a manuscript discovered by Blume in the library at Vercelli, in the year 1836, printed in the appendix to the report of the Record Commission in 1837, published with an excellent introduction and notes by Jacob Grimm, at Cassel, in 1840, and edited by J. M. Kernble, for the ^Elfric Society, in 1853. The two poems are, though 1 The word is ' middan-gcard ' (lit. 'middle-ward,' 'mid-abode'). Earth, in the northern imagination, was placed in the midst, between As-gard, the abode of the gods and heroic men, and Hela or hell. In various corrupted forms this fine old word held its ground in the language for centuries after the Conquest. PART I. ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. 13 in the same handwriting, quite unconnected with one another. Andreas, containing 1722 lines, is a narrative of some of the remarkable adventures of the apostle St. Andrew, in aid of the evangelist St. Matthew, who had fallen into the hands of a tribe of idolatrous cannibals in the land of Mermedonia. The Codex Apocryphus Novi Testament^ published by Fabricius, contains a brief abstract of this legend ; but a Greek MS. at Paris, entitled Hedfyic 'Av&jsou za) Mar0a/ou, furnishes a narra- tive approaching very closely to that of the Anglo-Saxon poem. 21. The chief incidents of the poem are as follows. St. Andrew, while preaching in Achaia, is warned by a voice from heaven to go to the aid of his fellow-labourer and friend St. Matthew, who was in Mermedonia, and in great danger. He comes down to the shore, and embarks in a boat in which the Deity himself and two angels are the rowers. A storm arises, and gives occasion to much edifying talk between the boatmen and the passengers. Andrew and his friends fall asleep, and next morning find themselves lying on the beach in Mermedonia. Unseen, Andrew walks up to the castle where the prisoner is confined ; the seven guards before the prison-door fall down dead ; the door flies open ; the friends embrace. St. Matthew and his fellow-prisoners depart immediately ; Andrew returns to the city. About this time the Mermedonians send for a fat prisoner to the jail, and their disappointment upon dis- covering that the birds have flown is inconsolable. But a breakfast must be had, so they at length resolve upon casting lots amongst themselves, to determine who shall be sacrificed to the appetites of the rest. The lot falls on a young man ; but, at the prayer of Andrew, all weapons lifted against him become like wax. The devil now appears, and reveals the presence of the saint ; Andrew is seized, and dragged all day over the hard roads and rocks, drogon deonnode : sefter dunscraefum, ymb stanhleofto : stearcedferhSe, efne swa wide : swa wegas to lagon, enta aergeweorc : innan burgum, strsete stanfage. storm upp aras aefter ceasterhofum : cirm unlytel haeffnes heriges. 1 This lingering martyrdom is renewed during several days, the saint being healed of his wounds each night, and strengthened to endurance by his Almighty protector. At length, after 1 ' They dragged the beloved one among the mountain dens, the strong- souled round the rocky summits, even as wide as ways lay, the old work of giants within the burgh, in the street paved with stones of many colours. A storm arose at the castle court, no small clamour of the heathen host.' 14 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PREL. CH. various astounding miracles, the persecutors are all overawed into baptism, and the saint, after appointing a pious bishop over them, named Plato, commits them to the grace of God, and departs, to their infinite sorrow, for his own country. 22. The subject of Elene, that is, Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, is the finding of the true cross at Jerusalem. The well-known story is adhered to pretty closely in its main features, though with much amplification in details. The discovery of the holy nails used in the Crucifixion receives especial prominence ; indeed, it almost throws the Invention of the Cross into the shade. The poem contains 1321 lines. 23. Both stories, then, in substance and in details, are taken from church tradition ; yet the spirit of the time and the people is manifest, perhaps, in the very choice of the subjects, especially in that of Elene. A Teuton loved before all things to hear of war and fighting ; now Constantine in the story only embraces Christianity because it has brought him victory in war; nor is the cross on the sacred Labarum sufficient for him out of the holy nails must be fashioned a bit for his bridle, which victory ever waits upon. In Andreas there is indeed no fighting ; but there is a striking picture of a solemn Volks-thing, or national assembly ; and in the account of the divine ferryman, we cannot but trace the sagas about the Saxon Woden, according to which he was wont, in the disguise of a ferryman, to transport and deliver men from danger. The patient, almost monotonous, endurance of the saint, is indeed a purely Christian feature ; but when we find him with all the wounds and bruises of the day miraculously healed before the morning, we are reminded of the fact that the sagas attribute the same marvel to the ' Hiadiiingar,' the ancient heroes of the North, though indeed with this difference, that the latter have fought valiantly, and not got more hard blows than they have given. 24. With regard to the authorship of these poems, Jacob Grimm (from whose excellent introduction my account of them is mainly taken) enters into an interesting speculation. The name of the author of Elene is given in runic letters at the close of the poem it is Cynewulf. But who was Cynewulf 1 and who wrote Andreas ? Grimm now proceeds to weave a pretty theory. Towards the end of Andreas occur the lines (1. 1487), HwaeSre git sceolon lytlum sticcum leoS worda dsel furSur reccan. 1 1 'Yet must ye two, in little pieces, further con over a portion of my verses. ' PAET I. ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. 15 The ' git ' (ye two) refers, he thinks, to a king and queen. These were, he conjectures, Ina, king of Wessex (688-725), and Ethelburga, his queen ; if so, the poet was probably Bishop Aldhelm, Ina's friend and counsellor, who is known to have written Saxon poems, though they were supposed to be lost, and who, as educated under Archbishop Theodore in the school of Canterbury, might easily have become acquainted with the Greek legend embodied in Andreas. Cynewulf was perhaps a disciple of Aldhelm. Crist, a long poem on the threefold coming of Christ, and Juliana, which is the legend of the martyrdom of the saint of that name, derived from her Acts, 1 are also proved, by runes inserted in the body of each poem, to have been written by Cynewulf. All four poems seem to point to a time when only some hundred years, or less, had elapsed since the nation renounced the faith of its forefathers, so that it still retained many ^vestiges of its wild heathen past. It should be nored that a German scholar, Dietrich (Haupt'sjf* Zeitschrift, ix.), first pointed out the unity of the work since entitled Crist ; till then it had been regarded as a collection of detached pieces. Cynewulf is also believed to have written part of Guftlac and possibly Phoenix, both printed in Grein's Bibliothek der Angelsachsuchen Poesie. The author of an excellent article in Brockhaus' Conversations Lexikon, from which these particulars are taken, adds that ' from his poems it may be gathered, that Cynewulf lived in the eighth century, spent part of his life in secular efforts and affairs, perhaps as a strolling singer, whence the collection of " Riddles " may have arisen ; and later on de- voted himself to the religious life. He was not wanting in culture, and probably had attended a convent school.' 25. Judith, a fragment of which only has come down to us, found in the same unique MS. volume which contains Beowulf, is not inaptly described by Mr. Turner 2 as an Anglo-Saxon romance, since, like many of the romances of a later age, while the outline of the story is taken from Jewish history, the tone, the descriptions, and many of the incidents, present the broadest local colouring, and breathe the full Teutonic spirit. The open- ing of the poem, down to the middle of the ninth section, is lost. The exact date is unascertainable, but Grimm seems to treat it as belonging to the great literary age of Wessex, the eighth century. 26. Several remarkable poems are preserved to us in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, presently to be described. The chief of these are, the Brunanburgh War-song, and the Elegy on King Edgar, given under the years 938 and 975 respectively. The first the ' Waterloo ode ' of the ninth century is a triurn- 1 Printed in the Acta Sanctorum, February 16. 2 Turner's Anglo-Saxons, iii. 302. 1 6 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. PEEL. CH. phal chant occasioned by the great victory won by Athelstan, over the Danes from Ireland under Anlaf, and the Scots under their king Constantine, at Brunanburgh. 1 Never, says the Gleeman, since the Angles and Saxons came hither from the eastward, had they gained a bloodier victory : Ne wear'S wsel mare OnSise ijlande aefer gyta folces jefylled beforan J>issum, sweordes ecjum, ]>ses \>e us secjaS bee ealde uSwitan, siffSan eastan hider Enjle and Seaxe up becomon ofer brymum brad Brytene sohton, \vlance wi^-smiSas, Wealas ofer-comon, eorlas arhwate, card bejeaton. ' Nor was there ever yet a greater slaughter of people brought about in this island before this with the edge of the sword, according to that which old sages tell us by book, since Angles and Saxons came up hither from the east, sought Britain over the broad main, as proud artificers of war overcame the alien race [Welsh], got possession the earls keen after glory ! of the land. 5 27. The Elegy on King Edgar belongs to the waning period of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Some of the homely, vivid metaphors of the old gleemen are still retained ; the sea is still ' the gannet's bath/ ' the home of the whale,' and so on ; but the fire and the swift movement are gone. It is short, and yet diffuse meagre, but obscure. 28. II. The extant prose writings, though numerous, are, with one exception, valuable not so much for any literary merits as for the light which they throw on the labours of the historian and the antiquary. There exists in the Public Re- cord-offices an immense body of documents charters, convey- ances, declarations, laws, edicts, &c. many of which have been arranged and translated by the labours of Thorpe and Kemble, and have greatly contributed to deepen our knowledge of the way of life of our forefathers. All the more valuable Anglo- Saxon charters, to the number of many hundreds, were pub- lished by Mr. Kemble in his invaluable Codex Diplomaticus. But such documents are of course not literature, and therefore need not be here considered. Another large portion of the extant works consists of translations, many of which proceed from the pen of Alfred himself, who has explained -his own 1 Various attempts have been made to identify the position of Brunan- burgh. The latest, and perhaps the best view, is that of Mr. Skene (Celtic Scotland), who places it on the Ouse near Boroughbridge. PAKT I. ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. 17 motives for undertaking the work. The views of an ' Educa- tional Reformer* in the ninth century are worthy of our careful attention. His object is, he says, 'the translation of useful books into the language which we all understand ; so that all the youth of England, but more especially those who are of gentle kind and at ease in their circumstances, may be grounded in letters for they cannot profit in any pursuit until they are well able to read English.' With these views Alfred translated the work of Pope Gregory, De Curd Pastorali, the epitome of universal history by Orosius, the work of Boethius De Consolatione Philosophice, and the Ecclesiastical History of Beda. In the epitome of Orosius occur some remarkable passages of which Alfred was himself the author ; these are, a general description of northern Europe, and an account of the Voyages of the Saxon mariners, Ohthere and Wulfstan. Ohthere himself told Alfred how, starting from Heligoland on the Norway coast, he had sailed round the North Cape into the White Sea, and afterwards, by way of Christiania to Schleswig Wulfstan's voyage was in the Baltic Sea, from Schleswig to Truso. See Description of Europe, &c., edited by the late Dr. Bos- worth, 1855. 29. But by far the most important prose work that has come down to us is the Saxon Chronicle, which gives a con- nected history of Britain, in the form of annals, from the Christian era to the year 1154. The oldest MS. in existence dates from about the year 891, and is thought, with much probability, to have been partly composed, partly transcribed from earlier annals, by or under the direction of Archbishop Plegmund. From this time the Chronicle seems to have been continued under succeeding Archbishops of Canterbury to the time of the Conquest. It would naturally be communicated to other monasteries, the monks of which, while copying it, would insert passages relating to their own province and their own foundation. Thus we have, besides the Canterbury Chronicle, an Abingdon Chronicle, a Worcester Chronicle, perhaps a Winchester Chronicle, and a Peterborough Chronicle; all extant in separate MSS. ; of which the first is at Cambridge, the next three at the British Museum, and the last at Oxford. All these agree in the main, but each has a number of notices peculiar to itself. 1 It seems possible to trace two principal hands in the com- position of the Chronicle prior to the time of Plegmund one that of a Northumbrian, the otlier of a West-Saxon writer. 1 The curious account of the origin of the Chronicle given by Geoffrey Gainiar (Mon. Hist. Brit. p. 792) is perhaps not far from the truth. B 1 8 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PREL. CH. The traces of the Northumbrian hand are most evident, espe- cially in the earlier portion; e.g. under the year 449 occurs the passage, ' From this Woden sprang all our royal kindred, and that of the South-Humbrians also.' Other indications occur under the years 697 and 702 ; and the comparative ful- ness with which Northumbrian affairs are recorded, as con- trasted with all the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms except Wes- sex, points to the same conclusion. The Northumbrian work was very likely performed at Lindisfarne ; at any rate, soon after the touching notice of the destruction of the monastery in the year 793, this writer disappears, and Northumbrian history sinks back into a cloud of impenetrable darkness. Of the MSS. which contain these Northumbrian annals, the Laudian MS. in the Bodleian Library (the E of Mr. Earle's late edition) is the most important and complete. Mr. Eaiie has shown cause for supposing that this MS. was compiled at the monastery of Peterborough, in or soon after the year 1116. The other great MS., known as the Benet MS. (the 3 of Mr. Earle), represents almost exclusively the historic view and literary interest of the South and West of England; thus, while the history of Alfred, on which the Laud MS. is almost silent, is minutely and lengthily told in the Benet, hundreds of notices of Northumbrian affairs which are found in the former are entirely omitted in the latter. The analysis of all the leading MSS. of the Chronicle has been ably made by Mr. Eaiie ; * but it is singular that he should have overlooked the significant entry in the Laud MS. under the year 449 above noticed : since that entry demonstrates, not merely that a Worcester scribe obtained Northumbrian information, which is Mr. Earle's theory (Introduction, p. xl.), but that part of the Chronicle itself comes from a Northumbrian hand. 30. Considered as a whole, the literature of the Anglo- Saxons conveys the impression that they were a prosaic and practical race, solid but slow thinkers, without much imagina- tion or mental fire. What they might have made of it, had they been allowed to develop their literature uninterruptedly, it is, of course, impossible to say. But it seems reasonable to suppose that, for ulterior ends of higher good, it was ordered that the Saxon commonwealth should not repose in unmolested prosperity. A vein of sluggishness, of Boeotian enjoyment, of coarse indulgence, with forgetfulness of the higher aims of life, ran through the Saxon character. Their transference from the sandy barrens and marshes of Holstein, from the peaty 1 Two of the Saxon Chronicles parallel ; Oxford, 1865. PART I. ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. 19 plains and stunted forests of Hanover, to the rich soil and milder climate of England, tended to develop this weak side this proneness to ease. In their old dwelling-place they were at least stimulated by the necessity of contending with the unfruitfulness of nature and the encroachments of the sea ; in comparison with it, England must have been a terrestrial paradise a very land of Cockaigne. This tendency to relapse into habits of indolence, which Sir Walter Scott has portrayed in the character of Athelstan in Ivanhoe, extended to the learned class, and to the churchmen no less than the laity. The influence of such a man as Bed a should have been enough to inaugurate a long era of literary energy; yet William of Malmesbury assures us that, with the exception of the brief Saxon annals and the barbarous epitome of Ethelwerd, he had not been able to discover any historical work composed by an Anglo-Saxon upon the affairs of Britain, from the death of Beda to his own time. To form the future English character, it was necessary that the harder and sterner elements which belonged to the Scandinavian races, should be mingled and gradually fused with the softer Germanic type. The Danish invasions and immigrations, which commenced in 787, and ter- minated with the establishment of the Danish dynasty in 1017, effected this. But in the process, the existing literary culture, and nearly all the establishments which had been founded to promote it, were swept away. In a country reduced to the dismal condition described by Bishop Lupus' in a sermon preached to his flock 1 about the year 1012, it was impossible that men's thoughts should be efficaciously turned to any sub- jects save such as bore upon their personal security. Canute, indeed, after he had restored internal peace and order, showed a desire to patronise literary men, and, by rebuilding the monasteries, to open asylums for learning. But the glory and greatness of his reign gave an impulse rather to the Scan- dinavian than to the Saxon genius. JSTo English poet sang of his victories ; that task was left to the scalds, whom he brought with him from Denmark. By this time large advances had been made towards the amalgamation of the races. Writing of the year 1036, Malmesbury 2 says that the citizens of London, ' from long intercourse with these barbarians ' (the Danes), ' had almost entirely adopted their customs.' The Danes adopted with facility the Anglo-Saxon tongue, though import- ing into it many Danish words, and probably breaking down to a great degree its grammatical structure. The secular laws 1 Turner, Ang.-Sax. Book vi. ch. xiv. 2 Malmesbury, p. 205 (Bohn's series). 20 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. CH. of Canute, addressed to Loth races equally, are written in Anglo-Saxon. All that the cold North could supply, the English nationality had now received. The stubborn hardi- hood and perseverance which were illustrated in the Drakes, the Cooks, the Stephensons, of later days, were, by this large infusion of Danish blood, made a part of the English nature. The intellectual activity and literary culture of the South, together with the great Roman tradition of political order and vigorous administration, were still wanting; and these were supplied by means of the Norman Conquest. TART II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 21 PRELIMINARY CHAPTER. PART II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 1066-1350. 1. IN the age at which we are arrived, two classes of men only cultivated literature, the clergy and the minstrels. The local centres at which learning was to be obtained were of two kinds, the universities and the monasteries. Poetry and light literature were comparatively independent of such aids ; yet the form and development even of these could not but be largely dependent on the social and moral condition of the classes amongst which they were circulated. The intellectual achievements, therefore, of the clergy both Saxon and Norman the means of self-culture which they had at their disposal, and the degree of success with which they availed themselves of those means the different classes of poets, their nationality, the traditional or other materials upon which they worked, and the furtherance or obstruction which they met with in the temper and habits of the time all these matters must now be successively touched upon. What we have named the Norman period embraces more than two centuries and a half, and includes the long conflict between two opposing elements, which terminated, on the whole, in favour of what was English, yet so that the national language, literature, and pre- vailing opinions, were all deeply coloured by French words and French thoughts. 2. For many years after the Conquest the Saxon clergy were in no mood or condition to betake themselves to the tranquil pursuits of learning. _ Before that catastrophe, re- ligious fervour and rigour of discipline had long been on the wane amongst them. We read of much laxity of manners, of bishops holding two or more sees at once, of priests so ignorant of Latin -as to be unable to say mass without innumerable blunders. The Conqueror, who, with all his cruelty and pride, hated hypocrisy and empty profession with all his heart, would 22 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEEATUEE. PEEL. CH. not tolerate these relaxed ecclesiastics, and by the nomination of Lanfranc (a native of Italy, but for many years prior of Bee, in Normandy) to the see of Canterbury, inaugurated a great reformation in Church matters. Some few of the Saxon bishops, as the noble 'St. Wulstan of Worcester, Agelric of Chichester, and one or two others, were left in possession of their sees ; the rest had to make Avay for Normans. Nor was this all. Had the unworthy only been deposed, and the worthy still allowed to look forward to advancement to be obtained through desert, the Saxon clergy might still have held together, and with renewed strictness of life a revival of learn- ing might have taken place among them. But the repeated insurrections of the English exasperated the fiery temper of the Conqueror ; and after having quelled them, and thus ' overturned the power of the laity, he made an ordinance that no monk or clergyman of that nation should be suffered to aspire to any dignity whatever.' x Thus cut off from the hope of due recognition for merit, the Saxon clergy were deprived of one of tha chief incentives to study. One may be sure that from that time the more ambitious among them would make haste to learn French, and would rather disguise their nationality than avow it. Yet there was at least one monas- tery, in which a literary work, begun in happier times two centuries before, was carried on by English monks, and in the English tongue. This was the continuation of the Saxon Chronicle, composed in the monastery of Peterborough. It ends abruptly in the first year of the reign of Henry II. (1154), the writer or writers being by that time probably unable to resist any longer the universal fashion of employing Latin for any serious prose work. William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Symeon of Durham all these, and many others, were writing history at this very time, and all, as a matter of course, wrote in Latin. The Anglo- Saxon, too, being no longer taught in schools, nor spoken in the higher circles of society, had lost very much of its original harmony and precision of structure; and when the annalist found himself using one inflexion for another, or dropping in- flexions altogether, he may well have thought it high time to exchange a tongue which seemed crumbling and disintegrating under his hands, for one whose forms were fixed and its grammar rational. Little did the down-hearted monk antici- pate the future glories which, after a crisis of transformation and fusion, would surround his rude ancestral tongue. 1 Malmesbury, p. 287. PART II. THE NOEMAN PERIOD. 23 3. Yet literature and learning were not negligently or even unsuccessfully prosecuted in England during this which we call the Norman period ; and this is a fact which we must learn to see in its true light, in order to understand aright the rise of English literature in the fourteenth century. Again, the intel- lectual awakening which spread to England in the eleventh and twelfth, and produced valuable literary results there in the thirteenth century, cannot be understood except in connection with the general European movement of mind which ensued upon the consolidation of society following the long troubled night of the dark ages. Something must therefore be said about the origin of that movement, about the course it took, and about the great thinkers whose names are for ever associated with it. 4. Strange as it may seem, the revival of intellectual activity at the end of the eleventh and in the twelfth century is clearly traceable to the labours and the example of Mahometans. Charlemagne, indeed, had made a noble effort in the ninth century to systematise education, and to make literature and science the permanent denizens of his empire, but the wars and confusion of every kind which ensued upon the partition of that empire among his sons extinguished the still feeble light. A happier lot had befallen the powerful and populous kingdoms founded by the successors of Mahomet. Indoctrinated with a knowledge of the wonderful fertility and energy of the Greek mind, as exemplified especially in Aristotle and Plato, by Syrian Nestorians (whose forefathers, fleeing from persecution into Persia after the council of Chalcedon, carried with them Syriac versions of the chief works of the Greek philosophers, and founded a school at Gondisapor, near Bagdad), Haroun-al- Raschid (whose reign was contemporary with that of Charle- magne), and Al Mamoun, his successor, saw and assisted in the commencement of a brilliant period of literary activity in the nations of Arabian race, which lasted from the ninth to the fourteenth century. Among the Arabian kingdoms none entered into this movement with more earnestness and success than the Moorish kingdoms in Spain. 1 We hear of the Uni- versities of Cordova, Seville, and Granada ; and the immense number of Arabic manuscripts on almost every subject con- tained at this day in the library of the Escurial at Madrid attests the eagerness with which the Moorish writers sought after knowledge, and the universality of their literary tastes. Of their poetry, and the effect which it had on that of Christian Europe, we shall speak presently. Their proficiency in science 1 Sismondi's Literature of the South of Europe. 24 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITEEATURE. FUEL. CH. is evidenced by the remarkable facts which William of Malmes- bury relates of Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II. After having put on the monastic habit at Flory, in France, his thirst for knowledge led him to quit his cloister and betake himself to the Moorish community in Spain, about the year 1000. At Seville, we are told, he 'satisfied his desires,' becoming an adept, not only in astrology and magic, but also in the ' lawful sciences' of music and astronomy, arithmetic and geometry. ' These,' says Malmesbury, ' with great perseverance he revived in Gaul, where they had for a long time been wholly obsolete.' Allowing for some exaggeration in this statement, since the studies of the Trivium and Quadrivium, 1 among which the said lawful sciences were included, had never been wholly discontinued in the West since the fall of the Koman Empire, we may yet easily conceive that Gerbert was the first who popularised in Gaul the use of the Arabic numerals, without which arithmetic could never have made any considerable progress ; and that by importing the astronomical instruments used by the Moors, together with a knowledge of the mechanical principles on which they were constructed, he may have placed the study of astronomy on a new footing. He became a public professor on his return into Gaul, and had many eminent persons among his scholars. 5. Our next forward step transports us to the monastery of Bee, in Normandy. There the abbots Herluin, Lanfranc, and St. Anselm formed a line of great teachers, whose lectures were eagerly attended, both by laymen and ecclesiastics. Whether the intellectual life of Bee was directly influenced by the writings of the great Arabian thinkers, it is difficult to ascer- tain. Avicenna, the physician and philosopher, died in 1037 ; therefore, in point of time, his expositions of the Aristotelian philosophy might have become known to Lanfranc and Anselm. The Organon, however, which was translated by Boethius and was known to Beda and Alcuin, had never ceased to be used in the schools, and the writings of St. Anselm do not, we be- lieve, contain any proof that he was acquainted with any other of the works of the Stagirite besides the Aristotelian logic. Still, it is not only possible, but probable, that the reports brought by Gerbert and others of the palmy state of literature among the Moors, and of the zeal both of teachers and students in their universities, may have indirectly had a stimulating effect on the studies of Bee. 6. St. Anselm, abbot of Bee after Lanfranc had been called i The Trivium consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric ; the Quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. PART II. THE NOKMAN PERIOD. 25 into England in 1070, is considered by many the founder of the scholastic philosophy. At any rate, he seems to have been the first to apply, on a large scale, philosophy and its formulae to the doctrines of religion. Yet, as he did not originate a method, and his writings do not form a systematic whole, it would seem that he cannot fairly be called the founder of scho- lasticism. What the true scholastic method was, and by whom originated, we shall presently see. St. Anselm merely handles, with greatly subtlety and dialectical skill, certain special sub- jects, such as the divine essence, the Trinity, original sin, &c., but does not treat of theology as one connected whole. For these doctrines he endeavours to find irrefragable intellectual proof, and to show that they must be as necessarily accepted on grounds of reason as on grounds of faith. Thus he defines his Proslogium, a treatise on the existence of God, to be ' faith seeking understanding' (fides quserens intellectum), and says that he has framed the work 'under the character of one endeavouring to lift up his mind to the contemplation of the Deity, and seeking to understand what he believes.' Yet we may be certain that St. Anselm himself, like all the saints, derived the certainty of his religious convictions through the will rather than through the reason; he believed and loved, therefore he knew. He, and those who were like-minded to him, could safely philosophise upon the doctrines of faith, because they already possessed, and firmly grasped, the con- clusions to which their argumentation was to lead. But what if a thinker were to arise, who should follow the same path without the same preservative ? What if a being of brilliant genius, of captivating eloquence, of immense ambition, should undertake to philosophise upon religion, without the safeguard of personal sanctity ? 7. Such a being was the famous Abelard. This is not the place to enlarge upon his story, which in every subsequent age has attracted the regards alike of the poet and the philo- sopher. 1 Suffice it to say that he developed a great scheme, of what we should now call rationalism, through taking up St. Anselm's argumentative way of proving religious doctrine, without his spirit of docile submission to authority. He made faith and reason identical (charitas Dei per fidem sive rationis donum infusa), and his scholars demanded from him, he in- forms us evidently placing his own sentiments in their mouths not words but ideas, not bare dogmatic statements but clear enunciations of their philosophical import. His 1 It has been handled by Bayle, Cousin, Pope, Cawthorn, &e. 26 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. PEEL. CH. lectures, at Paris, Melun, and Troyes, were attended by en- thusiastic multitudes. Roused from its long intellectual slumber, the Western world, like a man whose limbs have been numbed by long inaction, delighted in the vigorous exercise of its mental powers for the mere exercise's sake ; or else was eager to try their edge upon whatever subject came in their way. Hence, on the one hand, the endless logical combats, the twistings and turnings of the syllogism in every shape, the invention of innumerable sophisms and solutions of sophisms ; on the other hand, that undue extension of rational methods to objects of faith which we have ascribed to Abelard. The danger was great ; already Abelard's definitions and ex- planations trembled on the verge of heresy, if they did not go beyond it ; but the ground-tone of his philosophy was still more inconsistent with a traditional scheme of belief than any particular expressions. 8. At this crisis St. Bernard appeared to check the grow- ing evil. He turned back the stream of philosophy, or rather he forced it back within its own limits, and forbade it to encroach upon a domain which did not belong to it. In an- swering Abelard, he denied that Faith and Reason were identical, or that the doctrines of faith could be discovered and proved independently by any argumentative process. The objects of faith, he said, are given to us from above ; they are revealed by God exactly because it is impossible that they should be discovered by man. ' Quid magis contra rationem, quam ratione rationem conari transcendere ? ' A conference between the two, to be held at Soissons, was agreed to ; but when the time came for vindicating his philosophy, Abelard's heart failed him, and he appealed to the Pope. He was on the whole leniently treated ; he seems to have had misgivings that he had wandered into a wrong path ; and his life of struggle and suffering found its close in the peaceful seclu- sion of Cluny, whose abbot, Peter the Venerable, generously sheltered and protected his unhappy friend. We must not suppose, however, that St. Bernard's influ- ence as a thinker was mainly of a negative sort. On the contrary, this last, and not least eloquent, of the Fathers scarcely ever employed his penetrating and versatile genius except for some end of practical edification. Whether he addresses his ^own monks at Clairvaux, or writes to Pope Eugenius, or kindles the crusading zeal of nations, or counsels the Knights of the Temple, or composes Latin hymns, the evident aim of his labours is always to enlighten, animate, and do good to his neighbour. His Latin is admirable ; far superior PART II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 27 to that of St. Anselm ; and the charm of genius unites with the halo of saintliness in giving attractiveness to his writings. 9. Scholasticism, then, made what we may call a false start in the school of Bee; its true commencement dates a little later, and from Paris. Peter Lombard, the Master of the Sentences, hit upon the most convenient method of presenting theology under philosophical forms. The data of religion the substance of revealed truth he took from tradition ; and reserved to philosophy the subordinate office of presenting it in a connected form, of deducing inferences, solving difficulties, and harmonising apparent discrepancies. The Book of Sentences, which appeared in 1151, is a complete body of theology in four books. It commences with God His being and attributes ; then treats of the Creation, first of angels, then of man; of the Fall, and original and actual sin. In the third book it treats of the remedy of the Fall the Incarnation, of the theological virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit; in the fourth, of the sacraments, purgatory, the resurrection, the last judgment, and the state of the blessed. All these doctrines are given in the form of ' sentences,' extracted from the writings of the Fathers. The sentences are interspersed with numerous ' quaestiones,' in which the author proposes and attempts to solve any difficulties that may arise. The con- veniences of this plan are manifest, and it was at once adopted. Alexander Hales, Albertus Magnus, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century Duns Scotus, and William of Occam in the fourteenth whatever may be their differences, agree in treating theology as a whole, in seeking its data from authority, not from speculation, and in confining themselves to the discussion of special questions. Extraneous impulses were not wanting. The metaphysical and ethical works of Aristotle became known in the West about this period, chiefly through the commentaries of the celebrated Spanish Arab Averrhoes (1120-1198), and power- fully stimulated the speculative genius of the schoolmen. But the admiration of the Greek philosopher degenerated into an extravagance, and his authority was at last considered infallible in the schools. It was as if the age, in its horror of losing its way, would have a sheet anchor for the mind as well as for the soul, and chain the progressive intellect of man to the Aristotelian philosophy, because the unchanging interests of the soul demanded fixity and certainty in the eternal Gospel So it ever is, that a true and valuable principle, once found, is sure to be strained in the application. 10. The scholastic method, having thus taken its rise in 28 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PREL. CH. Paris, soon spread to England, and was prosecuted there with equal ardour. Some of the greatest of the schoolmen were British-born, although they reaped their highest honours, and spent the greater part of their lives, abroad. Alexander Hales, the Irrefragable, the master of St. Bonaventure, was the author of the first important commentary on the work of Peter Lom- bard, and died at Paris in 1245. Duns Scotus, the subtle doctor, whose birthplace, and even the date of whose death, are not certainly known, but who was, at any rate, a native of the British Isles, after lecturing at Paris with extraordinary success, is said to have died at Bologna in 1308. William of Occam, styled the Invincible, passed the greater part of his manhood at the Court of the Emperor in Germany, and died there in the year 1347. In the great struggle then proceeding between imperial and papal claims, Occam sided with the Emperors. He was also in his day the head of the school of the Nomi- nalists, a section of the schoolmen which maintained that our abstract ideas had no realities corresponding to them in external existence, but merely corresponded in thought to universal terms in language, that is, to generalised expressions, arrived at by the abstraction of differences. Walter Burley, elected a fellow of Merton College (far the most distinguished of the Oxford Colleges through all the fourteenth century) in 1305, cultivated the scholastic logic and metaphysics with great assiduity, being an opponent of the Scotists. Six or seven of his works were printed, chiefly abroad, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Historians and Chroniclers. 11. The great intellectual movement which we have been describing expended its force chiefly on questions of theology and philosophy ; but it also caused other subjects to be treated more intelligently and studied more earnestly. A great number of historians and chroniclers flourished in England during this period. All of these were ecclesiastics, most of them monks ; and all wrote in the Latin language. With the exception of Marianus Scotus, Ordericus Yitalis, and Kanulph Higden, they all confined themselves to recording the succession of events in their own country. There is no occasion to seek out motives and particular inducements impelling the learned of any country to historical composition. All men are eager to know the past ; to hear about the deeds of their forefathers ; to take their bear- ings, as it were, from the elevation to which history raises them, and from a survey of the road along which their nation, II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 29 or race, or class, have come, deduce more trustworthy conclu- sions as to the unknown future which lies before them. If, however, in regard to the principal writers, any special reasons must be given, it might be mentioned that William of Malines- bury, and his contemporary, Henry of Huntingdon, took as their literary model the Venerable Bed a, the father of modern history in the West ; that Richard the Canon records with natural complacency the chivalrous adventures of King Richard, in whose train he visited Palestine at the time of the third Crusade ; and that Geoffrey of Monmouth, when clothing in a grave historic dress the floating fictions which had come down the stream of their popular poetry, may have thought to indemnify his Welsh countrymen for recent defeat and present inferio- rity, by telling them of the imaginary victories of Arthur over Saxon hosts. Some account must be given of the chief historians or chroniclers in each century of our period. The twelfth century is the richest ; then flourished Eadmer, William of Malmes- bury, Ordericus Vitalis, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Symeon of Durham, Florence of Worcester, St. Ailred, Henry of Hunt- ingdon, Giraldus Cambrensis, Benedictus Abbas, Ralph de Diceto, and Roger de Hoveden. In the thirteenth century the leading names are Roger of Wendover, and Matthew Paris ; in the fourteenth, Nicholas Trivet, and Ranulph Higden. 12. Eadmer, the faithful and trusted follower of St. Anselm, wrote a chronicle to which he gave the name Historia Novorum, terminating in 1122. For the reigns of the two sons of the Conqueror it is the most valuable work that we possess ; it was printed by Selden in 1623. 13. The chronicle of Ingulfus, with its various continuations, extends from about 650 to 1486. It is chiefly occupied with the history of Croyland, an abbey founded in the eighth century by Ethelbald, King of Mercia, at the place where had stood the cell of his friend and confessor, St. Guthlac the anchorite. Ingulfus was abbot from 1075 to 1109, but the part of the chronicle which he wrote ends in 1090. The first continuation was by Peter of Blois, archdeacon of Bath, who died at a great age about the year 1198 ; a letter to him from the abbot, Henry de Longchamp, asking him to undertake the work, with his reply, in which he explicitly states his purpose of continuing the work of Ingulfus, are still extant. But nearly all the charters and deeds of grant, in which the chronicle abounds, are spurious. No ancient MS. of this Chronicle exists, and the many spurious or dubious passages in it have thrown an air of unveracity over the whole. 30 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEEATURE. PREL. CH. When we are told that Ingulf attended lectures on Aristotle at Oxford before the Conquest, and that 'brother Terricus,' about 1109, lectured at Cambridge ' according to the Introductions of Averroes,' who was not born till many years later, we see that the hand of the interpolator has been busy. Hence Sir Francis Palgrave (Quart. Rev. vol. 34) concludes the book to be 'a historical novel,' ' a monkish forgery of the thirteenth or fourteenth century ; ' and Mr. Freeman (Norm. Oonq. iv. 600) appears to take the same view. Still, there is a great deal in the book which one feels certain is genuine ; but for the want of any ancient text it is impossible accurately to distinguish the true metal from the base. Mr. Riley's view (Introd. ed. Bohn, p. xii.) is probably not far from the truth. ' Finding among their archives a chronicle of the convent from the earliest times (said to have been composed by the Sempects 1 by order of Abbot Turketul [the second founder of the abbey after its destruction by the Danes]), the monks made it the vehicle of their fictitious charters, added to it the histories which had been written by Egelric 2 (Turketul's nephew) and Ingulf, had the whole copied afresh, and deposited the MS. in the sacristy as corrobo- rative proof of their title to their lands.' This was done, Mr. Riley thinks, about 1415, and the charters forged about the same time. (See Gough's History of Croyland, and Archceol. Journal, xix. 32. 14. William of Malmesbury, a monk in the famous monas- tery of that name, founded by the Irish St. Maidulf in the seventh century, dedicated his Historia Regum Anglice to Robert, Earl of Gloucester, a natural son of Henry I., and the chief patron of literature in those times. He congratulates himself on being the * first who, since Beda, has arranged a continuous history of the English.' Being, as he tells us, of Norman descent by one parent, and of Saxon by the other, he writes of the actions of both impartially. Certain modern historians have, perhaps, made too much of the alienation caused between Saxon and Norman by the difference of race. The English knew that William of Normandy professed to have as good a title to the crown as Harold ; it was chiefly the unjust laws, not the persons, of him and his sons, to which they had a rooted objection; and it was as the 'tyrants of their fields,' not as Normans, that they detested his followers. Malrnesbury himself, though half Norman, evidently regards himself as a thorough Englishman ; the history of England, from the landing of Hengist and Horsa, is his history. Arch- bishop Lanfranc has a special devotion to Dunstan, a Saxon saint; and even the Saxon chronicler can freely praise the Norman abbot of Peterborough, if he is a man of worth and stands up for the rights of the monastery. Malmesbury's history comes down to the year 1142 ; he is supposed to have i The Sempects of Croyland (ffv/LnratKral, lit. play-fellows) were a few of the oldest monks, who had a share in the government of the monastery ~ Egelric's narrative was incorporated by Ingulf in his own work. PART II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 31 died soon afterwards. Besides writing the history of the English kings, he also compiled an account of the English bishops, De Gestis Pontificum, composed a history of Glas- tonbury Abbey, and biographies of St. Aldhelm and other saints, and left behind him various other works, of which some are still in MS., while several are not now known to exist. 15. Ordericus Vitalis, though his father was a native of Orleans, and he himself lived the greater part of his life in Xormandy, speaks of himself as ' an Englishman' (Bk. v. ch. 1). His father Odelirius, a clerk, and a member of the household of Eoger of Montgomeri, accompanied his lord to England at the time of the Conquest. He seems to have married an Englishwoman, by whom he had three sons, Orderic (born in 1075), Everard, and Benedict. His wife died, and Odelirius soon afterwards resolved to give up the remainder of his own life, as well as two of his sons, to the service of God. With Benedict, he took the monastic habit in a convent founded on his own land near Shrewsbury ; Orderic, when but a boy ten years old, was given over to the monks of St. Evroult in Nor- mandy. Writing some fifty-five years afterwards, the historian says : ' Wherefore, glorious God, who badest Abraham to depart from his own land and his father's house, and the society of his kinsmen, thou didst put it into the heart of my father Odelirius to separate me entirely from himself, and devote me, in body and soul, to thee. He therefore, amidst floods of tears, delivered me, also weeping bitterly, to the monk Reynold, and, sending me into exile for the love of thee, never saw me afterwards. Being then a young boy, it was not for me to oppose my father's will ; and he promised me, for his part, that if I became a monk I should partake with the Innocents the joys of Paradise. ... I was ten years old when I crossed the British sea, and arrived in Normandy, an exile, unknown to all, and knowing no one. Like Joseph in Egypt, I heard a language to which I was an utter stranger. But, supported by thy merciful goodness, I found the utmost kind- ness and attention amongst these foreigners.' The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic, though extremely desultory, is of great value for the light which it reflects on the state of society in Normandy both before and after the reign of the Conqueror. It is in thirteen books. The first two treat of the life of Christ and the ministry of the Apostles, and bring down the successions of secular princes and Roman pontiffs from the Christian era to 1141 or 1142. The five books which follow treat of all sorts of things ; the life of [St. Evroult ; the history of his monastery ; the lands which it pos- 32 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. CH. sessed ; the history of religion in Normandy from the time when it was first planted there ; the story of St. Nicholas, and the translation of his relics ; the careers of Hildebrand and Eobert Guiscard ; a short sketch of French history, and many other matters, terminating with a description of the death and funeral of William the Conqueror in 1087. The remaining six books carry on the history of events in England and Normandy, with tolerable regularity, from that date to 1141. 16. Geoffrey of Monmouth, author of the famous Historia Britonum, was a Welshman, as his name implies, and was raised in 1152 to the bishopric of St. Asaph. He also dedicated his history to Eobert, Earl of Gloucester. It professes to be a translation of ' a very ancient book in the British tongue,' brought out of Brittany by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, in which the actions of all the kings of Britain were related, from the Trojan Brutus ' down to Cadwallader, the son of- Cadwallo.' Nothing further is known of this ' very ancient book,' and not a single page of the history will stand the test of criticism. What amount of truth may be mixed up with the mass of falsehood it is impossible now to determine. But the book must ever possess an abiding literary interest, because, like the pretended history of Charlemagne by Archbishop Turpin, it furnished a rich mine of materials to the romance writers, of whom we shall have to speak presently. It is to Geoffrey's /ardent Welsh nationality, and disregard of historic precision, * that^e owe the raw material of the undying story of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. . Caradoc of Llancarvan, a contemporary of Geoffrey of Monrnouth, was commissioned by him to continue his History of the Britons ; he did so, and carried it down from the pretended death of Cadwallader, the last British king, in 689, to about the middle of the twelfth century. There is reason to think that his work was originally in Latin, but it has descended to us only under a Welsh dress, with the title of Brut y Tyivysogion, i.e. Chronicle of the Princes of Wales. Alfred of Beverley, treasurer of the great church there, having after a long search obtained the loan of a copy of the Historia Britonum, and not being rich enough to pay for a transcript of it, copied out a number of passages, to which he gave the name of ' Deflorationes Galfridi,' and out of these, and many other works, compiled a small volume of Annals, extending from the fabulous Brutus to 1129. This work was published by Hearne in 1716. 17. Symeon, a monk of Durham, the great monastery which had arisen towards the end of the tenth century, on a steep jutting hill enfolded in a bend of the Wear, to guard the sacred deposit of the body of St. Cuthbert, bishop of Lindis- farne, wrote, about 1105, a Historia Dlinelmensis Hcclesice, in 1'AKi 11. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 33 which, after telling of the rise and early fortunes of Lindis- farne, founded by St. Oswald in the seventh century, and of the wonderful life of Cuthbert the sixth bishop, he described the straits to which the monks were brought by the inroads of the Danes, their wandering from place to place for several years with the body of the saint, their settling for a hundred years at Chester-le-Street, and final establishment at Durham. From this point he continued the narrative for about a hundred years, making it close in 1096. This history was first printed by Sir Roger Twysden (Decem Scriptores, 1652) ; and in the critical introduction, which was furnished by Selden, an attempt was made to show that the writer could not have been Symeon, but was probably Turgot, prior of Durham. But a dissertation by Mr. Rud, prefixed to an edition of the Historia published in 1732, proved the utter futility of Selden's arguments. Symeon also wrote a chronicle, Historia Regum Anglorum et Dacorum, which commences at the point where Beda's history ends, and, using Asser freely, and largely appropriating the work of Florence, then recently published, ends in 1129. For northern affairs he is often a valuable and original authorit}'. 1 This second history of Symeon was continued for twenty- five years by John of Hexham. To the same monastery belonged Richard of Hexham, prior, from whom we have two valuable works, one giving the history of the church of Hexham, the other on the ' Acts of Stephen and the Battle of the Standard.' (See The Priori/ of Hexham, edited by Mr, Raine for the Surt. Soc.). 18. Florence, a monk of Worcester, taking for the founda- tion of his work the voluminous annals of the Irish monk, Marianus Scotus, composed the Chronicle which bears his name, commencing with the Creation and terminating in 1117, the year before the author's death. This work, in all the early portion, is substantially taken from Beda, Asser's Life of Alfred, and the Saxon Chronicle ; but as Florence approaches his own time he becomes really valuable, preserving to us the knowledge of many facts, especially in relation to Worcester and the parts adjoining, including Wales, which no other writer mentions. His lists of Saxon kings and bishops are also for the most part peculiar to himself, and of great value, since they are derived from sources, some of which are unknown and inaccessible. Another monk of Worcester, named John, took up the work where Florence left it, and continued the annals to the year 1141. This John has, under the year 1118, the following entry ; 1 The works of Symeon, edited by the author, have been lately published in the Rolls series. C 34 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. FUEL. CH. it is the one gleam of light but for which Florence of Worcester would be to us a bare name : ' Dom Florence, the monk of Worcester, died on the nones of July. His keen intelligence and perseverance in studious toil have rendered this Chronicle of Chronicles pre-eminent above all others. Corpus terra tegit, spiritus astra petit, Quo cernendo Deum cum sanctis regnet in tevum.' A second continuation, made quite independently, by two monks of Bury St. Edmunds, brings down the narrative of events to 1295, with a gap, however, from 1141 to 1152. ISa. St. Ailred is the author of a valuable Life of Edward the Confessor, an account of the Battle of the Standard, and the singular narrative of the Nun of Watton. He is also be- lieved to be the author of the treatise on the Saints of Hexham, printed by Mr. Raine in the Surtees work on Hexham. 19. Of Henry of Huntingdon, personally, we know next to nothing, but his tendencies and qualifications as a writer may be well judged of from the Chronicle, extending to the death of Stephen, which bears his name. He was Archdeacon of Hunt- ingdon, which was then in the diocese of Lincoln, and a friend of the Bishop Alexander, who held the see next before the great and noble St. Hugh of Lincoln, with the incidents of whose life one of the recent publications of the Rolls series has made us familiar. Henry is rhetorical and sometimes diffuse ; he has at the same time the tastes of an antiquary, and the heart of a thorough Englishman ; he delights in those old Saxon chronicles and poems which the polished Latinists of the twelfth century generally regarded as beneath their notice, and he actually took the trouble to translate into Latin prose the war-song on the battle of Brunanburgh, which he found in the Saxon Chronicle. 20. The Chronicle which passes under the name of * Bene- dictus Abbas,' i.e. Benedict, Abbot of Peterborough between 1177 and 1193, a record of the highest importance for the reigns of Henry II. and Richard I. has been conjectured by the latest editor, Professor Stubbs, to be the work of Richard Fitzneal, treasurer to Henry II., the author of the famous Dialogue de Scaccario. It certainly was not ivritten by Bene- d ictus, for there is distinct evidence of its having been tran- scribed by his order. 21. The chronicle of William of Newburgh (called also Neubrigensis and Gulielmus Parvus) relates to the same reigns, and terminates in 1197. It is in five books ; the first of which, after briefly retracing the history of the Norman kings, treats of the reign of Stephen ; the second and third deal with the TAUT II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 35 times of Henry II. ; and the fourth and fifth with those of Richard I. William was a monk of some enlightenment ; he protests in his preface against the practice of muddling history and mythology together, after the fashion which had been set by Geoffrey of Monmouth. 22. Ralph de Diceto, Dean of St. Paul's in London, is the author of an important chronicle called Imagines Historiarum, extending from 1147 to 1202, about which year he died, and also of an historical abridgment called Abbreviations C/troni- conun. In his later years Ralph was a friend of Walter Map, a canon of the same cathedral. Gervase of Canterbury, a monk of the great monastery of Christ Church in that city, was professed in 1163. He commenced as a writer by composing several tracts on the quarrel which broke otit between Archbishop Baldwin and the convent in 1185. About 1188 he began to write the important chronicle which bears his name ; starting from the burning down of the monastery in 1174, and stopping at the death of Richard in 1199. In another historical work, the Gesta JReguni, he abridges the story of the British kings from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and continues the narrative to 1210. He is also the author of a curious topographical work, Mappa Mundi, and of a series of lives of the arch- bishops of Canterbury, Actus Pontificum, from St. Augustin to Hubert, who died in 1205. (See Rolls edition of his works, and the prefaces by Professor Stubbs.) 23. Giraldus de Barri, surnamed Cambrensis to mark his nationality, was one of the ablest and most stirring spirits produced in a remarkable century. Born in 1147, the child of William de Barri, a powerful Norman baron of Pembroke- shire, and a Welsh lady of royal descent, Giraldus united in himself, in a notable degree, the good and bad qualities of either race ; he was energetic, proud, and grasping with the Norman ; imaginative, genial, vain, and nighty with the Celt. He re- ceived his education at the University of Paris, whence he returned to Wales in 1172, and, as Archdeacon of Brecknock, discharged with the utmost zeal and ability the duties of a vigilant pastor of souls. His uncle, who was Bishop of St. David's, died in 1176, and the chapter elected Giraldus to the vacant see ; but Henry II., to whom his Welsh connection and sympathies were no recommendation, insisted upon the appoint- ment of a safer man. The king, however, than whom none could better recognise or gauge the worth of a man of capacity, employed Giraldus on several missions of importance. He sent him, in 1185, in the train of his son John to Ireland, where he stayed about a year, and it is to this visit that we owe two works of the greatest historical and antiquarian value, the Topographia Hibentia', and the Vaticinalis Expugnationis Historia, under 36 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. FUEL. CH. which strange name the conquest of Ireland by Strongbow and his followers is graphically and minutely described. He was again employed by the king in 1188 to preach the crusade in Wales, in company with Archbishop Baldwin, and his well- known Itinerarium Cambrics was the literary result of his labours on this occasion, which were also highly successful in regard to their immediate object, for the fervid eloquence of Giraldus was exactly calculated to touch the hearts of his sus- ceptible countrymen. Again, in 1198, there was a vacancy in the see of St. David's, and the canons again nominated Giral- dus. But the Archbishop of Canterbury, who probably knew of his design, if elected, to claim metropolitan rights for the see of St. David's, resolutely opposed their choice. A furious struggle ensued, the steps of which are detailed, partly in Giraldus's autobiography, the work entitled De Rebus a se Gestis, partly in his historico-legal treatise on the see of St. David's, De Jure et Statu Menevensis Ecclesioe. He visited Rome more than once, and had repeated interviews with Innocent III., the master- mind of Christendom in that age ; but, after all, the Archbishop was too strong for him, and another man was appointed. After this great disappointment we hear little more of our fiery friend, who appears to have lived some eighteen years longer, in retire- ment, but in easy circumstances, dying about the year 1217. 1 24. Roger de Hoveden, one of the many ornaments of the great reign of Henry II., was a churchman devoted to legal and technical studies, who acted as one of the king's clerks or secretaries. Thus is explained the manner in which his Annals are encumbered with copies of charters, letters, bulls, briefs, and other documents. Being a native of Yorkshire, he naturally treats with somewhat disproportionate fulness the affairs of the northern counties. He intended his history to form in some sense a continuation of that of Beda, and therefore made it commence from the year 732, carrying it down to 1201, the events of the last twenty years being told in very great detail, so as to form one half of the entire work. 25. Roger of Wendover, a monk of St. Albans, Prior of Belvoir at the time of his death, in 1237, left behind him a chronicle entitled Mores ffistoriarum, which is considered to be divided into three parts. The first, extending from the Creation to the year A.D. 447, is entirely copied from older authors, and is of no value. The second part, which reaches to about the year 1200, is in the main copied from other chroniclers, but is valuable inasmuch as it preserves to us many 1 See Mr. Brewer's excellent Introduction to the works of Giraldus, edited by him for the Rolls series in 1801. TAUT II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 37 extracts from lost works. The third part, recording the history of Roger's own times, is exceedingly valuable as an original authority. 26. Matthew Paris, also a monk of St. Albans, wrote, under the title of Historia Major, a History of England, com- mencing from the remotest times, and coming down to 1259, the year in which he died. It was long believed that the entire work was original, but it has been lately discovered that the whole of the earlier portion, down to 1235, is taken from the Flores Historiarum of Roger of Wendover. So far as it is a contemporary authority, this bulky work has always been considered as of the highest value. Allowance must, however, be made for the prejudices of a monk when he writes of the secular clergy ; perhaps for those of an Englishman when he writes of the court of Rome. The whole work, ably and care- fully edited by Dr. Luard, may now be consulted in the Rolls series. Paris also wrote the Historia Minor, from the Conquest to 1253, also printed in the Rolls series. 27. Thomas Wikes, said by Bale to have been an Augus- tinian canon of Oseney, near Oxford, is one of Gale's Quinque Scriptores. His chronicle, from the Conquest down to 1260, gives a brief summary of events; from that point to 1289, where he breaks off suddenly, he is very full and interesting. John of Oxnead, a monk of the mitred abbey of St. Benet Holme in Norfolk, compiled a chronicle (published in the Rolls series) from the arrival of the Saxons to 1292. 28. William Rishanger, a monk of St. Albans, wrote a chronicle which he seems to have intended should serve for a continuation of the history of Matthew Paris ; it extends from 1259 to 1307. 29. Nicholas Trivet, a Dominican, and Ranulph Higden, a monk of St. Werburgh's, in Chester, composed, the one a well- written series of Annals, extending from 1135 to 1307, the other a work entitled Polychronicon, which comes down to 1357. This was the standard work on general history and geo- graphy towards the end of the fourteenth and all through the fifteenth century. The Latin MSS. of it are prodigiously numerous. No doubt Chaucer made use of it ; it is quoted by writers in the Wyclif controversy, 1 and Henry of Knyghton, writing about the year 1400, excerpts largely from it. It is divided into seven books, of which the first is a sketch of Universal Geography, taken from Pliny, Solinus, Beda, es muneches sseng. 'That is, , Merrily sang the monks within Ely, When Cnut the king rowed thereby : ' Row, my men, nearer the laud, And let us hear these monks' song.' Doubtless Canute's poem was in many stanzas, but this is the only one which has come down to us. * These verses,' adds Thomas, ' are to this day publicly sung at merry-makings, and quoted as proverbs.' Thomas' chronicle is in Gale's Scriptores Quindecim, 1691. 47. William of Malmesbury, in his Gesta Pontificum, tells us that Aldred, Archbishop of York, who died in 1069, said to Urse, the Norman Sheriff of Worcester, who had built his castle close to the monastery at that town, Hattest J>u Urs ; Have )m Godes kurs. Thou art called Urse ; Have thou God's curse ! 48. St. Godric lived as a hermit at Finchale, near Durham, for sixty years, dying in 1170. In a MS. life of him in the King's library, written not long after his death at the request of Thomas, prior of Finchale, are found (besides a few other detached verses) the following lines, which are not without a TAUT II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 51 Certain rude beauty ; they are said to have been composed by St. Godric : Sainte Marie virgine, Moder Jesus Cristes Nazareue, Oufo, schild, help J)in Godric ; Oufang, bring hegilich wiS J>j in Godes riche. Sainte Marie, Xristes bur, Maidenes clenhad, moderes flur, Dilie min sinne, rix in min mod, Bring me to winne wiS J>e selfd God. Saint Mary the Virgin, Mother of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Receive, shield, help thy Godric ; Receive, bring [him] quickly with thee to God's kingdom. Saint Mary, Christ's bower, Maiden's purity, mother's flower, Raze out my sin, reign in my mood, Bring me to joy with the same God. 49. The Prophecy of Here (perhaps Harford in Devonshire) is less interesting ; it consists of five rude lines, containing a prophecy (supposed to have been fulfilled in the reign of Kichard I.), that Englishmen should be divided into three parts, ' in thre y deled.' It is found in the chronicle of Bene- dictus Abbas. 50. It may be stated broadly, that from the eleventh to the thirteenth century inclusive, the prose literature of Europe came from churchmen, the poetry from laymen. But in one direction the churchmen made incursions into the domain of their rivals without fear of competition or reprisals. We refer to the Latin poetry of the Middle Ages. Much of this owed its existence to a spirited but hopeless endeavour one which even Erasmus was disposed to repeat a hundred and fifty years later to make the Latin the universal language of literature. All the existing vernacular tongues though some were more advanced than others were not to be compared in respect of regularity and euphony to the Latin ; and the poets of the cloister preferred to write elegant hexameters and elegiacs after the model of their beloved Virgil and Ovid rather than engage in a struggle with the difficulties of their native speech in its then condition of fluidity and rapid change. One con- cession they did make to the fashion of their own age, when, forsaking the classic metres, they sought for that measured melody which is the essential form of poetry, in the Arabic or possibly Celtic invention of rime, by this time (1100) com- pletely naturalised in the south of Europe. These Latin rimes 52 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. FUEL. CH. were called Leonine verses. 1 The solemn hymns of the Church some of which are unsurpassed even as literary composi- tions were composed in these riming measures ; among their authors were St. Anselm, St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Pope Innocent III. The majority of these were written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 51. No Latin poems of this elevated class were composed by English ecclesiastics, but leonine verse was largely used in this country as a vehicle for satire and humour. There is among the publications of the Camden Society a thick volume of such Latin poems, 2 the authorship of which was long ascribed, though upon the authority of no MS. of earlier date than the fourteenth century, to Walter Map, archdeacon of Oxford, the friend of Giraldus de Barri, and the composer of several of the great prose romances concerning Arthur, who nourished towards the end of the twelfth century. But Mr. Wright doubts whether Map had really any hand in them ; he thinks that they were 'probably written at different periods from the latter half of the twelfth century to the middle of the thirteenth ; ' and that they emanated from, and circulated amongst, university men, to whom attacks on ecclesiastical irregularities were always wel- come. Most of them pass under the name of * Bishop Golias,' an imaginary personage representing episcopal and clerical vice and irregularity, and also a satirist of the same. The Apoca- lypsis GolicB is a general onslaught on the shortcomings of the clergy ; it maintained its popularity down to the time of the Reformation. The Confessio Golice is the poem out of w T hich a few stanzas were extracted to form the famous drinking-song so called beginning Meum est propositum in taberna mori, on the strength of which Walter Map obtained the sobriquet of * the jovial Archdeacon,' the fact being, even assuming him to be the author of it, that the poem is ironical and satirical throughout. In a third poem, Golias in Romanam Curiam, occurs the following ludicrous account of the effect on a well- filled purse of the transaction of business at the papal court : Des istis, das aliis, addis dona datis, Et cum satis dederis, quaerunt ultra satis ; 1 The term seems to have been originally applied only to rimed hexa- meters or elegiacs, and afterwards to have been extended to any Latin rimed poems. The name comes from the inventor, Leoninus or Leonine, a monk of Marseilles, who nourished about 1135. See Warton, vol. i. p. cl. n. 2 Edited by Mr. Wright in 1841. PART II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 53 O vos, bursae turgidae, Rx>mam veniatis, Romas viget physica bursis constipatis. Praedantur marsupium singuli paulatim ; Magna, major, maxima, praeda fit gradatim. Quid irem per singula ? Colligam summatim : Omnes bursam strangulant, et expirat statim. 52. Two or three other poems, which it is strange to find in company with the satirical verses just described, are of a serious cast. Such is the Predicatio Golice, in which Golias is supposed to preach to his clerical brethren ; but the thread of address and admonition gradually widens into a magnificent ebauche of the Catholic creed. Man, it says, Dignitate praeminet universes rei, Factus ad imaginem majestatis l)ei ; Cuncta sibi serviunt ; ipse servit ei, Quern nox nocti prsedicat et dies diei. Obligavit omnia nostrse servituti, Alia deliciis, alia saluti ; Sciunt evangelicis regulis induti, Quibus frui convenit, quibus fas est uti, His nos beneficiis voluit ditari, Et adjecit cumulum muneris praeclari, Cum pro nobis Filium misit incarnari, Ut uniret hominem suo salutari. Est inenarrabilis ista genitura, &c. 53. But the strict Latinists scouted the idea of any such concessions to a corrupt modern taste as were implied in the practice of riming; when they wrote poetry, they used the metres as well as the language of the Latin poets. Thus Geoffrey de Vinsauf wrote a Latin poem, entitled De Novd Poetrid, and addressed to Innocent III., the intention of which was to recommend and illustrate the legitimate mode of versification in opposition to the leonine or barbarous species. Actuated by the same prepossessions, Josephus Iscanus, a monk of Exeter, who flourished about 1180, wrote a long poem in Latin hexameters, entitled De Bello Trojano, which possessed considerable literary merit. Though now forgotten, it enjoyed so great a popularity, even as late as the fifteenth century, as to be thumbed by school-boys in every grammar-school, and ranked by teachers side by side with the genuine poets of Koine. Joseph was a schoolfellow at Exeter of Baldwin, who was afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, and a life-long friendship was established be- tween them. He lived for many years at Geldres, where he was found by Baldwin, when on his way to Palestine in 1189, to join the Third Crusade, and induced by his patron to join him. His valedictory letter 54 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. CH. to Guibert, the pious abbot of Gemblours, is still extant. Baldwin died at Acre, and Joseph, returning home, wrote the Antiocheis, a poem in the same metre as that on the Trojan war, of which only fragments survive. The poem De Bello Troja.no can be shown by internal allusions to have been written between 1173 and 1183. It opens thus : Iliadum lacrimas, concessaque Pergama fatis, Praelia bina ducum, bis adactam cladibus urbem In cineres querimur, flemusque quod Herculis ira, Esiones raptus, Helene fuga, fregerit arcem, Impulerit Frigios, Danaas exciverit urbes. 1 54. A classical metre was also employed by Nigellus Wireker, a monk of Canterbury and precentor of the cathedral, in his satire entitled Speculum Stultorum, written about 1190. The poem is in Latin elegiacs, which, though full of what we should call false quantities, are easy and flowing. It has so much point and humour that the reader will not be sorry to have an abstract of its contents : The hero of the Speculum Stultorum is Brunellus or Burnellus (little brown ass), the property of Bernardus, an Italian farmer. He runs away from his master, and begins to speculate on self-improvement. He con- siders that the fundamental misery of his condition lies in the shortness of his tail, and, to remedy this defect, he seeks counsel and assistance from all quarters. He goes to consult a physician named Galienus. Galienus tells him he is a fool ; why not be content with his tail as it is ? Louis, King of France, is obliged to be content with his tail ; so are his bishops and barons : why not Burnellus ? At last, to get rid of him, Galienus tells him that the only way is to go to Salerno, and get the necessary recipe and drugs from the great medical school there. The journey into Italy gives occasion for many satirical descriptions. Burnellus studies at Salerno ; is cheated there by a London merchant ; at last, laden with phials, medicines, and prescriptions, he sets out for home. Misfortunes, chiefly caused by monks, overtake him. The Benedictine monk Fromundus sets his dogs on him ; they bite off half his tail ; his baggage is thrown off, the phials broken, and the medicines lost. He is in despair ; at last he resolves to go to Paris, that he may at least return home a scholar. To the University of Paris, of which a satirical description follows, he is accompanied by Arnoldus, who has joined him on^the road, and tells a curious story. Burnellus joins himself to the scholars of the English nation. He is thick-headed, and does not get on, so he resolves to turn monk. He passes in review all the orders ; the Hospitallers of the White Cross, the Black Monks (Cluniacs), the White Monks (Cistercians), the monks of Grand- mont, the Carthusians, the Black Canons, the Premonstratensiaus or Norbertines, the Secular Canons, and the Gilbertines of Sempringham. Not one of them pleases him entirely, and the modest idea occurs to him of founding a new order, which shall combine the good points and avoid the defects of all the rest. But suddenly his nose bursts out bleeding, and he takes this as a sign of coming evil. Bernardus his master appears, claims his property, and drives him off, after he has been on the loose for some five-and-twenty years. His master tells him that he shall have light work ; only a few faggots, two brass panniers, two sacks of flour, and him- i See the excellent monograph by Jusserandj Paris, 1877. r.viri II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 55 self on the top of all. For greater security, he cuts off both the ears of poor Burnellus : Funditus abscidit aurem Bernardus utramque, Cautior ut fieret, cauteriatus ita. Cured of ambition, our hero thenceforth subsides into the normal existence of donkeys. 55. In the interesting volumes which contain Wireker's Speculum (Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets of the Twelfth Century, ecL by T. Wright, Rolls series) may be read the Epigrams of Henry of Huntingdon, and an elegiac poem of about 800 lines, De Vitd Monachorum, by Alexander Neckam. This Neckam was the foster-brother of Richard I. He studied at Paris, and was known as one of the most brilliant scholars of his day, his special subjects being Grammar, Elocution, and Prosody. But the preference of a dead language, even as the medium for poetry, could not in the nature of things hold its ground. In poetry, the originality of the thought, the vigour and aptness of the expression, are what constitutes the charm : we read it, not that we may learn about things, but that we may come in contact with thoughts. But no one can think with perfect freedom except in his native tongue, nor express himself with remarkable degrees of force and fire, unless upon subjects coming closely home to his feelings. To an ecclesiastic, whose home is the church, the church's language might per- haps be considered almost as his natural speech, so long as his thoughts are busied with religious objects. Thus no poem more startlingly real, more tender, more awe-inspiring, exists in any language, than the wonderful sequence 'Dies iras, dies ilia.' But for the themes of love, or war, or gaiety, with which poetry is principally conversant, the Latin could not be so apt a medium as the roughest of the vernacular tongues, since to the ear accustomed to the vivid and expressive utterances on these subjects to which the converse of daily life of necessity gives rise, its phrases must always have seemed cold, flat, and indirect. Hence, as the Trouveres and their imitators rise and multiply, the school of Latin poetry dwindles away, and after the middle of the thirteenth century nearly disappears. The poetry which, strong in its truth to nature, supplanted its more polished rival, was the growth of France ; and to trace its origin, and analyse its many developments, is no part of the task of the historian of English literature. It is neces- sary, however, that the English student should have some general knowledge of the matter ; otherwise he would very im- perfectly understand the course of English poetry in this and in the following period. 56 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. PEEL. CH. French Poetry. 56. The French poetry of the age was divided into two schools, the Norman and the Provengal. The poets of the one were called Trouveres ; those of the other, Troubadours. The language of the one was the Langue d'oil, that of the other the Langue d'oc. 1 The poetry of the Trouveres was mostly epic in its character ; that of the Troubadours mostly lyric. Each most probably arose independently of the other, although that of the Troubadours sprang the soonest into full maturity, as it was also the first to decline and pass away. The origin of the Provengal literature is to be sought in the amicable intercourse which subsisted during the ninth and tenth centuries between the Moorish and the Christian states of Spain, resulting for the latter in their acquaintance with, and imitation of, the Arabic poetry and prose fiction. The poems of those children of the burning South were distinguished by an almost idolatrous exal- tation of the female sex, and an inexhaustible inventiveness in depicting every phase, and imagining every condition, of the passion of love. The Catalan minstrels took up the strain in their own language, which was a variety of the langue d'oc; and from Catalonia, upon its being united to a portion of Provence, in 1092, under Eaymond P>erenger, Count of Bar- celona, the newly kindled flame of romantic sentiment and idealising passion passed into the south of France, and gave birth to the poetry of the Troubadours. Of this poetry love is the chief, though not the sole, inspiration. It neglects the realities of life; it is impatient of historical themes which require learning and toil ; it is essentially fugitive subjective conventional. In a certain sense it may be called abstract poetry, since throughout a large portion of it the reader is removed from the world of concrete existences, and placed in an imaginary realm, peopled by beings who own no laws but the conventional decrees of a Court of Love, and know no higher ambition than that of being a successful suitor. Such a style evidently contains within itself the germ of a certain dissolution, unless it admit of change and enrichment from without. But external circumstances accelerated the fall of the literature of the Troubadours ; the bloody wars of which the south of France was the theatre during the early part of the thirteenth century, silenced the minstrel's lute and sub- stituted the wail of the mourner for the song of the lover. 1 So called from the different words signifying 'yes' in the two lan- guages PART II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 57 Attempts were subsequently made, down even to the fifteenth century, to revive the ancient style ; but they failed to impart to it more than a transient and factitious vitality. But in its flourishing time the Gay Science was eagerly cultivated in every part of Western Europe, and kings were proud to rank themselves among its members. Our own Richard Coeur-de- Lion not only entertained at his court some of the most cele- brated Troubadours of Provence, but himself composed several sir rentes which are still extant. A tenson, the joint composition of himself and his favourite minstrel Blondel, is said, according to the well-known story in Matthew Paris, to have been the means of Blondel's discovering the place of the king's confine- ment in Germany. 57. Almost the whole of the poetry of the Troubadours falls under two heads : the tenson and the sirvente. 1 The former was a kind of literary duel, or dialogue controversial, between two rival Troubadours, on some knotty point of amatory ethics, and often took place before, and was decided by, a Court of Love. To these courts we shall again have occasion to refer when we come to speak of Chaucer. The latter was employed on themes of Avar or politics or satire. Among the most eminent composers of sirventes were Bertrand de Born, the gifted knight of Perigord, whose insidious sugges- tions kept alive for years the feud which divided our Henry II. and his sons, Peyrols, a knight of Auvergne, and Sordello of Mantua. Bertrand and Sordello both figure in the great poem of Dante, the one in the Inferno, 2 the other in the Pur- gatorio? Poems by these, and many other Troubadours, may be found in the great work of M. Raynouard on the Provenfal poetry. 58. But the poetry of the Trouveres had a far more impor- tant and lasting influence over our early English literature than that of the Troubadours. We may arrange it under four heads : Romances, Fabliaux, Satires, and Historical Poetry. To the first head belong, besides a great number of poems on separate subjects, four great epic cycles of romance ; the first relating to Charlemagne, the second to Arthur and the Round Table, the third to the crusades for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, and the fourth to the ancient world and its heroes, especially Alexander the Great. Of the romances relating to Charlemagne, the oldest is the Chanson de Roland, a narrative of the last battle and death 1 Tenson is connected by Raynouard with 'contention.' Ducange ex- plains sirrentes as ' poemata in quibus servientium, seu militum, facta et semitia referuntur.' - Canto xxviii. 8 Canto vi. 58 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PUKL. CH. of the brave Eoland on the field of Roncesvalles. This poem r although, in the shape in which we now have it, licit ..written down earlier than the eleventh century, in. its primitive form is believed to date from the reign of Louis le Debonnaire. 1 As it stands, it was written by Turold, a Norman, whom some identify with the abbot of Peterborough: of the same name,; who governed the convent from 1069 to 1098, or else with Turold, his father, the Conqueror's tutor. The oldest MS. of this noble poem is in the Bodleian Library. It is written in stanzas of varying length, in riming lines of eleven or ten syllables; each stanza ends with the war-cry 'Aoi.' It has been ably edited by M. Genin, and, more recently, by M. Gautier, professor of the Ecole des Chartes. 59. Among the other celebrated pieces in this cycle are the Four Sons of Aymon, Roland and JFerrabras, and Ogier le Danois. The immense ' geste ' of Guillaume^ in 24 chansons, containing upwards of 130,000 lines, fills the whole of the fourth volume of M. Gautier's Epopees Francaises. A direct proof of the high antiquity of some portions at least of the Charlemagne romance is found in the lines in which Robert Wace, in the Roman de Ron, completed about 1160, describes the proceedings of the Norman minstrel Taillefer, just before the battle of Hastings : Taillefer, ki mult dien cantout, Sor un cheval ki tost alout, Devant li Dus alout cantant De Karlemaine e de Reliant, E d'Oliver e des vassals Ki morurent en Renchevals. 2 The Arthur Legend; The Saint Graal. 60. The next cycle, that of Arthur, was unquestionably founded upon the national and patriotic songs of Wales and Brittany. At the courts of the petty kingdoms of Wales, which for centuries, while the Saxons were fighting with each other or struggling against the Danes, seem to have enjoyed comparative prosperity and peace, the Welsh bards, feeding their. imagination on the memory of the gallant stand made by their patriotic prince against the Teutonic hordes, gradually wove a beautiful tissue of romantic poetry, of which the 1 Demogeot, Hist, de la Lit. Franqaise. 2 That is : ' Taillefer, who sang very well, on a horse which went quickly, went before the Duke, singing of Charlemagne, and of Roland, and of Oliver, and of the vassals who perished at Roncevaux.' PAKT TI. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 59 central figure was Arthur. The songs in which his exploits were celebrated naturally made their way among their self- exiled brethren in Brittany, and, perhaps, were by them added to and embellished. From Brittany they easily passed into the rest of France, and by the congenial imaginations of the Norman poets were eagerly welcomed. This is the direct in- fluence of Brittany upon the formation of the Arthur cycle: and it is exemplified in the romance of Iwain or Owen, com- posed in French by Chretien of Troyes, about the year 1160, after the Breton original by Jehann Vaour. There was also an indirect or reflex influence, communicated through the British history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, which, as we have seen, is stated by its author to have been translated from a work in the Breton language. Geoffrey reproduced this work in Latin, adding probably a good deal from original Welsh sources, and the result was the Historia Britonum. This Latin history became exceedingly popular, and was resorted to by the Trouveres as a secondary mine of information respecting Arthur and the Round Table. 61. The steps by which the Arthur legend gradually reached the complex form which it wore in the thirteenth century, can be made out with tolerable clearness. Gildas the Wise, writing about 550, mentions a great victory won by the Britons over the Saxons at the ' mons Badonicus,' but does not give the name of the victorious chief. Nennius, writing either at the end of the seventh, or in the ninth century, mentions the same victory as one of twelve gained at various times by the ' magnanimous Arthur ' over the Saxon invaders. Apart from Welsh sources, of which we shall speak further on, this is the earliest mention of Arthur. Nennius also mentions a boy named Ambrosius, born in a preternatural manner, who became a great magician, and had more than mortal knowledge. We pass over three or four centuries, and in the Historic Britonum of Geoffrey of Monmouth we find that the story of Arthur has grown enormously. His birth and parentage are fully explained, and his victorious career, both on the Conti- nent and in the British Isles, is described. The Ambrosius of Nennius now appears as Merlin the enchanter, the contem- porary not only of Vortigern, but of Uther Pendragon and his son Arthur. Concerning the Round Table, however, Geoffrey is silent. That splendid feature of the legend first appears in the Brut of Master Wace, which may be some ten or twelve years later than the Historia Britonum. Wace probably de- rived it from Breton poems or traditions to which Geoffrey had not had access. 'For the noble barons that he had, of 60 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. CH. whom each thought himself to be the superior, each accounted himself to be the better man, and none knew fear,' Fist reis Ertur la Runde Table, Dunt Bretun dient meint fable. (King Arthur made the Round Table, of which the Bretons tell many a fable.) Lagamon, in his version of Wace, enters into fuller particulars on the construction of the Table, which, by giving no one the precedence, was to put an end to the bloody conflicts for the uppermost seats which had been waged in Arthur's court. He ends by saying, ]>is wes ]>at ilke bord ]>at Bruttes of jelpeS ; and sugeS feole cunne lesinge, bi Ardure ])an kinge. (This was that same Board, that the Bretons boast of, and tell many kinds of leasings concerning Arthur the king.) 62. The legend had now attained a rich development ; but, popular as it was, it certainly contained little that was edifying. The Celtic nationality of its framers appeared in the manner in which Arthur's frequent slaughters of the Saxons were gloated over : the diablerie and magic of the old pagan North found expression in the stories of giants, serpents, enchanters, and wizards engrafted upon it. As it stood, it bore no Christian impress ; nay, by the revengefulness which it breathed, and the grotesque superstitions which it harboured, it must tend to lead away from religion the crowds that heard it recited. What if the legend were, so to speak, converted and baptized 1 What if the guilt of Arthur and the licentious- ness of his barons were to be visited with chastisement and expiated by penance? What if a religious idea were intro- duced into it, which should form a kind of plot, in connection with which both the existing forms and any future develop- ments of the legend might be arranged ? 63. Some such thoughts as these must have passed through the mind of the great churchman who, towards the end of the twelfth century, inwove into the Arthur legend the immortal conception of the Saint Graal. Whether it was Walter Map, or some other, will never be known with certainty ; the reader is referred for fuller speculation on this point to Sir F. Madden's edition of Sir Gawayne (printed for the Bannatyne Club in 1839), and the learned and profound observations of M. Paulin Paris. 1 From the literary point of view, the change may be 1 Les Manuscrits de la Bibliotheque Royale, Paris, 1838. I'AKT II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 61 said to consist in the incorporation of the legend of Joseph of Arimathea with that of Arthur. Tradition had long connected Glastonbury with Joseph ; there he was said to have estab- lished himself, and built a chapel after landing in Britain ; the Christmas flowering thorn which he planted is said to have flourishing descendants to this day. Taking the first sugges- tion of his story from the apocryphal ( Gospel of Nicodemus,' in which he and Nicodemus are said to have been thrown into prison at Jerusalem soon after the Ascension, but miraculously delivered from confinement, some inventive mind imagined a long series of adventures for Joseph, terminating with his arrival in Britain. Chief among these adventures figure the marvellous incidents arising from his guardianship of the Holy Graal. In order to comprehend the manner in which this new element is worked into and colours the whole mass of romances relating to Arthur, it is necessary to examine the circumstances under which it first appears. 64. In several of the oldest MSS. of romances of the Round Table, existing in the national libraries of England and France, distinct mention is made of an original Latin history of the Holy Graal, from which the various French romances forming the Arthurian cycle, including Merlin, Tristan, and Lancelot, were, with more or less of amplification, translated. This is asserted in so many words by Helie de Borron, in the preface to his Gyron le Courtois. This Latin original does not now exist, and some critics have doubted whether it ever existed, and was not assumed merely, in order to give an air of authority and veracity to the romances said to be translated from it. Yet as the Latin original from which Wace trans- lated his Brut certainly existed, it seems unreasonable to deny, in the face of positive statements by contemporaries, that there was some Latin treatise on which the romances of the Round Table were similarly founded. Luc de Gast, the author of the French romance of Tristan, says that he had ' read, and re-read, and many a time examined the great book in Latin which treats openly of the history of the Holy Graal.' 1 This Latin book may have been so utterly thrown into the shade by the celebrity of the French romances taken from it, that copies of it ceased to be made. In that case the few copies that ever existed may easily have been lost 65. If this Latin book existed, it was probably written by Walter Map, a genius of the highest order, with that design of converting the Arthur legends, and employing them in the service of Christ, which has been already explained. His i Paulin Paris, i. 118. 62 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. CH. mode of proceeding was conceived of, perhaps by himself but certainly by others, in the following manner. The adventures of Lancelot and his fellows in the Quest of the Holy Graal, and the history of the Graal itself, were originally set down in writing in the Breton tongue by King Arthur's order, and the records thereof preserved in Salisbury Abbey. There Walter Map found them, and translated them, at King Henry's com- mand, into Latin. So Geoffrey claimed to have founded his history of the Bretons on a Breton original The MS. which we are here quoting goes on to say that Henry II. also caused the history of the Graal to be turned from Latin into French ; l this was done by Kobert Borron. On the whole, I am inclined to believe that the Latin book of the Graal (Historia de Gradali) really existed, and that it was written by Map. The first part of it, the account of the Saint Graal, as containing the new element which it was his object to infuse into the cycle, he probably composed with great fulness and care. The legends of Merlin, Arthur's acts and death, of Lancelot, Tristan, and Palamedes, were already in existence when he began to write, some in a Welsh, some in a Breton, some even in a French dress; for the Chevalier au Lion at least, by Chretien of Troyes, must have been written before any of the Graal romances appeared. That Map knew Welsh, we may, considering his Welsh extraction and long residence near the Welsh border, regard as certain; it is probable therefore that he understood Breton also, and could read the legends of Tristan in the language in which they were then circulating. Fusing all these legends of the Kound Table into one, connect- ing the very Round Table itself with the loss of the Holy Vessel and its Quest, intertwining the threads of love and 'war, in the life of each Arthurian knight, with a golden mystic thread of more or less proximity to the Saint Graal, Map probably forbore to write in Latin with any great fulness the lives of these popular heroes. It was enough for him to 'have brought them and their actions into connection with the Saint Graal; the Romance poets, working on the grand out- lines which he had chalked out for them, might be trusted to till in the details. 66. What then was the story of the Saint Graal ? It was briefly this : While Christ still hung upon the cross, Joseph of Arimathea, desiring to have some object which the Saviour's hands had touched for a memorial of Him, went to the house where He had held the last supper with His disciples, and found there the bowl or dish from which He had eaten the 1 Reg. ME. III., in the British Museum. I'AKT II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 63 paschal lamb. This dish is the Graal. 1 After the deposition from the cross, Joseph, as the body of Christ is being laid in the tomb, receives into the Graal all the drops of blood that he can collect, as they flow from the sacred wounds. From this time all that happens to the Graal, and to those who come near it, is in the supernatural order. Thrown into prison, Joseph is nourished for many years by the Holy Graal alone, which appears to him in visions, and as an oracle reveals to him heavenly things. After he is released, he, at the com- mand of Christ, departs from Palestine, taking with him nothing but the Graal, and after a series of marvellous ad- ventures in many lands arrives in Britain. The Graal is kept in an ark, and the ark placed in a castle built for its reception. For several generations Britain prospers ; its kings are obedient to the faith ; and beatific glimpses of the Saint Graal are frequently vouchsafed. But a moral change comes on; lust, cruelty, and irreligion reign everywhere unrebuked, and the land is desolated, by factious strife. At last the sins of the people are so multiplied that the Graal is withdrawn into heaven ; at any rate it blesses human eyes no more. Yet a persuasion exists that it is not very far off, and may by dili- gent search be found ; and Uther Pendragon, Arthur's father, institutes the order of knights of the Round Table for the express purpose of undertaking the quest of the Graal. This quest thenceforth influences the actions, and colours the legend of each of the principal Arthurian heroes. Even when not seen, the Graal sometimes makes its presence felt in wonderful ways. In Sir Thomas Malory's version (Book x. part 2, ch. 4) we are told how the Holy Graal entered into the hall at Camelot, covered with white samite, while all the knights were seated at the Round Table; it passed by amid thunders and blinding flashes of sunlight : ' then had every knight such meat and drink as he best loved ; ' but there was none that might see it. Lancelot, Gawayne, Tristan, Bort, Agrawaine, and many others undertake the quest; they brave many perils, surmount many obstacles, but to none of them is the i Grraal, or graalz, means vessel of pleasure ; compare our ' loving-cup.' M. Fauriel refers it to the Provencal grazal ; in Ducange the forms grasala, grassellus, graletus, are found, all having the general meaning of 'vessel.' It must have been a word in common use ; for Helinand, a French chronicler who died early in the thirteenth century (the last date in his chronicle is 1204), after describing the Gradalis, says, ' Dicitur vulgari nomine graalz, quia grata mon servise, et por ce est elle apelle graals.' The etymology has not yet been satisfactorily explained. 64 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. CH. beatific vision granted, because they were not clean of heart. At last Sir Galahad, Lancelot's son, the type of Christian holiness and knightly honour, ' achieves the Saint Graal.' The holy vessel is manifested to him, with Joseph of Arimathea vested as a bishop kneeling before it. Galahad receives com- munion from the hands of Joseph, and entrusts to his companions a loving message for his father. * And therewith he kneeled down before the table and made his prayers ; and then suddenly his soul departed unto Jesus Christ. And a great multitude of angels bare his soul up to heaven, that his two fellows might behold it ; also they saw come down from heaven a hand, but they saw not the body ; and then it came right to the vessel, and took it and the spear, and so bare it up to heaven. Sithence was there never no man so hardy for to say that he had seen the Sancgreal (Saint Graal). 5 67. It is evident that whoever conceived the idea of the Saint Graal had for his principal design to enforce the dignity and fruitfulness of the eucharistic mystery. The chalice on the Catholic altar is the Saint Graal ; the treasury which it contains, like that in the Saint Graal, is present for brief in- tervals and disappears again ; after ' the sakering of the Mass,' to use the words of old Malory, it is there ; in a short space it vanishes, and is there no more. The only difference is, that whereas the ordinary chalice has not, as such, any peculiar sacredness, the Saint Graal is itself sacred, from having been held in the hands of Christ, and used by Him in celebrating the paschal feast. This distinction superadds to the religious significance of the conception an element of poetry and imagina- tion, which brings it within the sphere, and adapts it to the purposes, of literature. Nevertheless it remains true that a full comprehension of the Catholic doctrine of the eucharist is the proper key to understanding the pregnant import of this legend of the Saint Graal. 68. The number and order of the Graal romances may be thus represented : I. A Latin Historia de Gradali by Walter Map, written probably between 1160 and 1170, in which the commencements of the history of the Saint Graal were minutely given, and all the chief branches of Arthurian legend, Lancelot, Tristan, Per- ceval, &c., introduced with more or less of detail, and connected with the Saint Graal. II. The Saint Graal, a romance in French prose, translated by Robert Borron (whom there is some reason to believe to have been a native of Nottinghamshire, and an ancestor of Lord Byron) from the Latin of Map. It has been printed for PART II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 65 the Roxburghe Society, under the editorial care of Dr. Fur- nivall. III. Merlin; in French prose; translated by Robert Borron. IV. Quest of the Saint Graal ; in French prose ; by Walter Map; see MS. Reg. 14 E. III. This is sometimes regarded as a branch of Lancelot. V. Lancelot ; in French prose ; by Walter Map, as distinctly stated by Helie de Borron. VL Tristan ; Part I. ; by Luces, or Luc, de Gast, a castle near Salisbury. Part II. ; by Helie de Borron, a kinsman of Robert. VII. Mort Artur ; by Walter Map. VIIL Gyron le Courtois or Palamedes ; by Helie de Borron. All these eight romances, except the first, are in French prose, and the dates of their composition probably range between 1160 and 1230. To these we must add IX. Perceval ; in French verse, by Chretien of Troyes. This romance, which, with its continuations, extended to more than 20,000 lines, was founded on the prose Tristan of Luc de Gast, and probably written between 1190 and 1198, in which year Chretien is thought to have died. X. Parzival, with its prelude Titurel ; in German verse, by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Wolfram followed partly Chretien of Troyes, partly a Proven9al poet whom he names Kyot. The Titurel is thought to have been written in the last years of the twelfth century ; the Parzival between 1200 and 1207. The earliest in order of time of all the French romances of the Graal, according to the express testimony of Helie de Borron, was the Tristan of Luc de Gast. 69. That this legend of the Graal arose on British ground, there seems, on the whole, no ground for doubting. Yet M. Fauriel, in the work above cited, 1 concludes it to have been of Provencal origin, and Dr. Simrock in his edition of the Parzival takes the same view. With regard to M. Fauriel it is difficult to argue seriously with a writer who believes, not Perceval only, but the whole series of Arthur legends, to have been of Provencal origin. Dr. Simrock considers that the mention of Kyot, the Provenal poet, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, as the writer on the Graal whom he had chiefly followed, compels us to believe that the Graal legend had a Provencal origin. But in reply it may be argued : (1) Wolfram interlards what he says about Kyot with so 1 Histoire de la Potsie Provenqale, ii, 66 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. CH. many fabulous touches, that it is impossible to know how much of his words is to be believed. Kyot, he says, found the story of the Graal at Dolet (Toledo) ; it had first been written down by one Flegetanis, an astrologer, who, having a heathen father, worshipped a calf for his god, but on the mother's side was descended from Solomon. Flegetanis found out by the stars that the wondrous thing called the Graal was brought down to the earth by a band of angels, who then flew back to heaven. Evidently we are not on the ground of authentic statement here. But (2) Kyot, after all, is said by Wolfram to have found the Latin version of the work of Flegetanis which he used for his poem, not anywhere in the south of France, but in Anjou ; a province belonging to Henry II., to which the work of Map might easily have come from England. Moreover, he is stated to have written in French, not in Pro- vencal. It is needless to add that no one has ever seen a line of Kyot's poem. M. Fauriel lays much stress on allusions to the Saint Graal in the works of Provenfal poets of early date. But the earliest clear allusion that I have seen is in a poem by Kichard of Barbezieux, a troubadour of the thirteenth century, who might, of course, have read the French prose romances above enumerated. It seems to me that much stronger argu- ments than any hitherto adduced must be brought forward, before the glory of having originated the sublime conception of the Saint Graal can be justly withheld from Britain. Other Epopees : Fabliaux : Riming Chronicles. 70. Of the third cycle, that relating to the crusades, the most important piece is the famous romance of Eichard Coeur- de-Lion. The French original is not known to exist, but there is an English metrical translation, dating probably from the reign of Edward I., which is of great interest. It abounds in marvellous or miraculous details, which, however, there is reason to suppose, were not in the original romance (which was of the nature of a true heroic poem, and contemporaneous with the crusade itself), but added by succeeding Norman minstrels in the course of the thirteenth century. 1 71. The leading poem of the fourth cycle, that relating to the ancient world, is the Roman d' Alexandra, the joint work of Lambert li Cors and Alexandre de Bernay, which appeared in 1184. The extraordinary popularity of this romance caused the metre in which it was composed (rimed lines of twelve i See Ellis's Specimens of Early English Romances, vol. ii. p. 93 : and Weber's Metrical Romances (1810). PART II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 67 syllables) to drive out the heroic pentameters which had pre- viously been employed for epic poetry in France, and to be known thenceforth by the name of Alexandrine. It shares with many other French poems of this period the peculiarity of continuing the same rime through a whole paragraph, or for as many lines as the poet can find fresh instances of it. For instance, in the first twenty-three lines there is but one rime, -ir ; the next thirty-one lines have the rime -ie, the next six end in -ele, the next ten in -or, and so on. Some idea of the effect of this practice may be obtained from the following extract : For prendre bon exemple de proecce aquellir, De connoistre raison d'amer et de hair, De ses amis garder, et cierement tenir, Ses auemis grever, c'uns n'en puist avancir, Les laidures vengier, et les bienfaits merir, De canter, quant lius est, et a terme s'ofrir, Oies donques 1'estore boinement, a 1'oisir ; Cou est de 1'millor roi que Dex laisast morir. D'Alixandre vus voel 1'estore rafrescir, Cui Dex donna fierte et e 1'cuer grant air, Qui par mer et par tierre osa gent envair, &c. The poem opens with a dream which Alexander had, when a boy of ten years old, about an egg, out of which issued a serpent. The main points of the historical outline are pre- served with tolerable fidelity; we read of the siege of Tyre, the defeat and death of Darius, of Porus the Indian king, and the death of the great conqueror at Babylon ; but the frame is filled in, and sometimes overlaid, with an infinite amount of Gothic embroidery. The poem extends to upwards of 12,000 lines. An English version of the Roman d'Alexdndre (printed in Weber's Metrical Romances, under the title of Kyny Alisaundre) was produced about 1320. Weber says of it that 'few English romances can boast of a greater share of good poetry.' A continuation of the story, also in English, extending to 1200 lines, was edited by Mr. Stevenson, for the Roxburghe Club. 72. The Fabliau, or Metrical Tale, aimed, not at singing the actions of heroes, but at describing, in an amusing, striking way, the course of real life. It was to the chivalrous romance what comedy is to tragedy comedy, that is to say, like that of Menander, not like that of Aristophanes ; it is not political, and does not attack individuals, but paints society and phases of character. With a frequent touch of satire, or flavour of cynicism, the Fabliau is upon the whole a true account of the 68 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. CH. everyday life and manners of the time, of which it conveys no very pleasing or edifying impression. Many fabliaux were drawn from eastern l sources ; e.g. the famous Indian tale of the Seven Wise Masters, which has been rendered or imitated in so many different languages. 73. The glaring inconsistencies which this world presents between promise and performance between theory and prac- tice give rise in every age to satire. Every village has its satirist, who with greater or less skill exposes the hypocrite, and ridicules the dupe. It is quite a secondary question whether the satire current in any particular age finds or misses literary expression. In the Middle Ages the great literary movement of France, which we are now considering, could not fail to extend to satire also. And as deficient practice and perform- ance are nowhere so offensive as when they accompany the grandest theories and the most uncompromising professions, it was natural that the vices of ministers of the Church that one powerful European institution, the very grandeur of which made it a more obvious mark should be the principal theme of mediaeval satirists. The continuation of the Roman de la Rose, by Jean de Meung, composed about the end, and the famous tale of Reynard the Fox, 2 composed about the middle, of the thir- teenth century, are full of satirical attacks upon men in high places and established institutions, in all which the clergy come in for the principal share of invective. 74. The period which produced so many Latin chronicles for circulation among the clergy, gave birth also to French chronicles in verse for the entertainment of the laity. In verse because few laymen could read, and a history in rime was easier and more agreeable to remember, both for the reciter and for the hearer. We do not hear of prose chronicles in French, still less in English, until the next period, by which time a reading and cultivated lay audience had been formed. The chief name of note among these French metrical chroniclers is that of Maitre Wace, a learned clerk, born in Jersey, near the end of the eleventh century, and educated in Normandy. His first history, the Brut d'Angleterre (Chronicle of England), is in the main a translation of Geoffrey of Mon mouth's Historia Britonum before mentioned, and ends with the year 680. 3 His second work, the Roman de Ron (Kollo), is a history of the Dukes of Normandy, reaching down to 1170, the sixteenth year of Henry II. Part of this latter work is in the Alexandrine measure ; the remaining portion, and all the Brut d'Angleterre, are in the eight-syllable romance metre. Another chronicler, 1 Extract Book, art. 18. 2 See Grit. Sec., I. 21. 3 Extract Book, art. 8. PATH- II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 69 Benoit, composed, at the desire of Henry II., a history of the Dukes of Normandy, which appeared some years after that of Wace. Wace died about the year 1175. Geffroy Gaiinar wrote his Estorie des Engles, a metrical history of the Anglo- Saxon kings, about the middle of the twelfth century. His materials were, a Latin history of the British kings, lent him by Robert, Earl of Gloucester, who had caused it to be trans- lated from the Welsh (it was different, therefore, from the history in Breton of the same kings which had been used by Geoffrey of Monmouth) ; an ' estoire de Wincestre/ and an English book kept at ' Wassinburc,' i.e. Washingborough in Lincolnshire. The following couplet shows the metre : Coment chescous maintint la terre, Quel ama pes, e li quel guerre. 74a. The ancient literature of Wales is contained chiefly in four MS. volumes, the Black Book of Caermarthen, the Book of Aneurin, the Book of Taliessin, and the Red Book of Hergest. The first and third are in the library of Mr. Wynne of Peniarth ; the second in that of the late Sir Thomas Phil- lipps ; the fourth is at Jesus College, Oxford. The dates at which these compilations were made range from the second half of the twelfth century for the earliest (the Black Book), to the fifteenth century for parts of the latest (the Red Book). A patriotic Welshman, Owen Jones, who had prospered in trade as a furrier in London, caused all these pieces to be printed, in 1801 and subsequent years, under the title of The Myvyrian Archceology of Wales. There is great doubt as to the true age and authorship of many of the pieces in this collection, and also as to the identification of many localities named ; in this brief sketch we generally follow Mr. Skene, the author of an interesting work on The Four Ancient Books above mentioned. The great poets of the old time were Taliessin, Aneurin, Llywarch Hen, and Merddhin. They lived, not in Wales, but in the north of England, and, apparently, in the sixth century, when a fierce struggle raged for many years between the native Britons of Cumbria, and the Anglians of Bernicia, who under Ida (547) and later kings were always pressing up from the coast westward. Aneurin, in a poem called The Gododin, wrote of a great battle, disastrous to the Britons, which was fought about 570 at Catterick in York- shire. The chief native hero was the prince Urien, whose valour and liberality were celebrated by Taliessin in many poems. Arthur only appears in five poems, of which four are in the Book of Taliessin ; these are so cloudily expressed that 70 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. PREL. CH. no certain conclusion can be drawn from them on the disputed questions, whether Arthur was a king of South or of North Britain, and whether his twelve famous victories (supra, 61) were fought in Somersetshire, Cornwall, and other southern counties, or on the Scottish side of the border. But although Taliessin and the other great poets lived and sang in the sixth century, Mr. Skene considers that it is in the next century, in the age of Cadwallaun, when a gleam of success inspired the Cymry with the hope that they would yet rid themselves of their oppressors, that these poems, ' in their earliest consistent shape,' must be placed. That transient hope was overcast, and in 946 the British kingdom of Cumbria was overcome by Edmund, and most of the inhabitants migrated to Wales. In South Wales, where a settled peace had been brought in by the good Howell Dha (f 948), the bards revised and com- pleted the old poems, and added new ones. At this time also the earliest group of prose tales, some of which are found in the collec- tion called the Mabinogion (lit. ' tales for children '), came into existence. Other tales in the Mabinogion are Welsh versions of Arthurian romances, and must be regarded not as sources, but as echoes, of the work of the French trouveres. In the twelfth century a new and vigorous school of Welsh poetry, represented by such names as Gwalchmai, Owain, and Einion, arose in North Wales, and continued to flourish for several generations. The Welsh Triads, found in the Myvyrian Archaeology, raise many perplexing questions. The arranging of facts and maxims in threes, in order to aid the memory, is (as Mr. Stephens remarks in his admirable work on the Literature of the Cymry} very old, and not confined to Wales. They may be divided into Triads of history, bardism, theology, ethics, and jurisprudence. Some of those which we have, Mr. Stephens thinks, may be as old as the Druids ; but no collection of them goes back beyond the twelfth century. English Poets and Translators ; ' Havelok ; ' Lagamon, and other Riming Chroniclers ; Religious Poems ; Ormin, Hampole : Other Poems ; Battle of Lewes, Owl and Nightingale. 75. The English poetry of the period from 1200 to 1350 bears witness, as we have said, in almost every line, to the powerful foreign influences amid which it grew up, and to which it owed the chief part of its inspiration. It may be arranged, therefore, under the same four heads as the French poetry ; to PART II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 7.1 these, however, we will add two others, religious poems, and occa- sional poems ; since it is in these compositions that we first find a marked originality, a promise of an independent growth to come. Romances. English versions or imitations of the popular French romances began to be multiplied towards the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries. For a particular account of these English romances, the reader may consult the work of Ellis. Besides the two heroic sub- jects, Charlemagne and Arthur (the heroes of classical antiquity seem to have been less popular with the English versifiers), the crusades, particularly the one in which King Kichard was engaged, and many miscellaneous topics, are handled by these writers. Yet even Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Llamptoun, and Richard Coeur-de-Lion, 1 though the names have such a local and national sound, were founded upon French originals, the authors of which, indeed, were probably Englishmen, but derived from France their literary culture. 76. The earliest, or one of the earliest, and perhaps the most remarkable, of these English romances is the Anglo-Danish legend of Havelok? the unique MS. of which, discovered not many years ago in the middle of a volume of Lives of Saints in the Bodleian Library, was of course unknown to Ellis. This MS. dates from towards the end of the thirteenth century. But we possess a French version of the same story about a hundred and fifty years earlier in the Estorie des Engles by Geffrei de Gaimar, who evidently derived it from an English chronicle the book of ' Wassinburc ' ("Washingborough, near Lincoln) which he mentions among his authorities. It would be in- teresting to know whether this book was in verse or prose, but Gaimar does not say. The substance of the story, according to the English version, is briefly this. The sovereigns of England and Denmark, dying about the same time, leave to inherit their kingdoms, the one a daughter, Goldeboro', the other a son, Havelok. The guardians of the children, Godrich in England, and Godard in Denmark, are both false to their trust ; Golde- boro' is placed in Dover Castle, and Havelok is given by Godard to the fisherman Grim, to be drowned in the sea. But a mira- culous light issuing from the child causes Grim to spare him ; and soon after, taking all his family with him, together with the young prince, he sails for England, and landing on the coast of Lincolnshire founds the town of Grimsby, which still bears his name. Twelve years pass, and Havelok has become a youth of marvellous size, strength, and beauty ; Goldeboro', too, has become the loveliest of English maidens. Going to Lincoln for 1 Extract Book, art. 15. 2 Extract Book, art. 14. 72 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. FUEL. CH. work in a time of scarcity, Havelok by feats of strength attracts the notice of Godrich ; the traitor resolves to force Goldeboro' to marry him, as a kind of fulfilment of his promise to her father, to marry her to the ' best, fairest, and strongest man ' in Eng- land. The marriage takes place in spite of the resistance of both ; but Goldeboro' is soon comforted by beholding one night the marvellous splendour issuing out of Havelok's mouth. At her suggestion he sails for Denmark ; there, after a long train of adventures, which the reader must imagine, he is recognised as king, and defeats and slays Godard. Returning with a Danish army to England, he visits Godrich with the like retribution. Goldeboro' and he are crowned, reign over England for sixty years, and have fifteen children, of whom all the sons live to be kings, and all the daughters queens. Finally, the poet beseeches all who have heard his tale pat ilke of you, \vith gode wille, Seye a Paternoster stille For him J)at haveth }>e ryme maked, And Jjerfore fele nihtes waked ; pat Jhesu Crist his soule bringe Bi-fore his Fader at his endinge. 77. Another Anglo-Danish romance, the materials for which may also have been taken from the book of Washingborough or some similar com- pilation, is King Horn. It has come down to us both in English and in French, and of each version there are but three extant manuscripts, all in English libraries. The earliest MS. of the English version dates from about 1250 ; but the earliest French version cannot, it is said, 1 from the cast of the language, be dated later than the second half of the twelfth century. But for this one would be inclined to agree with Mr. Wright in dating the English before the French version. The latter is longer and more elaborate ; it contains, besides the names of the principal personages, which are the same as in the English version, many names which are found in other French romances of the thirteenth century. The English story has in it only names of pure Anglo-Danish origin. The tale, which bears a considerable resemblance to that of Havclok, tells how Horn, the son of the king of Suddene or Suthdene (Surrey), while in exile at the Court of Westernesse (Devonshire), won the love of Rymenhild, the king's daughter, and, after passing through a thousand perils, in which he was aided by knights from Westene-londe (Ireland), finally married her. The versification, though rude, is often very pleasing. The following is the opening, as found in the MS. in the Bodleian Library : Alle ben he blij>e pat to me wilen life : A song ich wille you singe Of Morye ]>e kinge. King he was bi westen, Wei ]>at hise dayes lesten, And Grodild hise gode queue, Feyrer non micte bene. 1 See Romania for May 1887. I'AKT II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 73 Here soue havede to name Horn, Feyrer child ne micte ben born ; Ne reyn ne micte upon-reyne Ne no sonne by-schine, Fayrer child J>anne he was, Brict so evere any glas, Whit so any lili flour, So rose red was hys colur. King Horn has been edited in English by Bitson, Mr. Lumby, and Dr. Horstmann, and in French and English by M. Francisque Michel. 78. To a somewhat later date (1320-30) is assigned the legend of Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, published by the Early English Text Society. 79. Scarcely any English versions of fabliaux are known to exist of earlier date than 1350. The raillery and more refined touches which belong to this class of compositions were not suited to the rude intelligence of the English-speaking popula- tion in the Norman period, and would have been utterly thrown away upon them. The only instance of a fabliau given by Ellis is the version of the Indian story before mentioned of the Seven Wise Masters, supposed to have been made from the French about the year 1330. 80. Under the head of satire, there exists a curious poem, entitled the Land of Cockaygne, the date of which is not cer- tainly known, though Warton is undoubtedly wrong in placing it as early as the twelfth century. It is a biting satire on the monastic orders, and bears the stamp of the flippant age of Boccaccio rather than that of the grave and earnest century of St. Bernard. Nothing is known about the author, nor is the French original, from which it was evidently taken, in existence. 81. Of the metrical chroniclers, who, in imitation of Wace and his fellow-labourers, related the history of England in English verse for the entertainment of the laity, the earliest in date is Lagamon, 1 priest of Ernley-on-Severn, now Areley Kin.gs, in Worcestershire, who, about the close of the twelfth century, p reduced an amplified imitation of Wace's Brut d? Angleterre. This curious work, the earliest existing poem of considerable magnitude in the English language, extends to about 16,000 long lines of four accents. 2 To produce the effect of metre, Lagamon employs both alliteration and rime, each of the rudest description ; sometimes, too, he seems unable to achieve either 1 During an excavation made in Areley Kings in 1886, fragments of an old Norman font were found, and traces of letters on the font step-stones, which, after removal of paint and whitewash, were found to be 'TEMPOKE LA [5] AMANNI SANTI.' - Extract Book, art. 10. 74 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PREL. CH. the one or the other. The writer seems to have been balancing between the example of his French prototype, who uses rime, and the attractions of the old native Saxon poets, who employed nothing but alliteration. In the opening passage he tells of his parentage, and what induced him to write : An preost wes on leoden : l Lajamon wes ihoten. 2 he wes LeovenaSes sone : him beo Drihten. 4 Hit com him on mode : and on his mern 5 J>onke. J>et he wolde of Engle : J>a seoelsen 6 tellen. wat heo ihoten weoren : and wonene 7 heo comen, J>a Englene londe : aerest ahten. 8 He goes on to say that he travelled over the land in search of materials, and found three ' noble books/ which he used for his guidance, the * English book ' of St. Beda, the Latin book written by St. Albin and the 'fair Austin, who brought baptism in hither,' and the French book by Wace. By the first two books, he seems merely to have meant the Ecclesiastical History of St. Beda, in its English and in its Latin shape. The English version is that which bears the name of Alfred. By some misapprehension he appears to have confounded Albinus, abbot of Canterbury, who is mentioned in Beda's preface as having supplied him largely with materials, with the author of the history. 82. Two MSS. of Lagamon's Brut exist, both in the British Museum. The oldest of these is in every way the most in- teresting ; it is held to have been written, or completed, about 1205. The later version is considerably shorter, and the MS. containing it was much damaged by the fire at the Cottonian Library in 1731, a portion of it being destroyed, and. another portion made illegible. In the earlier text about a hundred words of French or Latin origin, exclusive of those which were in use before the Conquest, have been found. To these, the later text, which is assigned to the middle of the thirteenth century, adds about fifty. The two texts together contain more than 28,000 lines, and only about a hundred and fifty new French words ; from this fact may be inferred the great slowness with which, at any rate in remote country districts, like 1 in the land. 2 called. 3 gracious. 4 the Lord. 5 chief. 6 noble deeds. 7 whence. 8 first owned. PART 11. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 75 the corner of Worcestershire where Lagamon wrote, the speech of the people was mingled with that of their conquerors. Lagamon is considerably fuller than Wace whom he imitates, and a complete inquiry into the sources whence he drew his additional matter has yet to be made. The valuable edition of the Brut, with translation and notes, which bears the name of Sir F. Madden, was printed in 1847 for the Society of Antiquaries. 83. The poem relates how Brutus, the great-grandson of ^Eneas, collecting a band of his Trojan kinsmen, descended from the exiles who had settled in Greece after the destruction of Troy, put himself at their head, and after a voyage full of peril and vicissitude landed at Dartmouth in Totnes. He became the ancestor of the kings of Britain, among whom Lud, Bladud, Lear, Gorboduc, and Lucius are reckoned. The last king mentioned in the poem is Cadwalader, whose date is 689 A.D. The exploits of Uther Pendragon and his more famous son Arthur are, as mentioned above, 1 related with great fulness. 84. An interval of nearly a hundred years separates Laga- mon from the next of the riming chroniclers, Robert of Glou- cester. 2 Robert may possibly be identified with a person of the same name who was chancellor to two Archbishops of Canterbury, in 1304 and 1318. (See Hearne's edition of the Chronicle.) He writes in the twelve-syllable or Alexandrine riming metre, in emulation, perhaps, of the French poets who had handled that measure so successfully. His object seems to have been to compile, for the instruction and entertainment of the laity, a complete history of Britain from the earliest times to his own day. Beginning, therefore, with a descrip- tion of the country, which he takes from Henry of Hunting- don, he follows Geoffrey and Wace to the period where they stop, viz., the end of the seventh century. This portion is less than half the work ; the rest, founded apparently on the stan- dard prose Chronicles of Florence, Huntingdon, Hoveden, and Wendover, with the addition, for the reign of Richard, of the romance of Richard Cceur-de-Lion, is brought down to the year 1270, where it ends abruptly. There is reason to think that the poem really ended with the death of Henry III., in 1272, but that the concluding portion has been lost. An allu- sion near the end to the canonisation of St. Louis shows that this part must have been written as late as 1297. From about 1260 Robert is an original and valuable authority for many 1 See ante 61. " Extract Book, art. 13. 76 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. FUEL. CH. incidents of the war between Henry III. and the barons. The poem contains more than 12,000 lines, and is written in a rough west-country dialect, which, however, has admitted a great number of French words not employed by La^amon. The following lines on the death of Arthur are a fair sample of Robert's performance : He gef 1 ]>e croune of ]>ys lond j>e noble Costantyn, (pe erl Cadore's son of Cornwayle, J>at was ys cosyn). And let him lede in to an yle, for to hele ys wounde, And deyde as J?e beste kyng, jjat me wuste ever yfounde. 2 Ac 3 na]>eles j>e Brutons, and ]>e Cornewalysse of ys kunde WeneJ) he be alive gut, 4 and abbejj 5 hym jut in mynde, pat he be to comene 6 jut, to wynne agen ]>ys lond. 85. To Robert of Gloucester succeeds Robert Mannyng, a native of Brunne, or Bourn, in South Lincolnshire, and a monk of the Gilbertine monastery of Sixhill. Mannyng composed a riming chronicle in two parts : the first a translation, in the ordinary octosyllabic verse of the romance writers, of the Brut by Wace, of which the reader has already heard so much ; the second a version in Alexandrine verse of a French metrical chronicle by Peter Langtoft, a canon regular of St. Austin at Bridlington in Yorkshire, ending with the death of Edward I. in 1307. The Prologue to the first part explains so simply and clearly the motives which induced the riming chroniclers to employ themselves on a task which to our modern notions, perhaps, involves a misapplication of poetical power, that it seems advisable to insert it here : Lordynges that be now here, If ye wille listen and lere [learn] All the story of Inglande, Als Robert Mannyng wryten [written] it fand, And on Inglysch has it schewed, Not for the lerid bot for the lewed [lay people], For tho [those] that on this lond wonn [dwell] That the Latyn ne Frankys conn [know neither Latin nor French], For to haf solace and gamen In felauschip when tha sitt samen [together]. And it is wisdom for to wytten [know] The state of the land, and haf it wryten, What manere of folk first it wan, And of what kynde it first began. And gude it is for many thynges For to here the dedis of kynges, 2 men ever knew found. 3 but. 4 yet. 5 have. 6 In this form we see the remains of the Anglo-Saxon gerund. PART II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 77 Whilk [which] were foles, and whilk were wyse, And whilk of tham couth [knew] most quantyse [quaintness, i.e. artfulness] ; And whilk did wrong, and whilk ryght, And whilk mayntend pes [peace] and fyght. Of thare dedes salle be my sawe [story], In what tymc, and of what law, I salle you schewe, fro gre to gre [degree, i.e. step by step], Sen [since] the tyme of Sir Noe. In this same Prologue, Mannyng speaks of the ' geste ' of Tristrem, as written in verse by Thomas of Ercildoune, com- plaining that it is commonly not said as Thomas made it. A note at the end of the MS. states that the second part of his chronicle was finished by Mannyng in 1338. Another poem by the same author, Meditacyuns of the Soper of oure Lorde Jesus, translated from St. Bonaventure's Vita Christi between the years 1315 and 1330, has been lately printed for the Early English Text Society. It opens thus : Allemyghty God yn trynyte, Now and ever wyth us be ; For thy Sones passyun Save alle J>ys congregacyun ; And graunte us grace of gode lyvyng, To wynne us blysse wythouten endyng. But the most interesting of all Mannyng's works is his Handlyncj Synne, translated, with the addition of many original passages, from the Manuel des Peclies of William de Waddington, written about thirty years before. The Handlyng Syime has been printed for the Roxburghe Club. The modern character of the language, and the large admixture of French words in this poem, have been well pointed out by Mr. Kington Oliphant. 1 It was begun in 1303, as the following lively passage shows : To alle Crystyn men undir sunne, And to gode men of Brunne, And speciali alle bi name J>e felaushepe of Symprynghame, Roberd of Brunne gretej) jow In all godenesse J>at may to prow [benefit]. Of Brymwake yn Kestevene, Syxe myle besyde Sympringham evene [plain] Y dwellede yn the pryorye Fyftene 5ere yn companye, In J>e time of gode dane Jone Of Camelton, J>at now ys gone. 1 Sources of Standard English, p. 182. 78 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. CH. In hys tyme was Y ]>ere ten jeres, And knewe and herde of hys maneres ; Sy)>yn wy)> dane Jone of Clyntone, Fy ve wyntyr wyj) him gan Y wone ; Dane Felyp was mayster J>at tyme pat Y began thys Englyssh ryme. pe yeres of grace fyl [fell] ]>an to be A jxnisynd and }>re hundrede and |>re. In )>at tyme turnede Y ]>ys On Englysshe tunge out of Frankys. 86. Religious Poems. Among those that remain to us, the most important is Ormin's work on the Gospels, usually called the Ormulum. 1 It has been carefully edited by Dr. K. M. White, formerly the Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon ; and again by Mr. Holt. Ormin and his brother Walter, to whom he dedicates the work, were both regular canons of St. Austin. To what part of England he belonged is unknown ; but the dialect which he uses is considered to point to the district surrounding Peterborough. There are no means of fixing the date with certainty ; it probably belongs to the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. The work is described by Dr. White as ' a series of Homilies, in an imperfect state, composed in metre without alliteration, and (except in very few cases) also without rime ; the subjects of the Homilies being ' the gospels daily read at the mass. The unique MS. is in the Bodleian Library ; it is in a sadly muti- lated condition. Ormin's plan was to paraphrase the gospel of the day, and then give a commentary upon it. He gives the heads of 230 gospels and twelve lessons from the Acts, but the part of the poem now extant only comes down to the thirty- second gospel, and is imperfect. In his prologue, Ormin (whose system of orthography, invented by himself, requires the doubling of every consonant that follows a short vowel) thus describes his plan : Ic hafe sammnedd 2 o Jnss boc pa Goddspelless neh 3 alle, patt sinndenn 4 o )>e messe-boc 5 Inn all >e ger 6 att messe ; And ass 7 affterr j>e Goddspell stant patt tatt te Goddspell mene>J>, patt mann birr]) spellenn 8 to ]>e follc, Off >essre 9 sawle nede. 87. The Proverbs of Hendyng, written in the southern dialect, near the end of the thirteenth century, are of unknown 1 Extract Book, art. 9. 2 collected. s n igh. 4 are> :, mass book. 6 year. ? aye, always. 8 ought to declare. their. PAKT II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 79 authorship. They consist of forty stanzas of seven lines, each ending with a proverb, followed by ' Quoth Hendyng. ' They have been printed in Reliquiae Antiquce. 1 88. The Cursor Mundi (date about 1320), a * metrical version of Old and New Testament History,' 2 in which are interwoven many legends of Saints, has never yet been printed entire ; it was once very popular, as is shown by the existence of numerous MSS. 89. Richard Rolle, who lived as a hermit at Hampole near Doncaster, and died in 1349, is the author of a metrical ver- sion of the Psalms in the northern dialect, which obtained a wide notoriety, and also of a curious moral poem called The Pricke of Conscience. This he wrote both in Latin and English. The following passage 3 on the joys of Heaven is a favourable specimen of Hampole's manner : Alle manere of joyes er in that stede. Thare es ay lyfe withouten dede ; Thare es yhowthe ay withouten elde, Thare es al kyn welth ay to vvelde. Thare es rest ay, withouten travayle ; Thare es alle gudes that never sal fayle ; Thare es pese ay, withouten stryf ; Thare es alle manere of lykyng of lyfe ; Thare es, withouten myrknes, lyght ; Thare es ay day and never nyght, Thare es ay somer fulle bryght to se, And never mare wynter in that centre. 90. Of the other religious poems in England which remain to us from this period, some (as the two by Mannyng before described) are didactic poems on points of Christian doctrine or morality ; some, Lives of Saints ; some, lastly, short poems on devotional topics, such as the Crucifixion and the Blessed Virgin under the Rood. Many interesting relics of this kind have been lately published by the Early English Text Society, e.g., the metrical lives of St. Marherete* [Margaret] and St. Juliana 5 and the Story of Genesis and Exodus. 91. The religious poems were probably written by eccle- siastics; but the occasional and miscellaneous poems of the period are evidently for the most part the productions of lay- men. There is one of these which the certainty of its date, and the remarkable character of its contents, render so impor- tant from an historical point of view, that it must be noticed here. This is a piece (given by Warton in exienso) composed after the battle of Lewes in 1264, by an adherent of Simon de 1 Extract Book, art. 12. 2 Specimens of Early English, Morris and Skeat, Part II. 3 Ibid. p. 124. 4 See below, I., 9. & Extract Book, art. 11 So HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. PEEL. CH. Montfort. The number of French words which it contains, and the easy way in which they are employed, unite to prove that the new English language was well on in the process of formation, conditioned always by the necessity, which this writer frankly accepts, of incorporating a vast number of French words, expressive of the ideas which England owed to the Norman invasion. Again, the broad, hearty satire, the strong anti-royalist, or rather anti-foreigner, prejudices of the writer, the energy of resolution which the lines convey, point unmistakably to the rise, which indeed must any way be dated from this century, of a distinct English nationality, uniting and reconciling the Norman and Saxon elements. A portion of this poem is subjoined : Sitteth alle still, and herkneth to me ; The kynge of Alemaigne, bi mi leaute, Thritti thousent pound askede he, For te make the pees in the countre, And so he dude more. Richard, thah thou be ever trichard, 1 Tricthen shalt thou never more. The kyng of Alemaigne wende 2 do f ul wel, He saisede the mulne 3 for a castel, With hare 4 sharpe swerdes he grounde the stel, He wende that the sayles were mangonel, 5 To help Wyndesore. Richard, &c. Sire Simond de Mountfort hath suore bi ys chyn, Hevede 6 he now here the erl of Waryn, Should he never more come to is yn, 7 Ne with sheld, ne with spere, ne with other gyn, 8 To helpe of Wyndesore. Richard, &c. Sire Simond de Montfort hath suore bi ys fot, Hevede he nou here sire Hue de Bigot, Al he shulde grante here twelf-moneth scot, Shulde he never more with his sot pot, To helpe Wyndesore. Richard, &c. Be the luef, be the loht, 9 sire Edward, Thou shalt ride sporeless o' thy lyard, 10 _ Al the ryhte way to Dovere-ward, Shalt thou nevermore breke foreword, 11 Ant that reweth sore ; i Treacherous. 2 Weened. 3 Mill. 4 Their. 5 A military engine. 6 Had. 7 His inn. 8 Engine. 9 Be thou lief, be .thou loth. w Grey horse. " Promise. TAUT II. THE NOKMAN PERIOD. Si Edward, thou dudest ase a shreward, Forsoke thyn ernes lore, 1 Richard, thah thou be ever trichard, Tricthen shalt thou never more. 92. To the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272) is supposed to belong the remarkable poem of The Owl and Nightingale, written probably by the 'Maister Nichole of Guldef orde ' (Guildford) who is named in it, or else by his brother John of Guildford, the author of the piece which, in the Cottonian MS., precedes that which we have under consideration. Perched on a spray, whence she looks down with sovereign contempt on her unmelodious adversary, the Nightingale challenges the Owl to a contest and controversy regarding their respective qualities of song. The Owl consents ; a dialogue follows, in which the Owl stands chiefly on the defensive, maintaining that her song is less harsh, and her appetite for mice and small birds less ravenous, than the proud Nightingale would allow. In the end they agree to go to Portesham, and submit their dispute to Master Nicholas of Guildford. The Owl says that she can repeat all that has been said : ' Telle jch con word after worde ; And jef )>e j?inc)> Jmt ich mis-rempe, pu stonde ajein, and dome crempe.' Mid j>isse worde forj> hi ferden, Al bute here and bute verde, To Portesham )>at heo bi-coine ; Ah hu heo spedde of heore dome Ne chan ich eu namore telle ; Her nis namore of Jns spelle. (' I can tell word after word, and if it seemeth to thee that I mis-state, do thou stand against me and stop judgment.' With these words forth they fared, all without army and without fol- lowers, until they reached Portesham. But how they sped in their judgment, I can no more tell you ; here is no more of this story.) The poem is nearly 1800 lines long ; it is in the dialect of the South of England, with many Danish forms. It was probably imitated from the Roman de Rose, or rather suggested by it. In that famous and widely influential poem, frequent mention is made of birds and their singing powers. The garden which the poet sees in his dream is alive with them : In many places were nyghtyngales, Alpes, fynches, and wodewales, i Forsake thine uncle's teaching* 82 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. FUEL. Cu. and various other birds, That songen for to wynne hem prys, And eke to sormounte in her songe That other briddes hem amonge. 1 93. In Hickes' Thesaurus, part of a moral poem of 119 stanzas is given, which the learned editor placed just after the Conquest, and to which Warton (Eng. Poetry, 1) would assign a still earlier date. The progressive changes in the language being now better understood, no modern critic would think of placing this poem, as we have it, much before the beginning of the thirteenth century. Dr. Morris however (Old Eng. Homilies, 2nd series, p. vii.) thinks it probable that all the numerous versions of this Moral Ode ' are transcribed from some late tenth or early eleventh century version,' not now in existence. From a MS. in the Bodleian the following specimen is taken : Ic am elder Jmme ic wes a winter and ec a lore ; 2 ic ealdi more )>anne ic dede, mi wit ojhte to bi more. Wei longe ic habbe child ibien 3 on worde and on dede ; pegh 4 ic bi on wintreu eald, to jiung 5 ic am on rede. DeaS coin on Jns midelard, 6 JmrS >es defies onde ; 7 and senne and sorSe 8 and iswinc 9 on se and on londe. Early English Prose : The Ancren Riwle ; Ayenbite of Inwyt. 94. It would not be easy to point out any considerable work in English prose, belonging to the period between the cessation of the Peterborough Chronicle in 1154 and the end of the twelfth century. Early in the thirteenth, the Ancren Riwle, or rule for Anchorites, was written. This interesting treatise partakes of three characters ; it is a rule of daily life, 1 JRomaunt of the Rose, as translated by Chaucer. 3 In winters and also in learning. 3 been. 4 though. 5 young. The reader will observe how this letter 5, which represented a guttural sound in the early language, was replaced in course of time, in some Words by g or ph, in others by y. 6 earth ; A.S. middangeard. 7 through the devil's rancour ; A.S. anda. sorrow. toil. PART II. THE NORMAN PERIOD. 83 u manual of instruction in those portions of the Christian doctrine which relate to counsels of perfection, and a guide to devotion. It was edited for the Camden Society in 1853. It has been ascribed to Simon of Ghent, who died in 1315; but considering the very archaic character of the language, the opinion which holds a former bishop of Salisbury, Eichard le Poore, to be the author, appears to me preferable. Bishop le Poore, the commencer, and in great part the builder, of the glorious cathedral at Salisbury, died in 1237. The work was written for a small society, consisting of three religious ladies, residing at Tarente, now Tarrant-Kaimes, in Dorsetshire. At a later period their house received the Cistercian rule, but at this time they appear not to have be- longed to any regular order. The dialect is considered to be West of England; it much resembles that of Lagamon, but differs from it in respect of the large number of French and Latin words which it admits. I quote a sentence from the extract printed in Mr. Kington Oliphant's Standard English : 'A lefdi [lady] was, jfct was mid hire voan [foes] biset al abuten, and hire lond al destrued, and heo [she] al povre, wiSinnen one eorSene castle. On [a] mihti kinges luve was ]?auh [however] biturned upon hire, so un-imete [measureless] swuSe [very], ]?et he vor [for] wouhlecchunge [wooing] sende hire his sonden [messengers], on efter ofter, and ofte somed [at once] monie [many] : and sende hire beaubelet [baubles, jewels] boSe veole [many] and feire, and sukurs of liverieS [victuals], and help of his heie hird [army] to holden hire castel.' 95. The Ayenbite of Inwyt, or Remorse of Conscience, is a translation by Dan Michel, of Northgate, Kent, made in 1340, of the French treatise, ' Le Somme des Vices et des Vertus,' composed near the end of the thirteenth century by Frere Lorens. The dialect is the Kentish, and exceedingly rough. It was edited by Dr. Morris for the Early English Text Society in 1866. 84 CHAPTEE I. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. ' 1350-1450. 1. HITHERTO such English writers as we have met with since the Conquest have generally appeared in the humble guise of translators or imitators. In the period before us we at last meet with original invention applied on a large scale : this, therefore, is the point at which English literature takes its true commencement. The Latin and French compositions, which engaged so much of our attention in the previous period, may in this be disposed of in a few words. That Englishmen still continued to write French poetry, we have the proof in many unprinted poems by Gower, and might also infer from a passage, often quoted, in the prologue to the Testament of Love. 1 But few such pieces are of sufficient merit to bear printing. In French prose scarcely anything can be mentioned besides the despatches, treaties, &c., contained in Eymer's Fonder a and similar com- pilations, and the original draft of Sir John Maundevile's Travels in the Holy Land. Froissart's famous Chronicle may, indeed, be considered as partly belonging to us, since it treats largely of English feats of arms, and its author the son of a painter of armorial bearings entered in early youth the ser- vice of Queen Philippa in the capacity of secretary, and held for many years a post in the household of Edward III. 2. In Latin poetry there is nothing that deserves mention except the Liber Metricus of Thomas Elmham, concerning the career of Henry V., edited by Mr. Cole for the Kolls series in 1858. Elmham, who nourished about the year 1440, was a Benedictine monk in the monastery of St. Austin's, Canterbury. The poem contains 1349 lines, and is, as Byron would have said, 1 ' Lette'than clerkes enditen in Latin, for they have the propertie of science, and the knowing in that facultie : and lette Frenchmen in their Frenche also enditen their queinte termes, for it is kyndely to their mouthes ; and let us showe our fantasies in soche wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge.' 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 85 not so much poetry as ' prose run mad ; ' in proof of which let these lines suffice : Hie Jon Oldcastel Christ! fuit insidiator, Amplectens hsereses, in scelus omne ruens ; Fautor perfidiae, pro secta WiclivianS, Obicibus Regis fert mala vota sacris. Whether the last line means c he wishes ill to the king's devout objects,' or what else it means, it is hard to say. 3. In Latin prose, we have a version, made by himself, of Maundevile's Travels, and the chroniclers (amongst others of less note), Eobert de Avesbury, Henry Knyghton, Thomas Walsingham, and John Fordun. Robert de Avesbury was registrar of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Court, and wrote a fair and accurate history of the reign of Edward III. (published by Hearne in 1720) coming down to the year 1356, in which or in the following year he died. The Eulogium Historiarum, by a monk of Malmesbury, was written about 1367 ; the con- cluding portion is of great value. The same may be said of the Chronicon Anglice, by a monk of St. Alban's, which gives the history of sixty years ending in 1388. These two anonymous works have been edited for the Rolls series by Mr. Haydon and Mr. E. M. Thompson, the present custodian of the MSS. in the British Museum. Henry Knyghton, the date of whose death is unknown, was a canon regular of Leicester ; he is the author of Compilatio de Eventibus Anglice a tempore Regis Edgari usque ad mortem Regis Ricardi II. His account of the rise of Lollardism, though written with a strong anti- W\'cliffite bias, is highly interesting and valuable. 4. The Historia Anglicana of Thomas Walsingham, a work to which all modern historians continually refer in writing of the events of the fourteenth and earlier portion of the fifteenth centuries, was edited by Mr. Riley for the Rolls series in 1864. Scarcely anything is known of Walsingham except that he was a monk of St. Alban's, that he compiled, besides the Historia, an account of Normandy, called Ypodigma Neustrice, and that he was still alive in 1419. The Historia, as it stands, extends from 1272 to 1422 ; but Mr. Riley shows some ground for supposing that the portion compiled by Walsingham himself may reach no further than to 1392, the only really original and valuable part even of this being the fifteen years between 1377 and 1392, while the concluding thirty years were added by some unknown hand. 5. John Fordun, a secular priest of Kincardineshire, is the author of the Scotichronicon, a history of Scotland in Latin 86 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATURE. CHAP. I. prose, written towards the close of the fourteenth century. The entire work contains sixteen books ; but of these only five and part of the sixth were composed by Fordun, the remainder being the work of Abbot Bower, who brings down the story to the death of James I. in 1437. 1 6. In theology and philosophy occurs the name of Thomas Bradwardine, one of the many ornaments of Merton College in the fourteenth century. Eorn at Chichester about 1290, he was proctor at Oxford in 1325, and afterwards lived several years in the family of Eichard of Bury, the learned bishop of Durham. He was appointed confessor to Edward III., and accompanied him in his French wars. In 1349 he was raised to the see of Canterbury, but died the same year. His great work, De Causa Dei contra Pelagium (1344), is an attempt to reconcile man's freedom with God's foreknowledge. It was enthusiastically received in all Christian lands. Chaucer alludes to it in a well-known passage :- But I ne cannot boult it to the bran, As can the holy doctor Augustin, Or Boece, or the bishop Bradwardin, Whather that Goddes worthy foreweting Streineth me nedely for to don a thing, &c. Nonnes Preestes Tale. John Wyclif was admired by his contemporaries as an expert logician and prolific system-monger, long before he wrote those attacks on the hierarchy, the mendicant friars, and the received doctrine concerning the Eucharist, which gained for him with posterity the name of the first English reformer. His numerous Latin works, very few of which have ever been printed, are classed by Dr. Shirley in his excellent Catalogue of the original Works of John Wyclif, 2 under six heads : 1. Philosophy and Systematic Theology ; 2. Sermons, Expositions, and Practical Theology; 3. Protests, Disputa- tions, and Epistles ; 4. On Church Government and Endow- ments ; 5. On the Monastic Orders ; 6. On the Secular Clergy. Under the first head is included the Swnma Theologies, a body of Divinity of stupendous magnitude, the substance of which he afterwards reproduced in the Trialogus, sive Summa Summce, the best known of all his works, printed at Basle by the Swiss reformers in 1525. 3 Two or three of his shorter Latin tracts are contained in the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, which, 1 Irving's History of Scottish Poetry, edited by Dr. Carlyle, p. 116. 2 Clarendon Press, 1865. s And carefully edited by Dr. Lechler, of Leipsic, for the Clarendon Press. 1869. 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 87 in spite of its enigmatical title, is a volume of remarkable in- terest, in respect of the light which it throws on the ecclesias- tical history of the last half of the fourteenth century. Here are described in detail the first bickerings between Wyclif and the friars his opponents, the synodical proceedings taken by the bishops against the rising heresy, the turbulent sympathy of the masters at Oxford with the accused, and the steps taken by the Government, on a scale of ever-increasing severity, to enforce submission to the hierarchy. Dr. Shirley's introduction to the volume, which was edited by him for the Rolls series in 1858, explains the acts and tendencies of "Wyclif in a spirit characterised by much penetration and fairness. Ralph Strode, another Merton man, the 'philosophical Strode' of Chaucer (infra 37), was the author of several logical treatises, one of which, the Consequents, was printed at Venice in 1517, He also took a part in the Lollard controversy, and wrote Positiones contra Wiclevum. John Bromyard, a Dominican of the Oxford friary, preached strenu- ously against the Wycliffites about 1390. He is the author of Summa Prcedicantium, a sort of commonplace-book alphabetically arranged. It has such articles as Accidia (sloth), Amor, Bellum, Castitas, Decimae. It has been printed abroad several times. 7. Early in the fifteenth century the Wycliffite opinions were examined by a theologian of far greater power than Wyclif Thomas of Walden, author of the Doctrinale Fidei. Thomas was a Carmelite, a member of one of those orders of friars which Wyclif pursued with incessant malediction. He was confessor to Henry V., and was summoned as a theologian to attend the sessions of the Council of Constance, at which the views of Wyclif were condemned. But finding that the Lollard party was still widely spread through the country, Walden undertook to combat their innovations once for all in a systematic treatise, which he dedicated to Pope Martin V. The Doctrinale, which appeared in 1428, is in three parts 1. * De Deo, Christo, Petro, Ecclesia, et Religionibus ; ' 2. * De Sacramentis ;' 3. 'De Sacramentalibus.' In the first, Wyclif s unsound views on the divine nature, on the prerogatives of the see of Peter, on the authority of the Church, and on the nature and objects of the monastic profession, are powerfully and eloquently rebutted. In the second part, his novel opinions on the Eucharist are discussed. The third part, on Sacra- mentals, deals with the externals and accessories of religion, and is directed rather against the Lollards than against Wyclif himself. The style of the work has great merits ; and to this probably it is owing that it was printed on the Continent in the sixteenth century (Venice, 1571), although in this country, 88 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. owing to the change of religion, it has been allowed to lie in manuscript. It is certain, sooner or later, to receive more adequate recognition than has hitherto been its lot. 8. The obvious cause of the decline of French and Latin composition in England was the growing prevalence, social and literary, of the native speech. To this many circumstances contributed. The gradual consolidation of nationalities, which had long been making steady progress throughout Europe, had been constantly drawing the Norman barons and the English commonalty closer together, and separating both from the rival nationality of France. Nor had the nation at any time lost, so to speak, its personal identity : it was England for which the Norman Richard fought at Acre; and even William of Malmesbury, writing not a hundred years after the Conquest, speaks of that event rather as a change of dynasty occurring in English history, than as of a complete social revolution. The influence of the Church must have pressed powerfully in the same direction. Though the Conqueror filled nearly all the sees with Normans, it was not long before native English- men, through that noble respect for and recognition of human equality which were theoretically always, and often practically maintained in the midst of feudalism by the Church of the Middle Ages, obtained a fair proportion of them. The poli- tical and official power of bishops in those days was great, and the native tongue of an English Archbishop of Canterbury could not, even by the proud Norman barons, his compeers in Parliament, be treated with disrespect. Again, since 1340, England and France had been constantly at war : in this war the English-speaking archers, not the French-speaking barons, had won the chief laurels : and the tongue of a humbled beaten enemy was likely to be less attractive to the mass of English- men than ever. The well-known law of Edward III., passed in 1362, directing the English language to be used thence- forward in judicial pleadings, was merely an effect of the slow but resistless operation of these and other cognate causes. Again, it must not be lost sight of, that a sort of tacit com- promise passed between the English and French-speaking por- tions of the population ; the former were to retain the entire grammar so much, at least, as was left of it of the native speech ; all the conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns, the osseous structure, so to speak, of the language, were to be English; while, in return, the Normans were to be at liberty to import French nouns, adjectives, and verbs at dis- cretion, without troubling themselves to hunt for the corre- sponding terms in the old literary Anglo-Saxon. Finally, this 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 89 English language, so re-cast, became in the fourteenth century the chosen instrument of thought and expression for a great poet ; and, after Chaucer, no Englishman could feel ashamed of his native tongue, nor doubt of its boundless capabilities. But the literary influences which had been long at work, united to the stubbornness of the popular preference for rhythms which had come down to them from their forefathers of at least eight centuries before, found ruder and,{in a sense, more congenial expression than through the mouth of Chaucer. This is also the age of Langland, the author of the long alli- terative poems which sounded so musically in the ears of the countrymen of Caedmon, and to the consideration of which we now proceed. Before, however, examining the Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, with Langland's other works, some notice must be taken of other alliterative poems of earlier date. 9. Alliterative Poems. One of the lives of St. Margaret, noticed above at p. 79, |is of very early date, about 1200, and alliterative. The Rev. 0. Cockayne, who edited it in 1866 for the Early English Text Society, printed it as prose, in order to ' abide by the example of our forefathers ' ! It did not strike him that our forefathers wrote down verse in this way on account of the scarcity and dearness of parchment ; they could not afford to leave so much of their material uncovered, as they must have done had they written verse as we do. The poem opens : Efter ure Laverdes pine, and his passiun, Ant his deS on rode, ant his ariste of deaS. The legend appears to be translated from a contemporary life by Theotimus of Antioch, and, though full of marvels, makes no allusion to that particular one which is represented in Raphael's exquisite picture of the saint. 10. Of Lagamon's Brut, which is partly alliterative, partly rimed, we have already spoken. A long period follows, to which no alliterative poems have as yet been certainly assigned; but that such poems will yet be recognised among the un- printed MSS. of our libraries, seems exceedingly probable. The alliterative romance of Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, first printed by Sir F. Madden in 1839 for the Bannatyne Club, and re-edited by Dr. Morris for the Early English Text Society, is deemed by the last editor to have been written about 1320. Sir Gawayne, Arthur's nephew, was the favourite hero of many a worker in the vast and splendid field of Arthurian romance. Passages in this particular poem can be 90 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. traced to the Perceval of Chretien de Troyes. The dialect is Northern, and not a little barbarous. The letter 3, which we have hitherto met with only as a guttural, occurs often in this poem with a sibilant sound, which led, in innumerable poems of later date, to its being confounded, or used interchangeably, with z. Thus we read at the opening : Sij>en )>e sege and ]>e assaut watj sesed at Troye, pe borg brittened and brent to brondej and askej. (After that the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy, the burgh ruined and burnt to brands and ashes.) 11. Joseph of Arimathie, an alliterative poem of about 1350, has been edited by Mr. Skeat for the Early English Text Society. It consists of 709 lines, but is incomplete, some ninety lines at the end being lost. So far as it goes, it follows pretty closely the story of Joseph, as developed in the romance of the Saint Graal by Eobert Borron. The only known copy, the language of which has both Midland and Southern forms, is in the ponderous volume in the Bodleian Library, known as the Yernon MS. 12. Dr. Morris places the alliterative romance of William of Palerne, 1 translated by an Englishman named William from the French poem ' Guillaume de Palerne ' (Palermo) for Hum- phrey de Bohun, nephew to Edward II., between the years 1350 and 1360. ' The story is, that Prince William of Palermo, son of Embrous, king of Sicily, was stolen when a child by a wer-wolf, who hid him in a forest in Apulia, and tended him with great care. He was there found by a shepherd, who adopted him ; but he was afterwards adopted by no less a person than the Emperor of Rome, whom he succeeded on the throne. The wer-wolf was Prince Alphonse, who was after- \vards disenchanted, and became King of Spain.' 2 The poem was first edited by Sir E. Madden for the Roxburghe Club, and afterwards by Mr. Skeat for the Early English Text Society. It is in a Midland dialect, full of French words, and very readable. 13. Piers the Plowman, and the other alliterative poems of Langland, come next in order of time ; these we shall examine presently. The esteem in which they were popularly held raised a crop of imitators, not only in England but in Scotland. It must have been the fame of Lan gland's alliterative verse that caused ' Huchowne of the Awle Ryale ' (by whom Sir Hugh Eglintoun, a courtier in the reigns of David II. and Robert II., is believed to be meant) to adopt that metre in writing the 1 Extr. Boole, art. 19. 2 Morris and Skeat, Spec., Part II. 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 91 ' Gest Hystoriale ' of the Destruction of Troy. This poem is of enormous length, more than 14,000 lines, and has been lately printed from a MS. at Glasgow for the Early English Text Society. It ends : Now the proses is plainly put to an end : He bryng us to the blisse, )>at bled for our syn. This, and other ' Troy books,' will be further considered when we come to speak of Lydgate. 14. In England two alliterative poems, Clannesse and Patience, the one of 1800, the other of 530 lines, written in a rough northern dialect, and edited by Dr. Morris for the same society, may probably be assigned to imitators of Langland, writing towards the end of the fourteenth century. In the first, the anger of heaven against impurity is illustrated by several Scripture narratives, in particular by the story of ' Baltazar ' son of ' Nabugodenozar ; ' in the second, the benefits of Patience, and the danger of being without it, are deduced from the history of Jonas the prophet. 15. Another unknown imitator produced Pierce the Plough- man's Crede, a poem 850 lines long, written about 1394. The writer, assuming the character of a plain unlettered man, pre- tends to be ignorant of his creed ; he applies in vain to friars of all the four orders, Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians, from whom he hears little but railing against one another ; at last he obtains all the knowledge that he desires from Pierce, or Peter, an honest ploughman. This satire is much more rancorous in tone than any of those of Langland. Chaucer held this form of rhythm cheap ; it had become, he knew, very popular in the north, but he, with the finer percep- tions and better opportunities of ' a sotherne man,' preferred the purer harmony resulting from exact measure and rime. He makes the Persone say : * But trusteth wel, I am a sotherne man, I cannot geste, rom, ram, ruf, by my letter, adding, as suitable to the Persone's character : And, God wote, rime hold I but litel better. It would seem from this passage that so great a number of romances or ' gestes ' written in alliterative verse (such as those of which we have just given a sample) were in circulation, that a verb 'to geste,' meaning to write alliteratively, had come into use. 1 Canterbury Talcs ; Persone's prologue. 92 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. 16. But in spite of the sarcasm of Chaucer, and the deter- rent influence which must have lain in the fact that he, and the English school of poets formed on him, abstained from using it, alliteration continued to flourish, though chiefly in the north, all through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century. Per- haps the latest alliterative poem that can be cited is the Two, Maryit Women and the Wedo, by Dunbar, who died about 1521. Even though alliteration was dropped in form, its characteristics were often retained in substance. The extreme irregularity of versification which is noticeable in so much of the English poetry of the fifteenth century, and down to the time of Surrey, seems to me to be a legacy from the alliterators. Where allite- ration is, the number of syllables in the verse is little regarded ; so long as the correspondence of the two halves of the line was by means of the alliteration the rom, ram, ruf, as Chaucer calls it preserved, the effect of poetry was thought to be realised, and the internal constitution of each half-verse was left pretty much to itself. I am speaking not of the alliteration practised by the Icelandic skalds, but of that used by our native poets ; and rather of that which is later than that which is earlier than the Conquest. In Beoivulf, Andreas, 'and all the finer Anglo-Saxon poems, though no strict rule limited the number of syllables, the ear and taste of the writers kept them within due bounds. After the Conquest this power of control seems to have been lost. Now, alliteration is, under any circum- stances, but a poor substitute for rime ; by the side of which it may be likened to the striking of a note three times on a flat metal plate, compared with the full ringing sound of the same note when struck on a bell. To this poverty of harmony let complete licence of internal structure be joined, and the result is seen in the rough and rambling alliterative poems, which their modern admirers, however interesting they may be on many accounts, find it extremely difficult to read through. Rime, after Chaucer's day, gradually supplanted alliteration ; but it was long before the ex-alliterators perceived that riming lines ought to involve a strict metrical system, and that the one point of music or harmony at the end of a line is not enough to compensate for anarchy and uncertainty reigning in every other part of it. In this way the intolerable irregularity of versifica- tion which annoys us in Lydgate and Occleve, and still more in inferior writers, such as Hawes, Bradshaw, Hardyng, and Barclay, may most simply be accounted for. 17. Piers the Plowman. The labours of Mr. Skeat, who has edited the three varying texts of this work for the Early English Text Society, and a portion of it as a school book for 1350-1450. EAELY ENGLISH PERIOD. 93 the Clarendon Press, have cleared up many points that were formerly obscure. Yet even now the real name of the author is uncertain. In one manuscript he is described as * Willielmus de Langlond,' in two others as ' Wilielmus W.' The first-named document describes him as a native of Shipton- under- Which- wood in Oxfordshire. In his poems he often speaks of himself ; and from the scattered notices Mr. Skeat has gathered that he was the son of a franklin or freeman, and educated at Malvern Abbey for the priesthood ; that he became a clerk and received the tonsure; but that, having married, he could never rise above minor orders. He had to struggle all his life with poverty, gaining a precarious maintenance as a chorister and scrivener. He lived many years in London, with his wife Kitte and his daughter Calote. There is some reason to think that he was at Bristol in 1399, at the time when Richard II. lost his throne ; but from that date we entirely lose sight of him. The Vision 1 exists in three different forms or recensions. The first, called by Mr. Skeat the A text, was written about 1362. It contains only 2567 lines, and in it the vision con- cerning Piers the Plowman is kept distinct from the Visio de Do-wel, Do-bet, et Do-best. In the later recensions the name Liber de Petro Plowman is given to the entire work, including the Visio de Dowel, &c. The first vision contains a prologue and eight * Passus ' (or chapters), the second a prologue and three Passus. After writing the A text, Langland remained quiet fifteen years. In 1377, the old king was just dead, merited disaster had fallen on the English arms in France, discontent was abroad, the young king was a minor, and his uncle, the hated Duke of Lancaster, was believed to be plotting for the crown. In such troubled times Langland resumed his work and rewrote his poem, putting in, in the Prologue to the first Vision, the well-known version of the apologue of the rats and the cat, and making very large additions. We have the result in the B text, which contains about 7100 lines. The C text contains additions and variations, made, in the opinion of Mr. Skeat, after 1390. This version shows some tendency to dif- fuseness and the discussion of subtle points in theology, but does not add more than abo^ut 250 lines to the poem as it stood in the B text. The distinction between the Visions is preserved, but the numbering of the Passus is made continuous, so that the C text contains in all twenty-three Passus, of which ten belong to the Vision concerning the Plowman, seven to that of Do-wel, four to that of Do-bet, and two to that of Do-best. 18. When we come to analyse the plot of this long poem, i Extr. Book, art. 24. \ 94 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. its enormous defects as a work of art become apparent. Nothing more rambling, more discursive, or more disconnected was ever written, The first Vision comprehends, so to speak, two sub- visions ; one is that of the field full of folk ; the other that of the Seven deadly Sins. The author falls asleep on a May morning under a bank beside a brook on Malvern hills, and dreams that he sees ' a faire feld ful of folke,' among whom are * japers and jangelers ' (jesters and babblers), ploughmen, mer- chants, anchorites, hermits, minstrels, beggars, pilgrims, and palmers. Beyond the field he sees a deep dale, and rising on the other side of it a toft or hill ; in the dale there is a dungeon, on the toft a lofty tower. Presently the king, the knighthood, the clergy, and the commons enter the field. The apologue of the rats and the cat is then, very abruptly, introduced : Wij) }>at ran ]>ere a route of ratones at ones, And smale mys myd hem, mo )>en a )>ousande, And comen to a conseille for here comune profit ; For a cat of a courte cam when hym lyked, And overlepe hem lyjhtlich, and laujte hem at his wille, And pleyed with hem perilouslych, and possed hem aboute. By the cat is meant John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. The proposition is then made to tie a bell round the cat's neck, but falls through, because not one ' raton ' can be found pat dorst have ybounden )>e belle aboute ]>e cattis necke. A sagacious mouse suggests the consoling reflection that things are just as well as they are ; if they killed this cat, there would soon come another; i.e., if all power were taken from John of Gaunt, it would only pass to some other prince of the blood, who might be as proud and tyrannical as he. The boy king is then spoken of ' Ye terre ubi puer rex est ' whence it is evident that this passage (which is not found in the A text) was written soon after the accession of Eichard II. in 1377. A lovely lady now appears and tells him that she is Holy Church ; the tower, she says, is the abode of the Creator and Father of men; the dungeon is the castle of Care, wherein dwells Wrong, the Father of Falsehood. Soon after the Lady Meed (i.e., reward, bribery) comes upon the scene; she is to be married to Falsehood the next day. Meed's unblushing and generally successful attempts to corrupt all ranks and orders, both in Church and State, form the chief subject of the re- mainder of this sub-vision. In the other sub- vision, the field again appears, with a multitude of people, and Reason preaching to them. In the course of her sermon, Reason makes the famous prediction, 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 95 much talked of at the time of tho dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. For ]>e abbot of Engelonde [in B text Abingdon] and j abbesse hys nece Shullen have a knok on here crounes, and incurable >e wouiide. The Seven deadly Sins, represented by different men, repent and confess, and agree to go in search of Truth. A Palmer meets them, of whom they inquire the road ; he says he has never heard of a saint of that name ; then Piers the Plowman enters, and undertakes to show them the right way. In the second Vision, scarcely a pretence to anything like a plan is retained. The author goes about seeking for Do-wel, i.e. good life, and gradually discovers what is meant by the word. The Passus on Do-bet, i.e. the higher life made possible for man by Christ, aim, with some degree of connection and plan, at showing that Jesus is the only Saviour of mankind. Do-best describes a strange vision in which Piers the Plowman appears to the people in the likeness of Christ ; Conscience makes a moral and political harangue ; and Need asserts the right of all men to take, if they cannot earn, the means of bare subsistence. The poet dreams again ; Antichrist has visited the earth, with Avarice and Simony in its train ; thoughts and images in a confused medley are crowded on the canvas ; and everything ends with the expression by Conscience, who is perplexed by Casuistry, and assailed by Sloth and other vices, of its determination to become a pilgrim, and seek Piers the Plowman over the world. 19. The general moral impression derived from reading this singular work, with its lame and impotent conclusion, is of a mixed character. Langland's touch is wavering, for his position was undefined, and his mind subject to continual gusts of reaction and reconsideration. In spite of all this satirical writing against the clergy, it would be a great mistake to consider him a puritan, much more a Lollard. Whatever he may say against the monks, he thinks there is no place like the cloister for perfection of life : however he may rail against corruption in the higher clergy, he strongly inculcates the obedience due to them and to the pope. His feelings, tastes, and sympathies are not those of a layman, but those of a clerk. He was an unhappy man, committed to a false position by a mistake made in early life, and driven into satire by seeing ecclesiastics who had avoided that mistake, though perhaps only externally, rising to heights of dignity and influence from which he, who felt himself morally their superior, was, as a married clerk, for ever debarred. 96 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. The literary value of Piers Plowman cannot be rated very highly. We have seen how destitute it is of anything like unity of plan; it might be added, that the author shows no power of creating or describing individual character ; that he sees and imagines much, but nothing very distinctly ; and that he has little skill in painting nature. On the other hand, a certain power of declamation and force of invective cannot be denied to him ; and there are many passages in which the surface of London life, in the infinitely varied aspects resulting from the aggregation of so many trades, callings, and professions in the great city, is vividly enough portrayed. 20. An alliterative poem of 850 lines, on the fall of Richard II., was printed some years ago for the Camden Society, and has been reprinted with Piers the Plowman by Mr. Skeat, under the title of 'Richard the Redeless.' No direct evidence of authorship exists ; but Mr. Skeat is strongly disposed, from the resemblance of style, to assign the poem to Langland. 21. Chaucer and his Works. 1 Of the parentage of Geoffrey Chaucer nothing is known with certainty. The long-received assumption, that he was born in 1328, has been of late years carefully examined, and found to rest on no positive evidence whatever. It is merely -a conjecture of Speght, who (writing in 1597) couples the date 1400 on Chaucer's tombstone with Leland's assertion that he lived to the ' period of grey hairs/ Sir Harris Nicholas and other antiquaries have ransacked with incredible industry the dusty memorials in the Record Office (Issue Rolls, Patent Rolls, Pipe Rolls, Closet Rolls, &c.), and have discovered that in October 1386 Chaucer deposed that he was then forty years old and upwards. His birth accordingly many would fix about the year 1340. Yet this view is not without its difficulties. In the earlier copies of the Confessio Amantis of Gower, which cannot be dated later than 1390, the Muse, after telling Gower to ' grete well Chaucer ' when they meet, and speaking of the faithful service which he, Chaucer, had done her in his youth, proceeds : Forthy, now in Ids daies olde, Thou shalt him telle this message, &c. Yet the poet who was ' in his daies olde ' in 1390, was then, according to the new view, only fifty years old. Leland, writing in the time of Henry VIII., says that he was ' noUli loco natusj but he gives no authority for the statement. Godwin's supposition, founded upon a number of minute allusions scat- ered through his works, that his father was a merchant, or 1 Exlr. Book, art. 26. 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 97 burgess of London, has been confirmed by recent investigations, which show that John Chaucer the father, and Richard the grandfather, were both vintners. That he was educated at a university may be held as certain, but whether at Oxford or Cambridge is not so clear. There is a passage in the Court of Love, line 912 : Philogenet I called am ferre and nere, Of Cambridge clerk ; which seems to tell in favour of Cambridge. On the other hand, it is known that his most intimate friends and disciples, Gower, Strode, and Occleve, were Oxford men, and the poor scholar who makes one of the group of Canterbury pilgrims is a ' clerk of Oxenford.' The Milleres Tale is about an Oxford student, and the scene is laid at Oxford ; but this is balanced by the Reves Tale, which introduces two Cambridge scholars, and brings us to ' Trompington not fer fro Cantebrigge.' This point, therefore, must be left in doubt. In 1359 Chaucer served in the great army of invasion which Edward III. led over into France. In the course of this bootless expedition Chaucer was taken prisoner, but seems to have been released at the peace of Bretigny in 1360. His marriage with Philippa Roet is thought to have taken place about the year 1366. This lady was a native of Hainault, and maid of honour~to Queen Philippa. Her sister Catherine was the third wife of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. These circumstances readily explain Chaucer's long and close connection with the court, commencing with the year 1367, when the king granted him a pension of twenty marks for life, under the designation of ' dilectus valettus noster.' His prudence and practical wisdom seem to have been as conspicuous as his more brilliant gifts, since he was at various times employed by the king on important diplo- matic missions. One of these took him to Italy in 1373, in which year he is thought with great probability to have become acquainted with Petrarch, who was then living at Arqua, near Padua. What other sense can be attached to the famous passage in the prologue to the Clerk's Tale ? I wil you telle a tale, which that I Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk, As proved by his wordes and his werk ; He is now dead, and nayled in his chest, Now God give his soule wel good rest ! Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete, Highte this clerk, whose rhetorike swete Enlumynd all Ytail of poetrie, As Linian did of philosophic, 98 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. Petrarch died in 1374, so that the acquaintance could not have been formed at the time of Chaucer's second visit to Italy, in 1378. In 1374 Chaucer was appointed to the lucrative office of Comptroller of the Customs in the port of London. About the time of the king's death, in 1377, he was employed on more than one secret and delicate mission, of one of which the object was to negotiate the marriage of Richard II. with a French princess. The new king granted him a second pension of the same amount as the first. In 1386 he sat as a burgess for the county of Kent in the parliament which met at Westminster. John of Gaunt, his friend and patron, was at this time absent upon an expedi- tion to Portugal ; and the Duke of Gloucester, another of the king's uncles, a man of cruel and violent character, succeeded in this parliament in driving the king's friends out of office, and engrossing all political power in the hands of himself and his party. In November of the same year a commission was appointed, through the Duke's influence, armed with general and highly inquisitorial powers extending over the royal house- hold and all the public departments. In December we find that Chaucer was dismissed from his office as comptroller. It is evident that these two circumstances stand to each other in the relation of cause and effect. The Commission may perhaps have seized upon the pretext of some official irregularities (for Chaucer received the appointment under stringent conditions), but it is clear that he suffered in common with the rest of the king's friends and favourites, not on account of his ' connection with the Duke of Lancaster,' but simply as a courtier. 1 This view of the matter is confirmed by the fact that in 1389, in which year Richard broke loose from his uncle's tutelage and dismissed him and his satellites, we find that Chaucer was appointed to the office of Clerk of the King's Works. In the interval he had been reduced to such distress as to be com- pelled to dispose of his pensions. From some unascertained cause he ceased to hold this new situation some time in the year 1391. Three years afterwards the king conferred on him a fresh pension of twenty pounds a year for life, to which Henry IV. in the first year of his reign (1399) added a pension of forty marks. Except these dry facts, we have absolutely no certain knowledge respecting the last ten years of Chaucer's life ; but it is satisfactory to reflect that the last days of the father of English poetry were at least spent in external comfort and free from the troubles of poverty. 22. The creative power and the literary talent of Chaucer 1 Mr. Bell, in the Life prefixed to his excellent edition of Chaucer, seems to have misapprehended this transaction. 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 99 were both of a very high order ; a worthier founder of a national literature could not be desired. But before we commence the examination of the works which have come down to us under his name, the preliminary question meets us, are all these works authentic 1 Of late years, much that used to pass unquestioned as Chaucerian has upon various grounds been held to be un- authentic or doubtful. These grounds, and their validity, must be briefly considered before we proceed further. For this pur- pose it will be convenient temporarily to arrange the reputed works of Chaucer under three heads, as : 1. Longer Poems. 2. Dream Poems, and the Court of Love. 3. Minor Poems. 23. The first division includes the Canterbury Tales, the Romaunt of the Rose, Troylus and Cryseyde, and the Legende of Goode Women. In the Canterbury Tales nothing is now printed that is not Chaucer's, except the Coke's Tale of Gamelyn, which, being found in several good MSS., is printed in Mr. Bell's edition, but with an express disavowal of belief in its authenticity. As for Troylus and the Legende, I do not know that any one has ever had the hardihood to question Chaucer's claim to them. But doubts have been thrown out by Mr. Bradshaw, the late learned librarian of Cambridge, and by Dr. Furnivall, and even (according to the testimony of the latter) by Professor ten Brink, as to the genuineness of the Romaunt. It is therefore necessary to consider, what evidence have we in its favour 1 The belief of the Elizabethan editors and first printers does not count for much, for we know that they ascribed to Chaucer many pieces (e.g. the Testament of Creseyde, by Henryson) with which he had no concern what- ever. There is but one MS. of the poem, that in the Hun- terian Museum at Glasgow ; it was written many years after Chaucer's death, and contains no indication of authorship. The evidences in favour of the Romaunt being by Chaucer are simply these that the style is just such as we should expect in an early work of his, and that the fact of his having made a translation of the Roman de la Rose is mentioned in the Legende of Goode Women. The passage may here be quoted for we shall probably have occasion to refer to it again. The God of Love says to Chaucer : For in pleyne text, withouten nede of glose, Thou hast translated the Romaunce of the Rose, That is an heresye ayeins my lawe, And makest wise f olke fro me withdrawe ; And of Cresyde thou hast seyde as the lyste. ioo HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEEATURE. CHAP. I. But Alcestis stands up for the poet, and says : He made the boke that hight the House of Fame, And eke the deeth of Blanche the Duchesse, And the Parlement of Foules, as I gesse, And al the love of Palamon and Arcite. Of Thebes, thogh the storye ys knowen lyte And many an ympne for your haly dayes, That highten Ballades, Roundels, Virelayes. And for to speke of other holynesse, He hath in prose translated Boece, And made the Life also of Seynte Cecile. He made also, goon ys a grete while, Origenes upon the Maudeleyne. Lastly, at a previous part of the poem, he had begged lovers To forthren me somewhat in my labour, Whether ye ben with the Leef or with the Flour. This evidence is conclusive, unless it be maintained that Chaucer's version of the Roman de la Rose is lost, and that the existing Romaunt is by some other poet. This is plainly an extravagant and gratuitous supposition, unless evidence can be brought to show that the Romaunt could not have been written by Chaucer. Such negative evidence Mr. Bradshaw and Dr. Furnivall thought they found in certain metrical tests, particularly in the riming of y and ye (curtesye, generaly) which, they say, in Chaucer's known works never rime to- gether. Without going here very fully into the question, I may remark that this seems but a slight basis on which to found such sweeping conclusions. In an age when orthography and pronunciation were rapidly changing, we cannot be certain that a rule which Chaucer observed at one time of his life, he may not have seen reason to disregard at another portion of it. Nor can we be certain that the transcriber of the one existing MS. of the Eomaunt did not sometimes modify his text to bring it into accordance with the forms of speech of his own day. Lastly, the test y-ye, if rigorously applied, would prove too much. The only reason why Chaucer should have rejected this rime, if he did reject it, was that he considered such words as curtesye, villanye, &c., to be words of four not three syllables. If then, in any work supposed to be his, such a word should be met with so used that it cannot be treated as of more than three syllables, the metrical test would prove that the work in question was not by Chaucer. For instance, take the line : That is an heresye ayeins my lawe. 1350-1450. . EAKLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 101 Here Juresye is plainly a word of three syllables ; then the work in which the line occurs is not by Chaucer. But the work is the Legende of Good Women ! which is very like a reductio ad absurdum. On the whole we may conclude that, in spite of the so-called metrical tests, the probability of the existing Romaunt of the Rose being identical with the version made by Chaucer is overwhelmingly great. 24. The next division of the works contains the Court of Love, the Assembly of Foules, the Flower and the Leaf, Chauceres Dreme, the Boke of the Duchesse, and the House of Fame. Against three of these, objections of more or less weight have been raised, viz., against Chauceres Dreme, The Flower and the Leaf, and the Court of Love. Of Chauceres Dreme, a poem of about 2380 lines in the octo-syllabic couplet, there is no MS. extant ; it was first printed by Speght in 1597. This fact I by no means agree with Dr. Furnivall in thinking fatal to its authenticity : the fortunes of manuscripts are so singular, that either from existence or non-existence it would generally be rash to infer anything confidently. But the internal evidence seems to condemn Cliauceres Dreme. The hand of the great master is nowhere apparent; the verse indeed goes jogging on in a not unpleasing fashion, and the writer was certainly trained in Chaucer's school ; but surely it was not Chaucer himself. It is more like Gower, or except as to the dialect James I. 25. The Flower and tlie Leaf, though its authenticity is maintained by M. Sandras in his fitude sur G. Chaucer (Paris, 1859), must, I think, be abandoned to the attacks of Professor ten Brink. 1 It is not that the versification and imagery are not both more or less of the Chaucerian type ; nor need we, with the Professor, attach much weight to the circumstance that this poem is not among those named by Alcestis in the Legende. Nothing proves that the list there given was meant to be exhaustive ; and the argument from omission would condemn Queen Anelida and the Complaynte of Mars and Venus equally with the Flower and the Leaf. But, on the other hand, Professor ten Brink well points out, that we miss in this work that alternation of seriousness and humour which is observable in every other certainly genuine work of Chaucer's of corresponding length. The great preponderance, too, of description over dialogue is not like Chaucer. Another suspicious circumstance, not mentioned by the Professor, is the large proportion of faulty lines, compared with those of which the metre is sound. From a comparison of the first 100 lines 1 Chaucer: Studien.; Miinster, 1870; p. 156. 102 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. of the Assembly of Foules with the first hundred of the Flower and the Leaf, it is found that only seven per cent, of the lines are faulty in the former case, while twenty-two per cent, are faulty in the latter. The rime test is again alleged, as decisive against the genuineness of the poem ; and although I think that the validity of this test has been much overvalued, yet I am willing to admit that the number of rimes of the type curtesye-generaly far exceeds that which any of the certainly genuine works exhibit. Finally and this is a test which to my mind is more decisive than the rime test, though the Pro- fessor does not notice it the use of ' very ' in the Flower and the Leaf is absolutely un-Chaucerian. Chaucer could not have written * So very good and wholsome be the shoures ' (Flower and Leaf, 1. 10), because his * veray ' or ' verray ' the French vrai is only an adjective ; it is never used as an adverb. Nor does the apparent reference to the poem in the Legende constitute a real difficulty. The allegory of the Leaf and the Flower the one representing the solid and enduring goods of virtue, the other the surface charm of transitory pleasure was one with which the educated classes of that age, both in France and England, were perfectly familiar ; an allusion to it, there- fore, is no sort of proof that Chaucer ever wrote a poem bearing that title. 26. With regard to the Court of Love, I dissent from the unfavourable judgment formed by Dr. Furnivall and Professor ten Brink. In style, tone, and versification it appears to me completely Chaucerian. The rime test is that on which the impugners of its genuineness chiefly rely; some sixteen instances being producible, in a poem of more than 1400 lines, of rimes of the general ij-curtesye type. It is certainly a noteworthy fact that in the Assembly of Foules, a poem of undoubted genuineness, and about half as long as the Court of Love, not a single instance of such a rime can be found. But may not this be accounted for by the extraordinary strength and energy of the verse, leading to a most sparing use of adverbs, rather than by a repudiation of such rimes on principle 1 The rime objected to almost always occurs where an adverb is used ; when the force of the poet's thought is such as to discard adverbs, the rime does not occur. It may be added that the rime eke seke (A.S. eac, secan) is really as faulty as the rime ye-y which is so much objected to; yet this occurs in the Assembly of Foules. 27. The third division, that of the Minor Poems, contains the following pieces, besides a few others not named : Quene Anelyda and Fals Arcyte, The Complaint of Pite, The Ballade 1350-1 4 ;,>. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 103 de Village, Chaucer es ABC, The Complaynte of Mars and Venus, Ballade sent to King Richard, The Complaynte of Chaucer to his Purse, Flee fro the Pres, The firste Fadyr, I* Envoy a Scogan, L* Envoy a Bulcton, The Cuckowe and the Nightingale, Tlie Complaynte of a Loveres Life, or, of the Black Knight. All these poems may without hesitation be attributed to Chaucer, except, perhaps, the last two. In the Cuclwwe and Nightingale the versification is so rough and halting that I do not believe that Chaucer, who had a horror of 'mysme- tryng,' 1 could possibly have written it. The same considera- tion tells against the authenticity of the Complaynte of a Loveres Life ; of which, too, the language appears to be rather later than Chaucer's time. It contains sundry imitations of passages in the Assembly of Foules and in the Knightes Tale, but has nothing in it original, nothing worthy of Chaucer. Chronology of Chaucer's Writings. 28. In the separate notices of the works which follow, whatever evidence may exist, tending to fix this or that com- position to a particular period of the poet's life, will be con- sidered. Anticipating this examination, we will now divide Chaucer's writings into three classes, those of his youth, those written in middle life, and those of his mature age. The ex- pression * old age ' is scarcely applicable to the last years of a man who, as is now believed, did not live to be more than sixty. Early Poems. The Complaynt of Pite, The Romaunt of the Rose, The Assembly of Foules, the Boke of the Duchesse, Quene Anelyda and Fals Arcijte, Chauceres A B C. Poems of Middle Life. Troylus and Cryseyde, The Court of Love, The House of Fame, The Love of Palamon and Arcite. Later Poems. Legende of Goode Women, Canterbury Tales, Ballade to Richard II., The Complaynte of Mars and Venus, The Complaynte of Chaucer to his Purse, Flee fro the Pres, The firste Fadyr, L* Envoy a Scogan, L* Envoy a Bukton. Chaucer's Early Poems. 29. The Complaynt of the Dethe of Pite is the composition of a courtly versifier, writing in the French manner. It 1 'And.for ther is so grete dyversite In Englissh, and in writynge of our tonge, So preye I to God, that non myswrite the, Ne the mysmetere, for defaute of tonge.' Tr. and Crys. ad fin. 104 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. abounds with that personification of moral qualities which the Roman de la Rose had introduced into European literature. Pity has died in the heart of the poet's mistress, and Cruelty now reigns there, having confederated herself with Beauty, Assured-Manner, Wisdom, and other virtues, with whom the poet remonstrates against the unholy league into which they have entered with a tyrannous feeling which is their natural enemy. 30. Romaunt of the Rose. The only MS. of this poem known to exist is in the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow. It is a translation of the long allegorical work written in octo- syllabic verse by two French poets, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung, under the name of Roman de la Rose. The originator of the design, Lorris who died in 1260 composed about 4000 verses, than which nothing, according to the taste of those days, could be conceived more exquisite in sentiment or more refined in diction. Jean de Meung continued the work in a very different strain. A born satirist, he lashed with an unflagging pen whatever abuses he found or fancied in the court, the castle, and the convent ; but though a revolu- tionist in temper, he was a man without an ideal. Chaucer translated the whole of Lorris' portion ; but of the 18,000 lines and more which were written by Meung he adopted only about 3600. Chaucer has allowed himself no variations from the story of the Roman de la Rose, which, in briefest outline, is as follows. Its hero is not the true knight, but the constant lover. L'Amant dreams that he is walking by the side of a river, and comes upon a beautiful garden, the Vergier du Deduit. Knocking at the wicket, he is admitted by Idleness, who tells him that the garden belongs to Deduit or Mirth. Courtesy approaches, and invites the new-comer to join the band of revellers, by whom Mirth is surrounded. Chief among these is Cupid, the God of Love, who carries five arrows. After sauntering for some time with this agreeable company, L'Amant goes off by himself to explore the garden. He comes to the well of Narcissus, at the bottom of which are two crystal stones, each of which wonder- fully reflects to the gazer's eye one half of the garden, with all the trees and flowers growing in it. In this mirror he sees ' a roser (rose-tree) chargid fulle of rosis.' He goes up to it, and admires its beautiful ' knoppes ' or flowers. One of these ex- celled all the rest in vigour of growth and perfection of form and hues : Among the knoppes I chese oon So faire, that of the reraenaunt noon 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 105 -\< preise I half so welle as it, Whanne I avise in my wit. For it so welle was enlumyned With colour reed, as welle fyned As Nature couthe it make faire. And it hath leves wel foure paire, That Kynde hath sett, thorough his knowyng, Aboute the rede roses spryngyng. The stalke was as rish right, 1 And thereon stode the knoppe upright, That it ne bowide upon no side. The swote smelle spronge so wide, That it dide alle the place aboute. As L'Amant gazes on the Rose, Love comes up and discharges his five arrows successively into his breast. From this moment L'Amant is inflamed with a passionate desire to possess the Rose, and the rest of the poem may be described as the narra- tive of his adventures in this pursuit, Danger, Wicked-Tongue, Shame, and Richesse doing their best to drive him out of the garden, Reason sagely advising him to renounce love and cultivate friendship in its place ; while Venus, Genius, Cupid, L'Arni (i.e. Friendship), and Bel-Accueil, or Fine Manners, encourage him to constancy, and help him to surmount the various perils by which he is beset. At the point where Lorris breaks off, L'Amant has just succeeded in kissing the Rose. At the end of Meung's part he plucks it; but Chaucer does not follow him so far. He stops at line 13,105 of the original, where Wicked-Tongue, having been persuaded to kneel down and make his confession, has his tongue cut out by J/Amant's unprincipled allies. 31. With the Roman de la Rose came in a new style, which influenced for more than three centuries the imaginative litera- ture of Europe. The period from Lorris to Spenser is the reign of allegory. We have seen how, in the turbulent ages which preceded the crystallisation of European society into separate states, the actions of popular warriors or kings, mixed up with many a wild growth of legend, were sung in national lays (Breton lays, the Welsh Triads, Frankish lays, &c.) ; how the Norman trouveres took these lays and worked them up into metrical chronicles and romances of chivalry ; finally, how the romance of chivalry was in great part spiritualised by the introduction of a religious meaning into the most popular and prolific of its developments, the Arthurian epopee. The theme of war appeared to have been worked out ; but an inventive poet might find scope for a fresh and attractive exercise of the 1 As straight as a rush. 106 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. imagination, through the expansion of the theme of love. In' that delicious valley of the Loire, between Orleans and Tours, where earth herself is like a garden, arose the poet who was to satisfy the refined and more exigent tastes of a courtly and aristocratic world, by removing from his page all the rough characters and violent catastrophes of which the readers of romance had had their fill, and introducing in their stead per- sonages that were not personages at all, but mere abstractions, yet whose words and proceedings were interesting, because engaged upon that unfailing source of interest, the love of man to woman. The machinery of a vision seen in a dream was suggested by the Somnium Scipionis, one of the most popular bequests of antiquity. The counsels and warnings to lovers were suggested, and in great part supplied, by the writings of Ovid. Thus we see that the work of Lorris arose out of a partial Renaissance, or reversion to classical images and pagan conceptions. That the Ars Amandi should come to spread so wide an influence was a fact of no good omen for the morals of Europe. Vice, it is true, lost a portion of its evil * by losing all its grossness ; ' l but far too much of the evil remained behind. The literary form chosen by Lorris, that of dream and allegory, attracted Langland and Chaucer as we have seen ; it was also adopted by Lydgate and Hawes and many other poets. His theme, and his mode of handling it, were imitated, with a change for the worse, by Gower in the Confessio Amantis. The deterioration came from copying the audacious license of Jean de Meung, who developed into a doctrine of anarchy, and the boundless riot of the lower faculties, passages which in Lorris were suggestive of nothing worse than elegant luxury and frivolity. No means exist for determining the date of the Romaunt. Professor ten Brink is inclined to place it in 1366 ; but there are not wanting reasons why it would be better to place it two or three years earlier. The great number of French words, the level flow of the style, the closeness of the translation, all point to a prelusive period of life, when Chaucer did not yet feel that he was thoroughly master of his own powers. It was probably earlier than, rather than contemporaneous with, the Assembly of Foules, which, as we shall presently see, there is good ground for assigning to 1364. 32. In the Assembly of Foitles, a poem of about 700 lines, in the Chaucerian heptastich or seven-lined stanza, 2 the poet 1 Burke's Reflections. 2 For a description of this stave, see Appendix, 'Stanzas.' 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 107 begins by saying that he has lately fallen in with a book, written ' wyth lettres olde,' by which he had been completely engrossed. The book was the treatise of Macrobius on the Dream of Scipio, to whom his ancestor 'Aufrikan' appeared in his sleep, and declared to him the nothingness of this world and the grea1> ness of eternity, together with many other wonderful things. The poet then falls asleep, and dreams that Aufrikan comes and leads him to a beautiful park or garden (the description of which is taken from Boccaccio's Theseide), a blessed place, where it is ever day, the air ever calm and sweet, no sickness comes nor age, and all wholesome spices and grasses grow abundantly. After much description of the sights of the garden, the poet tells us that he came to a place where the goddess Nature was seated upon 'an hille of floures.' It was Saint Valentine's day, and all the birds were gathered round her in order to choose their mates for the coming year. She holds on her hand a beautiful 'formel' eagle. The choosing begins, and three ' tercel ' eagles, one of which is a ' real ' (royal) tercel, dispute which shall have the formel eagle. Nature bids the leaders of the different orders of birds to deliver their verdict in the dis- pute. The falcon, representing the birds of prey, says that the formel should take the ' worthiest of knyghthode ' and ' of blode the gentyleste ' among the three tercels. The goose, speaking for the water-fowl, shows his lack of gentle blood and of the romantic spirit, by proposing with vulgar brevity that ' which- ever of the tercels she cannot love, let him love another.' But all the * gentil foules ' scout this ignoble idea. The cuckoo, for the worm-eating birds, advises that, since they cannot agree, the tercels and the formel shall remain single all their lives. But this advice is flouted and scorned by the merlin. The turtle-dove, for the seed-eating birds, simply urges the lovers to maintain unchanging constancy, and to live on hope a notion much ridiculed by the duck, who intimates that ' there be mo sterres, God wote, than a paire,' or, as we should say, ' there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it.' Embarrassed by these discordant verdicts, Nature tells the formel to choose for herself ; but she asks leave to put off her decision for another year, ' for to avysen me.' The other birds then pair and depart, singing a roundel in Nature's honour, of which the refrain is Qui bien ayme tarde oublie. It has been lately suggested by a writer in the Saturday Review, that Chaucer is referring in this poem to the courtship of Engelram de Couci and Isabel, daughter of Edward III., who io8 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. were betrothed in 1364 and married in 1365. Dr. Furnivall 1 thinks that this theory will not hold, because he has satisfied himself, by a search among the grimy treasures of the Record Office, that, in the actual courtship of this princely pair, things cannot have proceeded in the precise manner, nor at the precise dates, that seem to be indicated in the poem. But what if they could not ? Chaucer surely was not bound to trammel his imagination within the bounds of strict matter of fact. It is now generally agreed that the courtship intended cannot be that of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster (married in 1358), according to the view of Godwin and others, because that date is much too early, nor did the circumstances of that courtship resemble in any way those here shadowed forth. Yet it is scarcely possible to believe that some real event is not the basis of the poem ; and if this be granted, it is certain that no royal marriage in the reign of Edward III. fits the poem half so well as that of Engelram and Isabel. 33. The Bolce of the Duchesse was formerly called Chauceres Dreme, till Speght published the poem which properly bears that name in 1597. It is an elegiac composition of about 1350 lines, in octo-syllabic rime, on the death (1369) of Blanche of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt. In the Canterbury Tales, the Man of Lawe is made to say in his prologue, In youthe he [Chaucer] made of Ceys and Alciouu. Now the first part of the JBoke of the Duchesse give: ^ne story of Ceyx and Alcyone ; we have here therefore clear proof that this was a poem of Chaucer's youth. There are beautiful lines in this poem, and the description of the hunt in the wood is graphic and stirring. Still M. Sandras, who has pointed out how largely it is made up out of the works of the French poets Lorris, Meung, and Machault, is perhaps right in assigning to it no very high place among Chaucer's works. The slight plot is thus analysed by Mr. Bell : 2 Fall- ing asleep over Ovid's story of Ceyx and Alcyone, [the poet] hears the merry sounds of huntsmen and hounds, and starts from his bed to follow them to the woods. Here, while await- ing the unharbouring of the deer, he sees a knight sitting dolefully under an oak, lamenting the recent death of his lady. Having ascertained the cause and history of his sorrow, Chaucer rides home, and is suddenly awakened by the sound of the great clock of a neighbouring castle striking twelve. 1 See Dr. Furnivall's Trial Forewords. 2 Chaucer's Poetical Works, vol. vi. 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 109 The knight is John of Gaunt; and the lady his Duchess, Blanche. The identity of the latter is ascertained by a pas- sage where she is called " Fair White," which, says the mourn- ing knight, " was my ladyes name righte." ' The Lady Blanche died in 1369, and John of Gaunt married his second wife Con- stantia, daughter of Pedro the Cruel, king of Castile, in 1371. 34. Queue Anelyda and Fals Arcyte is an unfinished poem, mostly in the Chaucerian heptastich, in which we seem to have a rough draught of the story of Theseus and the two noble kinsmen of Thebes, laid aside by Chaucer when he had resolved to follow Boccaccio more closely, and complete the tale as we have it in The Love of Palamon and Arcite, or the Knightes Tale. Some curious specimens of metre found in this poem are described in the Appendix. Chaucer says that he has followed in it Statius and Corinna. At the opening Theseus is introduced, with his Amazonian queen Hippolyta, and her sister Emilie, making his triumphal entry into Athens, just as in the Knightes Tale. But then an abrupt transition is made to the affairs of Thebes ; we hear no more of Theseus, but the rest of the poem is devoted to the hapless love of Anelyda the queen of Ermony for her perjured Theban lover, Arcyte. In the Knightes Tale, on the other hand, the events all follow in a clear and logical sequence. The poem is named by Lydgate, in the prologue to his Falls of Princes, among Chaucer's works. Its exact date cannot be given, but it was certainly earlier than the ' Love of Palamon and Arcite ' mentioned in the Legende. 35. Cliauceres A B C, or La Priere de Nostre Dame, is a poem of twenty-three stanzas, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet (j, u, and w being omitted), in honour of the Virgin Mary. It is a translation from a composition of the same name by the French poet De Guilerville, whose verses are printed in Dr. FurjiivalPs One-Text edition of the Minor Poems of Chaucer, opposite the English text. For the metre, see the section on * Stanzas ' in the Appendix. There was a tradition in the time of Speght that Chaucer wrote the ABC at the desire of the Duchess Blanche. However this may be, it was probably a work of his youth. Poems of Chaucer's Middle Life. 36. Troylus and Cnjseyde is a translation, though with many changes and many additions, of the Filostrato of Boccaccio. The original inventor of the story (of which no hint is found in Homer, nor in the Greek writers of the Lower Empire, Dares and Dictys, from whose pages Guido delle Colonne supplemented i io HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. his Historia Trojana) was, according to M. Sandras, the Anglo- Norman trouvere, Benoit de Sainte-Maure. This author, a contemporary of Wace, before he wrote, by the commission of Henry II., his metrical history of the Dukes of Normandy, appears to have compiled a Geste de Troie, with the view of correcting the errors into which Homer had fallen, and giving the authentic history of the siege of Troy ! In this work, the sources of which appear to be but imperfectly known, the story of the loves of Troilus, son of Priam, and the faithless Chryseis, daughter of Chryses, the priest of Apollo, appears for the first time. Guido delle Colonne, a Sicilian lawyer of the thirteenth century, either copying Benoit, or using the unknown sources at which Benoit drew, reproduces the story in his Historia Trojana. From. Guido, and possibly from Benoit also, it was borrowed by Boccaccio, and worked up into the elegant poem of Filostrato. But the character of Cressid is very differently drawn by Boccaccio and Chaucer. In the hands of the former she is a light and sensual woman, for whom it is impossible to feel respect or pity; such a Cressid, in short, as we have in Shakespeare's play. But 'Chaucer's Cryseyde is cast in a different mould. She possesses every quality which entitles a woman, not only to love, but to respect. Her delicacy is con- spicuous; she is won with difficulty after a long courtship, carried on with consummate address under the direction of Pan- darus ; and is finally overcome by surprise. The moral beauty of her nature imparts a profound interest to her conduct, and we follow her through the gradual course of her infidelity with sorrow and compassion.' x 37. Chaucer speaks of Boccaccio by the pseudonym of Lol- lius, an historian of the third century. In the first book he calls him-/ myn autour Lollius ; ' again in the fifth book near the end of the poem, he says, ' as telleth Lollius.' Lydgate also quotes Lollius as an author on Troy at the end of his Troy book ; again, in the House of Fame, Chaucer names him after Homer as an historian of Troy. Professor ten Brink, following out a suggestion of Mr. Latham, conjectures that Chaucer may have misread his Horace (Epist. i. ii. 1), and instead of Trojani belli scriptorem, maxime Lolli, Praaneste relegi, may have read : Trojani belli scriptorum maxime Lolli, Prseneste te legi i Quoted from Mr. Bell's able Introduction to Troylus and Cvyseyde. 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. in ' I have read thee at Prseneste, O Lollius, greatest of the his- torians of the Trojan war.' This conjecture would be more admissible, were there any evidence that Chaucer was acquainted with Horace ; but, so far as I know, he quotes him nowhere in his writings. On the whole, the supposition that Lollius Urbicus, mentioned in ancient lists of Latin authors as an historian of the third age, is the person intended, seems the most probable. But why Chaucer, who freely names Dante and Petrarch, to whom he was far less beholden, should have chosen to avoid all men- tion of Boccaccio, to whom he was so deeply indebted, remains an unsolved difficulty. The Troylus is written in the Chaucerian heptastich, and is in five books. There is no certain indication of its date, but Lydgate vaguely speaks of it, in the prologue to his Falls of Princes, as a translation made in the poet's youth. But there is a marked increase of power as compared with the Romaunt, which may incline us to place it some ten or fifteen years farther on in the poet's life. The noble and eloquent close is worthy of all admiration. In the ' Envoye ' at the end, he commends it to the correcting hands of his friends Gower and Strode : O moral Gower, this boke I directe To the, and to the philosophical Strode, To vouchensauf, ther nede is, to correcte, Of youre benignites and zeles good. 38. The Court of Love is a poem of about 1400 lines, written in the Chaucerian heptastich. The only MS. of it known to exist is one lately discovered at Cambridge ; it is of the sixteenth century, and is perhaps the same as that used by Stowe, who first printed the poem in 1561. The versifica- tion is admirably musical ; nowhere in his works has Chaucer written anything better in this respect. The poet, who de- scribes himself as ' Philogenet, of Cambridge, clerk,' a name which perhaps contains a modest allusion to Chaucer's connec- tion, in virtue of his confidential position at court, with the royal house of Plantagenet, says that when he was eighteen years of age, Love compelled him to go on a pilgrimage to the isle of Cythera to do homage to Venus. On reaching the island he finds that its government is in the hands of Admetus and Alceste, acting as viceroys for Venus To whom obeyed the ladies good ninetene. So, in the Legende, Alceste is attended by * ladies ninetene.' 112 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. CHAP. I. Presently he espies a friend of his, the maiden Philobone ' chamberere unto the queen.' She acts as his guide, and brings him to the temple where Venus and Cupid preside. The god of Love chides him for having come so late to his court, and commands him to read the twenty statutes of love, and swear to observe them. This Philogenet does. The idea of these statutes is taken from the Roman de la Rose, but a cynical and immoral turn is given to some of them, of which the good Lorris would never have been guilty. After swearing to ob- serve the statutes, Philogenet makes a long prayer to Venus, in the course of which he petitions that a lovely lady whom he had seen one night in a vision might be given to him as his love. The prayer is granted, and Kosial, in the description of whose beauty the poet draws largely on that with which Boccaccio in the Theseide celebrates the charms of Ernilie, is revealed to his gaze. He makes his ' bille ' to her, suing for her grace, and she after a time looks favourably on his suit. The poem ends with a profane parody, which has nothing to do with the thread of narrative, of the psalms sung at matins on Trinity Sunday, the birds taking up the chant in succession in praise of the god of Love. In other passages of the poem monks and nuns are introduced, deploring that they had too early committed themselves by vows to a renunciation of the ser- vice of Cupid. In appearance nothing can be laxer than the morality of the Court of Love ; yet the gibes on austerity and the parodies on doctrine do not, in the mouth of Chaucer, mean all that they would mean in the mouth of a modern poet. He is exercising his poetical gift ; appropriating and imitating all the witty things, bad and good, that he finds in the pages of his French and Italian compeers. The astonishing immorality of a great deal in the Decameron, recommended as it was by all the graces of style, then first attained by the prose of any modern language, is a parallel phenomenon to the cynicism of the Court of Love. Yet neither Chaucer nor Boccaccio lost his faith, as the ' Retractions ' of the one, and the penitent end of the other, sufficiently demonstrate. * It was not his intente,' as the fiend said of the poor carter ; l there was no full and deliberate intention of the will in either poet to depart from the precepts of God and the Church, so that each, culpable as had been too often the exercise of his pen, made a good end at last. ; M. Sandras considers the Court of Love to be a very early work, but in this I cannot agree with him. The perfection of the verse seems to be more suitable to the ease and experience 1 The Freres Tale. 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 113 of a practised writer than to the rawness of a beginner. It is also worth noticing that the king of Love, when Philogenet is brought before him, is made to say : What doth this old, Thus far ystope in yeres, come so late Unto the court ? as if the poet was here thinking of himself as he really was, forgetting that he had represented Philogenet, at the time of this adventure, as only eighteen years old. I should be dis- posed to place the poem between 1370 and 1380. With regard to Philogenet's being a clerk of Cambridge, it is by no means unlikely, as has been often pointed out, that Chaucer studied at both universities. 39. The House of Fame is a poem of about 2170 lines, in octo-syllabic couplets, divided into three books. The first ' contains a dissertation on dreams analogous to the opening of the Roman de la Rose, an invocation of Sleep imitated from Machault, a reference to the tragical death of Croesus, as re- lated by Jean de Meung, and a description of the temple of Venus, adorned with paintings which represent the different scenes of the zEneid. . . . This long introduction ends with a vision borrowed from Dante.' 1 As in the ninth canto of the Purgatorio, the poet sees before him an eagle with golden wings, dazzlingly bright. In the second part he is carried aloft by the eagle, and after a long aerial voyage brought to the House of Fame, a palace founded on a rock of ice. The third part tells us what he saw there. In the great hall he beholds the statues of the famous poets of old, Homer on a pillar of iron, Virgil on one of iron tinned over, Ovid on a pillar of copper, and Claudian on one of sulphur. He sees and describes crowds of people of every rank and calling, and then suddenly wakes up, and finds that it is all a dream : Thus in dreming and in game Endeth this lytel booke of Fame. Many comic and satirical strokes are introduced throughout the poem ; of which one might say in general, that while evidently suggested by the Divina Commedia, it substitutes the fantastic English humour and wealth of conception for the austere dignity and serious purpose of the great Italian. The Home of Fame was modernised by Pope. It bears the evi- i Sandras, Etude, p. 118. H4 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUEE. CHAP. I. dence of a vast and discursive erudition, and should clearly be assigned to the middle period of Chaucer's life, of which it must be deemed the most important monument. 40. The Love of Palamon and Arcite appears, from the way in which it is mentioned in the Legende, to have been written some time before the latter work, but to have had little circulation. There can be no reasonable doubt that this is substantially the same composition with that which Chaucer has assigned to his Knight among the Canterbury Tales. It may therefore be passed over till we come to speak of that collection. Chaucer's Later Poems. 41. In writing the Love of Palamon and Arcite, Chaucer must have perceived that the riming pentameter, or, as we now call it, the heroic couplet, which he then used for the first time, offered advantages for a continuous, serious, and digni- fied exposition or narrative, which neither any form of Stanza, nor the short romance measure which he had used for the Romaunt and the House of Fame, could justly pretend to. This conviction, we may suppose, led him to choose this metre for the Legende of Goode Women, and afterwards for many of the Canterbury Tales. 42. The Legende is a poem of about 2600 lines, and is extant in numerous MSS. The name is perhaps derived from the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, which is a collec- tion of the lives of saints. For in pursuance of the mocking parody which we witnessed in the Court of Love, though in a milder and less cynical temper, the poet still assimilates the service of Christ to the service of Cupid, and celebrates the nine ladies here held up for imitation as the saints and martyrs of Love. The opening of the Legende is very beautiful. The poet tells us how, when May comes round, he leaves his books and his devotion, and goes abroad into the fields to do honour and obeisance to the Daisy, that ' floure of floures alle.' On such an occasion, after returning to his house he fell asleep in an arbour, and dreamed that he saw the god of Love with Alceste, and nineteen ladies in her train. Love charges him with having written many things in the dispraise of women, and tending to withdraw men from his service, particularly for having translated the Roman de la Rose That is an heresye ayeins my lawe. 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 115 But Alceste defends him, and obtains his pardon from the god on the following condition : Thou shalt, while that thou lyvest, yere by yere, The most partye of thy tyme spende In makyng of a glorious Legende, Of good wymmen, maydenes, and wyves, That weren trewe in lovyng al hire lyves. In performance of this penance, the poet writes the lives or * legends' of the following ladies who were eminent in the annals of Love, Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Medea, Lucretia, Adriana (i.e. Ariadne), Philomene, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra. His materials are taken almost entirely from Ovid's Metamor- phoses and Hei-oides, some passages being pretty close versions of the Latin. An indication of date is found in the following injunction laid down by Alceste on the poet : And whan this boke ys made, yeve it the Quene On my behalf, at Eltham, or at Sheene. Manifestly this could not be Queen Philippa, who died in 1369, long before most of the works named in the Legende were written ; it must therefore be the first queen of Richard II., Anne of Bohemia (the second, Isabella of France, whom he married in 1397, was a mere child), who came over to England in 1382, and died in her palace of Sheen in 1394. Between these two years the Legende must have been written. 43. Before examining the Canterbury Tales, the remaining productions of Chaucer's later years may be briefly noticed. The Ballade to Richard II. may perhaps be his ; but we should with equanimity see it adjudged to Lydgate or Gower. The Complaynte of Mars and Venus, a piece of about 350 lines, in stanzas of varying length, is, at least in part, a translation from the French of Graunson. Chaucer avows it to be the work of his old age : For elde, that in my spirite dulleth me, Hath of endyting al the subtilite Welnygh berefte out of my remembraunce. In contemporary MSS. this poem is said to have been written by Chaucer, at the request of John of Gaunt, to celebrate a shameful intrigue between the Duchess of York, Lancaster's sister-in-law, and the Duke of Exeter, her niece's husband. The Envoy to Scogan, and that to Bukton, are both late com- n6 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. positions ; in the latter, Chaucer entreats his friend to read . 'The Wyfe of Bathe.' Flee fro the Pres is a poem of three stanzas, breathing the noble and sad resignation of a great mind which at the end of its course, uncorrupted though not unstained, 'cast down but not subdued,' throws a backward look upon the storms of life : That the is sent receyve in buxomnesse, The wrasteling of this world asketh a falle ; Her is no home, her is but wyldyrnesse. Forth, pilgrime ! forth best out of thy stalle ! Loke up on hye, and thonke God of alle ; Weyve thy lust, and let thy goste the lede, And trouthe shal thee delyver, hit is no drede. The firste Fadyr is a short piece, ascribed to Chaucer by Scogan. The Complaynte to his Purse, being addressed to Henry IV., who obtained the crown in 1399, comes at the very end of our poet's life. He says in it that he is ' shave as nye as is a frere,' and throws himself on the benignity of the new king, not without success, as we have seen. 44. The general plan of the Canterbury Tales may be said to have been so far suggested by the Decameron of Boccaccio, that the later, like the earlier work, consists of a framework created for the purpose of inserting tales in. The ten friends, assembled during the prevalence of the plague in a country house outside the walls of Florence, and beguiling the tedium of a ten days' quarantine by each telling a story daily, are represented in the English poem by the thirty-two pilgrims, bound to the shrine of St. Thomas-a-Becket at Canterbury, each of whom (except the host) binds himself to tell a story for the amusement of the company, both going and returning. Harry Bailey, the host of the Tabard, the inn at Southwark from which the expedition starts, is its guide and chief. He is to tell no tale himself, but to be the judge of those which the other pilgrims tell. If the scheme announced in the Prologue had been fully carried out, it is evident that we should have a hundred and twenty-four tales. In fact, there are but twenty-four, of which two are told by Chaucer, one, the Coke's Tale, is a short fragment, and a fourth is told by the Chanounes Yeman, who is not one of the original party, but, with his master, joins the pilgrims on the road. This incompleteness is in marked contrast to the symmetrical exactness with which the less ambitious plan of the Decameron is worked out. A few general observations on the characteristics of Chaucer's genius, as exhibited in the Canterbury Tales, are 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 117 reserved for the second part of this work. 1 Here I propose, after discussing the question of the order in which the tales should be arranged, to indicate briefly the character of each, and the source from which it is supposed to be derived. The following persons besides the Host, out of the thirty- two pilgrims named in the Prologue, have no tales assigned to them : the Yeoman, two out of the three Nuns' Priests, the Haberdasher, the Carpenter, the Webbe (i.e. weaver), the Dyer, the Tapiser (tapestry-worker), and the Plowman. 45. The examination and comparison of a great number of MSS., carefully made by Mr. Bradshaw and Dr. Furnivall, have resulted in the re- establishment of the true order in which, if not the whole, at least the great majority of the tales should stand. About the first five tales, the Knight's, Miller's, Reve's, Cook's, and Man-of-Law's, there is no difficulty, for they are linked together by their prologues. The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale follow in all the printed editions. But a MS. (Arch. Seld. B. 14) has been found in the Bodleian Library, which places the Shipman's Prologue and Tale next after the Man-of-Law's Tale ; and this is unquestionably the right order. To the Shipman's Tale are linked in regular suc- cession the Prioresses Tale, Sir Thopas, Meliboeus, the Monkes Tale, and the Nonnes Preestes Tale. Rochester is mentioned in the Monk's Prologue Lo, Rouchester stondeth here faste by. After the Nounes Preestes Tale there is a break, and it is doubtful what tale should come next. Dr. Furnivall wavers between the Doctor's and the Wife of Bath's. But the Doc- tor's Tale, if the short prologue printed in Mr. Bell's edition be admitted as genuine, must follow the Franklin's Tale. Taking the Wife of Bath's as the next in succession to the Nonnes Preestes Tale, we get a sequence of nine tales, the Wife of Bath's, Frere's, Sompnour's, Clerk's, Merchant's, Squire's, Franklin's, Doctor's, and Pardoner's. In the first and third of these Sittingbourne is mentioned, a town ten miles beyond Rochester, and forty miles from London. Between the Somp- nour's and the Clerk's Tales there is no positive link, but one follows the other in five out of the six first-class MSS. printed by Dr. Furnivall in the Six-Text Chaucer. All the other tales in this group are linked together by prefatory matter. The Second Nun's Tale, which has no prologue, is placed next by Dr. Furnivall. To it is linked the Chanounes Yemans Tide, in i See Critical Section, ch. I., Nai~rative Poetry. ii8 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. which Boughton-under-Blee is mentioned, a village five miles from Canterbury. The Manciple's Prologue and Tale are placed next by Dr. Furnivall, in the former of which the ' litel toun ' called Bob-up-and-down, under the Blee, is mentioned. To the Manciple's Tale are linked the Persones Prologue and Tale, which in all the MSS. terminate the work. 46. General Prologue. The pilgrims being all met together at the Tabard, a natural occasion arises for the individual descriptions which follow, and which are unsurpassed in their kind in the whole range of mediaeval literature. Although the characters do not succeed each other in the strict order of the social hierarchy, yet a certain gradation is observable. The Knight and his son the Squire, with the Yeoman attending them, the Lady Prioress and her retinue, and the Monk who is ' to ben an abbot able,' form the first and most distinguished group. The Friar follows in a place by himself ; then we have a group representing the upper ranks of the middle class, both on its industrial and its professional side, and including the Merchant, the Clerk of Oxford, the Serjeant-at-Law, and the Franklin, a respectable freeholder farming his own land. A miscellaneous array, consisting of several artisans, a cook, a mariner, and a good wife from Bath who does a great trade in cloth, next appear; with these are strangely joined a Doctor and a Parson, or parish priest, with whom is his brother, a ploughman. The last group represents the lower middle class ; it consists of a Eeve, or land-steward, a Miller, a Sompnour (i.e. an official in an ecclesiastical court), a Pardoner, and a Manciple. Chaucer himself, with the Host, complete the cavalcade. Lots being drawn to decide who shall tell the first tale, the lot falls on the Knight. 46a. Knightes Tale. This, as we have seen, is a free version of the Theseide of Boccaccio, an heroic poem in twelve books, in the ottava rima, which appeared in 1341. Theseus, duke of Athens, after his conquest of Scythia, by which he won the hand of Hippolyta the Amazonian queen, returns to his capital. Before entering the city he is beset by a band of wretched women, praying him to avenge them on Creon, king of Thebes, who has forbidden the burial of the bodies of their husbands slain during the siege. Theseus at once marches against Creon, defeats and kills him. In the battle two young Thebans, Palamon and Arcite, are left for dead on the field ; but, their wounds being not mortal, they are taken to Athens and there imprisoned. From the window of their cell Palamon sees one May morning the faire Emelie, sister of Hippolyta, walking in the palace garden. Arcite also sees her ; the friends both 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 119 conceive themselves to be in love with the maiden, who all the time has not seen them, and a bitter quarrel ensues between them. Arcite is released, and Palamon at the end of seven years makes his escape. The rivals meet in the wood near Athens, and agree to fight the next morning. But the combat is inter- rupted by Theseus, who after hearing their story, promises that if they return to that spot at the end of fifty weeks, each with a hundred knights in his train, and institute a tournament for the love of Emelie, he will give her hand to the victor. Tlte lists are prepared with great care and expense, oratories and altars being erected to Venus, Mars, and Diana, and enriched with painting and sculpture. The tournament takes place on the appointed day ; Arcite is victorious ; but just as he is being proclaimed, his horse, startled by a ' fury infernal ' sent above ground by Pluto^ throws him on his head, and he receives a mortal injury. ^His farewell to Emelie is one of the most beautiful things in poetrg Palamon of course weds Emelie, and lives with her 'in blisse, in richesse, and in hele. J >^ , > Tyrwhitt considered thatr Chaucer's management of the story was superior to Boccaccio's, because he made Palamon see Emelie first, thereby establishing a kind of prior poetical right to her ; and also described jealousy and enmity as springing up between the two young Thebans from the first, whereas Boccaccio makes the tie of friendship between them so strong that for a long time both loved Emelie to distraction without being the worse friends. M. Sandras, on the other hand, suggests that the refinement of feeling and sentiment which such friendship implies was beyond the , strain of the English poet and his readers. Without pretending to settle so nice a question, we may observe that each poet, in handling this part of the story, was probably guided by his literary instinct to write in the way most in accord with the manners and mode of thought of his countrymen. The source from which Boccaccio obtained the story of Palamon and Arcite has not been discovered. From the Thebais of the poet Statius (lib. xii.) is taken all the earlier part of the story down to the death of Creon, and also (lib. vii) the first sketch of the description of the temple of Mars. But this sketch is in Statius hardly more than big words and gaudy swollen images. Boccaccio's description, while pre- serving all in Statius that is worth preserving, enlarges the theme with much elegance and force of expression. Chaucer departs widely from both, and in the terror and majesty of his lines reminds us, notwithstanding the inferiority of the medium, of the magnificent pictures of Tartarus in the sixth 120 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. ^Eneid. M. Sandras thinks that the particular story of Palamon and Arcite was probably the invention of some French trouvere, whose work is now lost, though known to and used by Boccaccio. But there seems to be really no reason why Boccaccio should not have invented it himself. Statius wrote his epic in twelve books, and called it the Thebaid. In the last book Theseus, the great mythic hero of Attica, is introduced for the first time, to redress the wrongs and impieties committed by Creon. Boccaccio seems to have thought that here was a great oppor- tunity for continuing, in a certain sense, the work of Statius, by writing another epic in twelve books, to be called the ' Theseid,' with Theseus for its leading character. The name of Palemon he found in Statius ; that of Arcita or Arcite he may have taken from the Archytas of Horace (Od. i. xxviii.). The element of love was indispensable in a mediaeval poem ; he therefore created Emilia, the sister-in-law of Theseus. The self-forgetting friendship of the two young Thebans is a reminis- cence of Pylades and Orestes. 47. The Milleres Tale relates how a demure Oxford scholar, fair without and false within, leagued with the wife of the carpenter with whom he was lodging against the poor man's honour, and deceived him by a ridiculous tale of a deluge, which his pretended knowledge of astrology enabled him to foresee. The origin of the story, says Mr. Bell, has not been ascertained ; the main incident, that of the tubs, Chaucer pro- bably found in some fabliau. There is great humour both in this and in the Keve's Tale, but at the same time so much that is gross and offensive, that one may well believe Chaucer to have had them specially in his mind when revoking those of his Canterbury Tales * that sounen unto sinne.' 48. The Keve, who was a carpenter by trade, is offended at the slight thrown upon the craft by the Miller's tale. He pro- ceeds to tell a tale, of which the scene is laid at Trumpington, near Cambridge, and which ends with the effectual humbling of the proud miller who thought to cheat the two Cambridge clerks from the north country. Two fabliaux, containing the main incidents of the story, one of which bears the title of De Gombert et des Deux Clercs, may have supplied Chaucer with his materials ; they are among the publications of the Chaucer Society. 49. The Coke, Eoger or Hodge of Ware, after being rallied by the Host on the deleterious quality of his dishes, promises to tell a tale of a * hosteler.' He begins it, and we see that there is every prospect of hearing a tale coarser than either the Reve's or the Miller's. But at the end of about 60 lines the 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 121 story-teller suddenly stops. Tyrwhitt is probably right in sup- posing that ' Chaucer's more mature judgment convinced him that two such tales as the Miller's and the Reve's were sufficient at a time.' He perhaps bethought himself of the promise made to his readers in the Miller's Prologue : Whoso list it not to heere, Turne over the leefe, and cheese another tale ; For he schal fynde ynowe bothe gret and smale, Of storial thing that toucheth gentilesse, And eek moralite, and holynesse. 50. The Coke holds his peace, and the Host, observing that now The schade of every tree Was in the lengthe the same quantite That was the body erecte, that caused it, and knowing that the day of the month was the eighteenth of April, infers from his profound astronomical lore that the time of the day is ten o'clock. Announcing this discovery to the pilgrims as a motive for losing no time, he calls upon the Man of Lawe for a tale. The learned Serjeant replies that he him- self speaks in prose, but that he will borrow a tale in rime from Chaucer, who in his * large volume ' has ' told of lovers up and down ; ' yet never, he adds, given currency to such wicked stories as those of Canace and her incestuous love, or about such an unnatural monster as the King Antiochus. This is a stroke at Gower, as we shall presently see, and helps to fix the date of the Canterbury Tales. The Man of Lawe pro- ceeds to tell the beautiful tale of Constance ; how the Sultan of Surrye, hearing of the beauty of the daughter of the Roman emperor, obtains her in marriage from her father on promising to become a Christian ; how, for keeping this promise, he is mur- dered by his own mother, who sends Constance away in a ship without a rudder ; how she is cast on the coast of Northum- berland, and, after many wonderful adventures, becomes the wife of Alia, the king of that country ; how Alla's wicked mother, Domegyld, turns him against her, and persuades him to send her afloat again in the same ship in which she came ; how the ship carries her and her little son, Mauricius, to Rome, where she lives a holy and retired life ; finally, how Alia, coming to Rome on pilgrimage, discovers his wife and son, and lives happily with them for many years. This tale is in the Chaucerian stanza. The saintly character of Constance is touched with indescribable refinement and grace, as well as 122 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. depth of feeling ; one is reminded of those lovely female heads which gaze, wistfully and tenderly, from the canvas of Sasso- ferrato or Luini. The story of Constance is also told in Gower's Confessio Amantis; and as no other source was formerly known, except for the portion that relates to Domegyld, whose wicked beha- viour towards Constance recalls a similar story in the Two Offas, a work ascribed to Matthew Paris, Tyrwhitt and other critics assumed that Chaucer must have taken the story from Gower. On this a further argument has been reared : could Chaucer have meant to say anything severe of Gower, in the passage about Canace and Antiochus, when he was on the point of borrowing from him the materials of an important tale ? This question comes to nothing, now that the common source from which both Gower and Chaucer took the story has been discovered. This source is the chronicle of Nicholas Trivet. The Chaucer Society has printed an old English version of part of this chronicle, on reading which no one can doubt that here we have Chaucer's original. Tiberie Con- stantyn, says Trivet, became emperor in 570 A.D., and reigned twenty-three years, at Constantinople however, not at Rome. According to one account he gave his daughter in marriage to a knight of Cappadocia ; but according to the ' olde cronicles of Saxons,' Constantia married Alle, the second king of North- umber, and had by him a son Morys. This Alle is the king in the well-known story of Gregory the Great and the Angle children whom he saw in the slave-market. Since therefore Chaucer took the tale from Trivet, not from Gower, the reason alleged for doubting his intention of attacking the latter in what he says of Canace falls to the ground. That he had that intention seems to me most evident. If so, the Man of Lawe's prologue, and the Canterbury Tales generally, must be brought down to a date subsequent to 1390, in which year, or in 1389, the Confessio first appeared. 51. The Host pronounces the Serjeant's to be 'a thrifty tale,' and, with many pious Durations, calls upon the Parish Priest. The Priest says, ' "What aileth the man, so synfully to swere ? ' Whereupon the Host ' smells a Loller (Lollard) in the wind,' and advises the company to stand by, and they will hear a sermon. But the Shipman gravely interposes, and says that there shall be no glosing of the gospel nor preaching here ; ' we all believe in the great God,' says he, and no one shall sow cockle (or tares) amidst our clean corn. Perhaps there is a reference here to Wyclif's short sermons on the Gospels read on Sundays and holidays, which were written at 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 123 Lutterworth towards the close of his life. 1 The Shipman then tells his tale, which is about a French merchant of St. Denis and a monk, named Dan John. This tale, like the Miller's and the Reeve's, belongs to Chaucer's cynical mood. It is followed by that of the Prioress, one strictly in keeping with her character and religious training ; it is the story of a little Christian boy killed in some Asiatic town by the cruel Jews, who could not endure to hear the child sing his Alma Redemp- toris Mater as he went up and down the street. The versifica- tion of this tale, which is in the Chaucerian stanza, is here and there rich and musical in the highest degree. In the last stanza there is a reference to the story of 'yonge Hugh of Lincoln,' said to have met a similar fate ' but a litel whyle ago ; ' the particulars are given in the Chronicle of Matthew Paris, under the year 1255. The tale itself is taken from a source similar to that of the legend of Alphonsus of Lincoln (printed by the Chaucer Society), which greatl3 r resembles it ; this story, however, dates only from the second half of the fifteenth century. 52. The Host now looks upon Chaucer, whom he accosts in his rough gibing way : Thou lokest as thou woldest fynde an hare : For ever upon the ground I se thee stare. A ' tale of mirthe ' is called for, and Chaucer professes a willing- ness to comply. Adopting an old romance tripping stanza, he begins to tell the company of the knightly adventures of Sir Thopas : Listeth, Lordes, in good entent, And I wol telle verrayment Of mirthe and of solas ; Al of a knyght was fair and gent In bataille and in tourneyment, His name was Sir Thopas. Sir Thopas rides forth unarmed, and meets with a giant named Sir Olifaunt, who throws stones at him, but Sir Thopas escapes after challenging the giant to fight next day, when he has his armour on. He returns to his castle, and the process of equipment for the fight begins. The description takes up many stanzas ; at last all is ready, and the knight sallies forth again. But the patience of the Host is by this time exhausted. * No more of this/ he says, ' for goddes dignitie.' Of such trashy rimes he will hear no more. Evidently Chaucer meant 1 See Select English Works of John Wyclif, vol. i. Oxford, 1871. 124 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. to quiz the authors of the * romances of prys, 5 such as Horn Child, Guy of Warwick, and others that he mentions, which, though still popular, were ever becoming more divorced from the realities of life. The poet pretends to be vexed, but sub- stitutes for the remainder of Sir Thopas the tale (in prose) of Meliboeus and his Dame Prudence, the subject of which is the forgiveness of injuries. This is translated from the Livre de Melibee et Prudence of Jean de Meung, which is [itself a ver- sion, or rather adaptation, of the Liber Gonsolationis et Consilii written by Albertanus of Brescia in 1246. 53. The Host, after drawing a comparison between the patient Prudence and his own wife, much to the advantage of the former, turns to the Monk, observes that they are now close to Rochester, and, after much sarcastic compliment on the subject of the worthy Piers's robust and portly appearance, asks for his tale. The Monk proceeds to tell certain tragedies, of which, he says, he has a hundred in his cell. He explains a tragedy to mean the history of one who, having ' stood in great prosperitee,' falls into misfortune and ends miserably. Perhaps Chaucer had begun to write a large work on this theme, in imitation of the De Casibus illustrium virorum of Boccaccio, and here assigns the seventeen ' tragedies ' which he had written to the Monk, as his tale. Or, as Mr. Skeat suggests, the four modern ^instances Pedro the Cruel, Pedro of Cyprus, Barnabo Visconti, and Count Ugolino may have been inserted by an after- thought in the course of a revision of the Tales subse- quent to their first publication. The death of Barnabo, which occurred in 1385, is the latest event, the date of which is ab- solutely certain, mentioned in the work. The sources of the tragedies are the Bible, Boccaccio's work just named, the Roman de la Rose (from which come the stories of ISTero and Croesus), and Chaucer's own reading and recollections. For the terrible tale of Ugolino, whom he calls ' erl Hugelin of Pise,' he refers his readers to Dante, 'the grete poete of Itaille.' 54. The Knight now interposes, saying that they have had enough and too much of these dismal narratives ; and the Host, after enforcing the same thing in his own way, with his usual bitter boldness of tongue, calls upon the Nun's Priest, addressing him with that proper gradation of dis-iespect which befits the social difference between a dignified monk and the chaplain of a nunnery, for the tale that he had promised. The amusing tale that follows is ' taken from a fable of about forty lines, "Don Coc et Don Werpil," in the poems of Marie of France, which is amplified in the fifth chapter of the old 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 125 French metrical Roman de Renart, entitled " Se comme Renart prist Chantecler le Coc." ' l 55. After the Nonnes Prestes tale there is a break. Pro- bably Chaucer, if his life had been prolonged, would have as- signed some tale to this place, and linked it properly on to the Wife of Bath's prologue. As things are, we can do no better (see above, 45) than place the last-named prologue in succes- sion to the tale of the Cock and the Fox. The Wife of Bath, a buxom, fresh-complexioned matron, loud of voice and with bold bright eyes, who has had five husbands at the church-door, and whose gay and costly attire is suggestive of the fact, which she ingenuously confesses, that while she married two of her husbands for love, she married three for money, discourses at great length in praise of matrimony before she commences her tale. The shrewd biting humour and sententious pithiness of much of this prologue make it a typical passage exhibitive of one side of the great poet his esprit moqueur ; but the hand- ling is too broad and realistic to admit of its being examined in detail. She does not spare her own sex : Deceite, wepyng, spynnyng, God hath given To women kindly [ = naturally], while that they may liven. The outward life of a vain worldly woman in the England of the fourteenth century is mirrored in her voluble talk. She ever loved to see and to be seen, she says : Therefore made I my visitations To vigilies and to processions, To prechings eke, and to these pilgrimages, To playes of miracles, and mariages. How unlike almost all these entertainments to the diversions of a rich tradesman's wife at the present day ! It is curious to meet here with the rough proverb which drew the attention of the world a few years back, when used by a great Prussian statesman of the luckless Parisians : But certeynly I made folk swiche chere, That in his owne grces I made him frie, For anger, and for verray jalousie. At the end of the prologue a wrangling arises between the Sompnour and the Frere, in the course 'of which we are told that the pilgrims had got nearly to Sittingbourne, a town ten miles beyond Rochester. The Wife's tale is illustrative of the axiom that the thing which women most desire is to have their own way. The story is the same as that of Sir Florent, in the i Dr. Morris. 126 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. first book of Gower's Confessio Amantis ; in a later shape we have it in the Marriage of Sir Gawayne, a ballad in Percy's Meliques. It is not likely that Chaucer took it from Gower ; but the common source remains as yet undetected. 56. The Friar, after commending the matron's tale, proceeds to tell a story of a Sompnour, who, having entered into a friendly league with a fiend, whereby they bind themselves to pursue misdemeanants and divide the plunder, proves to be more hard-hearted than his companion ; for the latter is will- ing to spare a poor, swearing carter who has put himself in his power, because, as he said, ' it was not his entente/ whereas the Sompnour is for showing him no mercy. The origin of the tale is supposed to be some old French fabliau. A Latin story of similar drift has been published by Mr. Wright in the Archceologia, vol. xxxii. 57. The Sompnour, boiling over with wrath at the uncivil usage which his profession has received at the Friar's hands, follows with a tale in which a questing friar is brought to con- fusion ; it is impossible to go into particulars. The scene is laid in Holdernesse, a district of Yorkshire ; but, according to M. Sandras, the outlines of the story are to be found in a fabliau by Jacques de Baisieux, the incidents of which take place at Antwerp. The Sompnour ends by saying : My tale is don, we ben almost at toune that is, at Sittingbourne. 58. The Clerk of Oxenford is now invited to open his lips, which he has kept closed all day ; he obeys, and tells the tale of patient Grisilde, which, he says, he learned at Padua from Francis Petrarch. This is usually, and with reason, taken as evidence that Chaucer made the acquaintance of Petrarch when he visited Italy in 1373. It appears also from Petrarch's letters that this particular story was known to him many years before he ever saw the Decameron, in which it figures as the last tale. On the other hand it is difficult to believe that Chaucer had not read the story in the Decameron before he ever saw Petrarch. For we have seen (ante, 32) that in a poem, probably written in 1364, Chaucer inserted several stanzas translated from the Theseide of Boccaccio. If, then, nine years before his interview with Petrarch, Chaucer knew the Theseide, is it not likely that he also knew the De- cameron, which had appeared in 1352 or 1353, and immediately obtained a wide circulation in Italy? Yet, considering the difficulty of multiplying copies of any work before the inven- tion of printing, it would perhaps be easy to exaggerate this 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 127 probability. At any rate it is now an ascertained fact, that Chaucer, in the Clerk's Tale, follows pretty closely Petrarch's Latin version of the tale in the Decameron, and it may be held as certain that he had a copy of this version before him. He may perhaps have seen the tale previously in the Decameron, and glanced through it without its leaving any impression ; coming from the lips of Petrarch himself, it may have seemed to be invested with a peculiar grace. As if tired of his theme, and bored by the invincible patience of his heroine, Chaucer adds an * Envoy ' to the tale, in his sharpest tone of irony and banter, entreating 'noble wives ' to beware of falling into that excess of humility which made Grisilde put up with her husband's absurd caprices. The Merchant, whose turn has now come, expresses his lively regret that his own wife was not more of a Grisilde, and then tells the tale of January and May, which was afterwards modernised by Pope. The theme is well worn an old husband married to, and deceived by, a young wife ; the story is found in part, according to Tyrwhitt, in a Latin tale written by one Adolphus early in the fourteenth century. 59. Next comes the beautiful tale of the Squire, concerning Cambuscan, the lord of Tartary, and Canace his daughter. It remains unfinished ; but Spenser, who gives to it a sequel of his own invention in the fourth book of the Faerie Queene, evidently believed that Chaucer had written the entire tale, but that the concluding portion had been lost. For in the stanzas following the well-known couplet Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled, On fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled he says : Then pardon, O most sacred happie spirit, That I thy labours lost may thus revive, And steale from thee the meed of thy due merit, That none durst ever whilest thou wast alive, And, being dead, in vain now many strive. l But there is no good reason to believe that Chaucer ever com- pleted the tale, and Milton certainly did not think so when he spoke, in the Penseroso, of him who left half -told The story of Cambuscan bold. Of the sources whence Chaucer drew the materials of this tale, a full and satisfactory account is given by Mr. Skeat. 2 They 1 Faerie Queene, iv., 2, 34. 2 Chaucer, Prioresses Tale, 0-H50. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 139 Andrew Wynton, author of the Originals Cronykil, was a canon of St. Andrew's, and prior of St. Serfs, the monastery on the island in Loch Leven. His Cronykil begins, as was then thought decorous and fitting, with the Creation, plunges into the history of the angels, discusses general geography, and at the end of five books, filled with this ' pantographical ' rubbish, as Dr. Irving amusingly calls it, settles down upon its proper subject, which is the history of Scotland from the earliest ages down to his own time. He died about the year 1420. He incorporates freely the work of preceding writers three hundred lines from Barbour, and no less than thirty-six chapters by some versifier, whose name, he says, he has not been able to discover. His verse is, like Barbour's, octo-syllabic ; it is naive, sense-full, and, in parts, touching. 1 Prose Writers : Maundevile ; Chaucer; Wyclif. 75. The earliest known work in English prose of a secular character, the Travels of Sir John Maundevile, dates from this period. As before mentioned ( 1), the book had been origi- nally written in French, and afterwards translated into Latin. It was probably about the year 1360 that Sir John prepared and published an English version also, for the benefit of his own countrymen. This is a proof that about this time the knowledge of French, even among the educated classes, was ceasing to be essential or universal. The author, who 'passid the see the }er of our Lord' 1322, professes not only to have traversed the Holy Land in several directions, but to have 'visited many countries farther east, including even India; but when we come to the chapters which treat of these countries, we find them filled with pre- posterous stories, 'which Maundevile, whose capacity of swal- lowing was unlimited, must have derived either from hearsay or from the works of travellers equally gullible with himself. When one reflects that Maundevile had as great opportunities as Herodotus, and then observes the use that he made of them, comparisons are forced on the mind not over-favourable to the English and medieval, as contrasted with the Greek and classical, grade of intelligence. Our author tells of the ' Land of Amazoym,' an island inhabited only" by a race of warlike women ; of rocks of adamant in the Indian seas, which draw to them with irresistible force any ships sailing past that have any iron bolts or nails in them : of a tribe of people with hoofs like horses, of people with eight toes, of dwarfs, and of a one- 1 Irving's History of Scottish Poetry.] 140 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEEATUKE. CHAP. I. legged race, whose one foot was so large that they used it to shade themselves from the sun with. The language, as used by Maundevile, appears almost precisely similar to that of Chaucer in his prose works. As a physician, Maundevile belonged to a class of men not usually addicted to superstition, or over- burdened with religious veneration ; a trait which Chaucer, with his profound knowledge of mankind, hits off in his ac- count of the ' Doctor of Phisike : ' His studio was but litel on the Bible. But the superstitious credulity of Maundevile is unbounded; nor did it tend to make his work unpopular. On the contrary, there is scarcely any old English book of which the manuscript copies are so numerous ; and it is certain that it was held in high estimation all through the fifteenth century down, in fact, to the time when, foreign travel having become more common, the existence of the eight-toed men, &c., began to be doubted. Much attention has been paid to Maundevile's book of late years, both in Germany and at home; and the new edition of the Encyclopedia Sritannica contains an exhaustive article (by Colonel Yule and Mr. E. B. Nicholson) which demolishes the knight's claim, not only to originality, but even to common honesty. One portion of the work, the description of the Holy Land, may represent personal observation ; though even here Maundevile appears to have been under obligations to a German traveller, Baldensele, whose book appeared in 1336. As to his more distant travels, the account of them is appropriated from the itinerary of the blessed Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan friar, whose wanderings over many countries of Asia lasted sixteen years, almost till his death in 1331. This work may be read in the Acta Sanctorum, under January 14. It is in the main a rational and credible narrative, but Maundevile has stuffed it out with fabulous stories of all kinds, borrowed largely from Pliny and Solinus. He has also 'taken bodily' a good deal from the travels of Hayton the Armenian, a Praemonstratensian monk, who wrote in 1307. Much that he says about the Tartars is taken without acknowledgment from the Franciscan friar Carpini. Furthermore, the English version of the work is said to exist in no MS. earlier than 1400 ; and there is no solid reason for believing it to have been made by Maundevile himself, for the passage asserting this is not found in the French, i.e. the original version, dated in 1371. Thus the claim, so long made for him, that he was the earliest writer of English prose on secular subjects, appears to fall to the ground ; that honour must be transferred to Chaucer. [1884.] 76. Chaucer's prose works consist, besides the two Canter- bury Tales already described, the Tale of Melibosus, and the Persones Tale, of a translation of Boethius' De Consolations Philosophic, the Astrolabie, and the Testament of Love. In translating Boethius, Chaucer was renewing for the men of his 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 141 own day the service rendered by Alfred to his West- Saxon countrymen. The Astrolabie is a treatise on astronomy, com- posed iii 1391, for the use of the poet's second son, Louis, who was at the time ten years old. It opens thus : ' Lytel Lowys my sonne, I perceive well by certain evidences thyne abylyte to lerne sciences touching nombres and proportions.' The Testa- ment of Love is divided into three parts. It professes to be an imitation of the work of Boethius. In the first part, Love bequeaths instructions to her followers, whereby they may rightly judge of the causes of cross fortune, &c. In the second, ' she teacheth the knowledge of one very God, our Creator ; as also the state of grace, and the state of glory.' Throughout these two parts are scattered allusions, or what seem to be such, to the circumstances under which Chaucer lost his official employment, and was reduced to poverty. The third part is a remarkable discourse on necessity and free-will, in which the doctrine laid down by St. Augustine and expounded by the schoolmen is eloquently set forth. Professor ten Brink believes that the Testament of Love is wrongly ascribed to Chaucer, 1. because the writer speaks of Chaucer in the third person, 2. because he praises him without measure, 3. because the passage in the Troylus about God's foreknowledge and man's free-will is erroneously quoted, 4. on the ground that it is incredible that Chaucer, after having translated Boethius, should now paraphrase him in this tedious fashion, 5. because with this writer Love is female, but with Chaucer always male. Some of these considerations have much force. On the other hand, Gower, in the passage quoted above (21), says that the Muse had bidden him to enjoin Chaucer, that he Do make his Testament of Love. Such a work might therefore be looked for from Chaucer's pen. It may be said that the forger adopted this name because of the passage in Gower ; but in that case he would surely have taken more care to remove from the work all appearance of its having been written by another than Chaucer. 77. Among the English writings of John Wyclif, his trans- lation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate must be first con- sidered. The subject is surrounded with difficulties, and cannot be fully discussed here. A fine edition of the Wydiffite Versions of the Holy Scriptures was issued in 1850, under the care of the Rev. J. Forshall and Sir. F. Madden, from the Oxford Univer- sity Press. In the preface to this work the following passage occurs, and represents probably the real state of the case : ' Down to the year 1360, the Psalter appears to be the only 142 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. I. book , of Scripture which had been entirely rendered into English. Within less than twenty-five years from this date a prose version of the whole Bible, including as well the apo- cryphal as the canonical books, had been completed, and was in circulation among the people. For this invaluable gift England is indebted to John Wyclif. It may be impossible to determine with certainty the exact share which his own pen had in the translation, but there can be no doubt that he took a part in the labour of producing it, and that the accomplishment of the work must be attributed mainly to his zeal, encouragement, and direction.' The version here referred to is the older of the two versions printed by Forshall and Madden. The later one appeared some years after Wyclif s death, being thought necessary by his Lollard followers on account of the inequality existing between different parts of the original work. However, the general agreement between the two versions is very close. The other English writings of Wyclif consist of Sermons, Exegetical treatises, Controversial treatises, and Letters. A selection of these, edited by the present writer, was published for the Clarendon Press in 187 1. 1 The Sermons, which are very short, are based upon the gospels and epistles read in the church service. The explanations of the New Testament parables are often racy and original ; many curious traditional interpretations are given ; and now and then, though it is but seldom, the tone rises to real eloquence. In the case of the other writings, in- teresting as many of them are, there is unfortunately much difficulty in distinguishing between those which are genuine and those which are more or less doubtful. The controversial tracts are directed chiefly against the four orders of friars, whose monasteries Wyclif called 'Caym's [i.e. Cain's] castles ; ' in a minor degree they assail the pope, the monks, and the higher orders of the secular clergy. Of one of the exegetical tracts, On the Paternoster, a portion of the striking peroration is here subjoined : * Whanne a man seith, My God, dely vere me fro myn enemyes, what othir thing saith he than this, Dely vere us from yvel? And if thou rennest aboute bi alle the wordis of holy praieris, thou schalt fynde nothing whiche is not conteyned in this praier of the Lord. Whoevere seith a thing that may not perteyne to this praier of the Gospel, he praieth bodili and unjustli and unleeffulli, as me thenkith. Whanne a man saieth in his praier, Lord, multiplie myn richessis, and encrease myu honouris, and seith this, havynge the coveitise of hem, and not purposynge the profit of hem to men. to be bettir to Godward, I gesse that he may not fynde it in the Lordis praier. Therfore be it schame to aske the thingis whiche it is not leefful to coveyte. If a man schameth not of this, but coveytise overcometh him, this is askid, that he dely vere fro this yvel of coveytise, to whom we seyn, Delyvere us from yvel.' John Trevisa translated Higden's Polychronicon (Prel. Ch. II. 29) into English ; his own words (cited in Warton's Hist, of Eng. Poetry, i. 5) show that he was engaged on this work in 1385. This, and also 1 Select English Works of John Wyclif. Oxford, 1871. 1350-1450. EARLY ENGLISH PERIOD. 143 another translation of somewhat later date, are in course of publication in the Rolls series, side by side with Higden's Latin. A curious English-Latin dictionary, the Promptorium Parvulorum, was compiled in 1440 by one Geoffrey, a recluse in the Dominican monastery of Lynn in Norfolk, for the use both of young clerics studying for ordina- tion and older members of the clergy who had forgotten their Latin. The form of English employed is the Norfolk dialect. The book was first printed by Pynson (1499) ; then by Wynkyn de Worde (1516) ; of late years (1843, 1865) it has been well edited for the Camden Society by Mr. Albert Way. William Lyndewode, official of the archbishop's court, and afterwards bishop of St. David's, wrote about 1425 a Provincial*, i.e. a collection of the synodal decrees of archbishops of Canterbury, from Stephen Langton to Henry Chicheley. It is arranged in five books, like the decretals of Gregory IX., and gives a general view of canon law as applied to the circumstances of the Church in England. The thirteenth-century con- stitutions of the legates Otho and Othobon are given at the end. ( 144 CHAPTER II. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 1450-1558. 1. M. SISMONDI, in his admirable work on the Literature of the South of Europe, has a passage, 1 explaining the decline of Italian literature in the fifteenth century, which is so strictly applicable to the corresponding decline of English literature for a hundred and seventy years after Chaucer, that we cannot forbear quoting it : * The century which, after the death of Petrarch, had been devoted by the Italians to the study of antiquity, during which literature experienced no advance, and the Italian language seemed to retrograde, was not, however, lost to the powers of imagination. Poetry, on its first revival, had not received sufficient nourishment. The fund of knowledge, of ideas, and of images, which she called to her aid, was too restricted. The three great men of the fourteenth century, whom we first pre- sented to the attention of the reader, had, by the sole force of their genius, attained a degree of erudition, and a sublimity of thought, far beyond the spirit of their age. These qualities were entirely personal ; and the rest of the Italian bards, like the Provencal poets, were reduced, by the poverty of their ideas, to have recourse to those continual attempts at wit, and to that mixture of unintelligible ideas and incoherent images, which render the perusal of them so fatiguing. The whole of the fifteenth century was employed in extending in every direction the knowledge and resources of the friends of the Muses. Antiquity was unveilid to them in all its elevated characters its severe laws, its energetic virtue, and its beau- tiful and engaging mythology ; in its subtle and profound philo- sophy, its overpowering eloquence, and its delightful poetry. Another age was required to knead afresh the clay for the formation of a nobler race. At the close of the century, a 1 Vol. ii. p. 400 (Roscoe). 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 145 divine breath animated the finished statue, and it started into life.' Mutatis mutandis, these eloquent sentences are exactly appli- cable to the case of English literature. Chaucer's eminence was purely personal ; even more so, perhaps, than that of the great Italians, for the countrymen of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio at least possessed a settled and beautiful language, adapted already to nearly all literary purposes ; while the tongue of Chaucer was in so rude and unformed a condition that only transcendent genius could make a work expressed through it endurable. The fifteenth century seems to have been an age of active preparation in every country of Europe. Though no great books were produced in it, it witnessed the invention of the art of printing, the effect of which was so to multiply copies of the masterpieces of Greek and Roman genius, to reduce their price, and to enlarge the circle of their readers, as to supply abundantly new materials for thought, and new models of artistic form, and thus pave the way for the great writers of the close of the next century. 2. Printing, invented at Metz by Gutenberg about the year 1450, was introduced into England by William Caxton, who learned the art in the Low Countries, where he lived for some years in the service of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, a sister of our Edward IV. The first books printed in English are believed to have been, ' The Recueil of the Historyes of Troye,' and * The Game and Play of the Chesse.' These trans- lations from the French were made by Caxton himself, and seem to have been printed under his direction at Bruges in 1475. In the course of the next year he probably came over to England. The first book indisputably printed in England was the ' Dictes and Sayinges of the Philosophers,' on the title- page of which we read, 'Enprynted by me, William Caxton, at Westmestre, the yere of our Lord mcccclxxvii.' His press was set up in the Almonry near Westminster Abbey; it is clear therefore that the Church regarded his proceedings with ap- proval, and was disposed to further them by substantial aid. The patronage also of two enlightened noblemen, Anthony Woodville Earl Rivers, and John Tiptoft Earl of Worcester, greatly aided Caxton in his enterprise. Out of about fifty works printed and published by Caxton in the course of his busy life, thirteen were on religious and moral subjects (The Pilgrimage of the Sold, TIic Art and Craft to know well to die, a Life of St* Catharine of Sienna, a Directorium Sacerdotum, &c.) ; three contained works of the English poets Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate ; twelve were books of romance, chivalry, and prose fiction (e.g. Godfrey of Boloyn, Malory's K 146 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. II. Histories of King Arthur, a collection of romances on the story of Troy, the Book of the Order of Knighthood, jE sop's Fables, the Historic of Reynard the foxe, &c. ) ; four were versions of Latin classical authors (Cicero De Senectute and De Amicitia, Virgil's ^Eneid, and Boethius' De Consol. Philos. in Chaucer's version) ; seven or eight were historical, topo- graphical, or legal works (e.g. Chronicles of England, the Polychronicon in Trevisa's version, Statutes of 1 Richard III. , &c.); and five or six were handbooks or didactic treatises, such as the Book of Good Manners, a Book for Travellers, the Doctrinal of Sapience, &c. Most of these were translations from the French language, which in the fifteenth century possessed a literature far richer than ours. This century was also signalised by the foundation of many schools and colleges, in which the founders desired that the recovered learning of antiquity should be uninterruptedly and effectually cultivated. Eton, the greatest of the English schools, and King's College at Cambridge, were founded by Henry VI. between 1440 and 1450. Three new universities arose in Scotland that of St. Andrews in 1410, of Glasgow in 1450, of Aberdeen in 1494 ; all under the express authority of different Popes. Three or four unsuccessful attempts were made in the course of this and the previous century, the latest in 1496 to establish a university in Dublin. Several colleges were founded at Oxford and Cambridge in the reign of Henry VIII. , among which we may specify Christ Church, the largest college at the former university (which, however, was originally planned by the magnificent Wolsey on a far larger scale), and the noble foundation of Trinity College, Cambridge. In the period now before us our attention will be directed to three subjects ; the poets, whether English or Scotch, the state and progress of learning, and the prose writers. The manner in which the great and complex movement of the Reformation influenced for good or evil the development of literature, is too wide a subject to be fully considered here. Something, however, will be said under this head, when we come to sketch the rise of the ' new learning,' or study of the Humanities in England, and inquire into the causes which rendered its growth fitful and intermittent. Poetry and Romance : Hardyng, Malory, Hawes, Bar- clay, Skelton, Surrey, Wyat ; first Poet Laureate. 3. The poets of this period, at least on the English side of the border, were of small account. The middle of the fifteenth century witnessed the expulsion of the English from France ; 1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 147 and u time of national humiliation is unfavourable to the pro- duction of poetry. If, indeed, humiliation become permanent, and involve subjection to the stranger, the plaintive wailings of the elegiac Muse are naturally evoked ; as we see in the instances of Ireland and Wales. But where a nation is merely disgraced, not crushed, it keeps silence, and waits for a better day. For more than thirty years after the loss of the French provinces, England was distracted and weakened by the civil wars of the Koses. This was also a time unfavourable to poetry, the makers of which then and long afterwards de- pended on the patronage of the noble and wealthy a patronage which, in that time of fierce passions, alternate suffering, and universal disquietude, was not likely to be steadily maintained. Why the fifty years which followed the victory of Bosworth should have been so utterly barren of good poetry, it is less easy to see. All that can be said is, that this was an age of prepa- ration, in which men disentombed and learned to appreciate old treasures, judging that they were much better employed than in attempting to produce original work, with imperfect means and models. Towards the close of the reign of Henry VIII. were produced the Songs and Sonnettes of the friends Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyat ; and Sackville wrote the Induc- tion to the Mirrour for Magistrates in the last year of Mary. Scotland seems to have been about a century later than England in arriving at the stage of literary culture which Chaucer and his contemporaries illustrate. Several poets of no mean order arose in that country during the period now in question. Of some of these, namely, Dunbar, Gawain Douglas, Lyndsay, and Henryson, we shall presently have to make par- ticular mention. 4. John Hardyng was in early life an esquire to Harry Percy, com- monly called Hotspur. After seeing his lord fall on the field of Shrews- bury, he took service with Sir Robert Umfravile, and remained till his death a dependant on that family. He wrote in that common seven-line stanza which we have called the ' Chaucerian heptastich ' a Chronicle of Britain, which comes down to 1462, ending with an address to Edward IV. urging him to be merciful to the Lancastrians, and to make just allowance for previous circumstances. John Shirley, who belongs to the end of the reign of Henry VI., was a great collector of the poems of Chaucer and Lydgate, besides being himself a diligent translator. The MS. Ashm. 59 in the Bodleian Library represents a part of his compilations. Benedict Burgh, whom we have met with already (I. 72), rose to be a prebendary of St. Paul's; about 1480 he translated Cato's Morals (the full title of which is DisticJia de Moribus ad filium) into the Chaucerian heptastich, or ' rime royal.' This popular work, of which Caxton also printed a version, was written by an unknown author in the fourth or fifth century after Christ. (Warton, III.) 148 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. II. 5. Romance in one shape or other furnished the educated , classes with intellectual amusement throughout the fifteenth as in the fourteenth century. The prose romance of the Saint Graal (see Prel. Ch. II. 68) was translated into English verse by Henry Lonelich in the middle of the fifteenth century ; his version along with the original was edited by Dr. Furnivall in 1861 for the Koxburghe Club. Perhaps it was the success of this translation which led Sir Thomas Malory, about 1470, to produce in English prose the remainder of the romances con- nected with the Saint Graal, under the title of The Historie of King Arthur and his Noble Knights of the Hound Table. He made his compilation ' out of certeyn bookes of Frensshe,' namely, the prose romances of Merlin, Lancelot, Tristan, the Queste du Saint Graal, and the Mort Artur. Caxton printed Malory's work in 1485. It has in later times been frequently edited, e.g. by Southey in 1817, by Mr. T. Wright in 1858, and by Mr. Conybeare in 1868. 6. In spite of this prevalent taste for romance, we have seen that a great mind like Chaucer's could abandon a track of thought and invention which was leading farther and farther away from reality, and paint the world which he saw before him ; nor did he spare ridicule for the hackneyed style of the romancist, as we saw in Sir Thopas. Stephen Hawes, author of the Pastime of Pleasure, had not enough originality and substance in him to follow such an example. Still, writing for a refined audience (he was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII.), he could see that if battles and knight-errantry and the feats of chivalry were to continue to please, they must be justi- fied by a new treatment. Scenes, the like of which are going on all round us, need no excuse for painting; their interest is immediate ; they come home, as Lord Bacon says, ' to our business and bosoms.' But when society is no longer in a state of war, when adventures are fewer and tamer, then, if narratives of strife delight us still, the poet is tempted to in- troduce a hidden meaning into his representations, and, under the forms of material war, to paint the eternal conflict that rages between the faculties and the desires of the human mind. Thus arises Allegory, a style which at once gratifies the poet with the sense of having come to something more profound and real than if he had remained among externals, and flatters the intelligence of his readers in the same proportion. Hawes, therefore, allegorises ; and while he writes of giants with three heads, and enchanted castles, and imprisoned damsels, and em- ploys all the gorgeous imagery of old romance, he offers to the cultivated and intellectual few a feast of reason ; he invites them 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 149 to trace, under all the exciting adventures of his hero, the pro- gress of a mind subjected to a scientific course of education. The substance of the poem under consideration is briefly this. Grand Amour, walking in a meadow, meets with Fame, from whom he receives a ' swete report ' of the beauty and excellence of the fayre lady, La Bell Pucell, who dwells in the Tower of Musike. He is eager to see her ; but first he is directed to the Tower of Doctrine, where, and in dependent towers, he is duly instructed in the ' seven sciences,' which are simply the old Trivium and Quadrivium of the schools, Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. In the course of his indoctrination, he naturally, therefore, visits the Tower of Musike, and meets La Bell Pucell. She grants him her love ; but her friends, she tells him, will soon take her home to her palace in a distant land, where she will be closely guarded by giants and dragons ; he, on his part, must complete his education in the Tower of Chivalry, if he hopes to force his way through all obstacles to her feet. Their parting is thus prettily described : ' Forth must I [La Pucell] sayle without longer delaye. It is full see ; my friendes will come soone ; Therefore I praye you to go hence your waye. It draweth fast now towarde the none.' ' Madame,' quod I [Grand Amour], 'your pleasure shall be done.' Wyth wofull herte and grete syghes, ofte I kyssed her lyppes, that were swete and softe. She unto me nor I to her colde speke, And as of that it was no grete wondre, Our hertes swelled as that they would breke, The fyre of love was so sore kept under. Whan I from her should depart asundre, Wyth her fayre head she dyd lowe enclyne, And in lykewise so dyd I with myne. Grand Amour duly visits the Tower of Chivalry, and is there trained in martial accomplishments and knightly virtues ; he is then dubbed a knight by king Melyzyus, and proceeds on his adventurous journey in quest of La Bell Pucell. This part of the poem much resembles romances of the old simple type, such for instance as those which are given in Ellis's Specimens. The last and decisive combat which the hero has to sustain is with the Monster of the Seven Metals, a dragon named Privy Malice. He runs the creature through after a terrific conflict, and then Ryght ther wythall the dragon to-brast, And out ther flew, ryght blacke and tedyous, 150 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. II. A foule Ethyope, which such smoke did cast, That all ye ylond was full tenebrous ; It thundered loude wyth clappes tempestious, Then all the ladyes were full sore adred, They thought none other but that I was ded. But the air clears presently, and he sees his lady's castle. All difficulties being now overcome, Grand Amour marries La Bell Pucell. Here the poem might have been expected to end ; but it is not so. After many years of consummate happiness, Grand Amour is one morning startled by the entrance of an unknown guest, who tells him that his name is Age. He introduces two companions, Policy and Avarice, whose society the hero assiduously frequents, till stopped by the visit of Death. Then come Confession, Contrition, and Satisfaction, and he dies. Even this is not all : Out of my body my soul then it went To Purgatory, for to be purified, That after that it might be glorified. His name and memory are enrolled by Fame for perpetual honour with those of the * nine worthies/ of whom three are of the pagan order of things, Hector, Alexander, and Caesar, three of the Jewish, Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus, and three of the Christian, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey de Bouillon. Of the exceeding crudity of the versification of this poem, it is difficult to form a just idea, except by reading a number of pages in succession. Of the degree in which these minions of a court, the affected euphuists of an earlier generation than that of Lyly, would have Latinized our language could they have had their way, a conception may more easily be gained. The fine old English words which abound in Chaucer, the loss of many of which in the modern language is deeply to be re- gretted, do not appear in Hawes ; instead of them we are treated to hundreds of such exquisite phrases as are found in the following stanza : o Her redolente wordes of swete influence, Degouted vapoure moost aromatyke, And made conversyon of my complacence ; Her depured and her lusty rhetoryke My courage reformed that was so lunatyke, My sorowe defeted and my mynde did modefy, And my dolourous herte began to pacyfy. Hawes must have died after the year 1509, since we have among his poems a Coronation ode celebrating the accession of Henry VIII. 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 151 6a. Wynkyn de Worde printed at Westminster, in 1496, a collection of treatises on Hawking, Hunting, Fishing, and Heraldry, with several short pieces. As the writer of the treatise on Hunting (which is in verse, and begins Where so ever ye fare, by fryth or by fell, My dere childe, take hede how Trystam doo you telle ) he names ' Dame Julyans Bernes.' For the other treatises he names no authors, and certainly does not appear to think that the Dame wrote them also. But if we may trust a note inserted by W. Burton (who wrote a history of Leicestershire early in the seventeenth century), in his copy of Wynkyn's publication, the book had been printed before, in 1486, at the monastery of St. Alban's, and was by 'Julian Berners,' of the ancient Hertfordshire family of that name, prioress of the monastery of Sopwell near St. Alban's. Bale, who seems to know nothing about her personal history, says that she flourished about 1460 ; he calls her ' Juliana Barnes.' Dame Berners tells her readers that there are four 'bestis of venere,' the hart, the hare, the boar, and the wolf; and five 'bestis of enchace,' the buck, the doe, the fox, the martin, and the wild roe ; all other beasts are to be called 'rascall.' 7. Alexander Barclay, a priest, chaplain to the college of St. Mary Ottery in Devonshire, translated in 1508, 'out of Laten, Frenche, and Doche,' to use his own words, Sebastian Brandt's then widely popular poem, the ' Ship of Fools.' This work has a purpose, partly satirical, partly didactic, hut chiefly the latter ; it is, in fact, a sermon in many heads on the cor- rupt manners of the age, and may he said to stand in nearly the same relation to ordinary sermons as that in which the Pro- verbs stand to the books of the Prophets. Brandt was an emi- nent professor and jurisconsult of Strasburg, who died in 1520. He composed the poem originally in German, and commenced to translate it into Latin ; this task, however, he soon trans- ferred to his disciple Locher, who completed it, and dedicated the translation to his master, in 1497, giving it the title of ' Xarragonia,' which seems to be a barbarous compound, made up of Narr t the German for fool, and the Greek verb ays/v, to conduct. A French version appeared about the same time, under the title of 'La Nef des Folz du Monde.' From these three versions Barclay compiled his English ' Ship of Fools,' printed by Pynson, side by side with Locher's Latin, in 1509. His rendering is by no means literal, and considerably more diffuse than the original ; the additions being often charac- terised by much spirit and graphic power. Most of the work is, like the Pastime of Pleasure, in the Chaucerian heptastich, but towards the end he introduces a new octave stanza, with three rimes, thus arranged, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3. The prose prologue of Brandt and Locher is freely rendered 152 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. II. in verse by Barclay. It is to the effect that poetry has always had as its chief office to commend virtue and reprove vice, and that, inasmuch as this present age abounded in vice and folly of every kind, Brandt, imitating the example of Dante and Petrarch, who wrote in their own mother tongue, the ' lingua Hetrusca,' had undertaken to lash the crimes and foibles of mankind in vernacular verse. The main body of the work contains the descriptions of one hundred Fools, and several supplemental cantos are added, one of which is headed * the Uny versall Shypp,' as containing all fools hitherto unspecified. The opening is spirited ; it is headed 'BARCLAY THE TRANSLATOUB TO THE FOLKS.' To shypp, galantes ! the se is at the ful ; The wynde us calleth ; our sayles ar displayed. Wher may we best ary ve ? at Lyn, or els at Hulle ? To us may no haven in Englonde be denayd. Why tary we? the anchors are up wayed ; If any corde or cabyl us hurt, let, outner hynder, Let slyp the ende, or els hewe it sonder. Henry Bradshaw, a monk of St. Werburgh's Abbey at Chester, is the author of a metrical Lyfe of Saynt Werburge, a Mercian princess of the seventh century, whose relics were translated to Chester in the time of Alfred for fear of the Danes. The poem was printed by'Pinson in 1521. It is in twelve-syllable stanzas a cumbrous unwieldy metre ; the following is a specimen : To all auncient poetes, litel boke, submitte the, Whilome flouring in eloquence facundious ; And to all other whiche present nowe be, Fyrst to maister Chaucer, and Lydgate sentencious, Also to preignaunt Barkley, nowe beyng religious, To inventive Skelton and poet laureate, Praye them all of pardon both erly and late. 8. John Skelton, a secular priest, studied at both univer- sities, and had a high reputation for scholarship in the early part of the sixteenth century. It is certain that his Latin verses are much superior to his serious attempts in English. A long rambling elegy in the seven-line stanza on Henry, fourth Earl of Northumberland, murdered in 1489, will be found in Percy. The versification is even worse than that of Hawes. In Skel- ton's satires there are a naturalness and a humour which make them still readable. Two of these, entitled Speke, Parrot, and Why come ye not to Court, contain vigorous but coarse attacks on Cardinal Wolsey, to escape from whose wrath Skelton had to take sanctuary at Westminster, and afterwards was protected by Bishop Islip till his death in 1529. He is particularly fond 1450 1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 153 of short six-syllable lines, which some have named from him * Skeltonical verse.' Here is a short specimen, taken from Phyllyp Sparrowe, a strange rambling elegy upon a favourite sparrow, belonging to a nun, which had been killed by a cat : cat of carlyshe kinde, The fynde was in thy mynde When thou my byrde untwynde ! 1 wold thou haddest ben blynde ? The leopardes sauvage, The lyons in theyr rage, Myght catche the in theyr pawes, And gnawe the" in theyr jawes ! The serpentes of Lybany Myght stynge th^ venymously ! The dragones with their tongues Myght poison thy ly ver and longes ! The mantycors of the montaynes Myght fede them on thy braynes ! &c. Skelton is also the author of a moral play, called Magnyfycence, an inane production of between two and three thousand lines, in the same rough * Saturnian ' metre in which, as we shall see, the first known English comedy, by Udall, was composed. There is no division into acts, only into scenes ; the characters are mere abstractions, such as Felycyte, Liberte, Measure, Fansy, Foly, &c. His comedy of Achademios, enumerated by himself among his works in the Garland of Laurell, appears to have perished ; should it ever come to light, it might possibly take from Ralph Roister Doister the distinction of being the earliest English comedy. 1 The beautiful ballad of the * Kotbrowne Mayd,' in praise of woman's constancy, first appeared about 1502, in a miscellany called Arnold's Chronicle. In versification it resembles a poem by Sir Thomas More, called * A rnery jest about a serjeant ; ' see his ' Works,' 1557. 9. Far above any hitherto named rose the poetic genius of Surrey. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, son of the victor of Flodden, was born about the year 1516. At the age of sixteen he was contracted in marriage to the Lady Frances Vere. His Geraldine, to whom so many of his sonnets are addressed, was a daughter of the Earl of Kildare. She slighted his passion ; and the rejected lover carried the fiery ardour of his spirit into the scenes of war and diplomacy. Having committed some errors in the conduct of the campaign in France in 1546, he was thrown into prison by order of the * jealous ruthless tyrant ' 2 1 See Skelton's works, carefully edited by Mr. Dyce, 1843. 2 Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto vi 154 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. II. who then sat on the throne, brought to trial on a trumpery charge of high treason, and beheaded in January 1547, a few days before Henry's death. His Songes and Sonnettes, together with those of Wyat and others, were first published in 1557. His translation of the second and fourth books of the zEneid is the earliest specimen of blank verse in the language. Sir Thomas Wyat the elder, a native of Kent, was much employed by Henry VIII. on diplomatic missions, and over- exertion in one of these occasioned his early death in 1541. The improvement in grace and polish of style which distin- guishes Surrey and Wyat in comparison with their predeces- sors was plainly due to Italian influences. The very term ' sonnet,' by them first introduced, is taken from the Italian 1 sonetto.' Puttenham, in his Art of Poesie (1589), says of them, that \having travelled into Italie, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesie, as novises newly crept out of the school of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesie from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be sayd the first reformers of our English metre and style.' He reputes them for 'the chief lanternes of light ' ^o all subsequent English poets. ' Their conceits were lofty, their style stately, their conveyance cleanly, their termes proper, their metre sweet and well-proportioned ; in all imi- tating very naturally and studiously their master, Francis Petrarch.' But this praise is too unqualified. In reproducing indeed, in his version of the ^Eneid, the Virgilian dignity, and some- thing of his majesty, Surrey is not unsuccessful. But the music, the finish, the pervading impress of perfection, these are all wanting. Of his famous love poems in honour of Geraldine, nine are written in a metre so uncouth (alter- nate twelve and fourteen syllable lines) that it would spoil the effect of far better matter ; and the unchanging querulous whine which characterises the whole series renders it tedious reading. In truth, notwithstanding the encomiums which Dr. Nott lavished on his favourite author, the gems in Surrey are but few, and may be counted on one's fingers. The sonnets ' Set me whereas ' l and ' The sote season,' the beautiful stanzas commencing ' Give place ye lovers,' the poem that begins ' When raging love,' and the fine elegy on his friend Wyat, nearly exhaust the list. Of the poems of Wyat a large proportion are translated or imitated from the Italian, j They relate almost entirely to 1 See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 58. 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 155 love, and sometimes attain to a polish and a grace which Eng- lish verse had not before exhibited. Of this the reader may in some degree judge from the passage quoted farther on. 1 10. To this period rather than to the next, since a portion of it was in W type in the year 1555, belongs the extensive poetical work meritorious in many ways, but inadequate in point of execution to the vastness of / the design entitled the Myrroure for Magistrates. Lydgate's Falls of Princes, translated from Boccaccio, was reprinted in 1554, and well received by the public. The printer desired that the work should be continued from the date at which Boccaccio left off, and devoted to the ' tragical histories ' of famous Englishmen exclusively. William Baldwin agreed, if sufficiently aided by other writers, to undertake the work. Owing to difficulties connected with the censorship, the book did not appear till 1559 ; in this its primitive shape it contained nineteen legends, of which twelve were by Baldwin himself, the rest being written by his friends, Ferrers, Phaier, Chaloner, and others. The first legend was that of Tressilian, one of Richard II. 's judges, executed by Gloucester's faction in 1388. The metre is the Chaucerian heptastich. Copious moralising is the leading characteristic of the whole work ; this note was just suited to the serious, self-inspecting, somewhat melancholy temper of the English mind ; and numerous redactions of the poem, the latest of which appeared in 1610, attest its remarkable popularity. Sackville's beautiful Induction, with the legend of the Duke of Buckingham who was beheaded in 1483, first appeared in the edition of 1563. The original design, which was merely to continue Boccaccio, was soon departed from ; and a number of legends were added, which carried back this 'history teaching by biography' to the fabulous age of the British kings. One great redaction and re- arrangement was effected by John Higgins in his edition of 1587 ; another by Richard Niccols in the crowning edition of 1610. In this last no fewer than ninety legends are contained ; among which one the finest perhaps in the whole work is the legend of Thomas Cromwell by Michael Drayton. 2 It contains a remarkably enlightened appreciation of the secondary causes which led to the sudden and tremendous fall of the ancient Church in England. 11. The earliest mention of a poet laureate eo nomine, occurs in the reign of Edward IV., by whom John Kaye was appointed to that office. 3 We read of a king's versifier (versi- ficator) as far back as 1251. The change of title admits of a probable explanation. The solemn crowning of Petrarch on the Capitol, in the year 1341, made a profound sensation through all literary circles in Europe. Chaucer, as we have seen, distinguishes Petrarch as ' the laureat poete.' In the next century we find the dignity of poeta laureatus forming one of the recognised degrees at our universities, and conferred upon proof being given by the candidate of proficiency in grammar, rhetoric, and versification. It is impossible not to connect this practice of laureation with the world-famous tribute 1 See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 58. 2 See Mr. Haslewood's edition of Tlie Mirrour for Magistrates^ 1815. s Hazlitt's Johnson's Lives, article Kaye. 1 56 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. II. rendered by the Romans to the genius of Petrarch. After the institution of the degree, it is easy to understand that the king would select his poet among the poetce laureati, and that the modest title of versificator would be dropped. Scottish Poets : Henryson ; Blind Harry; Dunbar; Gawain Douglas ; Lyndsay. 12. The present work does not pretend to trace the history of Scottish poetry ; but, in the dearth of genius in England during this period, the rise of several admirable poets in the sister country demands our attention. The earliest of these, Robert Henryson, appears to have died about the end of the fifteenth century. His longest poem, the Testament of Faire Creseyde, a sort of supplement to Chaucer's Troilus and Cry- seyde, was printed by Urry, in his edition of that poet. The pastoral, called Robin and Malcyne, is given in Percy's Reliqiies. The pith of the story is exactly that which we find in Burns' Duncan Gray, only that in Henryson's poem the parts are re- versed ; it is the lady who first makes love in vain, and then growing indifferent, is vainly wooed by the shepherd, who has repented of his coldness. The Abbey Walk is a beautiful poem of reflection, the moral of which is, the duty and wisdom of submitting to the will of God in all things. 13. At the beginning of this period, or about 1460, Blind Harry, or Harry the Minstrel, produced his poem on the adven- tures of Wallace. Considered as the composition of a blind man, The Wallace is a remarkable production. Considered as a work of art, a more execrable poem perhaps was never com- posed. Yet national resentment and partiality have made the Scotch, from the fifteenth century down to the present time, delight in this tissue of lies and nonsense ; a modernised ver- sion of it was a horn-book among the peasantry in the last century; Scottish critics, one and all, speak of its poetical beauties ; and even one or two English writers, ' carried away by their dissimulation,' have professed to find much in it to admire. It is written in the heroic riming couplet, and pro- fesses to be founded on a Latin chronicle by John Blair, a contemporary of Wallace ; but as no such chronicle exists, or is anywhere alluded to as existing, it is probable that the whole story is a pure invention of the minstrel's. 14. William Dunbar, the greatest of the old Scottish poets, was a native of East Lothian, and born about the middle of the fifteenth century. He studied at the University of St. Andrews, perhaps also at Oxford. In early life he entered the novitiate 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 157 of the Franciscan order, and preached, chiefly in order to sell indulgences, in many parts of England, and even in Picardy ; but he does not appear ever to have taken the vows. James IV. attached him by many favours to his person and court, where we have certain evidence of his having lived from 1500 to 1513, the date of Flodden. After that fatal day, on which his royal patron perished, his name vanishes from the Scottish records, and it is merely a loose conjecture which assigns his death to about the year 1520. Of Dunbar's poems, none of which are of any great length, the most perfect is The Thistle and the Rose, 1 written in 1503 to commemorate the nuptials of James IV. and Margaret, daughter of Henry VII. The metre is the Chaucerian hepta- stich. The versification is most musical, superior to that of any poet before Spenser except Chaucer, and better than much of his. The influence, both direct and indirect, of the father of our poetry, is visible, not in this poem alone, but through- out the works of the school of writers now under consideration. The poet, according to the approved mediaeval usage, falls asleep and has a dream, in which May the ' faire f rische May ' in which Chaucer so delighted appears to him, and commands him to attend her into a garden and do homage to the flowers, the birds, and the sun. Nature is then introduced, and com- mands that the progress of the spring shall no longer be checked by ungenial weather. Neptune and ^Eolus give the necessary orders. Then Nature, by her messengers, summons all organ- ised beings before her, the beasts by the roe, the birds by the swallow, the flowers by the yarrow. The Lion is crowned king of the beasts, the Eagle of the birds, and the Thistle of the flowers. The Rose, the type of beauty, is wedded to the Thistle, the type of strength, who is commanded well to cherish and guard his Rose. Such is an outline of the plot of this graceful poem. ' The design of the Golden Terge ' another allegoric poem ' is to show the gradual and imperceptible influence of love when too far indulged over reason.' 2 This poem is in a curious nine-line stanza, having only two rimes. But Dunbar excelled also in comic and satirical composition. The Flyting of Dun- bar and Kennedy is a wit-combat (though perhaps the word ' slanging-match ' would better describe it) between the poet and his friend Kennedy. The Freiris of Berwick is a tale, much of the same kind as the Reve's Tale of Chaucer, only less witty. There is no early evidence entitling us to ascribe it to Dunbar: this was merely a conjecture of Pinkerton's, which 1 See Critical Section, ch. I. Allegories. 2 Warton. 158 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. II. Mr. Paterson, a recent editor of Dunbar's poems, rightly regards as more than doubtful. The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins is another satirical production, the humour, dash, and broad Scotch of which remind one of Burns. The metre is that of Chaucer's Sir Thopas. Some Highlanders are introduced at the end and receive very disrespectful mention : Thae turmagantis 1 with tag and tatter Full loud in Ersche [Erse] begout to clatter, And rovvp lyk revin and ruke. 2 The devil sa devit 3 was with thair yell That in the deepest pit of hell He smorit them with smoke. Among Dunbar's shorter pieces there is none more in- teresting than his * Lament for the Makaris.' (' Makar' is the literal translation of the Greek word for 'poet.') As Words- worth, in those beautiful verses called ' An Extempore Effusion upon the death of James Hogg,' laments for his brother poets, among whom death had been unusually busy, so Dunbar, in the poem before us (written in 1507), avows that when he counts up the poets, his countrymen, who have" recently passed away, he is troubled by the fear of death, 'timor mortis conturbat me.' These words are the burden of each stanza : No stait in erd heir standis sicker ; As with the wynd wavis the wickir, So wavis this warldis vanite ; Timor Mortis conturbat me. After complaining that death has reft away Chaucer, Lydgate, and Gower, he adds : The gude Schir Hew of Eglintoun, Etrik, Heryot, and Wintoun, He has tane out of this cuntre" ; Timor Mortis conturbat me. Dunbar proceeds to name a number of Scottish authors de- ceased, of most of whom very little is known. Among them are, Clerk of Tranent, ' that maid the aunteirs [adventures] of Gawayne,' Sir Gilbert Hay, Barbour, Stobo, and Quintin Schaw. Kennedy, his old rival, was dying ; as for himself, he feels that he has not long to live. 15. Gawain Douglas, sprung from a noble family, studied at the University of Paris, and rose to be bishop of Dunkeld. After Flodden Field, the regent Albany drove him from Scot- 1 Ptarmigan ; to a covey of which he compares the Highlanders. 2 Croaked like raven and rook. a Deafened. 1450-155S. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 159 land. Coming into England, he was hospitably received by Henry, who allowed him a liberal pension. He died in London of the plague, in 1521. He is chiefly known for a translation of the ^Eneid into heroic verse, which is the earliest English version on record, having been published in 1513. The pro- logues prefixed to the several books have some poetic beauty ; and the language presents little more difficulty than that of Chaucer. A passage in one of these prologues is subjoined as a specimen ; it is part of an address to the sun : Welcurn the birdis beild l upon the brere, Welcuin maister and reulare of the yere, Welcum walefare of husbandis at the plewis, Welcura reparare of woddis, treis, and bewis. 3 Welcum depaynter of the blomyt medis, Welcum the lyffe of everything that spredis. Welcuin storare 3 of all kynde bestial, Welcum be thy bricht bemes gladand al. 16. Sir David Lyndsay was a satirist of great power and boldness* He is the Jean de Meung of the sixteenth century ; but, as a layman and a knight, he levels his satire with even greater directness and impartiality than that extraordinary ecclesiastic. In his allegorical satire entitled The Dreme, which is probably the earliest of his works, the poet is con- ducted by Remembrance, first -to the infernal regions, which he finds peopled with churchmen of every grade, then to Pur- gatory, then through the ' three elements/ to the seven planets in their successive spheres, then beyond them to the empyrean and the celestial abodes. The poetical topography is without doubt borrowed from Dante. He is then trans- ported back to earth, and visits Paradise ; whence, by a ' very rapid transition,' as Warton calls it, he is taken to Scotland, where he meets * Johue the comounweill,' who treats him to a long general satire on the corrupt state of that kingdom. After this the poet is in the usual manner brought back to the cave by the seaside, where he falls asleep, and wakes up from his dream. The metre is the Chaucerian heptastich. There is prefixed to the poem an exhortation in ten stanzas, addressed to King James V., in which advice and warning are con- veyed with unceremonious plainness. In 1535, his 'morality,' named Ane Satyr e of the TJirie Estaits, was acted before the Scottish court ; it took nine hours in the representation. It is described by Professor Nichol as a ' well-sustained invective against the follies and vices of the time, and as being the first Shelter. 2 Boughs. 3 Restorer. 160 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEEATUKE. CHAP. II. approach to a regular dramatic composition in Scottish litera- ture.' l Two years afterwards he composed a lament on the untimely death of Magdalene, the first wife of James V., under the title of ' The Deploratioun of the Deith of Quene Magda- lene.' She was a French princess, and Lyndsay descants with feeling and good taste on the universal joy which the celebra- tion of the marriage at Paris had spread at the time among the people of both nations : Bot at his mariage maid upon the morne, Sic solace and solempnizatioun Was never sene afore, sen Christ was borne, Nor to Scotland sic consolatioun ! There selit was the confirmatioun Of the weill kepit ancient alliance Maid betwix Scotland and the realme of France. Among the shorter pieces, the ' Testament of the Papyngo ' is well known ; under the form of the dying directions of a favourite parrot, addressed to the king, a bitter attack is made on the Catholic clergy. * Kittes Confessioun' (1541) is a coarse burlesque of the sacrament of Penance. That in which Chaucer could see so much beauty, and on the divisions and applications of which he loved to discourse with the serious minuteness of a theologian, appears purely evil and corrupt to the ruder northern intellect and impatient puritanism of Lyndsay. His Historic of the Squyer William Meldrum (1550) is an attempt to 'weave into the form of a metrical romance the career and exploits of a contemporary Scotch laird.' 2 The longest and latest of Lyndsay's poems is the Dialog concerning the Monarch^ which was written in 1553, about five years before his death. It extends to some 6000 lines, and is partly in seven-line, partly in eight-line stanzas. After ( describing with great tediousness the rise and fall of the four i monarchies mentioned by the prophet Daniel, the Assyrian, the Persian, the Greek, and the Koman, he 'prophesies the ' overthrow of the fifth and worst monarchy of all, the great tyranny of modern times, that of the Church. This gives him an opportunity of once more inveighing against . . . the court of Eome, and again calling aloud for a general reformation.' Lyndsay's incessant attacks on the Scottish clergy, the state of which at that time unfortunately afforded much ground for them, are said to have hastened the religious war in Scotland. 1 Preface to The Minor Poems of Lindsay, E. E. T. S. 2 Prof. Nichol. 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 161 The famous ballad, 'Christis Kirk on the Grene,' was assigned by Bannatyne, who made a collection of Scottish poetry in 1568, to James I. of Scotland (ante, I., 74). Dempster, writing in 1627, names James V. as the author. The matter has been keenly debated ; for my own part I think the earlier date inadmissible ; the language, diction, and style all seem to me to point to a writer somewhat later in date than Dunbar. The ballad, which contains twenty-two stanzas, opens thus : Was nevir in Scotland hard nor sene Sic dancing and deray, Nawthir at Falkland on the grene, Nor Pebills at the play, As was of wowers, as I wene, At Chrysts Kirk on a day ; Thair came our Kitties washen clene In new kirtills of gray, Full gay, At Chrysts Kirk of the grene that day. 17. The language of all these Scottish writers in theii serious compositions closely resembles the English of their contemporaries south of the Tweed ; the chief difference con- sisting in certain dialectic peculiarities, such as the use of ' quh ' for ' wh,' and of ' it ' and ' and ' for * ed ' and ' ing ' in the terminations of the past and present participles. But in proportion as they resort to comic expression, and attach their satire to particular places or persons, their language becomes less English and slides into the rough vernacular of their ordinary speech. Exactly the same thing is observable in Burns' poetry. Learning: Grocyn, Linacre, Colet, More; State of the Universities. 18. The fifteenth century was, as we have said, pre-eminently an age of accumulation, assimilation, and preparation. The first two-thirds of the sixteenth century fall under the same general description. England had to bring herself up to the intellectual level of the Continent, and to master the trea- sures of literature and philosophy which the revival and diffu- sion of Greek, and partly of Roman learning, had placed within her reach, before her writers could attempt to rival the fame of the great ancients. There is much interest in tracing in detail the numerous minute steps and individual acts which helped on this process. Many such are related by Wood in his Athence Oxonienses. Thus we are told that the first man who publicly taught Greek at Oxford was William Grocyn. Stapleton, a Roman Catholic writer of the age of Elizabeth, says, 'Recens tune ex Italia venerat Grocinus, qui primus in L 162 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEEATUEE. CHAP. II. ea setate Grsecas literas in Angliam invexerat, Oxoniique pub- lice professus fuerat.' Of course Grocyn had to go abroad to get this new learning. Born about 1450, and educated at Oxford, he travelled on the Continent about the year 1488, and studied both at Eome and Florence. Greek learning flourished then at Florence more than at any place in Europe, owing to the fact that Lorenzo de' Medici had eagerly welcomed to his court many illustrious and learned refugees, who, subse- quently to the fall of Constantinople, had been forced to seek shelter from the violence and intolerance of the Mussulmans in Western Europe. One of these learned Byzantines, Demetrius Chalcocondyles, together with the Italian Angelo Politian, afforded to Grocyn by their public instructions those oppor- tunities which he had left his country to search for, of pene- trating into the sanctuary of classical antiquity, and drinking in at the fountain-head the inspirations of a national genius, whose glories nc lapse of time can obscure. Gibbon, 1 with his usual fulness of learning and wonderful mastery of style, has thus sketched the features of this eventful time : 19. ' The genius and education of Lorenzo rendered him not only a patron, but a judge and candidate in the literary race. In his palace, distress was entitled to relief, and merit to reward; his leisure hours were delightfully spent in the Platonic academy; he encouraged the emulation of Demetrius Chalcocondyles and Angelo Politian ; and his active missionary, Janus Lascaris, returned from the East with a treasure of two hundred manuscripts, four score of which were as yet unknown in the libraries of Europe. The rest of Italy was animated by a similar spirit, and the progress of the nation repaid the liberality of her princes. The Latins held the exclusive pro- perty of their own literature, and these disciples of Greece were soon capable of transmitting and improving the lessons which they had imbibed. After a short succession of foreign teachers, the tide of emigration subsided, but the language of Constantinople was spread beyond the Alps ; and the natives of France, Germany, and England imparted to their country- men the sacred fire which they had kindled in the schools of Florence and Kome.' After noticing the spirit of imitation which long prevailed, he continues : * Genius may anticipate the season of maturity ; but in the education of a people, as in that of an individual, memory must be exercised before the powers of reason and fancy can be expanded ; nor may the artist hope to equal or surpass, till he has learned to imitate, the works of his predecessors.' 1 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. Ixvi. 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 163 20. But to return to Grocyn, whose visit to Florence occa- sioned this quotation. When settled in Oxford again, about the year 1490, he opened his budget, and taught Greek to all comers. He lectured afterwards in St. Paul's on the Hier- archies of Dionysius, ascribing them at first to the Areopagite, but retracting that opinion publicly on becoming convinced that it was an error. He preferred Aristotle to Plato, calling the first roXu^a^, a man of great knowledge, the second croXu^ydJj, a man of many words. 1 21. Thomas Linacre, the celebrated physician, was in residence and giving lectures at Oxford about the same time. He, too, had studied in Italy, chiefly at Florence and Rome, and had become an accomplished Greek scholar ; it is to him that we owe the first version of any Greek author made by an Englishman. This was a Latin translation published in 1499 of the Sphcera of Proclus, an astronomical treatise. Linacre also wrote a sort of Latin grammar, which he entitled DC Emendata Structura Latini Sermonis. Though, from a want of conciseness and of proper arrangement, this grammar could never have been very available as a primer, it shows great insight into the structure of the Latin tongue. A new edition of it appeared in 1543, for which Melanchthon wrote a preface, earnestly re- commending the book for the teaching of youth, if only a brief compendium of the rules of grammar had been mastered previously. Linacre also trans- lated into Latin the works of the old Greek physician Galen, and was the leading spirit in the knot of enlightened men who founded the College of Physicians (1518). 22. Another active patron of the new learning was Dean Colet, the founder of St. Paul's School, and the friend of Erasmus. His life was well written in the last century by Dr. Samuel Knight, a prebendary of Ely. The name Colet is probably a corruption of 'acolyte.' The engraving at the beginning of this biography shows us a spare figure in a dark gown and cassock, with a birretta on the head, bare neck, no beard or whiskers, large dark eyes, and a glance expressive of suppressed enthusiasm and strongly guarded self-control. He was born about the year 1466. When Erasmus visited Oxford in 1498, Colet, who had travelled before this, and made the acquaintance of the leading scholars in France and Italy, was in residence at Magdalen College. In a letter from the great scholar to his friend Sixtinus may be read a graphic account of a banquet or convivium, at which he, Colet, Prior Charnock, and other Oxford men were assembled one day, when they fell into a warm discussion on the 'sin of Cain.' 'Colet alone,' says Erasmus, ' was more than a match for us all ; he seemed to be beside himself with a kind of sacred frenzy ; the expres- 1 See his letter to Linacre, printed in the preface to the translation by the latter of the Sphcera of Proclus. 1 64 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, CHAP. II. sion of sublimity and majesty which his countenance wore was almost superhuman. Voice, eyes, look, aspect, all seemed to become grander and to suffer a transformation, " majorque videri, afflatus est numine quando." ' In his Italian travels Colet had formed the acquaintance of some of the distinguished men who at that time, having Florence as their centre, were zealously studying and propagating the philosophy of Plato. The chiefs of this school were Pico of Mirandola and Marsilius Ficinus. It was probably these associations that led Colet to the study of the works of the supposed Dionysius the Areopagite. This author, long believed to be the very Dionysius whom St. Paul converted, but about whom now the only controversy among critics is whether he shall be placed in the third century or in the fifth, wrote a book on the Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hier- archies, in which he traces out a regular and minute corre- spondence between the order of the church on earth and that which prevails among the heavenly spirits. On this book Colet wrote a treatise, which has been lately disentombed from MS., and edited with care and ability by one of the masters of the school which he founded, Mr. Lupton. This work he probably wrote about the year 1500. The editor says : ' Following his author faithfully in the main, both in the arrangement of his subject, and in his conclusions and general tone of thought, Colet pauses at times to treat more fully of some passing topic than is done in the original. Occasionally, too, he passes over a chapter of the Hierarchies altogether, that he may stay the longer at some halting-place of greater importance.' Sometimes he breaks forth into an indignant sentence, suggested by some- thing in his author, against the corruption and worldliness which had invaded the Church and held their ground so stub- bornly, even in the highest places. But the work by which Colet deserved best of learning was the foundation and organisation of St. Paul's School He com- menced his preparations in 1508, and the school was opened in 1512. All his patrimony and it was not small, for he was the son of a wealthy knight who had been twice Lord Mayor of London was given up to the school. He built it in St. Paul's Churchyard, on the site which it still occupies. An image of the child Jesus, to whom the school was dedicated, was placed over the raised seat of the head-master, and before this the scholars were to say a prayer, composed by Colet himself, on entering and on leaving school. The estates with which it was endowed, he, with much judgment, vested, not in any eccle- siastical corporation (in which case they would have been confis- cated at the Reformation and lost), but in the Mercers' Company 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 165 of London, to which his father had belonged. For his first head-master he appointed William Lilye, formerly a demye of Magdalen College, whom in the course of his roving life Colet had met at Rome, and discerned to be the man that he wanted. For his school Colet wrote in Latin a short treatise on the Latin syntax, De Constructione octo partium Orationis (Pynson, 1513). But this was probably soon superseded by the Latin grammar prepared by Lilye, under the name of Brevissima Institutio, sen Ratio Grammatices cognoscendce. This is the well-known ' Lilly's Grammar,' which, down to a comparatively recent period, was used in all our public schools, and is not even yet discarded at St. Paul's School. 23. Exegetical theology was first introduced into England by Dean Colet. During the Middle Ages the attractions of metaphysics and dialectic had caused the track of biblical in- terpretation, which had been cultivated so diligently and success- fully by many of the Fathers, to be almost forsaken. Now, the scholastic methods and inquiries being out of favour, the interest in the interpretation of Scripture revived. The energetic dean of St. Paul's lectured regularly at Oxford, and afterwards in London, on the Pauline epistles. These lectures are unfor- tunately lost ; and the only materials for judging of Colet as a theologian apart from the letter of Erasmus, describing his character and career to Jodocus Jonas are, a treatise De Sacramentis, lately edited by Mr. Lupton, the work on the Hierarchies of Dionysius already noticed, and a trenchant ser- mon, preached in St. Paul's, by desire of Archbishop Warham, at the opening of the convocation of the province in 1511, on the corruptions which overspread and undermined the Church in his day. This sermon, which has been several times trans- lated into English and reprinted, denounces powerfully the evils of worldly living and lust of gain which were ruining the Church through the clergy. The first part is on ' Con- formation,' according to the text, 'Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed in the spirit of your minds ; ' the second part is on ' Reformation. ' This, he says, depends on the clergy themselves, and principally on the bisliops. Let the laws be rehearsed (for they are sound and just, and minute enough to meet all cases), which forbid laying hands suddenly on men for ordination, condemn simony, enjoin residence, oblige to a seemly and reputable life, and lay down rules for the pure election of bishops, for the pure exercise of patron- age. If the bishops first, and after them the other orders of clergy, were once duly reformed, it would be an easy matter 166 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEKATURE. CHAP. II. to reform the laity, for corpus sequitur animam, the body followeth the soul. 24. A few words must be said about William Warham, the generous patron, the enlightened scholar, the Christian without reproach, whose name cannot be forgotten while the letters of Erasmus continue to be read. For some years before 1501, when he was made Bishop of London, he was principal of St. Edward's, or the Civil Law Hall, in the University of Oxford ; and had raised his Hall to the first rank, intellectually, among the colleges, by skilful regulations and a good selection of tutors. From London he was translated to Canterbury in 1503 on the death of Archbishop Dean. From the time of his first introduction to Erasmus, which was in 1497, he regarded the great scholar with affection and admiration, and during many years, after he was raised to the primacy, ministered to his temporal wants with greater liberality than any other of his patrons. Besides an annual pension, he seems to have been continually sending him money, together with other gifts. Erasmus was not ungrateful ; he is never weary of extolling to his correspondents the ' sanctissimi mores,' the love of letters, erudition, integrity, and piety, of the English primate. The Oxford movement in favour of sound learning and ' bonae literse,' to use the phrase then prevalent, he consistently en- couraged. He was the friend of Colet, and supported him on an important occasion against the unreasonable opposition of the Bishop of London. It is related of him that on his death- bed he asked his steward how much money was left in his coffers. Being told ' thirty pounds,' he smiled, and said, ' Satis viatici ad cselum ! ' 1 William Latimer, an associate of Linacre and Grocyn, was a priest of great learning, whom Erasmus tried to induce to teach Fisher Greek, but without success. He was highly prized by his contemporaries, but was shy and retiring, and accomplished little. He is the author of Epistolce ad Erasmum. (See his life in the Elogia Quorundam Anglorum by G. Lilye, son of the William noticed in the next paragraph ; Basle, 1561.) 25. Of Sir Thomas More's other writings mention will be made farther on ; in this place we shall only speak of the rela- tion in which he stood to the movement for the extension of learning. He studied in Oxford somewhere between 1490 and 1500; that is known, but the exact years cannot be determined ; nor, between conflicting statements, can we decide whether he was a member of Canterbury College (afterwards merged in 1 Enough journey-money to heaven. 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 167 Christ Church), or of St. Mary Hall. His father, Sir John More, an able and indefatigable judge, is said to have grudged the time which his gifted son spent at the university, and to have curtailed his allowance to the utmost, that the contraction of the supplies might involve a quicker return to London, and an earlier preparation for the bar. Erasmus, writing in 1517, be- wailed the comparative estrangement of his friend from a life of learning : ' What,' said he, * might not that marvellous felicity of nature (admirabilis ista naturre felicitas) have effected, had his genius received its training in Italy, and devoted its powers without restraint to the service of the Muse ! ' Though it is often said that he was at Oxford when Erasmus first arrived there in 1497, the expressions in Erasmus' letters appear to render this doubtful. But, however short his university career may have been, we know from Stapleton (the writer quoted in 18) that, with the aid of Grocyn and Linacre, he made the best use of it. He mastered Greek thoroughly, and became the most refined Latin scholar, the most expert hand in Latin writing, that England could produce. Two early compositions attest this his Progymnasmata and his Epigrams. The former are a very slight production ; they are translations from Greek epigrams, chiefly those of Lucian, into Latin elegiacs, each translation being separately done by More and William Lilye. More's versions are the most pointed and antithetical ; there is a want of finish about both. These Progymnasmata only fill nine pages. The epigrams, which are entirely by More, are a much more considerable work. They are addressed to Henry VIII., and appear to have been first published in 1513, or early in 1514. Most of them are in elegiacs, but not a few are in various Horatian metres ; some are original, others translated. There is a certain wantonness and luxuriance of tone about many of them, which is a little surprising to one who only knows More from his later works. Not a few are vigorous and terse in a high degree ; altogether the work would bear re-editing, better than many old books that are subjected to the process ; not that the verses have either the polish of Vida, or the severe grace of Milton. 26. Several epigrams relate to a poem in Latin hexameters, which had lately appeared in France, entitled Clwrdigerce navis conflagratio. The author was Germanus Brixius (Germain de Brie), one of the secretaries of Anne of Bretagne, the Queen of France, whom in a fulsome dedication he styles ' Frankorum regina Britonmnque dux.' It seems that in the short war between England and France, which broke out in 1512, a French ship, the name of which is latinised by Brixius as 168 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. II. ' Chordigera,' came into action with an English ship of war, the 'Regent.' According to Brixius, the 'Regent,' when on the point of surrendering, succeeded in setting fire to her antagonist ; and Herve\ the gallant captain of the ' Chordigera, ' with all his crew, were either drowned or burnt. It would appear that this magnificent story, like the similar tale about the 'Vengeur' in modern times, had but little foundation in fact ; and More in his epigrams makes fun of the valiant nerve", and discredits the history of his exploits. This brought down on his head from Brixius a torrent of invective and insult, in what is really a very clever Latin poem, the * Anti- morus.' More thought of replying, had indeed sent his reply to press ; but an urgent request from Erasmus, who was the friend of both, that he would let the quarrel drop, induced him to stifle the intended replication in the birth. The cor- respondence between More and Erasmus on this matter is exceedingly amusing. As a good illustration of More's humour, the reader is re- ferred to an epigram, headed ' De Nautis ejicientibus Monachum in tempestate cui fuerant confessi,' on some sailors who threw a monk overboard in a storm after having confessed to him. The translations from Lucian include the following dialogues, the Cynicus, the Necromantia, the Philopseudes, and the Tyranni- cida. A declamation in reply to this last, by More himself, in really excellent Latin, completes the work. There is evidence that More took an active interest in the promotion of good learning at Oxford. From a letter of Erasmus to Hutten, we learn that he lectured to a large university audience, when still very young, on the works of St. Augustine. There is also a letter by himself, printed in Jortin's Life of Erasmus, in which, addressing the uni- versity of Oxford, he complains warmly of the conduct of those ' scholastics ' who, ' calling themselves Trojans,' declaimed against all liberal arts and their cultivators, but especially against the study and the students of Greek. This letter is dated in 1519. 27. In this age of strange excitement, when a new world supposed to teem with wealth had just been discovered in the West, when by the invention of printing thoughts were com- municated and their records multiplied with a speed which must have seemed marvellous, and when the astronomical theory of Copernicus was revolutionising men's ideas as to the very fundamental relations between the earth and the heavens, unsettling those even whom it did not convince, there was a temporary forgetfulness, on the part even of many holding 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 169 high office in the Church, that this life, dignify it as you may, is, after all, a scene of trial, not of triumph, and that, if Christianity be true, a life of unchequered enjoyment, even though learning and art may embellish it, is not the ideal to- wards which man should aspire. The state of things which ensued, especially in Italy, but also in a less degree among all the nations of Western Europe, has been lucidly and un- sparingly portrayed by Dr. Newman in his essays on Savona- rola. The Reformers seized on this weak point, then noticeable in many of the clergy, and made out of it, to use a modern phrase, controversial capital. Human learning, they said Luther himself originated the cry was a waste of time as well as a dangerous snare ; art was mere pandering to the passions ; sinful man should be engrossed but by one pursuit, the pursuit of salvation should study only one book, and that the Bible. "When the party that favoured the Eeformation came into power under Edward VI., this spirit operated with prejudicial effect on the young plants of learning and culture which had begun to spring up at our universities. To take one well-known instance ; the ecclesiastical commissioners of Edward, in their visitation to Oxford, destroyed or removed a valuable collection, impossible to be replaced, of six hundred manuscripts of the classical authors, presented by Humphrey, the good duke of Gloucester, uncle of Henry VI., to that uni- versity. 1 Many members of the hierarchy also, among whom, as in the case of Nicholas V. and Leo X., some of the most intelligent and zealous promoters of the new learning had been found, saw reason, about the middle of the sixteenth century, to change their tactics. In England, at any rate, we know that the bishops, under Queen Mary, discouraged the study of the Humanities, and attempted to revive in their place the old scholastic exercises and disputations. The reformers imme- diately set up the cry, * You are trying to shut out enlighten- ment, to set up the barbarous -scholastic, in preference to the Ciceronian, Latinity, you are enemies of progress, of civilisa- tion, of the enlargement of the mind.' Cambridge soon followed the example of Oxford in intro- ducing the study of Greek. Towards the close of the reign of Henry VIIL, Sir John Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith are mentioned in the annals of that university as having been 1 They are also said by an old writer (Chamberlain, Present State of England) Part iii. p. 450, cited by Alban Butler under May 26) to have destroyed the library collected by the book-learned bishop of Durham, Richard of Bury (Prel. Ch. II., 37), which was then kept at Durham College. Oxford." 170 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEEATURE. CHAP. II. especially active in promoting this study. Milton refers to this in one of his sonnets : Thy age like ours, O soul of Sir John Cheke, Hated not learning worse than toad or asp, When thou taught'st Cambridge and King Edward Greek. Christopherson, Bishop of Chichester under Mary, was a man of con- siderable learning ; he made a Latin translation of the ecclesiastical his- torians (Eusebius, Sozomen, Socrates, Theodoret, and Evagrius), which, though deficient in accuracy, must have been a work greatly needed at the time, since three or four editions of it were printed before 1620. 28. The sense of insecurity induced among all classes by Henry's tyranny in his later years, and the social confusion which prevailed in the following reign, interrupted the peaceful flow of learned studies. The universities appear to have been sunk in a lower depth of inefficiency and ignorance about the year 1550 than ever before or since. Under Mary, Cardinal Pole, the legate, was personally favourable to the new learning. Sir Thomas Pope, the founder of Trinity College, Oxford, con- sulted him on the framing of the college statutes, in which it was provided that Greek should form one of the subjects of instruction. In his legatine constitutions, passed at a synod held in 1555, Pole ordered that all archbishops and bishops, as well as holders of benefices in general, should assign a stated portion of their revenues to the support of cathedral schools in connection with every metropolitan and cathedral church throughout the kingdom, into which lay scholars of respect- able parentage were to be admitted, together with theological students. These cathedral schools were kept up in the follow- ing reign, and seem to have attained considerable importance. But at Cambridge, at any rate, the reactionists obtained for a time a great ascendency. If Ascham is to be believed, the Greek poets and philosophers were to be banished, and scho- lasticism was to reign once more in the schools. In his School- master he thus describes the state of things : ' The love of good learning began suddenly to wax cold, the knowledge of the tongues was manifestly contemned ; yea, I know that heads were cast together, and counsel devised, that Duns, with all the rabble of barbarous questionists, should have dispossessed of their place and room Aristotle, Plato, Tully, and Demosthenes, whom good Mr. Eedrnan, and those two worthy stars of that university, Cheke and Smith, with their scholars, had brought to flourish as notably in Cambridge as ever they did in France and in Italy.' 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 171 Prose Writers : Pecock, Fortescue ; The Paston Letters, Leland, More; Historical Writing: Polydore Virgil, Capgrave, &c. ; Polemical Writing : Tyndale, More ; Ascham; Elyot. 29. Although no prose work produced during this period can be said to hold a place in our standard literature, con- siderable progress was made in fitting the rough and motley native idiom for the various requirements of prose composition. Through the work of the publication of our early records, which has now been going on for many years under the super- intendence of the Master of the Rolls, a curious book, dating from the early part of this period, has been made generally accessible. This is The Represser of Reginald Pecock, Bishop of St. Asaph. 1 The modern editor of the work, Mr. Babington, calls it, probably with justice, l the earliest piece of good philo- sophical disquisition of which our English prose literature can boast.' Pecock was a Welshman ; he was born about the end of the fourteenth century, and educated at Oriel College, Oxford. After his appointment to the see of St. Asaph, he took the line of vehement opposition to the teaching of the Lollards, the followers of Wyclif. The design of The Represser, which was first published in a complete shape about the year 1456, was to justify certain practices or 'governances,' as he calls them, then firmly established in the Church, which the Lollards vehemently declaimed against ; such as the use of images, pilgrimages to famous shrines, the holding of landed estates by the clergy, &c. Pecock was made Bishop of Chichester in 1450. His method of argument, however, which consisted in appealing rather to reason and common sense, than to Church authority, to justify the practices complained of, was displeasing to most of his brother bishops; and in 1457 his books were formally condemned in a synod held before Henry VI. at Westminster. He was deposed from his bishopric, and only escaped severer treatment by making a full and formal retractation of his opinions. Pecock wrote several other works in English, of which the following are extant in MS. (1) Tlie Donet : written about 1444, an introduction to the chief truths of the Christian religion, in the form of a dialogue between a father and a son. (2) The Follower to the Donet : this is a supplement to that work. 1 Extract Book, art. 30. 172 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUEE. CHAP. II. (3) The Poor Men's Mirror : this is the Donet popularised. (4) The Boole of Faith (1456). In this work he gives up the infallibility of the Church as a certain doctrine, but urges that it ought to be practically accepted, until it is proved that the Church is fallible. He also maintains that Scripture is the only standard of super- natural and revealed verities. (5) The Rule of Christian Religion: a folio of 384 pages. Also the Abbreviatio Reginaldi Pecock, in Latin: printed by Mr. Babington. 30. The most interesting work belonging to this period is Sir John Fortescue's treatise on the Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy. The author was Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench in the time of Henry VI. He was at first a zealous Lancastrian ; he fought at Towton, and was taken prisoner at Tewkesbury in 1471, after which he was attainted. But upon the death of Henry in that year, leaving no son, Fortescue admitted the legality of the claim of the house of York, and thereby obtained the reversal of the attainder. The title of the work mentioned is not very appro- priate ; it should rather be, a ' Treatise on the best means of raising a revenue for the King, and cementing his power,' these, at least, are the points prominently handled. The open- ing chapters, drawing a contrast between the state and character of the English'peasantry under the constitutional crown of Eng- land, and those of the French peasantry under the absolute monarchy of France, are full of acute remarks and curious information. It is instructive to notice that Fortescue (ch. xii.) speaks of England's insular position as a source of iveakness, because it laid her open to attack on every side. The observa- tion reminds us how modern a creation is the powerful British navy, the wooden walls of which have turned that position into our greatest safeguard. This work is in excellent English, and, if freed from the barbarous orthography in which it is disguised, could be read with ease and pleasure at the present day. Fortescue wrote also, about the year 1463, an able Latin treatise, De Laudibus Legum Anglice, designed for the use of the ill-fated Edward Prince of Wales, son of Henry VI. and Margaret, in which he labours to prove the superiority of the common law of England to the civil law. 30a. Of Sir Thomas Malory we have already spoken (ante, 5). No other prose writer of the fifteenth century deserves notice, unless we except Caxton, who wrote a con- tinuation of Trevisa's translation of the Polychronicon to the year 1460, and printed the entire work in 1482. His transla- 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 173 tion of Raoul le Fevre's Recueil des Histoires de Troye was 'begonne in Brugis in 1468, and ended in the holy cyte of Colen, 19 September, 1471.' He also printed a translation, made by himself from the Flemish, of the famous mediaeval apologue or satire of Reynard the Fox. For some eighteen years he continued with untiring industry to bring out popular works, chiefly religious or moral treatises and romances, from the press, and when he died he left able successors to carry on and extend his work. 1 306. The Paston Letters 2 contain the history of a Norfolk family, written by themselves between 1422 and 1503. Clement Paston, a yeoman, ploughed his own fields with his own oxen, ' ut prisca gens mortalium,' in the days of Edward III. He gave his sons a good education, and one of them be- came a judge, bought land, and gave importance to the family. John, the son of the judge, married Margaret Mauteby, and the letters which passed between her and her husband and sons are the most interesting part of the collection. The Paston family produced an admiral, another Clement, under Henry VIII., and was ennobled by Charles II. ; but the worthless son of the first Earl of Yarmouth ruined the property ; the great house at Oxnead was pulled down ; and the male line of the Pastons became extinct. Margaret, the wife of the above-named John Paston, seems to have been the pattern of a faithful, affectionate, shrewd, hard-working English wife in the fifteenth century. But she shall speak for herself. Her husband was lying sick in the Temple at London, apparently through some hurt or accident ; she writes to him from Norfolk on the 28 th September, 1443, as follows : To my rygth worchepful husband, John Paston, dwettyng in the Inner Temple at London, in hast. < Ryth worchipful hosbon, I recomande me to yow, desyryng hertely to her of yowr wilfar, thanckyng God of yowr a-mendyng of the grete disese that ye have hade ; and I thancke yow for the letter that ye sent me, for be my trowthe my moder and I wer nowth 3 in hertys es fro the tyme that we woste 4 of yowr sekenesse, tyl we woste verely of yowr amendyng. My modyr be-hestyd 5 a-nodyr ymmage of wax of the weytte of yow to oyer Lady of Walsyngham, and sche sent IIII nobelys to the IIII Orderys of Frerys at Norweche to pray for yow, and I have be-hestyd to gon on pyl- greymmays to Walsingham,^ and to Sent Levenardys 7 for yow ; be my trowth I had never so hevy a sesyn as I had from the tyme that I woste of yowr sekenesse tyl I woste of yowr a-mendyng, and zyth 8 myn hert is in no grete esse, ne nowth xal be, tyl I wott that je ben very hal 1 For fuller particulars about Caxton. see the History of English Literature by the late learned Professor Craik, of Belfast. 2 A portion of them was published by Sir John Fenn in 1787, to the great delight of Horace Walpole. The whole series, more than a thousand in number (among which, however, not letters only, but abstracts of wills, inven- tories, and other documents of family interest are included), was carefully edited by Mr. Gairdner in 1875. 3 not in heart's ease. 4 knew. 5 promised. 6 Where was a shrine of the Blessed Virgin, celebrated for many centuries. 7 St. Leonard's priory at Norwich. 8 yet. 174 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEKATURE. CHAP. II. I pray yow hertely that [ye] wol wochesaf to sende me a letter as hastely as 50 may, yf wrytyn be non dysesse to yow, and that ye wollen woche- safe to sende me worde quowe 1 yowr sor dott. Yf I mythe have had my wylle, I xulde 2 a seyne yow er dystyme ; I wolde ye wern at horn, yf it wer yowr ese, and yowr sor myth ben as wyl lokyth to her as it ys ther e ben, now lever dan a goune, jow 3 it wer of scarlette I may non leyser have to do wrytyn half a quarter so meche as I xulde sey to yow yf I myth speke with yow. I xall sende yow a-nothyr letter as hastely as I may. I thanke yow that ge wolde wochesaffe to remember my gyrdyl, and that ge wolde wryte to me at the tyme, for I sopose that wrytyng was non esse to yow. All myth God have yow in his kepyn, and sende yow helth. Wretyn at Oxenede, in ryth grete hast, on Sent Mikyllys Evyn. Yorys, M. PASTON. My modyr grette yow wel, and sendyth yow Goddys blyssyng and hers ; and sche prayeth yow, and I pray yow also, that ye be wel dyetyd of mete and drynke, for that is the grettest helpe that ye may have now to yowr helthe ward. Yowr sone faryth wel, blyssyd be God. 31. In 1510 More published the Life of John Pwus, Earl of Mirandula, with his letters, translated from the Latin ; the translation is preceded by a beautiful ' Envoy ' from More to his sister Joyeuse Leigh. That prodigy of genius, Pico of Mirandola, after having mastered all the learned languages, and sucked the marrow of all philosophical systems, was cut off by a fever at Florence in 1494, at the age of thirty-one. The effect of the revival of ancient learning was for a long time to induce our ablest literary men to aim at a polished Latin style, rather than endeavour to improve their native tongue. Erasmus wished that Latin should be the common literary language of Europe ; he always wrote in it himself, and held what he termed the barbarous jargon of his Dutch fatherland in utter detestation. So Leland, More, and Pole composed, if not all, yet their most important and most care- fully written works in Latin. John Leland, the famous anti- quary, 4 to whose Itinerarium we owe so much interesting topographical and sociological information for the period im- mediately following the destruction of the monasteries, and whose Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis, though not published till 1709, is the earliest instance of an endeavour on the part of an English writer to compile a systematic biogra- phical and critical account of the literature of his country, is the author of a number of Latin elegies, in various metres, upon the death of Sir Thomas Wyat the elder, which evince no common elegance and mastery over the language. More's 1 how. 2 should. 3 though. 4 The Itinerarium was first published by Thomas Hearne in 1710-12. Leland's Collectanea, being a mass of valuable archaeological notes, were also published by Hearne in six volumes in 1715. 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 175 Utopia, published in 1516, was composed in Latin, but has been translated by Burnet and others. 32. Utopia, according to its Greek derivation (ofl not, TOTTOS place), means the Land of Nowhere. The manners and customs of the Utopians are described to More and his friend Tonstall, while on a mission in Flanders, by an 'ancient mariner' named Raphael Hythlodaye (i.e. prater or gossipper, from #0Xos, idle talk, nonsense), who has visited their island. The work is a satire on existing society ; every [important political or social regulation in Utopia is the reverse of what was then to be found in Europe. The condition of the ideal commonwealth rebukes the ambi- tion of kings, the worldliness of priests, and the selfish greed of private persons. The Utopians detest war, and will only take up arms on a plain call of honour or justice. Instead of burning and torturing men for their religion, they tolerate all forms of belief or no-belief, only refusing to those who deny Divine Providence, and the soul's immortality, the right to hold public offices or trusts. They have no money, but the wants of all are fully supplied by the perfect mechanism of their free government ; equality prevails among them and is highly prized ; idlers are driven out of the commonwealth ; and the lands belonging to each city, incapable of appropriation to private owners, are tilled by all its citizens in suc- cession. 33. A pliant Italian ecclesiastic, Polidoro di Castello, who took the name of Polyclore Virgil, having obtained through the influence of his uncle, a cardinal, the archdeaconry of Wells and other English preferment, composed in Latin an Anglica Historia in twenty-six books, dedicating it to Henry VIII. This history at first came down to 1509 ; in a later edition Polydore added another book, continuing it to 1538. John Mair, or Major, after having taught scholastic theo- logy at Paris, became a professor at Glasgow and then at St. Andrews. He wrote in 1521, in Latin, a Historia de Gestis Scotorum, giving a brief summary of the chief affairs, both in England and Scotland, from the earliest times to the accession of Henry VIII. A work of greater pretension, the Historia Scotorum of Hector Boece or Boetius, appeared at Paris in 1526. Boece, born at Dundee, received his education at the university of Paris, where he won the friendship and esteem of Erasmus. His history, which he professes to found on ancient documents (never afterwards forthcoming) preserved at lona, is full of the. wildest fictions; but being written with connection and vigour, and conceived in a patriotic spirit, it became widely and lastingly popular. It is in seventeen books, and descends from the earliest times to the death of James I. in 1437. William Stewart (1531-5) translated it into Scottish verse (see this version in the Rolls series), and John Bellenden, about 1540, turned it into Scottish prose. The regular series of English prose chronicles commences 176 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. CHAP. II. in this period. The earliest is the Chronicle of England, by John Capgrave, 1 who dedicated the work to Edward IV. It opens with the creation of the world, and comes down to 1416. It appeared about the year 1463, but was never printed till it came out in the Eolls series. Robert Fabyan was an alderman and sheriff of London in the reign of Henry VII. ; his Concordance of Storyes, giving the history of England from the fabulous Brutus to the year 1485, was published after the author's death in 1516. Successive subsequent editions of this work continued the history to 1559. More published a History of Richard III. (or, as it is also called, of Edward V.), un- finished, in 1513. This work, observes Hallam, 'appears to me the first example of good English language; pure and perspicuous, well-chosen, without vulgarisms or pedantry.' 2 Edward Hall, an under-sheriff of London, wrote in 1542 a chronicle, entitled the Union of the Two Noble Families of Lancaster and York, bringing the narrative down to 1532. Richard Grafton, himself the author of two independent chronicles in the reign of Elizabeth, printed in 1548 a new edition of Hall, with a continuation to the end of Henry's reign. A curious biographical work, Illustrium Majoris Bri- tannice Scriptorum Summarium, was written by John Bale (a Carmelite friar who renounced his vows, joined the re- formers, and afterwards became Protestant bishop of Ossory) in 1548. The accuracy of this writer may be judged of by the fact, that in the article on Chaucer, he fixes the date of the poet's death in 1450, and in the list of his works includes the Falls of Princes (which was by Lydgate), and omits the Canterbury Tales. The first edition of the Summarium contained nine 'centuries,' each century consisting of notices on one .hundred authors. In the second edition (Basle, 1559), five additional centuries were inserted, on authors omitted in the former nine. This book, though most untrustworthy in details, is still of great value to the literary student, on account of the number of ancient works, the first lines of which are usually given, speci- fied in its pages. 34. Not much of the theological writing of the period pos- sessed more than a passing value. Portions of it are indirectly interesting, as illustrating manners and customs, or as tinged with the peculiar humour of the writer. The sermons of Bishop Latimer, 3 one of the leading reformers, who was burnt 1 Extract Book, art. 31. This author is better known as the compiler of the Lecienda Anylice, a collection of the lives of English saints, written in English, and founded on the Sanctilogium of John of Tynemouth, a writer of the four- teenth century. 2 Literature of Europe, i. 454. 3 Extract Book. art. 41. 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 177 at the stake under Mary, possess this twofold attraction. Thus, in preaching against covetousness, he complains of the great rise in rents and in the price of provisions that had taken place in his time, winding up his recital of grievances with the singular climax, * I think, verily, that if it thus continue, we shall at length be constrained to pay for a pig a pound.' The strange humour of the man breaks out in odd similes in unexpected applications of homely proverbs in illustrations of the great by the little, and the little by the great. Cranmer's works have but small literary value, though most important especially the Letters from the historical point of view. John Bale, already mentioned, Becon, Kidley, Hooper, and Tyndale, all composed theological tracts, chiefly controversial. More, Bishop Fisher, and Pole were the leading writers on the other side. 35. Among these writings we shall select for somewhat more detailed notice those of Tyndale and More. Kanged on opposite sides in the great controversy, both were sincere and earnest men, and both gave testimony of their sincerity with their blood. William Tyndale, a native of Gloucestershire, received his education at Oxford, whence he went to live with a Gloucestershire knight as tutor to his boys. The ecclesias- tical condition of the county while he was growing up was such as might well rouse to indignation his fervid spirit. The see of Worcester, in which diocese Gloucestershire was then included, had been held by four Italian prelates in succession, who had never set foot in England, but administered the affairs of the diocese through their chancellors. In 1521, Leo X. nominated to the see Giulio de' Medici, afterwards Clement VII. ; and Henry VIII. was not sorry to acquiesce in the appointment, because part of the arrangement was that Wolsey should administer the property of the see ; thus the favourite was rewarded, and the king not the poorer. Such shameful abuses of power in the highest places implied no breach in the network of ecclesiastical ordinance and privilege ; whatever was done or left undone, not a finger was to be raised, not a tongue to be moved, against the clergy ; their immunities were maintained by the State with all its power. Tyndale saw no remedy for all this, except in the circulation of the New Tes- tament amongst the people in their own language ; they would then see, he argued, how sweet and easy was the yoke which Christ had imposed on the members of his Church, how dif- ferent from the ponderous system which the clergy, aided and instigated by the civil power, had developed. He therefore devoted his life to the task of translating and circulating the M 1 78 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. II. Scriptures, especially the New Testament. He was obliged to carry on the work abroad : his first edition of the New Testa- ment was printed in 1527, partly at r 'Cologne and partly at Worms. The impression was then sent over to England, but the bishops endeavoured to suppress it. Warham, and after- wards Tonstall, Bishop of London, bought up all the copies they could lay their hands on and burnt them a proceeding not likely to answer their purpose, since printer and translator thus obtained a profit on the labour and capital expended, and were greatly encouraged to set to work instantly and print more. On this first version all the later versions were founded. The king, with his usual inconsistency, after having allowed the bishops to suppress Tyndale's Testament, and after having perhaps given the information to the government of the Belgian provinces, which led to the arrest and imprisonment of Tyndale in 1535, and his death at the stake in 1536, from that time changed his mind, and not only allowed the version to circulate freely, but caused it to be printed by his own printer, with the translator's name on the title-page. Tyndale's theological writings can hardly claim to be regarded as literature. The chief among them are, his Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue (1531), his Practise of Prelates (1530), and his treatise On Tracy's Testament; this last was found among his papers after his death. There is a fund of rough homely force behind all that the man writes ; a quality notice- able also in Becon, and Bradford, and others of these early reformers. At the same time he is unspeakably coarse, prone to libellous imputation, and quite devoid of any spirit of justice or charity towards his opponents. Here is a slight sample of his style. More in his Dialogue had spoken of faith ; Tyndale replies : ' Master More meaneth, of the best faith that ever he felt. By all likelihood he knoweth of none, other, but such as may stand with all wickedness, neither in himself nor in his prelates. Wherefore, inasmuch as their faith may stand with all that Christ hateth, I am sure he looketh but for small thanks of God for his defending of them ; and therefore he playeth surely, to take his reward here of our holy patriarchs.' He is always harping in this way on the supposed fact of More having been hired by the bishops to write for them. But we have it on the testimony of Eoper, More's son-in-law, that when the bishops and clergy in Convocation, probably in 1533, agreed to present More with the sum of four thousand pounds in acknowledgment of the labour and expense in which his con- troversial writings had involved him, he refused to accept one farthing, either for himself or for any member of his family. 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 179 The Practise of Prelates is a vigorous denunciation of the malpractices of bishops ; in it he urges secular princes and lords, as Wycliffe had done before him, to deprive ecclesiastical persons of that temporal power by which they encroached on the rights of the laity. It must have been such writings as this, and the dealings which as chancellor he had had with the writers, joined perhaps to a sense of the weakness of the bishops' harness in more than one important place, that made More once say to Roper, when the latter was talking in a boastful and sanguine way about the prosperous condition of the Commonwealth : ' Trothe it is so indeed, . . . and yet I praie God that some of us, as highe as we seem to sit upon the mountains, treading heretikes under our feet like ants, live not to see the day that we would gladly be at league and composition with them, to let them have their churches quietly to them- selves, so that they would be contented to let us have ours quietly to ourselves.' The pamphlet On Tracy's Testament discusses a will made by a Mr. Tracy, a Gloucestershire gentleman, in 1530, in which he directed in a pointed manner that no money should be paid after his death for the benefit of his soul, and that no part of his property should go to the Church. For this the chancellor, and Dr. Parker, who administered the diocese for its Italian bishop, actually caused the body of Tracy to be exhumed and cast forth out of consecrated ground ! It was found, however, that the canon law would not sanction this, and the chancellor, being sued by the relatives, was condemned and heavily fined. 36. The controversial and devotional works of Sir Thomas More, with a few exceptions, can only be read in black letter, never having been reprinted since they were first collected and published in 1557. The change of religion, and the fact that several of the polemical tracts were written hastily to meet some special occasion, are enough to account for this neglect. Yet the thoughts of so powerful and so cultivated a mind, though here presented in a somewhat crude and unsatisfactory form, are worth more attention than they have received. The following list, therefore, with the descriptions of which some notices of his imprisonment and death are intermixed, will be found not de- void of interest. (1) A Treatise on tJie Four Last Things (1522). This is a devotional tract, containing some eloquent passages ; it includes notices of the seven deadly sins, and ends unfinished. (2) A Dialogue, 1 in four books, chiefly on the worship of images, on praying to saints, and on pilgrimages, against ' the pestilent secte of Luther and Tyndale.' It was this work, pub- 1 Extract Book. art. 37. i8o HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEEATUEE. CHAP. II. lished in 1528, to which Tyndale wrote the ' Answer,' noticed in 35. (3) The Supplication of Souls. This was written in 1529, against those who denied that there was a purgatory, and espe- cially against a book that had recently appeared, entitled The Supplication of Beggars. More defends the power of the keys, and the plenitude of authority in binding and loosing given to St. Peter and his successors; he maintains also that souls in pain may be relieved by masses, prayers, and good works. (4) The Confutacion of Tyndale' 's Answere (1532). Of this immense treatise, seven books are occupied with the confuta- tion of Tyndale; the eighth is an argument against 'Friar Barnes's church ; ' the ninth, summing up all that has gone before, is 'a recapitulation and summary proof that the common knowen Catholic Churche is the verye true Churche of Christ.' There is much in this work that is powerfully and eloquently argued. He indulges in much severity of censure and sarcasm against Tyndale, says that several years of late have been ' plentuous of evil bookes,' and names among their writers Jaye, Thorpe, Constantine, Bayfield, and Frith. Friar Barnes's theory of an invisible church, composed of the elect and the pure, is examined in the eighth book. (5) The Apology (1533), for his previous controversial writings, was written soon after he had resigned the Great Seal, from the fear of coming into collision with the king on the marriage question. In this work he says that it always had been, and still was, his opinion that it was ' a thing very good and profitable, that the Scripture, well and truely trans- lated, should be in the Englishe tongue ; ' only he did not believe either in the competency or the good faith of those who were at the time engaged in the task. (6) The Debellacyon of Salem and Bizance (1533). This treatise was occasioned by the appearance of a work called Salem and Bizance, by one who styled himself ' the Pacifier,' and impugned More's Apology. (7) A Dialogue of Comforte against Tribulacyon (1534) was written in the Tower. After resigning the seals in 1532, More was not molested for some time. In 1533, on. the death of Warham, Cranmer was made Archbishop of Canterbury, and by his management the king obtained a divorce, and married Anne Boleyn. An act was passed to regulate the succession, and to this act a form of oath was attached, recognising the king as supreme head of the church in England. All the bishops, except Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, took this oath when tendered to them. More, being known to hold that the 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 181 oath could not lawfully be taken, was summoned to appear before the primate at Lambeth in April 1534. A letter to his daughter, Margaret Roper, written in that month, tells how he had appeared accordingly before Cranmer and a great number of the clergy ; how he had been pressed on all sides to take the oath, but, though not blaming any that took it, had still refused ; how the archbishop pressed him with a sophis- tical argument, to which he did not at the moment see the answer ; and how he saw Latimer amusing himself at horse- play with his friends in the Lambeth garden. Soon after- wards he was committed to the Tower, and his property, though he had taken the precaution to convey it to his wife and children, was seized by the king. The Dialogue of Comforte, fyc,., is an eloquent composition. It purports to be a translation from a Latin work by an Hun- garian author, who, writing at a time when his countrymen were under the continual terror of a Turkish invasion, animates them to face these dangers by the help of religion and divine philosophy. The work has been several times printed. 37. During two years and more, while More was in the Tower, he wrote, so far as opportunities served, continually ; when ink was denied him, he made use of a piece of coal On the 5th May 1535, he writes to his daughter that he had just seen Raynolds, a Brigittine monk of the Sion convent, and three Carthusians, led to execution for denying the royal supremacy; his reflections on what he had seen are note- worthy. Soon after this he was indicted of high treason, for ' malitiouslie, traitorouslie, and divellishlie ' denying the king to be the supreme head of the Church of England. At his trial, the particulars of which were related to Roper, his son- in-law, by some who were present, he said, among other things, that to give the king this supremacy involved a manifest violation of Magna Charta, the first clause of which provided ' quod Anglicana ecclesia libera sit, et habeat omnia jura sua integra et illaesa ' (that the English Church should be free, and have all its rights entire and inviolate). Audley, the new chancellor, urged upon him strongly the consent of the bishops and the universities in favour of the doctrine, but More re- plied that the majority of the bishops in Christendom, to say nothing of the saints in heaven, condemned it. The scene that followed the trial is familiar to all readers the condemned man issuing from the hall of unjust judgment, his Margaret rushing in among the guards and falling upon his neck, kissing him with a passion of love and grief, he blessing and comforting her, all the bystanders weeping. 1 82 HISTQKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. II. All the letters written by More from the Tower are full of interest. In one of them he explains to Cromwell the growth of his present convictions on the authority of the Holy See ; saying that he was originally little inclined to believe the primacy of the pope to be of divine institution, but that, after reading the king's Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, he had been led to examine the question, and, after much study of the Fathers, had become convinced that the doctrine was true. (8) A Treatise upon the Passion of Christ (1534). The in- troduction to this unfinished tract, which is founded on the narratives in all the four Gospels, is very beautiful. In a colophon the editor has appended these words : ' Sir Thomas More wrote no more of this woorke ; for when he had written this farre, he was in prison kept so streyght, that all his bokes and penne and ynke and paper was taken from hym, and sone after was he putte to death.' Besides the works above enumerated, there are extant several Meditations and Prayers, written with a coal in the Tower. In these we see that happy wit, that shaping imagi- nation, though chastened by long suffering, still keeping their lustre undimmed even to the glorious close. More was brought to the block on the 6th July 1535. The Emperor Charles V., on hearing of it, said to the English ambassador, ' We would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than such a worthy counsellor.' 38. The close of the period was adorned by the scholarship and refined good sense of Roger Ascham. A native of York- shire, he was sent at an early age to Cambridge, and during a lengthened residence there diligently promoted the study of the new learning. In 1544 he wrote and dedicated to Henry VIII. his Toxophilus, a treatise on Archery, in which, for military and other reasons, he deprecates the growing disuse of that noble art. His exertions were vain ; we hear indeed of the bow as still a formidable weapon at the battle of Pinkie in 1547, but from that date it disappears from our military history. In 1550 Ascham went to Germany as secretary to Sir Richard Morrisine, who was then proceeding as ambassador to the Imperial Court; and in 1553, while at Brussels, he wrote in the form of a letter to a friend in England, a curious unfinished tract, in which the character and career of Maurice of Saxony, whose successful enterprise he had witnessed, and of two or three other German princes, are described with much acuteness. In 1553 he was appointed Latin Secretary to Edward VI., and retained the office (the same that Milton held under Groin- 1450-1558. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 183 well) during the reign of Mary. On the accession of Elizabeth he received the additional appointment of reader in the learned languages to the Queen. Elizabeth used to take lessons from him at a stated hour each day. In 1563 he wrote his School- master, a treatise on education. 1 This work was never finished, and was printed by his widow in 1571. The sense and acute- ness of many of his pedagogic suggestions have been much dwelt upon by Johnson. An excellent biography of Ascham may be found in Hartley Coleridge's Northern Worthies. 39. John Bourchier, Lord Berners, who seems to have been the little nephew of Juliana Berners (see Haselwood's ed. of the ' Book of St. Albans '), made a good translation of Froissart at the command of Henry VIII.; this was printed in 1523. He also translated from the French the Golden boke of Marcus Aurdius, i.e., the 'Meditations' of that emperor, and the romance of Huon de Bordeaux ; this last has been lately reprinted. Sir Thomas Elyot, a courtier in the time of Henry VIII., is the author of the political treatise called The Governour. The book is dedicated to the king, and was first published in 1531. Experience and reading of the ancients, he tells us, have qualified him, and inclination incited him, to write of ' the form of a juste publike weale.' Such an opening makes us think of Plato's Republic, or More's Utopia, or, at the least, Fortescue's Absolute and Limited Monarchy. But the promise was not kept, nor could it well have been kept ; for who that had any regard for his life, and was not hopelessly servile in nature, could have written freely and fully on political questions under the horrible despotism of Henry VIII. ? After the first few pages, the author slides into the subject of education for the remainder of the first book ; the second and third books, again, with the exception of a few pages, form an ethical treatise on virtues and vices, with but slight reference to the bearing of these on the work of government. In the brief portion which is political, Elyot argues on behalf of ranks and degrees among men from the examples of subordination afforded in the kingdoms of nature. Superior knowledge he deems to be, in itself, the best and most legitimate title to superior honour. Monarchy, as a form of government, he sets above aristocracy and democracy. He draws an argument from a beehive : 'In a little beaste, whiche of all other is most to be inervailed at, I meane the Bee, is lefte to man by nature a perpetual figure of a just governaunce or rule ; who have among them one principall bee for their governour, which excelleth all other in greatnesse, yet hath he no pricke or stinge, but in him is more knowledge than in the reside we.' Extract Book, art. -44. CHAPTER III. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 1558-1625. 1. THIS is the golden or Augustan age of English literature. After its brilliant opening under Chaucer, a period of poverty and feebleness had continued for more than a hundred and fifty years. Servile in thought and stiff in expression, it remained unvivified by genius even during the first half of the reign of Elizabeth ; and Italy with her Ariosto and Tasso, France with her Marot and Rabelais, Portugal with her Camoens, and even Spain with her Ercilla, appeared to have outstripped England in the race of fame. Hence Sir Philip Sydney in his Defence of Poesie, written shortly before his death in 1586, after award- ing a certain meed of praise to Sackville, Surrey, and Spenser (whose first work had but lately appeared), does not ' remember to have seen many more [English poets] that have poetical sinews in them.' Gradually a change became apparent. The Paradise of Dainty Devices, a collection of poems published in 1578, contains pieces by Richard Edwards, Jasper Hey wood, and others, which evince a skill of poetical handling not before met with. England's Helicon, a poetical miscellany (comprising fugitive pieces composed between 1580 and 1600), to which Sidney, Raleigh, Lodge, and Marlowe contributed, is full of genuine and native beauties. Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, a miscellany of the same class, appeared in 1602. Spenser pub- lished the first three books of the Faerie Queene in 1590 ; Shakspere began to write for the stage about the year 1586; the Essays of Francis Bacon were first published in 1597 ; and the first portion of Hooker's great work on Ecclesiastical Polity appeared in 1594. 2. The peaceable and firmly settled state of the country after 155$ \yas largely instrumental in the rise of this literary greatness. \ (Queen Elizabeth, whose sagacity detected the one paramount political want of the country, concluded "in the 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 185 second year of her reign a rather inglorious peace with France, and devoted all her energies to the work of strengthening the power of her government, passing good laws, and improving the internal administration of the kingdom. J The consequences of. thje durable internal peace thus established were astonish- ing. Men began to trade, farm, and build with renewed vigour ; a great breadth of forest land was reclaimed ; travellers went forth to ' discover islands far away,' and to open new outlets for commerce ; wealth, through this multiplied activity, poured into the kingdom ; and that general prosperity was the result which led her subjects to invest the sovereign, under whom all this was done, with a hundred virtues and shining qualities not her owi). Of this feeling Shakspere became the mouth- piece and mirror : She shall be loved and feared ; her own shall bless her ; Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn, And hang their heads with sorrow : good grows with her ; In her days every man shall eat in safety Under his oion vine, what he plants, and sing The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours. 1 There is indeed a reverse to the picture. Ireland was devas- tated in this reign with fire and sword ; and the minority in England who adhered to the ancient faith became the victims of an organised system of persecution and plunder. Open a book by Cardinal Allen, and a scene of martyred priests, of harried and plundered laymen, of tortured consciences and bleeding hearts, will blot out from your view the smiling images of peace and plenty above portrayed. The mass of the people, however, went quietly with the government, believing and the circumstances of the time were such as to lend some colour to the belief that to adhere to the Pope meant, not merely preference for the old religion, but also sympathy with Spain, disloyalty to England, and aid and comfort to her enemies all over the world. [ Wealth and ease brought leisure in their train ; and leisure demanded ^entertainment, not for the body only, but also for the mind. ) The people, for amusement's sake, took up the old popular drama, which had come down from the very beginning of the Middle Ages ; and, after a process of gradual transfor- mation and elaboration by inferior hands, developed it, in the mouths of its Shakspere, Jonson, and Fletcher, into the world- famed romantic drama of England. As the reading class in- creased, so did the number of those who strove to minister 1 Henry VIII. act v. sc. 5. 1 86 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEKATURE. CHAP. III. to its desires ; and although the religious convulsions which society had undergone had checked the movement towards a complete and profound appreciation of antiquity, which had been commenced by Colet, More, and Erasmus, in the univer- sities, so that England could not then, nor for centuries after- wards, produce scholars in any way comparable to those of the Continent, yet the number of translations which were made of ancient authors proves that there was a general taste for at least a superficial learning, and a very wide diffusion of it. Translation soon led to imitation, and to the projection of new literary works on the purer principles of art disclosed in the classical authors. The epics of Ariosto and Tasso were also translated, the former by Harrington, the latter by Carew and Fairfax; and the fact shows both how eagerly the Italian literature was studied by people of education, and how general must have been the diffusion of an intellectual taste. Spenser doubtless framed his allegory in emulation of the Orlando of Ariosto, and the form and idea of Bacon's Essays were probably suggested to him by the Essays of Montaigne. Let us now briefly trace the progress, and describe the prin- cipal achievements, in poetry and in prose writing, during the period under consideration. ^ Spejaser, Shakspere, Southwell, Warner, Daniel, BraylQS* Donnje, Davie^, Lodge, Qj^ajuuan, Marston, Gascoigne, Sidney, Tusser, Marlowe, Translators. " 3. Among the poets of the period, Spenser holds the first rank. The appearance of his Shepheard's Calender, in 1579, was considered by his contemporaries to form an epoch in the history of English poetry. This poem is dedicated to Sidney, and in an introductory epistle, feigned to come from a third hand, addressed to his friend Gabriel Harvey, 1 the poet enters 1 Harvey was a native of Saffron Walden, and an early and firm friend of Spenser, who celebrates him as ' Hobbinol ' in the Shepheard's Calender. In his youth he wrote Gratulationes Valdinenses, Congratulations from Saffron Walden, a Latin elegiac poem in honour of Elizabeth. In another early pro- duction, Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets, he desires that he may be 'epitaphed the inventour of the English hexameter,' an absurd form of that metre which Stanihurst and others adopted (see below, 24), but which did not long hold its ground. Harvey introduced Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney, perhaps also to Leicester. With Spenser he published in 1580 Three proper and wittie familiar Letters, on an earthquake that had recently occurred, and on ' our English reformed versifying,' by which was chiefly meant the hexameter. (Warton's English Poetry, iv. 205 ; Haslewood's Ancient Critical Essays, Lond. 1815.) 1558-1 t.j:.. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 187 into some curious particulars respecting the diction of bis work. He commences the epistle by quoting from the 'old famous poet ' Chaucer, and also from Lydgate, whom he calls 'a worthy scholar of so excellent a master.' The Calender itself, partly by the large use of alliteration, partly by an express allusion in the epilogue, supplies us with evidence that he was a diligent reader and admirer of the Vision of Piers Plowman by Langland. These three were his English models : he was young and full of enthusiasm, and there is little wonder if their poetical diction, which, if obsolete, was eminently striking and picturesque, commended itself to his youthful taste more than the composite English current in his own day. His words are as follows : * And first of the wordes to speake, I graunt they bee some- thing hard, and of most men unused, yet both English, and also used of most excellent authours and most famous poets. In whom, whereas this our poet hath bin much travailed and thoroughly read, how could it be (as that worthy oratour sayde), but that walking in the sunne, although for other cause he walked, yet needes he mought be sunburnt ; and having the sound of those auncient poets still ringing in his eares, he mought needes in singing hit out some of their tunes ? But whether he useth them by such casualtie and custome, or of set purpose and choise, as thinking them fittest for such rus- ticall rudenesse of shepheards, either for that their rough sound would make his rimes more ragged and rusticall, or else because such old obsolete wordes are most used of country folke, sure I thinke, and thinke I thinke not amisse, that they bring great grace, and, as one would say, authoritie to the verse. . . . But if any will rashly blame his purpose in choise of old and unwonted wordes, him may I more justly blame and condemne, or of witlesse headinesse in judging, or of heedles hardinesse in condemning ; for, not marking the compasse of his bent, he will judge of the length of his cast : for, in my opinion, it is one especial praise of many which are due to this poet, that he hath laboured .to restore, as to their rightfull heritage, such good and naturall English wordes as have beene long time out of use, and almost clean disherited, which is the only cause that our mother tongue, which truly of itself is both full enough for prose and stately enough for verse, hath long time been counted most bare and barren of both. Which default, when as some endeavoured to salve and recure, they patched up the holes with pieces and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the French, there of the Italian, everywhere of the Latin ; not weighing how ill those tongues accorded with 188 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. themselves, but much worse with ours; so now they have made our English tongue a gallirnaufrey, 1 or hodge-podge of all other speeches,' The twelve eclogues of the Shepheard's Calender (Spenser, relying on an erroneous etymology, spells the word seglogues) are imitations, so far as their form is concerned, of the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil. As with these poets, the pastimes, loves, and disappointments of his shepherds, Cuddie, Colin, Hobbinol, and Piers, form the subject-matter of several eclogues. In others, more serious themes are handled. In the fifth, seventh, and ninth, for instance, the abuses both of the old and the new Church are discussed, the chief ground of attack being the laziness and covetousness of prelates and clergy ; the fourth is a panegyrical ode on Queen Elizabeth ; in the tenth is set forth ' the perfect pattern of a poet ; ' the eleventh is an elegy on a lady who is named Dido. 2 In the tenth, the poet anticipates, as Milton afterwards did, the loftier strain to which he felt that his genius would ere long impel him. 4. In 1580, Spenser attained the object of his desires, being appointed Secretary to the Lord Grey of Wilton, on his nomi- nation to the vice-royalty of Ireland. To this stay in Ireland we owe Spenser's only prose work, his View of the State of Ireland, which, though presented to the Queen in manuscript in 1596, was for political reasons held back from publication till the year 1633. His connection with great men was now established, and we cannot doubt that his great intellect and remarkable powers of application made him a most efficient public servant Nor were his services left unrewarded. He received, in 1586, a grant of Kilcolman Castle, in the county of Cork, together with some three thousand acres of land, being part of the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond. From this time to his death, in 1599, few particulars are known about him, but he seems to have resided chiefly in Ireland, and there to have composed his greatest work, The Faerie Queene. His friend Sir Walter Raleigh, to whom The Faerie Queene is dedicated, is thought to have introduced him to Queen Elizabeth, who granted him, in 1591, a pension of fifty pounds a year. In 1598 occurred a rising of the Irish, headed by O'Neill, the famous Earl of Tyrone, which, after the defeat of the English general, Bagnal, extended to Munster; for a time there was no safety for English settlers outside the walls of fortified places. Spenser had to flee from his castle, which 1 From the French Galimafree ; but the origin of the word is unknown. 3 Extract Book, art. 54. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 189 was taken and burnt by the insurgents; his infant child is said to have perished in the flames. In the greatest trouble and affliction, he crossed over to England, and died a few months afterwards in a lodging-house in London, being only in his forty-sixth year. 5. Out of the twelve books composing, or which ought to compose, The Faerie Queene, we have but six in an entire state, containing the ' Legends ' of theTled Cross Knight, Sir Guyon, Britomartis, a lady knight, Cambel and Triamond, Sir Artegall, and Sir Calidore. In the characters and adventures of these heroic personages, the virtues of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy are severally illus- trated and portrayed. Of the remaining six books, we pos- sess, in two cantos on Mutability, a fragment of the Legend on Constancy. Whether any or what other portions of them were ever written, is not certainly known. It would be vain to attempt, within the limits here pre- scribed to us, to do justice to the variety and splendour of [this poem, which, even in its unfinished state, is more than twice as long as the Paradise Lost. The allegorical form, which, as we have seen, was the favourite style of the mediaeval poets, is carefully preserved throughout ; but the interest of the narra- tive, as full of action and incident as an old romance, and the charm of the free, vagrant, open-air life described, make one think and care little for -the hidden meaning. * There is some- thing,' said Pope, 'in Spenser, that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read The Faerie Queene when I was about twelve with a vast deal of delight, and I think it gave me as much when I read it over about a year or two ago.' 1 An account in some detail of a portion of the second book will be found at a later page. 2 Spenser devoted himself with ardour to the support of the religious system and policy adopted by Elizabeth and her ministers. From his youth upwards he was an aspirant for public employment, at first with little success, if the well- known complaint 3 in Mother Hublerd's Tale may be taken to apply to his own case. He would neither have succeeded in entering the public service, nor, having entered it, could he have retained his position, had he not shown himself zealously affected to the new state of things. Again, as a holder of confiscated lands in Ireland, he personally benefited by that great public crime, which, commenced under Elizabeth, was con- summated under William of Orange, the eviction of the Irish 1 Spence's Anecdotes. 2 See Crit. Sect. ch. I., Narrative Poetry. 3 Extract Book, art. 54. igo HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. people from nearly the whole of its own soil, under the pretext of imposing upon them a purer faith. It need not, therefore, surprise us to find Spenser typifying by 'Una,' first, Truth and its oneness, secondly, the newly established Church of England and Ireland, and by 'Duessa,' first, Falsehood and its multiplicity, secondly, the ancient Church, thirdly, Mary Queen of Scots. This last extension of the allegory occurs in the ninth canto of Book V., where Duessa is supposed to be put on her trial, and found guilty of the same heinous crimes that were imputed to Mary, while Mercilla (Queen Elizabeth), out of the goodness of her heart, delays to give effect to the judgment. On the other hand, Spenser seems to have had no sympathy with the Puritans. The religious discipline by which the Eed Cross Knight is purified in the house of Caelia (Book I., Canto x.) has not the least savour of the teaching of Geneva, but is borrowed from the rules of ancient piety. By the 'Blatant Beast' (Book VI), Puritanism, with its destroying hand and railing bitter tongue, appears to be in- tended. It is said of him that after ransacking the monas- teries, From thence into the sacred church he broke, And rob'd the chancell, and the deskes downe threw, And altars fouled, and blasphemy spoke, And the images, for all their goodly hew, Did cast to ground, whilst none wp,s them to rew ; So all confounded and disordered there. He was subdued and bound by Sir Calidore, or Courtesy; but after a time he escaped, and is now, Spenser intimates, pursuing his old trade of detraction and slander, almost un- rebuked. This is a clear allusion to the growth of Puritanism in the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, and to the increasing loudness of its clamour against those portions of the established ritual which it disliked. 6. Of the many shorter poems left by Spenser, none are more noteworthy than The Ruines of Time and The Teares of the Muses. The first, dedicated to Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, is, in its main intention, a lament over her noble brother's untimely death. The marvellous poetic energy, the perfect finish, the depth of thought, the grace, tenderness, and richness of this poem make it eminently illustrative of Spenser's genius. 1 The Teares of the Muses, published in 1591, is an impassioned protest against the depraved state of the public taste, which at this time, according to Spenser, led society in general to despise learning, nobles to sacrifice true 1 See Grit. Sect. ch. I. , Miscellaneous Poems. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 191 fame to vanity, and avarice, and authors to substitute servility and personality for wit. Each muse bewails in turn the miserable condition of that particular branch of literary art over which she is supposed to preside. Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, frankly owns that her occupation in England is a sinecure : But I, that in true tragedies am skilled, The flower of wit, find nought to busie me, Therefore I mourne, and pitifully mone, Because that mourning matter I have none. This might well be said when, as yet, no better tragedy had appeared in England than Sackville's Gorboduc. The complaint of Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, is different. The comic stage had nourished, thanks to one gifted 'gentle spirit ; ' but he was now keeping silence, and ribaldry and folly had possession of the stage. Then comes the following interesting passage : All these, and all that else the comic stage With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced, By which man's life, in his likest image, Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced ; And those sweet wits, which wont the like to frame, Are now despised, and made a laughing game. And he, the man whom Nature's self had made To mock herselfe, and truth to imitate, With kindly counter, under mimic shade, Our pleasant Willy, ah ! is dead of late ; With whom all joy and jolly merriment Is also deaded and in dolour drent. Instead thereof, scoffing scurrilitie And scornful folly with contempt is crept, Rolling in rymes of shameless ribaudry, Without regard or due decorum kept, Each idle wit at will presumes to make, And doth the learned's task upon him take. But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen Large streams of honnie and sweet nectar flowe, Scorning the boldness of such base-born men, Which dare their follies forth so rashly throwe, Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell, Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell. In spite of Mr. Todd's petty objections, I firmly believe that here we have Spenser's tribute to the mighty genius that had already given Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, and perhaps one or two historical plays, to the English stage. 192 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. 7. In Colin Clout's come Home againe, Spenser, having, returned to his Irish home, describes the visit which he paid to England in 1591, the condescension of the Queen, and the ways of the Court ; all under the mask of a conversation between shepherds and shepherdesses. The Foure Hymnes in honour of earthly and heavenly Love, earthly and heavenly Beauty, are written in the Chaucerian heptastich ; the force and harmony of the verse are wonderful. Mother Hubberd's Tale, a work of the poet's youth, is in the heroic couplet ; it is in the main a satire, first exposing with a lofty scorn the hypocrisy and self-seeking of the new clergy, and then turning off to paint the meanness, cunning, and hardheartedness which pervade the atmosphere of a Court. It is in this connection that the famous passage occurs, thought to embody his own experience, which describes the miserable life of a suitor for some favour at Court. Daph- naida and Astrophel are elegies, the last upon the death of Sir Philip Sidney. The lovely nuptial hymn, Epithalamion, was written on the occasion of his marriage ; its metre and movement are Pindaric. Muio- potmos is an elaborate poem, in the fantastic style, on the fate of a butterfly. The reader will observe that there is a wide interval, in respect of the polish and modern air of the diction, between the productions of 1579 and those of 1590 and 1591. One may reasonably conjecture that the perusal of such a play as Two Gentlemen of Verona had led Spenser to modify consider- ably his youthful theory, giving the preference to the obsolete English of a former age. Richard Barnfield has been lately ascertained (see Ward's English Poets, vol. i.) to be the author of two poems in the Passionate Pilgrim, which have been often given to Shakspere ; these are, the sonnet beginning ' If music and sweet poetry agree,' 1 and the ode 'As it fell upon a day.' Barnfield was an imitator and fervent admirer of Spenser. 8. The poems of Shakspere all fall within the early part of his life ; they were all composed before 1598. Writing in that year, Meres, in the Wit's Treasury, says, ' As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous honey-tongued Shakespeare. Witness his "Venus and Adonis ; " his " Lucrece ; " his sugared sonnets among his private friends.' These, together with such portions of the Passionate Pilgrim and the Lover's Complaint as may have been his genuine composition, constitute the whole of Shakspere's poems, as distinguished from his plays. The sonnets, 2 a hundred and fifty-four in number, were first published by a bookseller, Thomas Thorpe, in 1609, with a dedi- cation to a Mr. W. H., ' the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets.' Yet there are some among them viz., those from cxxvii. to cliv. inclusive that are evidently addressed to a woman to some dark-featured, dark-haired beauty, who has 1 Extract Book, art. 69. 2 Ibid. art. 57. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 193 fascinated the poet, and in his passion for whom respect has no part. The tone of self-humiliating adulation which seems to pervade those of which Mr. W. H. was the object, has always been a mystery and a trouble to the admirers of Shakspere, who have been driven to invent various hypotheses to account for it. The subject is fully discussed by Mr. Knight in his Pictorial Shakspere, and briefly handled by Hallam in the third volume of his Literary History. 1 It has been thought by some that the Earl of Southampton, born in 1573, by others that \Villiam Herbert, born in 1580, who became Earl of Pembroke in 1601, is intended by ' W. H.' The second supposition seems the more probable. Whoever was meant, the mental condition which produced these sonnets is explained, as we think, with great force and probability in a little book called ' An Introduction to the Philosophy of Shakespeare's Sonnets, by Richard Simpson' (London, 1868). 'Shake- speare,' says Mr. Simpson, ' is always a philosopher, but in his sonnets he is a philosopher of love.' He imagines W. H. to have been 'either the Earl of Southampton or some other young man of birth and wealth, wit and beauty, who had travelled into Italy, and had come back, brimming over with academies and love-philosophy, with Petrarch and Platonism, upon which he disputed with Shakespeare, and by his discussions '"'begot " the sonnets.' The works of Pico di Mirandola, Marsilius Ficinus, and other Italian Platouists, abound with metaphysical discussions on love, the ground-thesis of which is to be sought in Plato's Symposium. They distinguish the vulgar from the civil love, and both from the chivalrous love ; last and highest of all they place the celestial or ideal love, which, excited originally by the pure admiration of the beauty of some beautiful youth, rather than of any woman, rises gradually upwards to the contem- plation of the celestial or ideal beauty. Mr. Simpson's little book is well worth a careful study. 9. Of the minor poets of the Elizabethan age, the earliest in date among those that attained to real distinction, was Robert Southwell, 2 the Jesuit, cruelly put to death by the Govern- ment in 1595, for the crime of having been found in England, endeavouring to supply his family and friends with priestly ministrations. His poems, under the title of St. Peter's Com- plaint, with other Poems, appeared in the same year that he was executed, and were many times reprinted during the next forty years. Southwell, it seems, was the founder of the modern English style of religious poetry ; his influence and example are evident in the work of Crashaw, or of Donne, or of Herbert, or Waller, or any of those whose devout lyrics were admired in later times. Chaucer had, it is true, shown in the prologue to the Prioress's Tale, and in the poem called 1 See also the editions of the Sonnets by Professor Dowdeu and Mr. Gerald Massey. r- 2 See his Poetical Works, edited by the late Mr. Turnbull, 1856, and Extract Book, art. 55. N 194 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. his A B C in honour of the blessed Virgin, how much the English tongue was capable of in this direction. But the language was now greatly altered, and Chaucer, though admired, was looked upon as no subject for direct imitation. The poets of the time were much more solicitous to write like Ovid than like Isaiah. We may admit the truth, excluding only Spenser from its application, of Southwell's general censure, that ' In lieu of solemn and devout matters, to which in duty they owe their abilities, they now busy themselves in express- ing such passions as serve only for testimonies to what un- worthy affections they have wedded their wills. And because the best course to let them see the error of their works is to weave a new web in their own loom, I have laid a few coarse threads together, to invite some skilfuller wits to go forward in the same, or to begin some finer piece, wherein it may be seen how well verse and virtue suit together.' The precision of Southwell's language, and its exact adaptation to the original and beautiful conceptions of his verse, are manifest on a careful reading of St. Peter's Complaint, the subject of which is the remorse of the apostle after his three denials of Christ. The following stanza is a good illustration of his manner : Titles I make untruths : am I a rock, That with so soft a gale was overthrown ? Am I fit pastor for the faithful flock, To guide their souls, that murder'd thus mine own ? A rock of ruin, not a rest to stay ; A pastor, not to feed, but to betray. A little poern called ' Love's Servile Lot ' is striking from its clear, cold austerity. Of ordinary human love, or passion, he says The will she robbeth from the wit, The sense from reason's lore ; She is delightful in the rind, Corrupted in the core ; and concludes with the advice Plough not the seas, sow not the sands, Leave off your idle pain ; Seek other mistress for your minds Love's service is in vain. 10. Southwell was attacked by Hall, then an eager rising young man at Cambridge, in the first book of his satires, called Virgidemice (i.e. 'harvests of rods'), published in 1597. l Hall's 1 Extract Book, art. 70* 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 195 notion seems to have been that verse was too trivial and too worldly a garb wherein to clothe religious thought. But Mar- ston (see infra, 18) smote the smiter, who had railed 'Gainst Peter's teares and Marie's moving moane, and argued the matter out rather forcibly : Shall painims honor their vile falsed gods With sprightly wits, and shall not we by odds Far far more strive with wit's best quintessence To adore that sacred ever-living Essence ? Hath not strong reason moved the legist's mind, To say that fairest of all nature's kind The prince by his prerogative may claim ? Why may not then our soules, without thy blame, (Which is the best tiling that our God did frame), Devote the best part to His sacred name, And with due reverence and devotion Honor His name with our invention ? l Henry Constable, a poet of 'slight but graceful genius' (A. Lang in Ward's English Poets, i.), wrote many sonnets in early life in praise of his mistress Diana. He was imprisoned for several years on the score of being a Catholic ; perhaps this had something to do with the direction of his later sonnets to the honour of the saints, and chiefly of St. Mary Magdalen. 11. William Warner, by profession an attorney, is said 2 to have first published his Albion's England in 1586. This un- wieldy poem (which some read and print in long fourteens, and others in short eights and sixes it makes not the smallest difference) is in the style of the old riming chronicles ; begin- ning at the Flood, it traces, through twelve books, the history of Britain, loyally and properly terminating with the reign of Elizabeth. The poem opens thus : I tell of things done long ago, Of many things in few ; And chiefly of this clyme of ours The accidents pursue. Thou high director of the same Assist mine artlesse pen, To write the gests of Britons stout, And actes of English men. 12. Never was a circle of more richly gifted spirits con- gregated in one city than the company of poets and play- wrights gathered round the Court in London between 1590 and 1610. From Kent came Samuel Chapman, the translator of 1 Marston's Works (ed. J. O. Halliwell, 1856). Satyrc IV. 2 See Warton, vol. iv. p. 303 n. 196 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEEATUEE CHAP. Ill Homer; from Somersetshire the gentle and high-thoughted Daniel ; Warwickshire sent Michael Drayton, author of the Polyolbion, and William Shakspere ; Kaleigh who shone in poetry as in everything else he attempted came from Devon- shire ; London itself was the birthplace of Donne, Spenser, and Jonson. All these great men, there is reason to believe, were familiarly acquainted and in constant intercourse with one another; but unhappily the age produced no Boswell; and their table-talk, brilliant as it must have been, was lost to posterity. One dim glimpse of one of its phases has been preserved in the well-known passage by Thomas Fuller in the Worthies of England : ' Many were the wit combats between him and Ben Jonson. Which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an Eng- lish man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention. He died A.D. 1616, and was buried at Stratford- upon-Avon, the town of his nativity.' 13. The great intellectual activity which pervaded the Eng- lish nation during this period, the sanguine aspiring temper which ^prevailed, the enthusiastic looking forward to an ex- panding and glorious future which filled the hearts of most men, are certified to us in the works of a crowd of writers of the second rank, of whom, though scarcely one did not attempt many things for which he was ill qualified, almost all have left us something that is worth remembering. Among these one of the most remarkable was Samuel Daniel. He had an ambition to write a great epic, but in this he signally failed. His Wars of the Hoses, a poem in eight books, written in the eight-line stanza the ottava rima of Italy is a heavy, life- less production, in which there are innumerable accounts of men's motives and plans, but not one description of a battle. He had no eye for a stirring picturesque scene, no art to make his characters distinct and natural ; the poem, therefore, pro- duces the effect of a sober and judicious chronicle done into verse, in which the Hotspurs, Mortimers, and Warwicks are all very much of a piece. His eyes seem at last to have been opened to the fact that he was only wasting his time, for the poem breaks off suddenly just before the battle of Tewkes- bury. But the meditative temper of Daniel stood him in good stead in other attempts. His Epistle to tlie Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, is marked by an elevated idealism. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 197 But his best work is certainly the Musophilus. 1 This is in the form of a dialogue between a man of the world, disposed to ridicule and contemn the pursuits of men of letters, 'and the poet himself. The progressive and hopeful character of the age is well illustrated in the fine passages in which the poet foretells an approaching vast expansion of the field of science, and dreams of great and unimagined destinies (since then how fully realised !) reserved for the English tongue. 14. Michael Dray ton also was no mean poet ; indeed Mr. Hallam considered that he had greater reach of mind than Daniel. And this, nakedly stated, is undoubtedly true ; Drayton had more variety, more energy, more knowledge of mankind, and far more liveliness than Daniel. His Baron's Wars 2 are not tame or prosaic ; they are full of action and strife ; swords flash and helmets rattle on every page. But unfortu- nately, Mortimer, the hero of the poem, the guilty favourite of Edward II. 's queen, is a personage in whom we vainly endea- vour to get up an interest. There is much prolixity of descrip- tion in this poem, due, it would seem, to imitation of Spenser, whose influence on Drayton's mind and style is conspicuous. But it is one thing to be prolix in a work of pure imagination, when the poet detains us thereby in that magic world of unearthly beauty in which his own spirit habitually dwells, and quite another thing to be prolix in a poem founded upon and closely following historical fact. When both the close and the chief turning-points of the story are known to the reader beforehand, the introduction of fanciful episodes and digressions, unless ad- mirably managed, is apt to strike him as laborious trifling. If Drayton had known, like Tasso, how to associate Clorindas and Erminias with his historical personages, he might have been as discursive as he pleased. But this was * a grace beyond the reach ' of his art ; and the Baron's Wars remain, therefore, incurably uninteresting. England's Heroiccd Epistles, published in 1598, have a much stronger claim to distinction. This work, which is in the heroic couplet, consists of twelve pairs of epistles, after the manner of Ovid, supposed to be exchanged between so many pairs of royal or noble lovers : among these are Henry II. and Fair Rosamond, Owen Tudor and Queen Catherine, Surrey and Geraldine, Guilford Dudley and Lady Jane Grey. The style is flowing, fiery, and energetic, and withal extremely modern ; it seems to anticipate the ' full resounding line ' of Dryden, and to rebuke the presumption of the poets of the Stuart age, who chose to say that English had never been pro- perly and purely written till "Waller and Denham arose. The 1 Extract Book, art. 64. 2 Ibid. art. 65. 198 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. CHAP. III. Mooncalf is a strange satire and one of a higher order than the weak, uncouth attempts of Hall, Donne, and Marston on the morals and manners of the time. One of the best known of Drayton's poems is the Nympliidia. This is in a common romance metre (the same which Chaucer used for his Sir Thopas), and has for its subject the amours of the Court of fairy land. It is a work of the liveliest fancy, but not of imagination. It is interesting to find Don Quixote referred to in a poem published so soon after Cervantes' death : Men talk of the adventures strange Of Don Quichot and of their change. Not long before his death he wrote a spirited ballad on the battle of Agincourt (1627), in dactylic stanzas. The most celebrated of our author's works still remains to be noticed the Polyolbion 1 (1613-1622). This is a poem of enormous length, written in the Alexandrine or twelve-syllable riming couplet, and aiming at a complete topographical and antiqua- rian delineation of England. The literary merits of this Cyclopean performance are undeniable. Mr. Hallam thinks that 'there is probably no poem of this kind in any other language comparable together in extent and excellence to the Polyolbion; nor can any one read a portion of it without admiration for its learned and highly gifted author.' But the historian of literature goes on to say that 'perhaps no English poem, known so well by name, is so little known beyond its name ; ' and, on the whole, the verdict of criticism pronounces it to be a huge mistake ; to be a composition pos- sessing neither the unity of a work of art, nor the utility of a topographical dictionary. 15. Of Drayton's personal history we know almost nothing; but when we come to speak of John Donne, the image of a strange wayward life, actuated evermore by a morbid restless- ness of the intellect, rises to our thoughts. This man, whose youthful Epithdlamia are tainted by a gross sensuality, ended his career as the grave and learned Dean of St. Paul's, whose sermons furnish the text for pages of admiring commentary to S. T. Coleridge. 2 One fancies him a man with a high fore- head, but false wavering eye, whose subtlety, one knows, will make any cause that he takes up seem for the moment un- impeachable, but of whose moral genuineness in the different phases he assumes, of whose sincere love of truth as truth, one has incurable doubts. As a writer, the great popularity which he enjoyed in his own day has long since given way 1 Extract Book, art. 65. 2 In the Literary Remains, vol. iii. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 199 before the repulsive harshness and involved obscurity of his style. The painful puns, the far-fetched similes, the extrava- gant metaphors, which in Shakspere occur but as occasional blemishes, form the substance of the poetry of Donne ; if they were taken out, very little would be left. He is the earliest poet of the fantastic or metaphysical school, of which we shall have more to say in the next chapter. The term c metaphysical,' first applied to the school by Johnson, though not inappropriate, is hardly distinctive enough. It is not inappropriate, because the philosophising spirit pervades their works, and it is the activity of the intellect, rather than that of the emotions, by which they are characterised. The mind, the nature of man, any faculty or virtue appertaining to the mind, and even any external phenomenon, can hardly be mentioned without being analysed, without subtle hair-splitting divisions and distinctions being drawn out, which the poet of feeling could never stop to elaborate. But this is equally true of a great deal that Shak- spere (especially in his later years), and even that Milton has written, whom yet no one ever thought of including among the metaphysical poets. It is the tendency to conceits, that is, to an abuse of the imaginative faculty, by tracing resemblances that are fantastic, or uncalled for, or unseemly which really distinguishes this school from other schools. This point will be further illustrated in connection with the poetry of Cowley. Donne's poems are generally short ; they consist of elegies, funeral elegies, satires, letters, divine poems, and miscellaneous songs. 1 Besides these, he wrote Metempsychosis, or the Pro- gress of the Soul, a poem published in 1601 ; 'of which,' Jonson told Drummond, in 1618, 'he now, since he was made Doctor, repenteth highlie, and seeketh to destroy all his poems.' In a man of so much mind, it cannot be but that fine lines and stanzas occasionally relieve the mass of barbarous quaintness. Take, for instance, the following stanza from the Letter to Sir H. Wotton : Believe me, Sir, in my youth's giddiest days, When to be like the court was a player's praise, Plays were not so like courts, as courts like plays ; or this, from the letter to E. Woodward : We are but farmers of ourselves, yet may, If we can stock ourselves and thrive, up-lay Much, much good treasure 'gainst the great rent day. 16. Towards the end of the century a serious reflecting 1 Extract Book, art. 68. 200 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. CHAP. III. mood seems to have been the prevailing temper in the edu- cated part of the nation : our writers loved to dive or soar into abstruse and sublime speculations. Among the noblest memo- rials of this philosophic bent, is the Nosce Teipsum of Sir John Davies, Attorney-General for Ireland, a poem on the soul of man, which it aims to prove immaterial and immortal. It is in the heroic quatrain or four-lined stanza, with alternate rimes, a metre afterwards employed by Davenant, Dryden, and Gray. The philosophy is Christian and Platonic, as opposed to the systems of the materialist and Epicurean. The versification is clear, sonorous, and full of dignity. There is a passage at the end of the introduction which curiously resembles the celebrated meditation in Pascal's Pensees upon the greatness and littleness which are conjoined in man : I know my body's of so frail a kind As force without, fevers within, can kill ; I know the heavenly nature of my mind, But 'tis corrupted both in wit and will : I know my soul hath power to know all things, Yet is she blind and ignorant in all ; I know I'm one of Nature's little kings, Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall : I know my life's a pain, and but a span : I know my sense is mock'd in every thing ; And, to conclude, I know myself a man, Which is a proud, and yet a wretched thing. 17. The 'best odes and madrigals' of Thomas Lodge, written between 1580 and 1600, are held by Mr. Gosse (Ward's English Poets, voL i.) to 'rank with the finest work of that rich age.' This seems to be exaggerated praise; certainly in the examples of Lodge's poetry which Mr. Gosse himself has collected there is nothing remotely comparable to the lovely elegiac ode in Cymbeline (Grit. Sec. I. 64), or even to the finest passages of the Shepheard's Calendar. His romances, Rosalynde (1590), A Margarite of America (1596), and others, are said by Mr. Gosse to show the influence of Sannazzaro and Tasso ; they are in the line of Sidney's Arcadia, but of inferior power. George Chapman and John Marston belonged to the same literary set, about which unhappily we know so little, that in- cluded Shakspere and Ben Jonson. As a second-rate drama- tist, Chapman will receive some notice further on ; here a few words must be said about his translation of the Iliad, which appeared about 1601. 1 It is written in the same metre as 1 Extract Book, art. 64. 1558-162;". ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 201 Warner's Albion's England, but always printed in long four- teen-syllable riming lines. Considered as exhibiting imagina- tive power and rapidity of movement, this version does not ill represent the original ; the Elizabethan poets well understood how to make words the musical symbols of ideas, and were not given to dawdle or falter on their way. But the simplicity and dignity of the original, in other words, the points which constitute the unapproached elevation of Homer in poetry and art, these were characteristics which it was beyond the reach of Chapman to reproduce. 1 Still, considering the time at which it appeared, and that this was the first complete metrical ver- sion of the Hiad in any modern language, it was truly a sur- prising and a gallant venture, and well typifies the intensity of force with which the English intellect, at this strange period, was working in every direction. Chapman afterwards published a version of the Odyssey (1614) in the heroic couplet. The translation is bold and rugged, the construction and sense continually running over from one couplet to the next. The writer had a wit of con- siderable vigour, but of coarse texture. 18. Marston- is the author of five separate satires (1598), besides three books of satires collectively named The Scourge of Villanie (1599). The separate satires are not without merit, as the passage given above (p. 195), which was taken from the fourth of them, might prove. The second contains an attack on the Puritans, who first appeared a few years before this time as a separate party. A Puritan citizen, who said grace for half an hour, but was a griping usurer, is thus satirised : No Jew, no Turke, would use a Christian So inhumanely as this Puritan. Take heed, worlde ! take heed advisedly, Of these same damned anthropophagi. I had rather be within an harpie's clawes Than trust myself in their devouring jawes, Who all confusion to the world would bring Under the forme of their new discipline. The Scourge of Villanie is much inferior to the separate satires. The author gloats over the immoralities which he pretends to scourge in a manner which forces one to think of ' Satan re- proving sin/ All is invective; those delightful changes of hand, with which Horace wanders back to the scenes of his boyhood, or gives us his opinion of Lucilius, or sketches the 1 See the Lectures of my brother, the late Professor of Poetry, On Trans- lating Homer. 202 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. poetical character, or playfully caricatures the Stoic philosophy, are not for the imitation of such blundering matter-of-fact satirists as Hall, or Donne, or Marston; with them satire is satire : they begin to call names in the first line, and, with the tenacity of their country's bull-dogs, continue to worry their game down to the very end. 19. George Gascoigne, a Cambridge man, is known as the author of a satire called The Steele Glas, published in 1576, and dedicated to Lord Grey of Wilton. 1 In the dedication he speaks of himself as one who had 'misgoverned his youth,' but had resolved to take to industry in his riper age. The first part of the poem, which is in blank verse, is in the style of an old morality. Satyra, the sister of Poesy, sees the latter married to Vain Delight ; she cries out against him, and he cuts out her tongue with the ' Raysor of Restraynte.' Yet she can still with the stump of her tongue make some imperfect sound; and she will now inveigh against the age, because in its pride it refuses to see itself truly in the mirrors which are its delight ; she will hold up before its eyes the steel glass of Lucilius, not the crystal glass ; for this last he bequeathed to those who like to seem rather than to be ; but the steel glass to those who wish to see themselves just as they are, whether foul or fair. A general invective against society, and its dif- ferent classes and orders, succeeds ; parts of which are spirited and forcible, but, for want of defined and personal interest, it loses itself in the vague. At last Satire sees in the glass a number of praying priests, to whom she addresses various counsels and requests, admonishing them finally not to cease praying till the time conies when the swarming abuses of the land shall cease : When Lais lives not like a ladie's peare [peer], Nor useth art in dying of her heare. 20. The sonnets, songs, and canzonets of Sir Philip Sidney ^re imitated from Italian and Spanish models, but they are ireighted by his powerful mind with a burden of thought and passion almost too great for such slight structures to bear : * gemuit sub pondere cymba sutilis.' Astropliel and Stella consists of a hundred and eight love sonnets, with songs in- terspersed. Astrophel is Sidney ; by Stella Lady Rich was meant. As Penelope Devereux she had shone as a leading beauty in Elizabeth's corrupt court; Sidney loved her, but spoke too late ; and she became the wife of a man whom she did not love, Lord Rich. Sidney's passion mastered him, and 1 Extract Book, art. 48. 1658-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 203 for two years he gave way to a guilty love : it is the one stain on his lofty character. He afterwards married Frances, daughter of Walsingham, the Secretary of State. Three years after his marriage, in 1586, he fell at Zutphen. Sidney's sonnets are not inartificial, like Shakspere's, but framed upon the right Petrarcan model. In Astrophel and Stella let the reader note particularly the fourth : Virtue, alas ! now let me take some rest ; and the eighty-fourth : High-way, since you my chief Parnassus be. Among his c Sonnets and Translations ' occurs a beautiful poem to which neither name is applicable ; it seems to have been written soon after Penelope's marriage. The Shaksperian cast of the thought and imagery is remarkable : Ring out your bells, let mourning shews be spread, For Love is dead : All Love is dead, infected With plague of deep disdain : Worth, as nought worth, rejected, And Faith fair scorn doth gain. From so ungrateful fancy ; From such a female frenzy ; From them that use men thus, Good Lord deliver us. Let dirge be sung, and trentals rightly read, For Love is dead : Sir Wrong his tomb ordaineth My mistress' marble heart ; Which epitaph containeth, Her eyes were once his dart. From so ungrateful, &c. Al as ! I lye : Rage hath this error bred ; Love is not dead, but sleepeth In her unmatched mind : Where she his counsel keepeth Till due deserts she find. Therefore from so vile fancy, To call such wit a frenzy, Who Love can temper thus, Good Lord, deliver us. Sir Edward Dyer, of Sharpham Park, Somersetshire, an intimate personal friend of Sidney, wrote a few poems, the force and pathos of which left a deep impression on his con- temporaries. The chief of these are, the fine poem of reflexion, 204 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. ' My mind to me a kingdom is,' printed in many collections ; l a poem in forty short stanzas, breathing the deepest melancholy, almost despair, entitled ' A Fancy ; ' and the lovely ode ' To Cynthia/ beginning 'Amidst the fayrest mountayne topps.' (Miscell. of the Fuller Worthies Library, Rev. A. B. Grosart, 1872.) 21. Thomas Tusser, a native of Essex, after trying various callings, turned his hand to farming, and while struggling with a Suffolk farm, which proved more than a match for him, published (about 1558) Five Hundreth Pointes of good Hus- bandrie, as well for the Champion or open Countrie, as also for the Woodland or Severall. 2 The versification is mean and rough ; it is rather favourably represented by the following sample : The sun in the southe, or else southlie and west, Is joie to the hop, as a welcomed guest ; But wind in the north, or else northerlie east, To the hop is as ill as a fraie in a feast. Stillingfleet (quoted in Warton's History of Poetry) says of Tusser : ' He throws his precepts into a calendar, and gives many good rules in general, both in relation to agriculture and economy ; and had he not written in miserable hobbling and obscure verse, might have rendered more service to his- countrymen.' 22. Christopher Marlowe, who for his rare gift of expression might fitly be called the Keats of the sixteenth century, was born at Canterbury in 1564. Like Keats he was of humble birth, the son of a shoemaker ; like him he was cut off by an untimely death. Of his plays we shall hereafter speak ; among his few poems and translations, the fragment of Hero and Leander is remarkable for the exquisite grace and melody of the verse. As completed by Chapman, the poem has six books, called ' Sestiads ; ' of these only the first two, and small portions of the others, are by Marlowe. Though founded on a Greek poem of the pseudo-Musseus (a grammarian, who is supposed to have lived in the fifth century after Christ), Hero and Leander has more of the character of an original work than of a translation. We will quote the beautiful passage, a line from which is put in the mouth of Phebe by Shakspere in As You Like It (act iii. sc. 5) : It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is over-ruled by fate. When two are stript, long ere the course begin, We wish that one should lose, the other win ; 1 Extract Book, art. 218. 2 Ibid. art. 45. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 205 And one especially do we affect Of two gold ingots, like in each respect : The reason no man knows ; let it suffice, What we behold is censured by our eyes. Where both deliberate, the love is slight : Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight ? Marlowe, after being known as one of the brightest wits at Cambridge, launched into the stage-life of London. Accord- ing to the common story, he was killed in a tavern brawl at Deptford in 1593. Puritan writers held up his death as a divine judgment, sent to punish the laxity of his opinions. 23. Sir Walter Raleigh, the gay courtier, the gallant soldier, the discoverer of Virginia, the father of English colonisation, the wily diplomatist, the learned historian, the charming poet, as he did everything else well by the force of his bright and incomparable genius, so he is the author of a few beautiful and thoughtful poems. 1 I am persuaded that he wrote The Lie, for I do not believe that any one then living, except Shakspere, was so capable of having written it. 2 Fulk Greville, son of Sir Fulk Greville of Beauchamp Court, Alcester, in Warwickshire, created Lord Brooke in 1620, the friend and kinsman of Sidney, was employed and rewarded both by Elizabeth and by James L He had a powerful intellect, but one which feeling and fancy did not duly counterpoise. The heroines of his tragedies moralise and argue interminably, and when asked a plain question of fact, usually reply with a philosophical disquisition. Speaking of his two tragedies Mustapha (1609) and Alaham (1633) Lamb says : 3 ' Their author has strangely contrived to make passion, character, and interest of the highest order subser- vient to the expression of state dogmas and mysteries. He is nine parts Machiavel or Tacitus, for one part Sophocles or Seneca. In this writer's estimate of the faculties of his own mind, the understanding must have held a most tyrannical pre-eminence. Whether we look into his plays, or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and made rigid with intellect' The texture of Greville's work is so uniform, that a short extract, taken almost anywhere, is enough to show the lines on, which his mind proceeds. In Mustapha, 1 Printed at the end of vol. viii. of the Oxford edition of Raleigh's Works. 2 (See Extract Book, art. 59.) The evidence is not conclusive either way ; it certainly was not written ' the night before his execution,' according to the common story, because it had appeared in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody in 1602 ; but Raleigh's name was given by the printer as one of the contributors to the Rhapsody, and to him, above all the other contributors, in my opinion at least, may The Lie most reasonably be assigned. a English Dramatic Poets, Bohn. 206 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. Solyman the emperor believes that his son Mustapha is con- spiring against him, a belief which the sister, Camena, tries to dispel : Sol. I think 'tis true, who know their children least, Have greatest reason to esteem them best. Cam. How so, my lord ? since love in knowledge lives, Which unto strangers therefore no man gives. Sol. The life we gave them soon they do forget, While they think our lives do their fortunes let. Cam. The tenderness of life it is so great, As any sign of death we hate too much ; And unto parents sons perchance are such. Yet nature meant her strongest unity 'Twixt sons and fathers ; making parents cause, Unto the sons, of their humanity, And children pledge of their eternity. Fathers should love this image in their sons. Posthumous poems, Of Monarchy and Religion, appeared in 1670. A complete edition of all Lord Brooke's works was brought out (1870) by the Kev. A. B. Grosart in the Fuller Worthies Library. (See the article in Ward's English Poets.) Giles Fletcher, a Cambridge man and a clergyman, wrote a long religious poem in stanzas, Christ's Victoria and Triumph (1610). His brother Phineas, also a clergyman, is the author of The Purple Island or Isle of Man, together with Piscatorie Eclogs and other poetical Miscellanies, pub- lished at Cambridge in 1633. It is in seven-lined stanzas, and aims at being an elaborate physiological description of the body and mind of man. Phineas, with considerable powers of description, is a palpable imitator of Spenser. An older Giles Fletcher, father of the two poets, wrote (1591) Of the Russe Commonwealth. All three 'were of the kindred of John Fletcher the dramatist. On the metres employed by the Fletchers, see App. 21. 24. Respecting the numerous tribe of translators who were busy in the reign of Elizabeth ample details are given in the fourth volume of Warton's ' History of Poetry.' Before 1600, Homer, the pseudo-Musseus, Yirgil, Horace, Ovid, and Martial, were translated into English verse; most of the versions ap- peared before 1580. Thomas Phaier brought out seven books of the ^Eneid, in the fourteen-syllable or Sternhold metre,^in 1558. A ridiculous version of four books, executed by Richard Stanihurst, in English hexameters, to be read and scanned in the same way as the Latin, appeared in 1583. Abraham Fleming, in 1575 and 1589, published versions in the same metre of the Bucolics and Georgics. Of Chapman's version of Homer we have already spoken. Thomas Drant published in 1566-7 versions of the Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica of Horace. In 1575 Arthur Golding brought out a complete 155SI ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 207 version, in fourteen-syllable lines, of Ovid's Metamorphoses ; this remained popular for many years. 1 Marlowe made a \vrsion of Ovid's Elegies, which, along with the pamphlets of Nash and Harvey, was seized under a decree of Archbishop Whitgift in 1599, ordering that all immoral books and satires should be brought in and burnt. The Heroical Epistles of the same author were englished by George Turberville. Marlowe also left a version, in blank verse, of the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia. Thomas Churchyard 2 (1578) translated into English verse three books of Ovid's Tristia. Joshua Sylvester, a mer- chant adventurer, translated (1598) the Creation du Monde or Semaine of the Gascon poet Dubartas into English heroics, with the title of Divine Weekes and Workes. Dramatists : Origin of the English Drama; Miracle Plays ; Moral Plays ; Udall, Still, Heywood, Sack- ville and Norton, Marlowe; the Dramatic Unities ; Shakspere, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Greene, Peele, Nash, L^ly, Massinger, Ford, Webster, Mar- stoh, ChapmanTDekker, T. Heywood, Rowley, Tour- neur, Shirley. 25. What we have to say on the development of the drama in this period may best be prefaced by a brief sketch of its rise and progress in the Middle Ages. Five distinct influences or tendencies are traceable as having co-operated, in various degrees and ways, in the development of the drama. These are : 1, the didactic efforts of the clergy; 2, mediaeval philosophy ; 3, the revival of ancient learning ; 4, the influence of the feeling of nationality ; 5, the influence of continental literature, especially that of Italy. 26. The first rude attempts in this country to revive those theatrical exhibitions, which, in their early and glorious forms, had been involved in the general destruction of the ancient world, were due to the clergy. They arose out of a perception that what we see with our eyes makes a greater impression upon us than what we merely hear with our ears. It was seen that many events in the life of Christ, as well as in the history of the Christian Church, would easily admit of being dramatised, and thus brought home, as it were, to the feelings and con- 1 Extract Book, art. 47. - This writer, who ' trailed his pike ' as a soldier in many wars, lived to a great age, and produced a long list of works, both prose and verse. Among the former is a ' Description of the woeful wars in Flanders ; ' the latter include several tragedies in the Mirror for Mayistratcs. 208 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. sciences of large bodies of men more effectually than by sermons. As to books, they of course were, at the time now spoken of, accessible only to an insignificant minority. The early plays which thus arose were called ' miracles/ or ' miracle plays,' because miraculous narratives, taken from Scripture or from the lives of the saints, formed their chief subject. The earliest known specimens of these miracle plays, accord- ing to Mr. Wright, 1 were composed in Latin by one Hilarius, an English monk, and a disciple of the famous Abelard, in the early part of the twelfth century. The subjects of these are the raising of Lazarus, a miracle of St. Nicholas, and the life of Daniel. Similar compositions in French date from the thirteenth century ; but Mr. Wright does not believe that any were composed in English before the fourteenth. The follow- ing passage, from Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, will give a general notion of the mode in which they were performed. It relates to the famous Coventry Mysteries, of which a nearly complete set has been preserved, and published by the Shake- speare Society : . Before the suppression of the monasteries, this cittye was very famous for the pageants that were played therein, upon Corpus Christi day. These pageants were acted with mighty state and reverence by the fryers of this house (the Franciscan monastery at Coventry), and conteyned the story of the New Testament, which was composed into old English rime. The theatres for the severall scenes were very large and high ; and being placed upon wheeles, were drawn to all the eminent places of the cittye, for the better advantage of the spectators. These travelling show-vans remind one of Thespis, the founder of Greek tragedy, who is said to have gone about in his theatrical cart, from town to town, exhibiting his plays. According to older authorities, the movable theatre itself was originally signified by the term ' pageant,' not the piece per- formed in it. The Coventry Mysteries were performed in Easter week. The set which we have of them is divided into forty- two parts, or scenes, to each of which its own ' pageant,' or moving theatre, was assigned. Traversing, by a prescribed round, the principal streets of the city, each pageant stopped at certain points along the route, and the actors whom it con- tained, flinging open the doors, proceeded to perform the scenes allotted to them. Stage properties and gorgeous dresses were not wanting; we even meet, in the old corporation accounts, 1 Introduction to the Chester Plays, published for the Shakespeare Society. A note of doubtful authority, found in a MS. of these plays written at the end of the sixteenth century, ascribes them to Ralph Higden, author of the Polyclironicon. (See Morley's English Writers, ii. 350.) 1658-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 209 with such items as money advanced for the effective exhibition of hell-fire. Two days were occupied in the performance of the forty-two scenes, and a person standing at any one of the appointed halting-places would he able to witness the entire drama. The following passage presents a fair sample of the roughness of style and homeliness of conception which charac- terise these mysteries throughout ; it is taken from the pageant of the * Temptation : ' ' Now if thou be Goddys Sone of might, Ryght down to the erthe anon thou falle, And save thisylf in every plyght From harm and hurt and peinys alle ; For it is wretyn, aungelys bright That ben in hevyn, thy faderes halle, Thee to kepe bothe day and nyght, Xal be ful redy as thi tharalle, Hurt that thou non have : That thou stomele not ageyn the stone, And hurt thi fote as thou dost gon, Aungelle be ready all everychon In weyes the to save.' It is wretyn in holy book, Thi Lord God thou shalt not tempte ; All things must obey to Goddys look, Out of His might is non exempt ; Out of thi cursydness and cruel crook By Godys grace man xal be redempt ; Whan thou to helle, thi brennynge brooke, To endles peyne xal evyn be dempt, Therein alwey to abyde.' &c. &c. The Towneley Mysteries, so named because the only exist- ing MS. (from which they were printed for the Surtees Society in 1836) belonged to the old Catholic family of 'Towneley of Towneley' in Lancashire, might perhaps with more propriety be named the Wakefield Mysteries, as having been written for the guilds of that town. This is Mr. Morley's conjecture (English Writers, II. 357), who gives an interesting analysis of a grotesque little pastoral comedietta, annexed to that member of the series which treats of the appearance of the angel to announce the Nativity to the shepherds. A shepherd called Mak steals a sheep ; makes ludicrous efforts, aided by his wife, to conceal the theft ; is detected, and soundly beaten by the other shepherds. These pieces seem to be mostly of north-country origin, but they ' vary among each other in style, language, and dramatic power.' On the whole they are later in date than either the Chester or the Coventry Mysteries. 210 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. 27. The philosophy of the Middle Ages, which we have named as the second influence co-operating to the development of the drama, dealt much in abstract terms, and delighted in definitions and logical distinctions. Debarred, partly by ex- ternal hindrances, partly by its own inexperience, from profitable inquiry into nature and her laws, the mind was thrown back upon itself, its own powers, and immediate instruments ; and the fruits were, an infinite number of metaphysical cobwebs, logical subtleties, and quips or plays upon words. Thus, instead of proceeding onward from the dramatic exhibition of scriptural personages and scenes to that of real life and character, the mediaeval playwrights perversely went backwards, and refined away the scriptural personages into mere moral abstractions. Thus, instead of the Jonathan and Satan of the mystery, we come to the Friendship and the Vice of the moral play, or morality, a dramatic form which seems to have be- come popular in this country about the middle of the fifteenth century. How far this folly would have gone it is impossible to say; fortunately it was cut short by the third influence mentioned the revival of ancient learning. When the plays of Terence and Sophocles, nay, even those of Seneca, became generally known, none but a pedant or a dunce could put up with the insufferable dulness of a moral play. 28. The earliest known English comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, 1 bears plain marks of the power of this new influence. Its author was Nicholas Udall, master of Eton College; the exact date of its publication is unknown, but it was certainly composed before 1551. It is written in jingling rhyme, the lines being usually of twelve syllables, though frequently shorter. It is divided into acts and scenes, like those plays of Plautus and Terence of which it is a professed imitation. The following is an outline of the plot, which is managed with considerable skill. The heroine, Dame Christian Constance, is betrothed to a merchant, Gawin Goodluck, who is absent on a voyage. Ralph Koister Doister, who is an idler about town and a silly vain fellow, meets her and falls in love with her. His courtship proceeds with many ludicrous turns and inci- dents, the lady spurning it, while Matthew Merrygreek, a sort of follower of Kalph, pretends to further it, but in fact loses no chance of making a fool of his patron. Gawin returns, and after some difficulty, the circumstances of his rival's supposed favourable treatment being all explained, the lovers come to an understanding, the wedding-day is fixed, and Kalph is invited to the marriage. 1 Extract Book, art. 43. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 211 29. Gammer Gurton's Needle 1 and Misogonus, 2 both pro- bably composed before 1560, are comedies of the same kind, but of still ruder workmanship. In the first the plot amounts to no more than this : Gammer Gurton has lost her needle in mending the nether garments of her servant Hodge, and after everything has been thrown into confusion, and several persons falsely accused of stealing it, the needle is found just in the place where it might have been expected to be, that is, in the garment itself. The metre is the same as that of Ralph Roister Doister ; the object of the writers evidently being to reproduce, so far as they could, the effect of the rough iambic senarii of Plautus and Terence. Our dramatists at this period had sufficient sense to admire the ancients, but not enough to make them despise themselves and their own productions. The more flexible French genius had already begun to follow the advice of the poet Du Bellay, who, writing in the year 1548, says : ' Translation is not a sufficient means to elevate our vernacular speech to the level of the most famous languages. What must we do then ? Imitate ! imitate the Komans as they imitated the Greeks ; as Cicero imitated Demosthenes, and Virgil^ Homer. We must transform the best authors into ourselves, and, after having digested them, convert them into blood and nutriment.' Yet, on the other hand, the sturdy English independence brought with it countervailing advan- tages ; but for it, the Elizabethan literature, while gaining perhaps in polish and correctness, would have lost tenfold more in the free play of thought, in exuberance and boldness of con- ception, and in that display of creative genius which invents new forms for modern wants. 30. Before the appearance of comedies properly so called, a sort of intermediate style was introduced by John Heywood, jester and musician at the court of Henry VIII. He produced several short plays which he called Interludes. The name had been in use for some time, and merely signified a dramatic piece performed in the intervals of a banquet, court 1 Baker in the BiograpJtia Dramatica, followed by Collier (Hist, of the Eng. Drama, ii. 444), assigns this play, written in a metre resembling that of Ralph Roister Doister, to John Still, a Cambridge master of arts, who, after being Master of St. John's College, was elected Vice-Chancellor of the university in 1575, and appointed by Elizabeth to the see of Bath and Wells in 1593. Various circumstances show that he had a leaning towards the Puritan party. This is not the sort of career that the loose-tongued author of Gammer Gurton's Needle, who besides shows not the slightest leaning towards any party or doc- trine of the Reformers, would be likely to have run. Nor does there seem to be any other positive ground for ascribing the play to him beyond the fact, that on the title-page of the edition of 1575, this ' ryght pithy pleasaunt and merie Comedie ' is said to have been ' made by Mr. S. Mr of Arts.' 2 This play, written in twelve-syllable quatrains, and translated from the. Italian, was made by one Thos. Eychardes about 1560 (Collier). 212 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. CHAP. III. pageant, or other festivity. Moral plays are thus frequently described by their authors as interludes. But the novel character of Heywood's plays, and the popularity which they obtained, caused the name of Interlude to be, after his time, reserved for plays of similar aim and construction. The novelty consisted in this : that whereas, in a Moral play, the characters are personified qualities (Felicity, False Semblance, Youth, &c.), in an Inter- lude they are true persons, but not yet individuals ; they are the repre- sentatives of classes. Thus, in Heywood's clever interlude of The Four P's, 1 theleading characters are, the Pedlar, thePalmer, the Pardoner, and thePoti- cary. In another, one of the characters is even named ; this is A Mery Play betivene the Pardonere and the Frere, the Curate and Neighbour Pratte. He also wrote the interludes Johan, Tyb his wife, and Sir Johan the preeste (1533), and Genteelness and Nobilitic ; besides being the author of six hundred epigrams, whence he is sometimes quoted as the Epigrammatist. He was a great joker, and a favourite with Sir Thomas More and Queen Mary. At the same time he adhered staunchly to the old religion, and is said to have narrowly escaped the halter under Edward VI. (Warton, vol. iii. ; Dodsley's Old Plays.) No comedies worthy of note appeared after those above mentioned for more than twenty years, not till the time of Greene, Peele, and Marlowe, the immediate predecessors and contemporaries of Shakspere. 31. The earliest known tragedy was brought upon the stage in 1562, under the title of Gorloduc or Ferrex and Porrex* It was jointly composed by Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst, and Thomas Norton, a Puritan lawyer. It is the first English drama of any kind written in blank verse. The subject, like that of Shakspere's King Lear, is taken from the fabulous British annals, originally compiled by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century, and innocently copied into the histories of most of the chroniclers down to the time of Milton. The writers were educated men, and it seems probable that they chose an episode taken from the legendary history of Britain as the subject of their tragedy, in imitation of the Greek tragedians, whose constant storehouse of materials was the mythical traditions of Greece. Similarly Milton thought of writing an epic poem on the Legend of Arthur and his knights. But this play bears witness also to the influence of the fourth tendency noted above the desire to deepen and justify the pride of English nationality. The play is full of allusions to the present state of things, enforcing the advan- tages of peace and settled government, the evils of popular risings and a disputed succession. The same design of illus- trating the present by the past is apparent in an old play written so far back as the last years of Henry VIII., the Kynge Johan of Bishop Bale, a piece holding an intermediate i Extract Boole, art. 40. 2 /^. ar t. 46. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 213 position between the moral play and the regular drama, some of the situations and ideas of which are, possibly, through the medium of a later play on the same subject published in 1591, worked up in the King John of Shakspere. But our first truly historical play seems to have been the Life of Edward II. by Christopher Marlowe. Mr. Hallam calls it * by far the best, after [the historical plays of] Shakspere.' 32. The appearance of Marlowe's tragedy of Tamburlaine the Great, in 1586, makes an epoch in the history of the English drama. Blank verse is used in it with so much force and ingenuity that from that time the adoption of this as the regular dramatic measure was a settled question. The gorgeous language, the rants, the bombast, the Asiatic pomp, which deck this dramatic presentation of the Tartar conqueror, though they provoked Shakspere to good-natured satire, 1 did not prevent the play from making an extraordinary impression. Nor was this popularity undeserved. * This play,' says Mr. Hallam, ' has more spirit and poetry than any which upon clear grounds can be shown to have preceded it. We find also more action on the stage, a shorter and more dramatic dialogue, a more figura- tive style, with a far more varied and skilful versification.' Marlowe's greatest work, The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus* (1588), has attracted much attention of late years, owing to the celebrity with which Goethe's great work has invested the old story. Mr. Hazlitt, though deeming it ' an imperfect and unequal performance,' does justice to its power. ' Faustus himself,' he says, ' is a rude sketch, but it is a gigantic one. This character may be considered as a personification of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity sublimed beyond the reach of fear and remorse. He is hurried away, and, as it were, devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature and art, and to extend his power with his knowledge. He would realise all the fictions of a lawless imagination, would solve the most subtle speculations of abstract reason ; and for this purpose sets at defiance all mortal conse- quences, and leagues himself with demoniacal power, with "fate and metaphysical aid." Faustus, in his impatience to fulfil at once and for a moment, for a few short years, all the desires and conceptions of his soul, is willing to give in exchange his soul and body to the great enemy of mankind.' 3 Thomas Kyd is the author of a famous tragedy, Jeronymo, acted in 1588, and of its sequel, The Spanish Tragedy. They are ranting plays, full of sensational incident ; half of Jeronymo is in rime. 33. The fondness for seeing the past history of the nation exhibited in dramatic show, conduced, more than any other single cause, to that constant neglect of the dramatic ' unities ' 1 Henry IV., Part ii., Act ii., Sc. 4. 2 Extract Book, art. 53. 3 Other plays of Marlowe are The Jew of Malta (1589) and The Massacre of Paris (1592), both tragedies. Mr. Dyce believes that he had a hand in the 'First Part of the Contention of York and Lancaster,' on which Shakspere founded the second part of Henry VI. (see below, 42). The tragedy of Dido is thought by Mr. Dyce (Marlowe's Works, 1858) to have been begun by Marlowe and finished by Nash. The dates assigned, which are those of the first appearances of the plays, are probable rather than certr.in. 214 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. for which our English play-writers are conspicuous. This, therefore, is the place to explain what those unities were, and how our early tragedians came to violate them. Aristotle, in his Treatise of Poetry, collects from the practice of the Greek dramatists certain rules of art, as neces- sary to be observed, in order that any tragedy may have its full effect upon the audience. The chief of these relates to the action represented, which, he says, must be one, complete, and important. This rule has been called the Unity of Action. He also says that tragedy 'for the most part endeavours to conclude itself within one revolution of the sun, or nearly so.' This rule, limiting the time during which the action repre- sented takes place to twenty-four hours, or thereabouts, has been called the Unity of Time. A third rule, not expressly mentioned by Aristotle, but nearly always observed by the Greek tragedians, requires that the entire action shall be transacted in the same locality ; this is called the Unity of Place. These three rules were carefully observed by the first Italian tragedians, Rucellai and Trissino ; and also in France, when the drama took root there. In Spain and in England they were neglected, and apparently for the same reason that both peoples were fervently national, and intensely self- conscious ; and therefore, in order to gratify them, the drama tended to assume the historic form a form which necessitates the violation of the unities. 1 Marlowe, in his historical tragedy of Edward IL, and Shakspere, in his ten historical plays, proceed upon this principle. Shakspere, however, when he wrote to gratify his own taste rather than that of the public, so far showed his recognition of the soundness of the old classical rules, that in the best of his tragedies he carefully observed the unity of action, although he judged it expedient, perhaps with reference partly to the coarser perceptions of his audience, to sacrifice those lesser congruities of place and time which the sensitive Athenian taste demanded, to the require- ments of a wider, though looser, conception of the ends of dramatic art. 34. Marlowe, Peele, Greene, Nash, and Lodge, were all young men together, and all writing for the London stage between the years 1585 and 1593. They had all received a university education, and as brother wits and boon companions were on terms of the freest intimacy. But an interloper, an upstart, a mere provincial who had never seen the inside of a college, worse than all, a player, who ought to have deemed it sufficient honour to perform the plays which these choice spirits 1 See Critical Section, ch. I., Dramatic Poetry. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 215 condescended to write, had come up from Warwickshire to con- found them all. The grievance is thus alluded to by Greene, in a curious pamphlet called A Groat's Worth of Wit, written just before his death in 1592. Addressing three of his brother dramatists, supposed to be Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, he says : ' Is it not strange that I to whom they [the players] all have been beholding is it not like that you, to whom they all have been beholding, shall, were ye in that case that I am now, be both of them at once forsaken 1 Yes, trust them not ; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country? We shall have occasion to examine into the meaning of Greene's charge presently. From this passage, besides other slight indications pointing the same way, it may be concluded that Shakspere (for no one has ever doubted that the allusion is aimed at him) had begun to employ himself in dramatic writing before 1592, that he moved in a different circle in society from that which was formed by the educated wits and literati of London, and that he had been busy in adapting other men's plays for production at his own theatre. 35. Every one knows how few and meagre are the known facts of Shakspere's biography. * The two greatest names in poetry,' says Mr. Hallam, 'are to us little more than names. If we are not yet come to question his unity, as we do that of " the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle," an improvement in critical acuteness doubtless reserved for a distant posterity, we as little feel the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear, as we can give a distinct historic personality to Homer. ... It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name, that we seek. No letter of his writing, no record of his conversation, no character of him drawn with any fulness by a comtemporary, has been produced.' Such as they are, however, the chief of those particulars which untiring research has either firmly established or placed on the level of strong probabilities, must here be related. William Shakspere was born at Stratford - upon - Avon, in April 1564. 1 He received, so far as we know, no better 1 After the ai-ticle in Fuller's Worthies, the earliest biographical note on Shak- spere is that communicated by John Aubrey to Anthony a Wood, which, with 216 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. education than the grammar school of the place afforded ; and soon after he had reached his twentieth year, was drawn up to London, probably through the influence of his friend Eichard Burbage, a leading actor of the day, and himself a Warwick- shire man. Shakspere's name stands twelfth in a list still extant, of the date of 1589, containing the names of sixteen players, who were at the same time joint proprietors of the Blackfriars Theatre. In a similar list, dated in 1596, he stands fourth, having evidently in the interval attained to a much more important position in the partnership. At this latter date the company were in possession, not only of their old theatre at the Blackfriars, but of a new one by the river- side, called the Globe Theatre, which they used for summer performances. Already, before 1592, besides altering old plays, Shakspere had written several independent dramas, to be per- formed' by his company. In 1598 as we learn from a passage in Meres' Wit's Treasury published in that year at least twelve of his plays had appeared ; namely, the comedies of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour Won (supposed to be All's Well that Ends Well), Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Merchant of Venice ; the historical plays of Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., and King John, and the tragedies of Titus Andro- nicus and Romeo and Juliet. Shakspere prospered in his pro- fession ; he amassed a considerable fortune, which we find him to have invested in houses and lands at Stratford, whither he retired to live at ease some years before his death in 1616. During this retirement, he probably wrote the three Roman plays Julius Ccesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. 36. Out of thirty-five plays which Shakspere has left us (excluding Titus Andronicus. and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and waiving the difficult question as to his connexion with the three parts of Henry VI.), fourteen are comedies, eleven trage- dies, and ten histories. With reference to Shakspere, the term 1 comedy ' simply denotes a play that ends happily ; but it may have abounded, in the development of the plot, with serious and pathetic incidents. This intermediate style was afterwards other short lives from the same hand, ' Letters ' of that age, and other matter, Was first published from the originals in the Bodleian Library in 1813. ' This William,' says Aubrey, 'being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess, about 18, and was an actor at one of the playhouses, and did act exceedingly well.' The writer tells several hearsay anecdotes of no great interest, and adds that he had heard Davenant and Shadwell say, that Shak- Bpere ' had a most prodigious wit.' The next life was by Nicholas Rowe. John Aubrey, a Wiltshire man, of Trinity College, Oxford, the friend of Hobbes, and a fellow of the Royal Society, is the author of a volume of Mis- cellanies, on apparitions, dreams, levitation, and the like. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 217 called by Fletcher { tragi-comedy,' a term which he appropriated to those plays in which the final issue of the plot is for good, yet in which, while that issue remains in suspense, some of the principal personages are brought so near to destruction that the true tragic interest is excited. Eighteen of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher answer to this description ; which would also obviously apply to Measure for Measure, The Mer- chant of Venice, or Winters Tale. 37. The influence of the fifth developing cause mentioned above, viz., the study of continental literature, 1 is apparent at once when we turn to Shakspere's comedies. Ariosto's two comedies, the Cassaria and the Suppositi, first acted in 1512, were, like our own Roister Doister, formed upon ancient models ; but they were written in flowing blank verse, and in a language already polished and beautiful ; circumstances which, apart from the genius of the writer, would go far to account for the great popularity which they obtained. They were trans- lated into English by George Gascoigne ; and it is probable that to these and other Italian comedies Shakspere owed much. That he was well read in Italian tales is certain, since from such tales the plots of no fewer than six of his comedies were derived. One, Love's Labour's Lost, comes presumably from a French source ; and one, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, from a Spanish source. But, after all, it is a matter of little con- sequence from what source his materials were derived : whether they were coarse or fine, his transforming touch changed them all alike into gold ; and so infinitely superior are the very earliest in date of his comedies to any that had appeared before, that one might truly call such pieces even as The Taming of a Shrew, 2 and Greene's Orlando Furioso much more, of course, the performances of UdalJ and Still mere rough drafts, or attempts at the comic style, and say that English comedy really commences with Shakspere. Nothing strikes one more than the comparative simplicity and purity of style even in his early plays. The dramatists of the day were mostly men who had received a university education, and they seem to have thought that unless they gave abundant proof of their college learning in their plays, people would hold them cheap. So, with the grossest disregard to dramatic fitness, the speeches of nearly all their characters are stuffed full with high-flown classical allusions, introducing us to all 1 On the influence of the Italian literature in particular, see a brilliant and learned article, from the pen of Mr. Churton Collins, entitled ' The Predecessors of Shakspere,' in the Quarterly Review for Oct. 1885. 2 Upon this old play, which Mr. Knight conjectures to have been the work of Greene, Shakspere modelled his Taming of THE Shrew. 218 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. the gods of Olympus, and all the principal places of the world as known to the ancients. A few lines from the old Taming of a Shrew may serve by way of illustration : Sweet Kate, thou lovelier than Diana's purple robe, Whiter than are the snowy Apennines, Or icy hair that grows on Boreas' chin. Father, I swear by Ibis' golden beak, More fair and radiant is my bonny Kate Than silver Xanthus, when he doth embrace The ruddy Simois at Ida's feet : &c. ..\ The speaker in these lines is Ferando, the character in the old play corresponding to Shakspere's Petruchio. If we turn to Shakspere's play, we see that he, too, makes Petruchio compare Kate to Diana ; but mark the difference : Pet. Did ever Dian so become a grove As Kate this chamber with her princely gait ? O be thou Dian, and let her be Kate ; And then let Kate be chaste and Dian sportful. Kate. Where did you study all this goodly speech ? Pet. It is extempore, from my mother wit. This is no more than might be naturally and fitly put in the mouth of the eccentric gentleman from Verona, while the former passage is mere rant and fustian. However, it cannot truthfully be denied that Shakspere, too, falls sometimes into extravagant and dramatically inappropriate language, though it is generally in the use of quips, quibbles, puns, and metaphysical refinements, arising out of the very exuberance of his intellectual energy, that he sins against literary simplicity ; very seldom indeed by decking out his verse with proper names, in the fashion above described. As to the surpassing grace, art, and truth to nature which these comedies in various degrees exhibit, the limits of this work would be soon outstepped if we were to dwell on them. 38. The following list of the fourteen comedies, the titles of which are arranged in alphabetical order, shows the date at or about which they severally appeared, and the source (where it can be traced) from which the plot of each was derived : (1) AWs Well that ends Well. Date uncertain, but before 1598, if the common supposition identifying this play with the Love's Labour Won of Meres be correct. The story is found in the ninth novel of the fourth day in Boccaccio's Decameron ; but Shakspere probably took it from Paynter's Palace of Pleasure* (1566), where the tale appears in English. (2) As You Like It. 2 Date about 1600. The plot is English, taken from Thomas Lodge's novel of Eosalynde, published in 1590. 1 The two volumes of the Palace of Pleasure contain translations of ninety- four of Boccaccio's Tales (Warton, iv.). 3 Extract Book, art. 57. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 219 (3) Comedy of Errors. Date about 1590 ; in any case one of Shakspere's earliest pieces. The plot is classical, being derived from the Mencechmi of Plautus, but through one or both of two English versions which had previously appeared. (4) Lore's Labour's Lost. 1 One of the earliest of Shakspere's comedies ; date before 1590. The source of the plot has never been discovered ; perhaps it was Shakspere's own invention, stimulated by what he had heard of the 'Academes' in Italy, the members of some of which were quite flighty and enthusiastic enough to vow a three years' abstinence from female society, with fasting, vigils, and philosophy, like that to which Ferdinand and his three courtiers have bound themselves. Evidently this play and the Sonnets belong to the same period of Shakspere's life. (5) Measure for Measure. Date uncertain ; probably after 1607 ; a late play. The source of the plot is the Promos and Cassandra of George Whetstone, a play printed in 1578, but never acted. Whetstone found the story in a novel of Giraldi Cinthio ; the plot is therefore Italian. (6) Merchant of Venice. Date about 1594. Stephen Gosson, in his pamphlet The School of Abuse (1579), describes a play of his time, 'The Jew shown at the Bull,' which showed ' the greedinesse of worldly chusers, and bloody minds of usurers ; ' it seems likely, therefore, that this was an earlier play, now lost, containing both the main incidents of Shakspere's play, the choosing of the caskets, and the exaction of the pound of flesh. But for these two incidents earlier sources have been found, one Italian, the other mediaeval. The story of the bond and the pound of flesh has been found in a tale called 11 Pecorone, by Fiorentino, printed in 1558 ;^ that of the caskets in the Gesta Romanorum, No. 76. 2 (7) Merry Wives of Windsor. First printed in 1602 ; but Mr. Knighl believes that it was acted ten years earlier. The story is Shakspere's own invention ; the manners, language, and characters are those of his own day. The Falstaff of this comedy is an inferior and notably different creation from the Falstaff of Henry 1 V. (8) Midsummer Night's Dream.* Date between 1593 and 1597. The materials for the story of this beautiful play were taken by Shakspere from various sources. Theseus, his queen Hippolyta, and their court at Athens, are borrowed from Chaucer's Knight's Tale. Puck and the fairies were part of the mystico-moral furniture of the popular mind in the Middle Ages. Harsnet's Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures (1603) speaks of ' Robin Good-fellow the frier, and Sisse the dairy-maid.' But no poet had made use of the conception before Shakspere. The name of Oberon comes from a translation by Lord Berners (1579) of the old French romance of Huon and Auberon. The name Titania seems to have been invented by Shakspere. Finally, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe was probably taken from Golding's version of Ovid's Metamorphoses (ante, 24), though Shakspere might also have read it in Chaucer s Legende of Good Women. (9) Much Ado about Nothing. Date about 1599 ; it' was first printed in 1600. The story is Italian, taken from one of Bandello's novels, in which Fenicia and Timbreo represent the Hero and Claudio of the play. (10) Taming of the Shrew. The original play of unknown authorship, The Taming of a Shrew, which Shakspere has followed pretty closely, was printed in 1594. Shakspere's play probably appeared about the same time ; one cannot suppose that he would have stooped to this kind of 1 Extract Book, art. 57. 2 See Sir F. Madden's Old English Versions of the Qesta Romanorum, edited for the Roxburghe Club, 1838. 3 Extract Eook, art. 57. 220 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. appropriation in his later years. The story of the cure of the shrew is found in the Nottc Piacevole of Straparola (1550), and in the Conde Lucanor of the Spanish author ,luan Manuel. But the story is old and widely diffused ; it has been traced to a Persian and also to an Old-German source. (11) The Tempest. Date about 1611 ; it is one of the latest of the plays, though printed the first in the folio of 1623. Professor Ward thinks it probable that the source whence Shakspere derived the story was a German play, Die schone Sidea, by Jacob Ayrer of Niirnberg, who died in 1605. Not that Shakspere could have read German, but that he might have heard of the play from English actors returning from Germany. Some of the details of the storm and the reference to the ' still vex'd Bermoothes ' appear to be traceable to the Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Isle of Divels, by Silvester Jourdan, published in 1610. (12) Twelfth Night. 1 Date about 1601. The sources are, an Italian play called Gli Inganni, first printed in 1582, and a tale about twins by Bandello. But both the characterisation and the plot are to a large extent original. (13) Two Gentlemen of Verona. Date about 1598. The chief source of the play is the romantic novel called Diana Enamorada, by the Spanish author Montemayor ; a version of this, by Bartholomew Yonge, was published in 1598, and was probably used by Shakspere. (14) Winter's Tale. Date 1610 or 1611. The source of the play is Robert Greene's novel of Pandosto, the Triumph of Time, published in 1588. 39. Among the eleven tragedies are included some of the brightest and most wonderful achievements of the human in- tellect. In Hamlet, with its fearful background of guilt, and lingering, yet foreshadowed, retribution, we see the tragic results which follow from in the words of Goethe c a great action being laid upon a soul unfit for its performance ; ' the unfitness consisting, according to Coleridge, in the want of a due balance ' between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect ; for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.' In Macbeth, on the other hand, the action of the drama proceeds with a breathless rapidity ; the first crime engendered by that ' vaulting ambition which doth o'erleap itself/ necessitates the commission of others to avert the natural consequences of the first. A large part of a life is presented to our eyes in the light of one great gilded successful crime, until at last it topples over, and is quenched with the suddenness of an expiring rocket. In King Lear, with its ever-thickening gloom and deepening sorrows, we see the tragic fate which, as the world of man is constituted, too often waits on folly no less than on guilt, and involves the innocent alike with the guilty in the train of terrible consequences. In Othello, the drama opens with all the .elements of happiness ; manly courage, beauty, truth, devoted 1 Extract Book, art. 57. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 221 love are met together in the pair who have fought against all the powers of social prejudice in order to become one, and have conquered ; yet all is marred by the fiendish wickedness of one man, who abuses the resources of a powerful intellect to practise on the open and impulsive nature of Othello, until he crushes in an excess of volcanic passion the jewel which an instant after he would give the whole world to restore. In Romeo and Juliet, all that is beautiful and all that is excessive are brought together : the loveliness of the Italian sky ; the youth- ful grace of the lovers ; the fair palaces and moonlit gardens of Verona; the hereditary and unforgiving hatred of the two noble houses; the whirlwind of passionate love which unites their two last surviving scions in the inextricable bond of an affection stronger than all the hatreds of their ancestors ; their final union in the tomb, beyond the reach of severance by angry fathers or the chances of time these are the materials of a drama which, for pure literary beauty, stands perhaps unsurpassed among intellectual creations. It is not, however, our purpose to attempt anything like a general critical analysis of these or any of Shakspere's plays ; nor indeed is it necessary. Genius furnished the text, and men of the greatest intellectual gifts have supplied the commentary; the reader will thank us for referring him to their works, rather than attempting to sub- stitute an inferior article of our own. 1 40. Of the eleven plays of Shakspere which are usually classed as tragedies, two, Cymbdine and Troilus and Cressida, since they do not end tragically, do not properly deserve the name. We proceed to pass these plays in review, as in the case of the comedies : (1) Antony and Cleopatra. Date uncertain, but probably late (see 35). The source of this and of the other Roman plays is the translation of Plutarch's Lives, made in 1579 by Sir Thomas North, from the French version by Jacques Amyot. (2) Coriolanus. (See the preceding article.) (3) Cymbdine. Date uncertain; it was acted in 1610 or 1611, but whether for the first time is not known. The character of Cymbeline was found by Shakspere in Holinshed, whose authority was Geoffrey of Monmouth. According to Geoffrey, ' Kymbelinus ' was king of the Britons at the time of the Christian era, and had two sons, Guiderius and Arviragus. The story of Imogen is borrowed from that of Ginevra, in the ninth novel of the second day of the Decameron. (4) Hamlet. The time when this great tragedy first appeared is a point still much disputed. A play called Hamlet was, according to an entry in Henslowe's Diary, acted at Newington in 1594. In a tract by Lodge 1 The works particularly referred to as most generally accessible, are Coleridge's Literary Remains, Augustus Schlegel's Dramatic Literature, the chapters on Hamlet in Goethe's Wilhclm Mcistcr, and the works of Gervinus, Guizot, and Villemain. To these may be added the Essays of Karl Elze, and Prof. Dowden's Critical Study of Shakspere's Mind and Art. [1888.] 222 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. entitled 'Wit's Miserie,' and printed in 1596, there is an allusion to 'the ghost which cried so miserably at the Theator like an oister wife, Hamlet, revenge.' Mr. Knight believes that this was the first draft of Shakspere's Hamlet, and that Lodge, quoting from memory, did not give the exact words used by the ghost in the play, but only the substance of them. Others hold that since no such words as ' Hamlet, revenge ' occur in Shakspere's play, Lodge must have been alluding to a play by some other writer. On this point we are inclined to go with Mr. Knight. However this may be, the Hamlet of Shakspere was certainly entered in the books of the Stationers' Company, as having been recently acted by the Lord Chamberlain's servants, in 1602. It was first printed in 1603. In the following year the play reappeared, with the following title-page : ' The Tragicall Historic of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. By William Shake- speare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much againe as it was, according to the true and perfect coppie.' Substantially this quarto of 1604 and the Hamlet of the folio of ]623 are the same play, and are greatly expanded and altered from the edition of 1603. The immediate source of the plot (unless there was an earlier play which Shakspere followed) is the Cent Histoires Tragiques of Belleforest, probably in jan English version. Belleforest took the story of Hamlet from the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammaticus, who flourished about the begin- ning of the thirteenth century. Saxo writes the name ' Amleth ; ' the queen he calls ' Gerutha.' (5) Julius Ccesar. 1 (See the article on Antony and Cleopatra.) (6) King Lear. 2 Date between 1603 and 1606. Shakspere found the story of Lear and his daughters in Holinshed's history ; Holinshed took it from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle. In an amplified form it occurs in La^amon's Brut. Spenser also tells the story in the second book of the Faerie Queene, Canto 10. According to Geoffrey, Leir was the fourth king in descent from Brutus, the founder of the British monarchy. (7) Macbeth. Date between 1603 and 1610. Shakspere took the main facts of the story from Holinshed's History of Scotland. Macbeth is no mythical personage, like Lear or Cymbeline ; his expulsion from Scotland by Earl Siward in the reign of Edward the Confessor is mentioned in one of the Saxon Chronicles, and also by Florence of Worcester. (8) Othello. 3 Date about 1602, in which year it was played at Harefield before Queen Elizabeth. The source of the plot is Giraldi Cinthio's novel of II Moro di Venezia. (9) Romeo and Juliet. Date 1596 or 1597. The materials for this play were found by Shakspere in a novel of Bandello translated in Paynter's Palace of Pleasure (1567), and also in an English poem by Arthur Brooke founded on the said novel, and published, with the title 'The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet,' in 1562. (10) Timon of Athens. Date uncertain ; it has been assigned both to 1601 and to 1610. The principal source of the plot is the account of Timon the Athenian contained in Plutarch's life of Mark Antony. Another source, in Mr. Knight's opinion, was the Greek dialogue, ' Timon, or the Misanthrope,' by Lucian. Mr. Knight believes that the differences in style, and in the cast of thought, presented in this play are so remarkable as to justify the conclusion that it is not wholly the work of Shakspere. (11) Troilus and Cressida. Date 1609. The materials are taken partly from classical, partly from mediaaval sources. The characters of Thersites, Ajax, Menelaus, &c., seem to have been borrowed by Shak- spere from Chapman's translation of Homer (1601), but the development i Extract Book, art. 57. 3 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 223 is in great part his own. For the loves of Troilus and Cressida he was indebted to Chaucer's poem ; but how different is Cryseyde from Cressida ! The former, as we saw (ch. I. 36), loves virtue and honour, but is weak ; the latter quick-witted and keen, without modesty or reverence, loose- tongued and loose-thoughted is incapable of any affection save of one sort. Yet there are passages in this play as authentically stamped with the transcendent genius of Shakspere as anything which he ever wrote. Some materials seem also to have been furnished by Lydgate's Troy-book, and Caxton's Recueil des Histoires de Troye. 41. Historical Plays. In the literatures of Greece and Kome, it is not to the dramatic, but to the epic poetry that we must look for the exhibition of the peculiar pride and spirit of either nationality. Thus in the Iliad, as Mr. Gladstone has eloquently shown, 1 the Greek character and the Greek religion are forcibly and favourably contrasted with those of Asia ; and the jEneid is pervaded, as if by a perpetual under-song, by a constant stream of allusion to the greatness of Rome. In English poetry this spirit of nationality has sought its expression in the historical drama, and pre-eminently in the historical plays of Shakspere. It is a noble series ; commencing, in the chronological order, with King John, and ending with Henry VIII. ; omitting, however, the reigns of Henry III., the four Edwards, and Henry VII. The manful proud spirit of Englishmen is continually asserting itself. Foreign interfer- ence seems to be resented as such, from whatever quarter it may come, and whether it relate to Church or to State affairs. Thus in King John (act iii. sc. 1), he makes the king say to Pandulph : Thou canst not, cardinal, devise a name, So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous, To charge me to an answer as the pope. Tell him this tale ; and from the mouth of England Add thus much more : That no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions ; But as we under heaven are supreme head, So, under him, that great supremacy, Where we do reign, we will alone uphold, Without the assistance of a mortal hand. So tell the pope ; all reverence set apart To him and his usurp'd authority. And for a more general expression of the same feeling, take the concluding passage of the same play : This England never did nor never shall Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself. 1 In his work on Homer and the Homeric Age. 224 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEBATUKE. CHAP. III. Now these her princes are come home again, Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue, If England to herself do rest but true. As a matter of course, the unities of time and place are disregarded in these historical plays. The preservation even of the unity of action, in a number of plays adhering pretty faithfully to the order and manner of the events, is, as a general rule, impossible ; nor has Shakspere attempted it. In Henry VIII., for instance, his object seems merely to have been to present a succession of remarkable scenes, founded on occur- rences which happened in the first thirty years of that reign ; these scenes are, the fall of Buckingham, the fall of Wolsey, the divorce and death of Queen Catherine, and the birth of Elizabeth. Patriotic feeling may be held to invest such a play in the spectator's mind, if only it be written in a lofty and worthy spirit, with a unity of design equal to any that art can frame. When, however, the events of a reign group themselves naturally into a dramatic whole, as in the case of Kichard III., Shakspere does not lose the opportunity of still further heightening the effect by his art, and there is accord- ingly not one of his plays more closely bound together in all its parts by the development of one main action than this. The unscrupulous and fearless ambition of Richard III., so different from the same passion as it appears in the conscience- haunted Macbeth, crushes successively beneath his feet, by fair means or foul, all the obstacles in his path ; till the general abhorrence, springing out of that very moral sense which Richard despised and denied, swells to such a height as to embrace all classes, and crushes his iron will and indomitable courage, his scheme, throne, and person, beneath a force yet more irresistible. 42. The ' Histories ' are ten in number : (1, 2) Henry IV. In two parts. First printed in 1598, and probably written in the preceding year. The famous Victories of Henry V. , a prose drama written about 1580, was the foundation upon which Shakspere worked, both in Henry 1 V. and in Henry V. It is a very poor piece ; its Prince Hal is a mere drunken debauchee. In this old play Sir John Oldcastle occurs as one of the prince's companions, but plays no important Eart, even in the comic portions. Out of this character Shakspere created is incomparable Falstaff, 1 who was called, in the first draft of both parts of Henry I V. , Sir John Oldcastle. The name was changed in deference to the Protestant feeling of the Londoners, who regarded the Lollard Oldcastle as a martyr. The general source whence Shakspere drew materials, for this and for his other histories, is Holinshed's Chronicle. 1 Extract Book, art. 57. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 225 (3) Hf.nry V. Probable date 1599. The sources of this play are the same as those for Henry 1 V. (4, 5, 6) Henry VI. In three parts. Part I. was first printed, so far as is known, in the folio of 1623. Part II. was published in 1594, under the title of the First Part of the Contention of the two famous Houses of York and Lancaster; and Part III. in 1595, with the title, The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the Death of good King Henrie the Sixt. The principal source of all three plays is rather the Chronicle of Hall than that of Holinshed. Since the question was first mooted by Edmund Malone, in his Disserta- tion on the Three Parts of Henry VI., volumes have been written on the authenticity of these three plays. Malone endeavoured to prove that not one of the three was written by Shakspere ; and in this conclusion Coleridge, Hallam, and Gervinus, with certain reservations, agree. On the other hand, Knight and the German critic, Ulrici, argue strongly for the authenticity of all three. It is chiefly a question of .internal evidence ; and my own opinion, coinciding with that of the impugners, is, that no one of these plays is, as a whole, the work of Shakspere, though each has undoubtedly been altered, retouched, and enlarged by him to an extent which it is sometimes easy and sometimes difficult to define. Of all three plays, I am disposed to believe that he had least to do with Part I. , which treats of the leading events of the reign, especially those connected with the siege of Orleans and the exploits of Joan of Arc, from 1422 to 1445. In Part II., which covers the period from 1445 to 1455, most of the episode of Jack Cade may be unhesitatingly ascribed to Shakspere ; and his hand may surely be traced in the recasting of the death-scene of Cardinal Beaufort, by which the tame and lack-lustre lines of the First Contention are transformed into a passage of unequalled sublimity and beauty. In Part III., which takes us to the murder of Henry in 1471, many of the speeches put in the king's mouth, Warwick's dving speech, and the whole of the last scene, appear to me to have been written by Shakspere. (7) Henry VIII. Probable date 1613 ; a play of Henry VIII. was certainly acted at the Globe Theatre on June 29 of that year, and owing to the firing of cannon on the stage (according to the stage direction in act i. sc. 4) the thatch of the theatre caught fire, and it was burnt to the ground. The materials for the plot were supplied by Hall's Chronicle and Cavendish's Life of Wolsey ; perhaps also by common, tradition. Of late years grave doubt has been thrown on the authenticity of this play ; see a paper by Mr. Spedding, first printed in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1850, and reprinted inlhe Transactions of the New Shakspere Society. Indeed, any one who has Shakspere's rhythm in his ear cannot but feel that the movement and ring of the verse in the greater part of the play (excepting the first act) are not Shaksperian. The mere abundance of feminine endings (that is, endings which have one or more syllables beyond the last accent) is enough to convince one that the chief author was some other than Shakspere. Mr. Fleay, in his Sliakespeare Manual, has gone fully into this consideratirm ; he shows that whereas Othello, e.g., out of about 2900 lines has 646 with feminine endings, Henry VIIL, out of about 2600 lines, has 1195 with such endings. If we exclude the first act (which I believe to be Shakspere's) from the comparison, the proportion of feminine endings becomes much greater Mr. Spedding thinks that the chief author of the play was John Fletcher and the resemblance of style to some of Fletcher's known plays is certainly considerable. The drama is to a great extent a piece of gorgeous court- pageantry. It ends with the birth of Elizabeth, on which occasion P 226 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. Cranmer delivers a prophecy of the greatness of the maiden-queen, and also of ' him that should succeed,' James I. Anne Boleyn does not appear in the most favourable light, while Catharine of Aragon is represented as an injured saint and a heroic woman ; this makes it certain that the play was produced in the reign of James I., whose Spanish sympathies were notorious, and not in that of Elizabeth, who would not have endured such slighting mention of her mother. (.8) King John. 1 Date uncertain, but before 1598. The chief source of the plot is an older play of unknown authorship, The Troublesome Raignc of King John, which appeared in 1591. (9) Richard IJ. Z This play, first printed in 1597, was probably written about the same time. The period embraced in it extends from January 1398 to February 1400, the supposed date of Richard's murder. The sources of the plot are the Chronicles of Fabyan and Holinshed. (10) Richard III. Date about 1593 ; it was first printed in 1597. The subject was very popular on the stage. An older play, The True Tragedie of Richard III., appeared in 1594 ; it has little in common with Shakspere's play. The chief source of the plot is Holinshed's Chronicle. The picture of Richard, with its hardly relieved blackness, was borrowed by Holinshed from Sir Thomas More's History of Edward V. (ante, ch. ii. 33). More had strong Lancastrian sympathies and antipathies ; hence some modern writers are disposed to infer that the colours are overcharged, and that Richard was not really such a monster as tradition has exhibited him. That he passed several wise and just laws in his short reign is certain. 43. Two plays remain which are usually printed as Shakspere's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and Titus Andronicus. Pericles. First printed in 1609, with Shakspere's name on the title- page ; and probably first acted, at any rate as it now stands, the year before. The source of the plot is the story of Appollinus of Tyre, related in the Seventh Book of Gower's Confessio Amantis. Hence 'Ancient Gower ' is introduced like a herald at the beginning of each act of the play, to tell the audience the drift of what they are about to see represented. The most degraded modern audience would scarcely tolerate this play, and if there were good grounds to dispute Shakspere's connection with it, his admirers would willingly do so. The chief reason for adopting such an opinion lies in the fact that it was not included in the first folio edition of 1623. It first appeared among the collected plays in the third folio, that of 1664. Again, the extremely inartistic construction of the plot, which embraces several separate actions, seems inconsistent with that mastery of his art to which Shakspere had attained long before 1608. This induces Mr. Knight to conjecture that it was a very early work of the poet's, which, having become popular on the stage, was in part newly written and published some fifteen years later. However this may be, the unbroken stage tradition of the seventeenth century (Dryden, for instance, speaks of it as the first birth of Shakspere's muse), and the far stronger evidences of style, manner, and rhythm, force us, however reluc- tantly, to admit that Pericles is probably the authentic work of the poet. Titus Andronicus. First printed in 1600, without author's name. It is ascribed to Shakspere by Meres, as we have seen, and was included in the folio of 1623. There is a ballad on the same subject in Percy's Rcliques, with the heading ' Titus Andronicus's Complaint. ' Mr. Hallam remarks : ' Titus Andronicus is now, by common consent, denied to be in any sense a production of Shakespeare ; very few passages I should think not one resemble his manner.' Without denying that there may be 1 Extract Book, art. 57. 2 Ibid. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 227 some touches here and there from Shakspere's hand, which it is now impossible to distinguish with certainty, I should cordially subscribe to Mr. Hallam's judgment. But Mr. Knight replies that the ' consent ' of all the German critics runs the other way. This does not, however, mean so much as would appear at first sight ; for, in a case where the use of language, the general cast of expression, and all that constitutes manner are concerned, it is idle to oppose a consensus of foreign to a consensus of English critics. As Mr. Hallain says, 'res ipsa per se vociferatur.' The versification of the play is vigorous, but it runs in a different channel, and with a different movement, from that of Shakspere a movement perhaps even more equably sustained than his, but without those ascensions, those upward springs, whether of thought or fancy, which characterise his genuine work. The scraps of Latin, 'sit fas aut nefas,' 'per Styga, per manes vehor,' &c., point to some university scholar, not to the player who had learned no more Latin than what the Stratford Grammar School could teach a truant pupil. 44. Doubtful or spurious plays. Of The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play founded on the story of Palamon and Arcite, which was first printed in 1634 with the names of Fletcher and Shakspere on the title-page, Coleridge says, ' I can scarcely retain a doubt as to the first act's having been written by Shakespeare.' Mr. Dyce, the editor of Beaumont and Fletcher, goes farther, and assigns to Shakspere, besides the first act, the first scene of the third, and some portion of the fifth. The titles of other plays that have been ascribed to him are, Locrine (which Professor Ward is inclined to give to Peele), Arden of FeversJiam, Edward 111., Sir John Oldcastle, The London Prodigal, and A Yorkshire Tragedy. 45. It is usual to rank Ben Jonson next after Shakspere among the dramatists of this age, chiefly on the ground of the merits of his celebrated comedy, Every Man in his Humour, published in 1596. Yet the inferiority of Jonson to Shak- spere is immeasurable. It is true that he observes the * unities ' (as he takes care to inform us in the prologue), and that the character of Captain Bobadil, the bouncing braggart of the piece, though the original conception of it is found in Terence, and though it falls far short of the somewhat similar creation of * Ancient Pistol,' abounds in fine strokes of humour. 1 But the characters generally do not impress one as substantial flesh-and- blood personages like those of Shakspere, but rather as mere shadows, or personified humours, in which one cannot feel any lively interest. Real wit is rare in the piece ; and of pure fun and merriment there is not a sparkle. Even the humour, although it has been so much admired, has scarcely any uni- versal character about it ; local turns of thought, and the passing mannerisms of the age, are its source and aliment. Neither of the two completed tragedies which Ben Jonson left, Sejanus and Catiline, was of much service to his fame. 2 1 Extract Bool; art. 73. 2 Chief plays of Ben Jonson Every Man in his Humour, Every Man out of his Humour, Volpone or The Fox, Epicoene or The Silent Woman, The Al- chemist, Bartholomew Fair, comedies ; The Poetaster and Cynthia's Revels, 228 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. III. The story of Sejanus, the powerful minister of Tiberius, is an excellent tragic subject; 1 but Jonson, though he was learned about Roman manners and the externals of Roman life, failed to catch the spirit of the Roman character ; its dignity on the one hand, its cold intellectual hardness on the other, he has not reproduced, nor, apparently, appreciated. The Poetaster, a comical satire, is a drama in every way superior to Sejanus. The scene is laid at the court of Augustus ; Crispinus (by whom is intended the dramatist Thomas Dekker) and Deme- trius Fannius are arraigned as bad and worthless poets and libellous scribblers ; Crispinus, being condemned, has to swallow a purge, which makes him bring up a string of crude and flatu- lent words which he had been in the habit of using ; and the two are sworn to keep the peace towards Horace and all other men of genius for the future. In this play there is more regularity in the verse, more measure in the conceptions, more ap- propriateness in the expressions, than are met with in Sejanus ; the scene in which Augustus invites Virgil to read before the court a passage from the &neid, is really a noble picture. Among the comedies, Volpone and the Alchemist are usually placed first. The first is the story of a wily Venetian noble- man, who, assisted by a confederate, feigns himself to be dying, in order to extract gifts from his rich acquaintances, each of whom is persuaded in his turn that he is named as sole heir in the sick man's will. It was this Volpone, between whose character and that of Lord Godolphin, Dr. Sacheverell, in his celebrated sermon, drew the audacious parallel which probably had a good deal to do with his prosecution. The workmanship of this piece is good, and the dialogue lively ; but the characters are too uniformly weak or vicious to allow of the play taking a strong hold on the mind. In the Alchemist the knight, Sir Epicure Mammon, is the dupe of Subtle the alchemist, by whom he is being ruined, while supposing himself to be on, the brink of the attainment of "enormous wealth. Out of forty-six extant plays, eleven are comedies, three comical satires, one a pastoral drama, only two, besides a frag- ment of a third, tragedies, and twenty-eight masques or other court entertainments, short pieces, in which, to a yet greater extent than in the modern opera, the words were of less im- portance than the music, decoration, dumb show, and other theatrical accessories. comical satires ; Sejanus and Catiline, tragedies ; The Sad Shepherd, a pastoral drama ; Love freed from Ignorance and Folly, Oberon the Fairy Prince, The Golden Age restored, and The Fortunate Isles, masques. 1 Extract Book, art. 73. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 229 46. The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are written in a purer style and finer language ; yet in both these respects they fall far below those of Shakspere ; and /most of them are dis- figured by a grossness of thought and expression which became more and more the besetting vice of the English stage. / They are about fifty-four in number, thirteen of which seem to have been produced by the two friends in conjunction ; the remainder are understood to have been by Fletcher alone, with the assist- ance, in several of them, of the dramatists] Massinger, Rowley, and Shirley. 1 There is much fine writing in these plays, but they are marred even for reading, much more for acting, by their utter want of measure and sobriety, a defect partly due perhaps to the predilection of the authors for Spanish plots./ The characters in TJie Maid's Tragedy, one of the most famous among their tragedies, go to almost inconceivable lengths of extravagance. In the celebrated comedy of Ride a Wife and have a Wife, the change which gradually comes over the wife, who has found a master where she meant to have a submissive tool, is nobly and beautifully described ; but this very change seems grossly improbable, when ensuing upon the utter moral corruption which 'possessed her at first. Of the Bloody Brother, or Hollo, Duke of Normandy, Coleridge writes that it is * perhaps the most energetic of Fletcher's tra- gedies ' (Notes on Shakspere). XThe versification of these plays is, as a general rule, much less musical and regular than that of Shakspere.- 47. Robert Greene, who ran through his life and used up his genius almost as quickly as Marlowe, is the acknowledged author of several plays, which were edited and published by Mr. Dyce in 1831. These are, Orlando Furioso, A Looking Glass for London and England, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Comicall Historie of Alphonsus King of Aragon, and The Scottish Historie of James IV. We have seen that Mr. Knight is disposed to assign to him the old play of The Taming of a Shrew (ante, 37) ; he has been also conjectured to be the author of George-a-Greene, The Pinner of Wakefteld, which has been assigned by some to Shakspere. 48. George Peele, a Christ Church man, was an intimate friend of Greene, Nash, and Lodge. His Arraignment of Paris, a court pageant, was exhibited before Elizabeth in 1584. His historical play of Edward I. (1593) is of little value; but he 1 Extract Book, art. 71. 2 Chief plays of Beaumont and Fletcher Philaster, the Maid's Tragedy, the Knight of the Burning Pestle, King and no King, the Scornful Lady ; of Fletcher alone the Elder Brother, the Beggar's Bush, Rule a Wife and have a Wife, the Faithful Shepherdess. 2 3 o HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. III. shows to considerable advantage in his scriptural drama, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe. The revolt and death of Absalom are worked into the play, which was first printed in 1599. The verse is generally flowing and musical, more equably so, perhaps, than that of either Ben Jonson or Fletcher. There is all the Elizabethan wealth of imagery and illustration, together with that redundance and tendency to excess which are also of the time. 49. Thomas Nash, more effective as a pamphleteer than as a dramatist (see below, 78a), is known as the author of two come- dies, Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592) and The Isle of Dogs, and a serious drama, Christ's Tears over Jerusalem (1593). John Lyly produced " Six Court Comedies," in prose, be- tween 1580 and the end of the century ; of these Endimion and Campaspe are accounted the best. He aided his friend Nash in the Martin-Marprelate controversy, writing against the Puritans a strange pamphlet entitled Pap with a Hatchet. 50. Of the plays of Philip Massinger eighteen are preserved : six tragedies, eight comedies, and four tragi-comedies. The famous play of A Neio Way to pay Old Debts still keeps posses- sion of the stage, for the sake of the finely drawn character of Sir Giles Overreach. 1 Massinger's plays were carefully and ably edited by Giffard in 1813. He seems to have been a retiring amiable man, ill fitted to battle with the rough theatrical world on which he was thrown. He could compose a fine piece of theatrical declamation, and arrange situations which proved very effective on the stage, as we see in the long popular tragedy of the Virgin Martyr ; but for the creation of character, in the Shaksperian way, he had no vocation; his personages are not fashioned and developed from within outwards, but take up or change a course of action, rather because the exigencies of the plot so require, than because the action and reaction between their natures and externarcircumstances constrain them so to behave. The Virgin Martyr has telling situations, and was ex- tremely popular in its day. The martyr is Dorothea, a Christian maiden of the age of Diocletian. Antonius, who is in love with Dorothea, is finely drawn. There is little reality in the other characters. There is no intrinsic reason laid in the nature of Theophilus, as developed up to the end of the fourth act, to account for his turning Christian in the fifth, any more than is the case with Sapritius or Sempronius. 2 1 Extract Book, art. 76. 2 Chief plays of Massinger the Virgin Martyr, the Fatal Dowry, tragedies ; the Maid of Honour, A Very Woman, the Bashful Lover, tragi-comedies ; A New Way to pay Old Debts, the City Madam, comedies. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 231 51. John Ford, a native of Devonshire, and born in 1586, was bred to the law, though he never seems to have made any- thing of a career in that profession. His first play, The Lover's Melancholy, was produced in 1629 ; his last, The Lady's Trial, in 1639. From this date he disappears from our view. The plots of his finest tragedies are so horrible and revolting that it has long ceased to be possible to produce them on the stage. Ford's command of language, and power of presenting and suitably conducting tragic situations, are very great. He wrote a portion of a once famous play, The Witch of Edmonton, in conjunction with Rowley and Dekker. In the Broken Heart we have a smooth and cheerful opening, but the fourth and fifth acts bring down a very shower of horrors. In the fourth, King Amyclas dies, Panthea starves herself to death, and Orgilus her lover treacherously kills her brother Ithocles, by whom he had been prevented from marrying her. In the fifth, Calantha the daughter of Amyclas, who had been betrothed to Ithocles, dies of a ' broken heart ; ' and Orgilus, allowed to choose the manner of his death, opens his veins with his own dagger. The language in this play is often intricate and obscure, which is the less excusable in Ford, because he could write with a beautiful clear- ness and simplicity. Nine plays by Ford have survived, of which four are tragedies, two tragi-comedies, one a masque, one (Perkin Warbeck) an historical play, and one a .comedy. 1 52. Of John Webster, the author of a famous tragedy called The Duchess of Malft, not even so much as the year of his birth is known. The period of his greatest popularity and acceptance as a dramatist was about 1620. Eight of his plays have been preserved, of several of which he was only in part author. The three tragedies are exclusively his, and it is upon these that his fame rests. The plot of The Duchess of Malfi turns upon the virtuous affection conceived by the Duchess for her steward Antonio, an affection which, by wounding the pride of her family, involves both its object and herself in ruin. 53. John Marston was born about the year 1575. What little is known of him is gathered almost entirely from stray allusions in the works of his contemporaries. In conversation with Drummond of Hawthornden, Ben Jonson spoke contemp- tuously of Marston, and said that he had fought him several times. He is the author of eight plays, the chief of which is The Malcontent, a tragi-comedy. Besides these, he was part- author, with Jonson and Chapman, of the comedy of Eastward Hoe, which contained such stinging sarcasms upon the Scotch that all three were thrown into prison. 1 Chief plays of Ford the Broken Heart, Love's Sacrifice, the Lover's Melancholy, the Lady's Trial, the Fancies Chaste and Noble. 232 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUEE. CHAP. III. 54. Chapman has left us eight comedies and four tragedies, among which the tragedy of Bussy d'Amboise is the most noted. Even of this Dryden says, in the dedication to his Spanish Friar ; ' A famous modern poet used to sacrifice every year a Statius to Virgil's manes; and I have indignation enough to burn a d'Amboise annually to the memory of Jonson.' 55. Some mention must be made of Thomas Dekker, the butt, as we have seen, of Jonson's satire in the Poetaster. Dekker replied vigorously to the attack in his comedy of Satiro-mastix ; or, the Untrussing the Humorous Poet, in which Ben Jonson is introduced as ' Young Horace.' He wrote several other plays, in whole or in part ; with "Webster he produced Westward Hoe and Northward Hoe, and assisted Middleton in the Roaring Girl. Dekker is also the author of several satirical tracts, e.g., News from Hell, and the Guls Hornbooke, which throw great light on the manners of the age. 56. Thomas Heywood, a most prolific writer, is the author of one very famous play, A Woman Killed with Kindnesse (1617). The story closely resembles that of Kotzebue's play of the Stranger ; an unfaithful wife, overcome by the inexhaustible goodness of her injured but forgiving husband, droops and expires in the rush of contending emotions shame, remorse, penitence, and gratitude which distract her soul. Thomas Middleton wrote, in whole or in part, a large number of plays ; Mr. Dyce's edition of his works comprises twenty-two dramas and eleven masques. Of these the Familie of Love and the Witch (from which Shakspere may have derived a suggestion or two for the witches in Macbeth) have been singled out for praise. William Rowley seems to have preferred writing acts in other men's plays to inventing or adapting plots for himself ; thus we find him taking part in the Old Law with Massinger and Middleton, and in the Spanish Gipsie with Middleton. There is much powerful writing in Cyril Tour- neur's tragedy of the Atheist's Revenge. In The Muses' Looking Glass Thomas Randolph cleverly defends the stage against the Puritans, owning that it lives by vices, but maintaining that it is as physicians live by diseases, ' only to cure them/ 57. When we look into the private life of these Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, we too often find it a wild scene of irregular activity and unbridled passion, of improvidence and embarrassment, of fits of diligence alternating with the satur- nalia of a loose and reckless gaiety, of unavailing regrets cut short by early death. Yet we must not judge them harshly, for they fell upon an age of transition and revolution. The ancient Church, environed as it was with awe and mystery, 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 233 spreading into unknown depths and distances in time and space, which might be resisted, but could not be despised, had passed from the land like a dream ; and the new institu- tion which the will of the nation had substituted for it, what- ever might be its 4 merits, could not as yet curb the pride, nor calm the passions, nor dazzle the imagination of England's tur- bulent and gifted youth. True, Catholicism, in disappearing, had left solid moral traditions behind it, which the better English mind, naturally serious and conscientious, faithfully adhered to and even developed ; but the playwrights and wits, or at any rate the great majority of them, plunged in the immunities and irregularities of a great city, and weak with the ductile temperament of the artist, were generally outside the sphere of these traditions. 58. The last of this race of dramatists was James Shirley. His first play, Love Tricks, appeared in 1625, and scarcely a year passed between that date and 1642' in which he did not bring a new drama upon the stage. In November 1642, the Long Parliament passed a resolution, by which, in consideration of the disturbed state of the country, the London theatres were closed. Out of the thirty dramas comprised in Mr. Dyce's edition, six are tragedies, four tragi- comedies, and twenty comedies. The plots of more than half of these are of Italian or Spanish origin ; most of the rest are drawn from contemporary English life. * In the greater part of Shirley's dramas/ says Mr. Hallam, ' we find the favourite style of that age, the characters foreign and of elevated rank, the interest serious but not always of buskined dignity, the catastrophe fortunate; all, in short, that has gone under the vague appellation of tragi-comedy.' It must be admitted in Shirley's favour, that though his inci- dents are often coarse, and his dialogue licentious, his poetical justice is most often soundly administered ; in the end vice suffers and virtue is rewarded. He was burnt out in the great fire of 1666, and the discomfort and distress thus brought upon him are said to have caused his death. Besides his regular dramas, Shirley is the author of several moral plays, masques, and short plays for exhibition in private houses or schools. At the end of a performance of this kind, which seems to have been the last dramatic piece he ever wrote, the Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, occurs the noble choral ode beginning ' The glories of our blood and state,' x which is printed in Percy's Reliques and many other collections. 2 1 Extract Book, art. 85. 2 Chief plays of Shirley the Maid's Revenge, the Politician, the Cardinal, tragedies ; the Ball, the Gamester, the Bird in a Cage (which has an ironical dedication to William Prynne), the Lady of Pleasure, comedies. 234 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. Adopting the title of the old satirical play Histriomastix . (players' scourge), written in 1610, "William Prynne, a Puritan barrister, published in 1632 a bulky volume denouncing the immorality of the stage, its evil social consequences, its incom- patibility with the progress of religion, the licentiousness of the actors, &c. The queen had lately herself acted in a pas- toral at Somerset House, and the king was induced to believe, by Laud and others, that a passage in Prynne's book speaking in uncivil terms of ' women actors,' was levelled at Henrietta Maria. Brought into the Star Chamber, Prynne was tried and condemned, and received a most severe sentence, which included standing in the pillory, and the loss of parts of both ears, besides utter professional ruin 1 (Collier's Annals of the Stage). In spite of such severe repression the invectives of the. Puritans against theatrical entertainments during all this period became ever louder and more vehement, creating by their extravagance a counter licence and recklessness in the dramatists, and again justified in their turn, or partly so, by their excesses. At last, as already mentioned, the Puritan party became the masters of the situation, and the theatres were closed. This date brings us down some way into the succeeding period. 58a. Learning was at a low ebb in England during this period. The universities stopped their printing presses about 1521, and did not use them again for more than sixty years. A large proportion of the best scholars, especially at Oxford, could not conscientiously accept the transference of ecclesiastical authority which the accession of Elizabeth brought in, and were either silenced or forced into exile. Even after the new system was at work, able Oxford men, as Hallam says, had a way of ' dropping off to Douay.' Cambridge gave in to Pro- testantism far more easily ; most of the prominent men in the party of change who had any pretensions to learning, e.g., Cranmer, Becon, Parker, Grindal, Whitgift, and Sandys, were of that university. The first five Protestant archbishops of Canterbury were all Cambridge men, a fact than which none could more clearly show the restlessness and repugnance of the Oxford mind under the new arrangements. In Ascham's School- master (ante, ch. II. 38) there is no indication that Greek was then taught in English grammar schools. As the reign pro- ceeded, matters gradually improved ; in the statutes which 1 Prynne was released by the Long Parliament in 1641. As the civil war proceeded he took part in his vehement way with the Presbyterians against the Independents and the army (Milton speaks of him as ' a fierce reformer once, now rankled with a contrary heat ') ; and after the Restoration was made Keeper of the Records in the Tower, in which capacity (Morley, First Sketch, 691) he published three folio vols. of ' Records,' to illustrate the ancient ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the kings of England. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 235 Lyon, the founder of Harrow, gave to the school (1590), instruction in some Greek orators and historians, besides Hesiod, is enjoined. The first Greek grammar used at Eton is said to have been compiled by Camden ( 70), while he was a master at Westminster. A complete edition of Cicero's works, reprinted from that of the Frenchman Lambin, appeared in 1585. An accomplished scholar at last appeared in Sir Henry Savile, warden of Merton College, Oxford, who by his trans- lation of the Histories and Agricola of Tacitus (1581) did some- thing for scholarship, by editing several of the old chroniclers (Reiwin Anglicarum Scriptores post Bedam prcecipui, 1596) conferred a service on those engaged in mediaeval studies, and by his elaborate edition of the works of Chrysostom (1612) and his republication of Bradwardine's De Causa, Dei (1617) sought to be of use to theologians. Grotius, writing in 1613, said that learning was of small account in England ; that Casaubon would not have prospered here merely as a man of letters; 'theologum induere debuit,' he was obliged to play the divine. (Hallam, Lit. of Eur. vol. ii.) However, about the beginning of the seventeenth century, an inestimable service to the cause of good letters in England was rendered by Sir Thomas Bodley, who gave to the university of Oxford (which the fanatical havoc wrought by the reformers [supra, II. 27] had left without any collection of books) his own library and the MSS. which he had collected, added at his own cost large and handsome buildings to the old library-room over the Divinity School, and left the bulk of his property to provide for the extension and conservation of the new institute. Fuller writes in his Worthies, ' This Library was founded by Humphrey the good duke of Gloucester ; confounded in the raign of Edward the Sixth by those who I list not to name ; ref ounded by worthy Sir T. Bodley, and the bounty of daily benefactors.' The Bodleian Library now ranks among the best in Europe. Prose Writing : Novels, Lyly's 'Euphues,' Sidney's ' Arcadia/ Hall ; Essays : Bacon, Burton ; Criti- cism : Gascoigne, &c. 59. The prose literature of this period is not less abundant and various than the poetry. We meet now with novelists, pamphleteers, and essayists for the first time. Lodge wrote several novels or novelettes ( 17), from one of which, as we have seen, Shakspere took the plot of As You Like It. 236 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEKATURE. CHAP. III. Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, 1 a didactic romance by John Lyly, with several appendices or sequels, appeared in 1579, and Euphues and his England, by the same author, in 1580. Both have been lately reprinted by Mr. Edward Arber. Euphues is a clever but not, as Mr. Arber thinks, a very clever book treating of friendship, love, philosophy, educa- tion, and religion. Euphues is a young Athenian who finds himself, on the death of his parents, the possessor of a large fortune, a fine person, a ready wit, and a cultivated mind. He proceeds to Naples, where he gains the friendship of Philautus, engages in a great deal of philosophical conversa- tion, has one or two love affairs which come to nothing, and at length sails for Athens, leaving a long letter for Philautus in- veighing against love, and urging his friend to flee women and their allurements. To this letter is attached 'Euphues and his Ephebus,' a tract on education, which Professor Kushton, of Cork College, has shown to be almost entirely a translation from Plutarch's treatise on the same subject. With this tract is connected another called 'Euphues and Atheos' being a dialogue between Euphues and an atheist. After being, not so much talked, as railed and browbeaten out of his errors with great ease and celerity, the atheist is made to exclaim : 1 Euphues, howe much am I bounde to the goodnesse of almightie God, which hath made me of an infidell a beleever, of a castaway a Christian, of an heathenly Pagan a heavenly Protestant ! ' 60. Euphues and his England is a much more considerable work. Euphues visits England in company with Philautus, and several English friends who have been staying in Italy, and writes a ' description of the countrey, the Court, and the manners of the isle.' In this picture there is not a particle of shadow; England and the English, as compared with other nations, are all light. The temper that leads to this kind of writing we now call Chauvinism. There is, of course, an elaborate panegyric on Queen Elizabeth, whose beauty is re- presented, if that were possible, as being equalled by her virtue. Englishmen are sparing in the use of strorfg liquor, unlike the men of other nations, ' who never think that they have dyned till they be dronken.' The English ladies ' spend the morning in devout prayer,' whereas the gentlewomen of Greece and Italy use ' sonets for psalmes, and pastymes for prayers.' Hence the divine favour is reserved for this virtuous people exclusively. i Oh blessed peace ! oh happy Prince ! oh fortunate people ! The lyving God is onely the Englysh God.' 1 Extract Book, art. 61. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 237 61. There is less affectation in the style of Euphues than, after reading the Monastery, one would be prepared to expect. Antithesis and alliteration are doubtless much resorted to ; the author seems to have regarded them as the chief orna- ments of an English style. He is also fond of bringing in curious or scientific terms ; he abounds in similes and illus- trations ; and is almost as fond of proverbs as Cervantes, though less happy in applying them. But, on the whole, the talk of Euphues and his friends is simple and rational com- pared with the affected pedantic bombast which Scott puts in the mouth of his Sir Piercie Shafton, and calls Euphuism. As for the precise and mincing way of speaking attributed to Holofernes in Shakspere's Love's Labour's Lost, the notion that Lodge and Euphues are here glanced at has been satisfactorily shown by Mr. Knight to be untenable. The more the subject is investigated, the more manifest it will be that no great change of literary style is ever so dis- tinctly traceable to one book, or one man, or one set of men, as on a casual survey it would seem plausible to maintain. A pedantic preference for long words of classical origin has often been supposed to be a distinctive mark of 'Euphuism.' But the tendency to the employment of such words showed itself strongly as far back as the time of Hawes (see ante, p. 150). The same thing was noticed by a shrewd and forcible writer of the middle of the century, Thomas Wilson. I quote the passage from Mr. Knight's preface to Love's Labour's Lost. In his Arte of Rhetorike 1 (1553) Wilson cites a letter which he describes as actually written by the applicant for a bene- fice ; it runs as follows : * Ponderying, expendyng, and revo- lutyng with myself your ingent affabilitie, and ingenious capacitie for mundane affaires, I cannot but celebrate and extol your magnificall dexteritie above all other. For how could you have adapted suche illustrate prerogative, and dominicall superioritie, if the fecundite of your ingenie had not been so fertile and wonderfull pregnauntT In truth, this sort of thing may be easily explained as an extravagance and excess growing out of the zeal for the revival of classical learning, and varying in intensity according to the development of public or individual taste. Nevertheless, it must be granted that the writings of Lyly exercised temporarily a considerable influence on style; and 1 This ingenious and delightful book, of which Warton has given a summary in his fifty-fifth section, appeared as a companion volume to The Rule of Reason, cnnteinyng the Arte of Logike t first published in 1551. Wilson prided himself on being the first to clothe the science of Logic in an English dress. Both books abound in curious and well-told stories, illustrating the rules laid down. 238 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATURE. CHAP. III. this we learn from a witness who attests the far more powerful influence excited by the writer next to be mentioned. Dray ton, in an elegy ' Of Poets and Poesie,' l praises Sidney for having thoroughly paced our language, so that it might run abreast of Greek and Latin. Sidney, he says, did first reduce Our tongue from Lillie's writing then in use ; Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flyes, Playing with words, and idle similies. As th' English apes and very zanies be Of everything that they do hear and see, So, imitating his ridiculous tricks, They spake and writ all like meere lunatiques. 62. Just as the sonnets and songs of Sir Philip Sidney (ante, 20) are of a merit and power transcending the foreign models on which they were framed, so is it with his celebrated prose romance, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. 2 The Diana of Montemayor (1580), and the Arcadia of Sannazzaro (1549), suggested the form of the work; but a glance at these insipid and artificial productions will show that the intellectual and imaginative reach visible in the English work, the richness and beauty of many of the descriptions, the energy, loftiness, and suggestiveness of the thoughts, are solely due to the native genius of the writer. Written about 1584, the Arcadia was first published in 1613. It may be described as the record of the adventures of the two friends, Pyrocles and Musidorus, while aspiring to the love of the princesses of Arcadia, Philoclea and Pamela. But long narratives are introduced by way of episode, and many other personages, particularly the parents of the princesses, have a troublesome activity, and a proneness to fall in love with every one whom they ought not to think of; all which circumstances complicate the plot wonderfully, and make the novel wearisome to modern taste. Eclogues and songs, in all kinds of classic metres most of which are ridiculously unsuited to English words are of constant occur- rence : we have elegiacs, sapphics, anacreontics, phaleutiacs, asclepiadics, &c. The highly coloured prose, full of trope and metaphor and metonymy, and in the best passages senten- tious and profound rather than antithetical, is a typical monu- ment of the Elizabethan manner a manner which is generally rich and forcible, but too often sacrifices simplicity and good taste. The book contains many striking passages on forms of government. For an unlimited democracy Sidney had an 1 Quoted by Mr. Arber in his preface to Euphues. 2 Extract Book, art. 51. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 239 unbounded aversion; but he also condemns oligarchy, parti- cularly that worst form of it, * when men are governed indeed by a few, and yet are not taught to know what those few be, whom they should obey.' The following word-picture is Sidney's description of Arcadia : There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees ; humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with the re- freshing of silver rivers ; meadows enamel'd with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers ; thickets which, being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so too by the cheerful disposition of many well-tuned birds ; each pasture stored with sheep, feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory craved the dams' comfort ; here a shepherd's boy piping, as though he should never be old ; there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice-music. 63. The strange political romance, Mundus Alter et Idem, by Joseph Hall, appeared in 1605. The man has taken a great stride since he wrote his satires (ante, 10) ; he is now a grave divine, pacing on the road to preferment; his style is chastened and improved ; he no longer discharges his shafts at haphazard, but keeps them for the adversaries of the divine right and prerogative of kings and bishops. Like Sidney, he dreads a pure democracy; but he is not, like Sidney, a true lover of human freedom. In writing the Mundus, &c., his .object seems to have been to depict the brutal, savage, and debased condition into which, according to his theory, a com- .munity would fall if allowed to manage its own affairs and gratify all its caprices. Pure democracy, he means to say, would in time bring man down to the level of the brutes. His * Terra Australis ' has four main territories, Crapulia, Viraginia, Moronia, and Lavernia. The land altogether is a fool's paradise, a land of Cockayne. ' The whole country groans with eatables of all kinds, and none are permitted to be exported.' The grand-duke or king is elected solely on account of his eating powers. In his speech of installation he declares himself an uncompromising foe to fasting, abstinence, short allowance, and leanness. * Every one is desirous of governing, none willing to obey. Everything is regulated by public suffrage ; all speak at once, and none pay any attention -to what their neighbour says. They have a perpetual parlia- ment, and what is voted to-day may be repealed to-morrow.' The real animus of the writer is here unveiled ; we have before us a Coryphaeus among the clerical advisers who en- couraged Charles I. to reign eleven years without a parlia- ment, and who would have suppressed the House of Commons 240 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. and established regal absolutism, if their power had been equal to their will. 64. In this period, the literature of travel and adventure, which has attained to such vast proportions among us in modern times, was placed on a broad and solid pedestal of recorded fact by the work of Richard Hakluyt, a Hereford- shire man, who in 1589 published a collection of voyages made by Englishmen ' at any time ' (as he states on the title-page) 1 within the compass of these fifteen hundred years.' Purchas' Pilgrimage, of which the third edition is dated 1617, will occur to many as the book in which Coleridge had been reading before he dreamed the dream of Kubla Khan. Samuel Purchas was the clergyman of St. Martin's, Ludgate, and a staunch upholder of episcopacy. In the epistle dedicatory, addressed to Archbishop Bancroft after saying that he had consulted above twelve hundred authors in the composition of the work, and explaining what those would find in it who sought for information simply he proceeds : ' Others may hence learn . . . two lessons fitting these times, the unnatural- ness of Faction and Atheism; that law of nature having written in the practice of all men . . . the profession of some religion, and in that religion, wheresoever any society of priests or religious persons are or have been in the world, no admit- tance of Paritie ; the angels in heaven, divels in hell (as the royallest of fathers, the father of our country, hath pronounced), and all religions on earth, as here we show, being equally sub- ject to inequality, that is, to the equitie of subordinate order. And if I live to finish the rest, I hope to show the Paganism of anti-christian popery,' &c. Without being a follower of M. Comte, one may be of opinion that the mental condition of those who could carry on, or assent to the carrying on of, anthropological researches in the temper of mind avowed by honest Purchas, needed a large infusion of the esprit positif. 1 65. The genius of Montaigne raised up English imitators of his famous work, one of whom was afterwards to eclipse his original. Francis Bacon published a small volume entitled Essays, 2 Religious Meditations, Places of Perswasion and Dis- 1 The full title of this curious old book is, 'Purchas, his Pilgrimage, or, Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places. dis- covered, from the Creation unto this Present. In four parts. This First con- tayneth a Theological and Geographical History of Asia, Africa, and America, with the islands adjacent.' Besides the religions, ancient and modern (which, he says, are his principal aim), he undertakes to describe the chief rarities and wonders of nature and art in all the countries treated of. 2 The word 'essay' (which is from the Low Lat. exagium (exigere), a searching trial or examination ; Ital., saggio ; Span., ensayo ; Fr., essai) is used by Bacon in its proper and original sense. 155S-1G25. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 24! wca&ion, in 1597. The essays were ten in number, and treated chiefly of man in his social relations ; 1 they were followed by twelve ' Meditationes Sacrae,' or Religious Meditations, in Latin, treating of such topics as c The Miracles of our Saviour,' * Hypocrites/ and ' Atheism ; ' and these by * The Coulers of Good and Evill,' ten in number, which are the * places of per- swasion/ &c. (in other words, plausible but often fallacious arguments), mentioned in the title-page. The ten essays, except that of * Honour and Reputation,' after being much altered and enlarged, were republished, with the addition of twenty-nine new essays, in 1612. The last edition published in the author's lifetime was that of 1625, under the title of 'Essayes, or Counsels Civill and Moral;' 2 it contained fifty- eight essays, of which twenty were new, and the rest altered or enlarged. In the dedication to this last edition Lord Bacon writes : ' I do now publish my Essayes ; which of all my other workes have beene most currant; for that, as it seemes, they come home to men's businesse and bossomes. I have enlarged them both in number and weight, so that they are indeed a new work.' The Essays in this their final shape were immediately translated into French, Italian, and Latin. 66. At the end of the present period an Oxford student, fond of solitude and the leaTSeTWu&t of great libraries, produced a strange multifarious book, which he called The Anatomy of Melancholy.^ Robert Burton lived for some thirty years in his rooms at Christ Church, much like a monk in his cell, reading innumerable books on all conceivable subjects ; ' but to little purpose,' as he himself admits, ' for want of good method ; and could hit on no better mode of utilising his labours than by completing, or attempting to complete, a design which the Greek philosopher Democritus is recorded to have entertained that of writing a scientific treatise on melancholy ! Burton had an odd sort of humour, and an idle hour may be whiled away pleasantly enough by opening his book almost anywhere ; but as for science, it is not to writers of his stamp that one must go for that. Sir Thomas Overbury, a courtier in the time of James I., was cut off in his prime by the vengeance of Lady Essex, whose marriage with his pupil, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, he discountenanced, though he had connived at the previous guilty intrigue. His Characters, modelled on the 1 The titles of some of them were, 'Of Discourse,' 'Of Ceremonies and Respects,' 'Of Followers and Friends,' 'Of Regiment of Health,' 'Of Honour and Reputation,' ' Of Faction.' 2 See Crit. Sect ch. II. 51, and Extract Book, art. 67. 3 Extract Book, art. 72. Q 242 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. well-known work of Theophrastus, and a poem called The Wife, were published posthumously in 16H. 1 67. The deeper culture of the time displayed itself in the earliest attempts in our language at literary and aesthetic criticism. George Gascoigne, the poet, led the way with a short tract, entitled Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Rhyme in English : this appeared in 1575. William Webbe is the author of a Discourse of English Poetrie, pub- lished in 1586, a work of little value. But in 1589 appeared the Arte of English Poesie by Puttenham, a gentleman pensioner at the court of Elizabeth, a work distinguished by much shrewd- ness and good sense, and containing, as Warton's pages testify, a quantity of minute information about English poetry in the sixteenth century which cannot be found elsewhere. Sir John Harrington's Apology of Poetrie was prefixed to his transla- tion of Ariosto. Edmund Bolton's Hypercritica (cir. 1610) aims at laying down ' a rule of judgment for writing or reading our histories,' naming for praise those authors who in his opinion supply the best choice of English for the use of historians. (See Hasle wood's Ancient Critical Essays, 1815.) But among all such works, Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy, written about 1584, stands pre-eminent. Chaucer's dic- tion was antiquated ; Surrey and Wyat were refined versifiers rather than poets ; the sun of Spenser had but just risen : and, as people are apt to hold cheap that in which they do not excel, it seems that the English literary public at this time were disposed to regard poetry as a frivolous and useless exer- cise of the mind, unworthy to engage the attention of those who could betake themselves to philosophy or history. A work embodying these opinions, entitled The School of Abuse, ^vas written by Stephen Gosson in 1579, and dedicated to Sidney ; and it seems not improbable that this work was the immediate occasion which called forth the Defence of Poesy. In this really noble and beautiful treatise, which moreover has the merit of being very short, Sir Philip seeks to call his countrymen to a better mind, and vindicates the pre-eminence of the poet, as a seer, a thinker, and a maker. 2 68. It has been discovered 3 that from this period dates the first regular newspaper, though it did not as yet contain domestic intelligence. 'The first news-pamphlet which came out at regular intervals appears to have been that entitled The Neios of the Present Week, edited by Nathaniel Butler, which 1 Extract Book, art. 75. 2 See Grit. Sect. ch. II, 54, s Craik, vol. iv. p. 97. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 243 was started in 1622, in the early days of the Thirty Years' War, and was continued, in conformity with its title, as a weekly publication.' History : Holinshed, Camden, Bacon, Speed, Knolles, Raleigh, Foxe. 69. Continuing in the track of the Chroniclers mentioned in the last chapter, Raphael Holinshed and his colleague, William Harrison, produced their well-known Description and History of England, Scotland, and Ireland, in 1577. Since the revival of learning, familiarity with the works of Strabo and other Greek geographers had caused geography to become a popular study ; and among the evidences of this in England, the topographical portions of this Chronicle are perhaps the most important that we have come to since the Itinerarium of Leland, though superseded, a few years later, by the far more celebrated and valuable work known as Camden's Britannia, It would be unfair to say a word in dispraise of the style of this Description, since its author, Harrison, throws himself ingenuously on the reader's mercy, in words which remind one of the immortal Dogberry's anxiety to be ' written down an ass.' * If your honour,' he says, (the book is addressed to Lord Cobham,) ' regard the substance of that which is here declared, I must needs confesse that it is none of mine owne ; but if your lordship have consideration of the barbarous composition showed herein, that I may boldly clairne and challenge for mine owne ; sith there is no man of any so slender skill, that will defraud me of that reproach, which is due unto me, for the meere negli- gence, disorder, and evil disposition of matter comprehended in the same.' Of Holinshed, the author of the historical portions, very little is known ; but the total absence of the critical spirit in his work seems to show that he could not have belonged to the general literary fraternity of Europe, since that spirit was already rife and operative on the Continent. Ludovicus Vives, for instance, a Spaniard, and a fellow-worker with Erasmus and other emancipators of literature and taste, had expressed dis- belief in the fable of Brute, the legendary founder of the British monarchy, many years before ; yet Holinshed quietly trans- lates all the trash that he found in Geoffrey of Monmouth, about that and other mythical personages, as if it were so much solid history. The extent to which, in the sixteenth century, credulity still darkened the historic field, may be judged of from a few facts. Thus Holinshed lays it down as probable that Britain was peopled long before the Deluge. These primitive 244 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. CHAP. III. Britons he supposes to have been all. drowned in the Flood; he then attributes the repeopling of the island to Samothes, the son of Japhet, son of Noah. The population being scanty, it was providentially recruited by the arrival of the fifty daugh- ters of Danaus, a king of Egypt, who, having all killed their husbands, were sent adrift in a ship, and carried by the winds to Britain. This, however, Holinshed admits to be doubtful, but the arrival of Ulysses on our shores he is ready to vouch for, and he favourably considers the opinion that the name of Albion was derived from a huge giant of that name who took up his abode here, the son of Neptune, god of the seas. Then, as to Brute, the great-grandson of ^Eneas, Holinshed no more doubts about his existence, nor that from him comes the name of Britain, than he doubts that Elizabeth succeeded Mary. Such were among the consequences of the manner in which the uncritical writers of the Middle Ages had jumbled history, theology, and philosophy all up together. Nevertheless the Chronicles of Holinshed, being written in an easy and agree- able style, became a popular book. They were reprinted, with a continuation, in 1587 ; they found in Sliakspere a diligent reader ; and they were again reprinted in 1807. John Stow first brought out his Chronicle of England in 1574 ; it was frequently republished, with enlargements and continuations, down to 1631. The Survay of London, by the same author (who was the son of a London tailor), 'contayning the Originall, Increase, Modern Estate, and Government of that city,' first appeared in 1598 ; edition followed edition down to 1754. Stow is not so credulous as Holinshed ; he rejects Brutus, but believes in Lud, the supposed founder of London. Edmund Campion, a Jesuit, who was put to death for 'religion by Elizabeth's government in 1581, wrote a History of Ireland, which was published in the next century by Sir James Ware. John Knox, the destroyer of Catholicism in Scotland, besides a tract written while Mary was reigning in England and Mary of Lorraine regent at Edinburgh, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous Regi- ment of Women, is the author of a History of the Reformation of Religion within the realm of Scotland. It is in four books, and ends in 1564. It remained unpublished a long time ; at last David Buchanan brought it out in 1644, adding a fifth book of uncertain authorship, and interpo- lating or retrenching freely. The first genuine edition was that of 17B2. (M'Crie's Life of Knox, 1831.) 70. It was not long before the judicial office of the historian began to be better understood. William Camden, now scarcely thought of except as an antiquary, was in truth a trained and ripe scholar, and an intelligent student of history. England has more reason to be proud of him than of many whose names are more familiar to our ears. The man who won the friendship of the president De Thou, and corresponded on equal terms with 1658-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 245 that eminent historian, as also with Casaubon and Lipsius abroad, and Usher and Spelman at home, must have possessed solid and extraordinary merits. His Britannia, a work on the topography of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with the isles adjacent, enriched with historical illustrations, first appeared in 1586, while he was an under-master at Westminster School. In 1604 he published his Reliquice Britannicce, a treatise on the early inhabitants of Britain. In this work, undeterred by the sham array of authorities which had imposed upon Holinshed, he 'blew away sixty British kings with one blast.' 1 Burleigh, the great statesman of the reign of Elizabeth, the Cavour of the sixteenth century, singled out Camden as the fittest man in all England to write the history of the first thirty years of the Queen's reign, and intrusted to him, for that purpose, a large mass of state papers. Eighteen years elapsed before Camden discharged the trust. At last, in 1615, his History, or Annals of England during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, made its appearance. ' The love of truth,' he says in the preface, ' has been the only incitement to me to undertake this work.' The studied impartiality of De Thou had made this language popular among historians, and Camden probably fancied at the moment that he had no other motive ; but to say nothing of the ' incitement ' administered by Lord Burleigh, his own words, a little further on, show that the * scandalous libels ' published in foreign parts against the late Queen and the English government, formed a powerful stimulus ; in short, his History must be taken as a vindication, but in a more moderate tone than was then usual, of the Protestant policy of England since the accession of Elizabeth. Its value would be greater than it is, but for his almost uniform neglect to quote his authorities for the statements he makes. This fact, coupled with the discovery, in our own times, of many new and independent sources of information, to him unknown, has caused his labours to be much disregarded. In 1622 Camden founded at Oxford the professorship of Ancient History which still bears his name. The ' Camden Society,' established in 1838 for the publication of historical documents not before edited, took its name from him. 71. Sir Erancis Bacon's History of the Reign of Henry VIL, published in 1622, is in many ways a masterly work. With the truo philosophic temper, he seeks, not content with a super- ficial narrative of events, to trace out and exhibit their causes and connections ; and hence he approaches to the modern 1 Speed. 246 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. III. conception of history, as the record of the development of peoples rather than of the actions of princes and other showy personages. 72. The writers of literary history have been unjust to John Speed, whom it is the custom to speak of as a dull plodding chronicler. Speed was much more than this. His Historie of Great Britain exhibits, in a very striking way, the rapid growth of that healthy scepticism which is one of the essential qualifications of the historian. The nonsense which Holinshed, as we have seen, had received from his predecessors, and innocently retailed, respecting the early history of Britain, Speed disposes of with a few blunt words. A supposed work of Berosus, on which Holinshed, following Bishop Bale, relied for the details he entered into respecting the antediluvian period, had been proved to be an impudent forgery ; Speed there- fore extinguishes Samothes, the daughters of Danaus, Ulysses, &c., without ceremony. Next, he presumes to doubt, if not to deny, the existence of ' Albion the Giant.' But a more auda- cious piece of scepticism remains. Speed does not believe in Brute, and by implication denies that we English are descended from the Trojans ; an article which, all through the Middle Ages, was believed in with a firm undoubting faith. After giving the evidence for and against the legend in great detail, and with perfect fairness, he gives judgment himself on the side of reason ; and with regard to the Trojan descent, advises Britons to * disclaim that which bringeth no honour to so renowned a nation.' The same rationality displays itself as the History proceeds in treating of wonderful stories founded on flimsy evidence. The complimentary verses printed, as the custom then was, at the beginning of the second edition of the work, show that Speed was warmly admired by a circle of contemporary students, who took an eager interest in his labours. This fact, and the rudiments of a sound historical criticism contained in his His- tory, entitle us to conjecture that, had no disturbing influences intervened, the English school of historians, which numbered at this time men like Speed, and Knolles, and Camden, in its ranks, would have progressively developed its powers, and at- tained to ever wider views, until it had thought out all those critical principles which it was actually left to Niebuhr and the Germans to discover. But the civil war came, and broke the thread of research. The strong intellects that might otherwise have applied themselves to the task of establishing canons of evidence, and testing the relative credibility of various historical materials, were compelled to enter into the 1558-KLV.. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 247 arena of political action, and to work and fight either for King or Parliament. We cannot complain ; one nation cannot do all that the race requires. Contented to have immensely accelerated, by our civil war and its incidents, the progress of political free- dom in Europe, we must resign to Germany that philosophical pre-eminence, which, had the English intellect peacefully ex- panded itself during the seventeenth century, we might possibly have contested with her. 73. Another excellent and painstaking writer of the school was Richard Knolles, a former fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, who published in 1610 his General Historie of the Turks. It was the first complete history of this people that had appeared, and the interest of the undertaking lay, in the opinion of the author, in the ' fatal mutations ' which this war- like nation had in a short time brought upon a great part of the world. In the mournful list of conquests from Christendom which he records, the only names of countries that have been since reconquered are Hungary, Greece, and Algeria; but the European mind had not, in 1610, become indifferent from long custom to the ruin of so many Christian communities, recently flourishing in Asia Minor and Koumelia. Johnson (Rambler, No. 122) thought that this work 'displayed all the excellences that narration can admit,' and explained its comparative ob- scurity by the to Englishmen uninteresting and uninviting nature of the subject. 74. The versatility of Raleigh's powers was something marvellous ; nevertheless it must be admitted that when he undertook to write the History of the World, 1 commencing at the Creation, he miscalculated his powers. No one indeed would bear hardly on a work, the labours of which must have relieved many a cheerless and lonely hour in that dark prison- cell in the Tower, in which one may still stand, and muse on the indomitable spirit of its inmate. The book, however, has cer- tainly been overpraised. It is full of that uncritical sort of learning, which, with all its elaborate theories and solemn dis- cussions, we, in the nineteenth century, know to be absolutely worthless. The hundred and thirty-eighth page is reached before the reader is let out of the Garden of Eden. Deuca- lion's flood is gravely treated as an historical event, the date of which is pretty certain ; a similar view is taken of the ' flood of Ogyges,' which, by a stupendous process of argumentation, is proved to have taken place exactly five hundred and eighty years after that of Noah. A voluminous disquisition follows, with the object of proving that the ark did not rest on Mount i See Crit. Sect. ch. II. 24. 248 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEKATURE. CHAP. III. Ararat, but upon some part of the Caucasus. At the end of four hundred and eleven pages, we have only reached the reign of Semiramis, B.C. 2000, or thereabouts. Proceeding at this rate, it was obviously impossible, even though the scale of the narrative is gradually contracted, that within the ordinary term of a human life the work should be carried down beyond the Christian era. It closes, in fact, about the year B.C. 170, with the final subjugation of Macedon by the Romans. That there are eloquent and stirring passages in the book, no one will deny ; yet they mostly appear in connection with a theory of history which, though commonly held in Raleigh's day, has long ceased to be thought adequate to cover the facts. That theory a legacy from the times when all departments of human knowledge were overshadowed and intruded upon by theology is fully stated in the preface. It deals with history as being didactic rather than expository ; as if its proper office were to teach moral lessons, the most important of these being, that God always requites virtuous and vicious princes in this world according to their deserts that * ill-doing hath always been attended with ill-success.' History, on this view, became a sort of department of preaching. The one-sidedness of the theory, and the special pleading of its advocates, after eliciting counter-extravagances from Machiavel and Hobbes, drew down, in the Candide, the withering mockery of Voltaire. 75. The appearance of the first edition of Foxe's Acts and Monuments, commonly called the Boole of Martyrs, in 1561, is yet more an historical than a literary event. Of this work, filling three bulky folio volumes, nine standard editions were called for between its first publication and the year 1684; and it is impossible to exaggerate the effect which its thrilling narratives of the persecutions and burnings of the Protestants under Mary had in weakening the hold of the ancient Church on the general English heart. The style is plain and manly : the language vigorous and often coarse; but it was thereby only rendered the more effective for its immediate purpose. It is now indeed well understood that Foxe was a rampant bigot, and, like all of his class, utterly unscrupulous in assertion ; the falsehoods, misrepresentations, and exaggerations to which he gave circulation, are endless. Take for instance his account of the death of Wolsey, which we know from the testimony of George Cavendish, an eye-witness, to be a string of pure un- mitigated falsehoods. ' It is testified by one, yet being alive, in whose armes the said Cardinall died, that his body being dead was black as pitch, also was so heavie that six could scarce beare it. Furthermore, it did so stinke above the 1558-1023. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 249 ground, that they were constrained to hasten the burial thereof in the night season before it was day. At the which burial such a tempest with such a stinke there arose, that all the torches went out, and so hee was throwne into the tombe, and there was laied.' Such foul slanderous hearsays it was Foxe's delight and care to incorporate by dozens in his work : no weapon came amiss, if a Catholic prelate was the object aimed at. Mr. Maitland, in a series of pamphlets, 1 examined a number of these, proved their falsehood, and established the general unreliability of the martyrologist. The first volume, beginning with the persecutions directed against the early Church, professes to trace, according to a favourite doctrine of the Reformers, the history of a faithful and suffering remnant, the pure Church of Christ, which re- tained the unadulterated Gospel in the midst of the idolatrous corruptions introduced by the official Church, down across the Dark and Middle Ages, through the Waldenses, the Albigenses, Wyclif, Huss, and Oldcastle, to the brighter times of Luther and Cranmer. This volume ends with the accession of Henry VIII. The second volume includes the reign of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. ; the third is chiefly taken up with the records of the persecution under Mary. Foxe has the credit of having been among the first to awaken an interest in the '.forgotten literature of our forefathers by publishing (1571) The Gospel of the fower Evangelistcs translated in the olde Saxons' tyme out of Latin into the vulgar toung of the Saxons, with a dedication to Elizabeth. Theology : Jewel, Hooker, Parsons, Stapleton, James I, Andre wes; Translations of the Bible. 76. In the grave works resulting from profound thought and learning, not less than in the creations of the imaginative faculty, the buoyant and progressive character of the period may be traced. To speak first of theology : even the Catholic controversialists seem to catch the contagion of the time's en- thusiasm. Allen and Parsons wrote and combated with a hope- ful pugnacity not found in the Gothers and Challoners of a later age ; driven from the old universities, they founded English colleges for the education of priests at Eome and Douay ; they laboured to keep up their communications all over England;; they formed plots ; they exposed the doctrinal and liturgical compromises in which the new Anglican Church 1 The first of the series was entitled 'Six Letters on Foxe's Acts and Monuments,' 1837. 250 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. CHAP. III. had its beginning ; they would not believe but that all would ultimately come right again, and the nation repent of its wild aberrations from Catholic and papal unity. 77. The partisans of the Reformation split, as the reign went on, into two great sections the Puritans and the Church party, or Prelatists, as they were nicknamed by their oppo- nents. The leading men among the former had been in exile during ^the persecution in Mary's reign, and returned home full of admiration for the doctrines and Church polity of Calvin, which last they had seen in full operation at Geneva. Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, was one of these : his famous Apology, published in 1562, is Calvinistic in its theology; but the fact of his being able, though with some scruples of con- science, to accept a bishopric, proves that the differences be- tween the two parties about Church* government were not as yet held to be vital. The Apology, which was directed against Rome, and originally written in Latin, drew forth a reply from the Jesuit Harding, to which Jewel rejoined in his Defence of the Apology, a long and laboured work in English. 78. Matthew Parker, the first Protestant archbishop under Elizabeth, was ' a man of strong mind and sterling common sense, with business habits and great powers of application.' * He seems to have been one of those healthy, broad-chested, coarse-fibred, capable men, who by their mere weight and mass gravitate to the central position in affairs, but in whom there is no initiative, either intellectual or spiritual men who are convinced that pleasure is sweet, and ' ginger hot in the mouth,' much more firmly and with more decided relish than they believe any point of religious faith. Such men will hold to a religion in tranquil times, and persecute its assailants ; but they readily give up their hold when fortune and the powers of the world declare against it, and obsequiously take up with another. They are born Erastians ; what the State approves they approve, and * account it canonical ; ' in a period of transi- tion they will argue ably for the unassailable validity of every successive position which the State, as it drifts away from Catholicism, temporarily assumes. Nor will they argue insin- cerely ; for the flesh, the world, and material satisfactions are their real body of doctrine ; where these are not, they cannot see the presence of the Spirit of truth ; where these are, they cannot persuade themselves that He does not familiarly abide. Cranmer was one of these men ; but he was caught in a sudden and stern Catholic reaction, and, though ready to profess any- thing to save his life, was not spared. Parker was more for- 1 Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 251 tunate. Born in 1504, and educated at Cambridge, where lie rose to be Master of Corpus College and Vice-Chancellor, he took advantage, though a priest, of the unsettled state of things under Henry VIII, and married. He prudently sought retirement during the reign of Mary, though he did not find it necessary to go into exile. Elizabeth and Cecil, when the breach with Rome was finally decided upon, pitched upon him as a fit working head of the new institution ; and from their point of view it was a judicious choice. Besides managing adroitly the trust committed to him, Parker showed a con- siderable interest in the progress of literature. He made a metrical version of the Psalms (1557), but this is of small merit. By his means the translation of the Bible, afterwards known as the ' Bishops' Bible/ was set on foot, and came into use from 1568. In 1572 he published a work in Latin, De Antiquitate Britannicoe Ecclesice. Through his means and under his direction, editions of Matthew Paris, Walsingham, and Asser issued from the press. His valuable collection of MSS. he left between the library of his own college and that of the university, which he so enlarged as almost to deserve the credit of being its founder. While Grindal was archbishop, the deviations of the Puritan clergy from the established liturgy were to some extent con- nived at. But upon the appointment of Whitgift, in 1583, a man of great energy and a strict disciplinarian, uniformity was everywhere enforced ; and the Puritans saw no alternative before them, but either to accept a form of Church government of which they doubted the lawfulness, and acquiesce in practices which they detested as relics of ' Popery,' (such as the sign of the cross at baptism, the use of vestments, the retention of fast and feast days, &c.,) or else to give up their ministry in the Church. Before deciding on the latter course, they tried the effect of putting forth various literary statements of their case. Of these the most important were the Admonition of Cart- wright, and the Ecclesiastica Disciplina of Travers. These works drew forth from the Church party a memorable response, in the Ecclesiastical Polity of Richard Hooker. This celebrated man, who never attained to higher ecclesiastical rank than that of a simple clergyman in the diocese of Canterbury, pub- lished the first four books of his treatise on Ecclesiastical Polity in 1594 ; the fifth book followed in 1597. 1 His life by Izaak Walton is one of our most popular biographies ; but it used to be remarked by the late Dr. Arnold, that the gentle, humble, unworldly pastor brought before us by Walton is quite 1 Extract Book, art. 60. 252 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. III. unlike the strong majestic character suggested by the works themselves. The general object of the treatise was to defend the Established Church, its laws, rights, and ceremonies from the attacks of the Puritans. These attacks reduced themselves to two principal heads : first, that the episcopal government of the Church and the temporal status of bishops, together with all laws connected with and upholding this system, as not being laid down in Scripture, were therefore unlawful, and ought to be exchanged for the Presbyterian system, which they main- tained was so laid down ; secondly, that many of the rites and practices enjoined by the rubric were superstitious and * popish,' and ought to be abolished. To the first position Hooker replies by establishing the distinction between natural and positive law, the former being essentially immutable, the latter, even though commanded by God Himself for special purposes and at particular times, essentially mutable. Thence he argues, that even if the Puritans could prove their Presbyterian form of Church government to be laid down in Scripture, it would not follow (since such form was, after all, a part of positive law), that for cogent reasons and by lawful authority it might not be altered. The philosophical analysis of law which the course of his argument renders necessary, is the most masterly and also the most eloquent portion of the treatise. To the second head of objections Hooker replies by endeavouring to trace all the rites and practices complained of to the primitive and uncorrupted Church of the first four centuries. His great familiarity with the writings of the Fathers gave him an advan- tage here over his less learned opponents ; -yet at the same time the minuteness of the details, coupled with the comparative obsoleteness of the questions argued, renders this latter portion of the work less permanently valuable than the first four books. The sixth book, as Mr. Keble has proved, 1 is lost to us, all but a few of the opening paragraphs ; the remainder of the book as it now stands being a fragment upon a totally different subject from that treated of in the original, though undoubtedly com- posed by Hooker. The seventh and eighth books belong to the original design, but were published long after Hooker's death, from MSS. left unrevised and in a disorderly condition. 78a. The ' Martin Mar- Prelate ' controversy arose out of the produc- tion of a series of pamphlets by Puritan writers, commencing in 1588, who, under that title, attacked the bishops and episcopacy, calling the former a 'swinish rabble,' 'petty Antichrists.' 'proud prelates/ 'enemies to the Gospel,' &c. The pamphlets were printed at a secret press, removed 1 In the Introduction to his excellent edition of Hooker's Works, Oxford, 1842. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 253 from place to place to evade the search of the pursuivants. It was at last discovered and destroyed ; and John Penry, the chief circulator of the tracts, was hanged for sedition (1593). This poor man, in the address to the Queen, found among his papers, which was the cause of his death, says, ' If we had had Queen Mary's days, I think that we should have had as flourishing a Church this day as ever any. For it is well known that there was then in London, under the burthen, and elsewhere in exile, more flourishing churches than any now tolerated by your autho- rity.' It may be inferred from this that the government under Mary was a mixture of indulgence and severity. Nash the dramatist took part in the controversy against the Puritans, writing A Counter Cuff to Martin Junior, Martin's Month's Mind, PasquiVs Apology, &c. (1589). (Strype's Life of Whitgift; Hazlitt's British Poets.) 79. The Catholic writers of this period were very busy with their pens in their different places of exile, and produced a great number of works, both in Latin and in English. We have the names of Staple ton, Sander or Sanders, Walsingham, Harps- field, More (the historian of the English Jesuits), Campion, and many others. Robert Parsons, whose name has been already mentioned, excelled them all in industry and tenacity. A long and candid account of his labours may be read in Wood's Atlience. Among his many treatises, the Three Conversions of England (1603) is the most remarkable. 1 The first conversion is supposed to have taken place in the time of the apostles ; the second is that effected in the second century, in the days of Pope Eleutherus and the British King Lucius ; the third is that commenced by Pope Gregory. The works of Thomas Stapleton, collected in four large folio volumes, are now scarcely to be met with outside the walls of a few public libraries. Obliged, with his family, to go into exile at the accession of Elizabeth, Staple- ton found shelter, under the rule of Spain, at Louvain, and afterwards at Douay. In the proem to the Tres Thames, his principal work, containing biographies of St. Thomas the apostle, St. Thomas-a-Becket, and Sir Thomas More, he says that he was born in the same month in which More was martyred, and that he had obtained authentic information respecting him from a number of other English exiles, and also from the works of many distinguished foreign authors, such as Cochlseus, Paulus Jovius, Budseus, and Khenanus. Nicholas Sander, one of the theologians whom the passing of the Act of Supremacy drove into exile, became a professor at Louvain, and published there (1571) a Latin work 'On the Visible Monarchy of the Church/ But a much better known work is that which he wrote l On the Origin and Progress of the Anglican Schism ' (printed after his death in 1585), the revelations in which were so 1 Extract Book, art. 52. 254 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. dreadful, and so damaging to those who actively furthered the English reformation, that to deny their truth, and brand him as a liar, was the only course left for his opponents. But the original sources which have been made public property in the last thirty years singularly confirm many of Sander's state- ments, and it seems likely that this indirect justification will yet be carried much further. Nicholas Harpsfield was arch- deacon of Canterbury in 1558. Refusing to change his religion he was thrown into prison in July 1559, and kept in bonds till his death in 1583. He is the author of an 'Ecclesiastical History of England, ' in Latin, and a treatise on the * Hseresis Wickliffiana.' Under Mary he wrote an English treatise of great interest and value on the ' Pretended Divorce ' between Henry VIII. and Catharine of Arragon. This at last got into the hands of a Catholic bookseller, one Carter, who was about to print it ; but being found with it in his possession by the pursuivants, and it being known that he had printed other Catholic works, he was executed. The MS. was first printed for the Camden Society in 1878, carefully edited by Mr. Pocock. 80. In the reign of James, Dr. Donne and Bishop Andrewes were the chief writers of the Episcopalian party. The reaction against the encroaching self-asserting spirit of Puritanism, joined to the perception that the controversy with the Catholics could not be carried on upon the narrow Puritan grounds, nor with- out reference to the past history of the Church, led back about this time the ablest and best men among the Anglican divines to the study of the primitive ages and the writings of the Fathers. Donne, Andrewes, and Laud, as afterwards Bull, Pearson, Taylor, and Barrow, were deeply read in ecclesiastical literature. James I. prided himself on his theological pro- fundity. His Basilicon Doron, or advice to his son Prince Henry, published in 1599, contains far more of theological argument than of moral counsel. In 1610 his works were published in folio; they include his of ten -cited treatise on Demonology l (in which he assumes the reality and discusses the conditions of the Satanic agency which operates in witches), and a tract against the new practice of smoking, called A Counterblast .to Tobacco. His Apology for the Oath of Allegi- ance, written in 1605, to justify the imposition upon English Catholics of the new oaths framed after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, drew forth an answer from Bellarmine, under the feigned name of Matthew Tortus. To the strictures of the cardinal a reply appeared with the curious title of Tortura Torti 1 Extract Book, art. G6. !.-> 1G25. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 255 (1609), from the pen of Lancelot Andrewes, bishop of Win- chester. This good and able man, in whom an earnest piety was united to a quick and sparkling wit and an unflagging industry, was of humble parentage, but, by sheer weight and force of character, he gained the intimacy and confidence of three sovereigns Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. He was one of the translators of the Bible in the time of James ; the portion assigned to him and his company being the Pentateuch, and the historical books from Joshua to the end of the Second Book of Kings. He died in 1626, and was lamented in a beautiful Latin elegy by Milton, then a young student at Cambridge. 81. The authorised English version of the Scriptures was the work of the reign of James. * Forty-seven persons, in six companies, meeting at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge, distributed the labour among them ; twenty-five being assigned to the Old Testament, fifteen to the New, seven to the Apo- crypha. The rules imposed for their guidance by the King were designed, as far as possible, to secure the text against any novel interpretation ; the translation called The Bishops' Bible being established as the basis, as those still older had been in that ; and the work of each person or company being subjected to the review of the rest. The translation, which was commenced in 1607, was published in 1611.' x On the Bishops' Bible named in this extract see above, 78. In that version, also, earlier translations had been pretty closely followed ; so that there can be no doubt that the English of the authorised version is considerably more antique in character than that of the gene- ration in which it appeared. Of a few expressions such as 'wist ye not,' * strait 'for narrow, 'strawed,' 'charger,' 'emerods,' ' receipt of custom,' and the like the meaning may perhaps be thus obscured for the uneducated. But, on the whole, the beautiful simplicity and easy idiomatic flow of the authorised version render it a people's book, and a model for translators ; while the strength and dignity of its style have probably operated for good upon English prose- writing ever since. Philosophy : Francis Bacon; his Method; 'The Advancement of Learning ' : Lord Herbert. 82. In the early part of the seventeenth century, the philo- sophy and science taught at the intellectual centres of the country Oxford and Cambridge differed little from those which the great schoolmen of the Middle Ages had invented or 1 Hallam's Literature of Europe, vol. ii. p. 403. 256 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. III. transmitted. That is to say, logic and moral philosophy, the one investigating the reasoning process, the other the different qualities of human actions, were taught according to the system of Aristotle ; rhetoric was studied as a practical application of logic ; and mathematics, more as an intellectual exercise than as an instrument for the investigation of nature. The physical sciences, so far as they were studied at all, were treated in an off-hand manner, as if they were already tolerably complete ; and being still overlaid with metaphysical notions, which gave the show without the reality of knowledge, were unable to make effectual progress. For instance, the old fourfold division of causes into material, formal, efficient, and final, instead of being regarded as what it really is a useful temporary formula to introduce clearness into our own conceptions was still sup- posed to be actually inherent in the nature of things, and was made the basis for the formation of distinct departments of knowledge. In the seventeenth century, the human mind, even among the most advanced communities, had still much of the presumptuous forwardness natural to children and savages. The complexity of natural phenomena was partly unknown, partly under-estimated. Instead of sitting down humbly as a disciple, and endeavouring to decipher here and there a few pages of nature's book, man still conceived himself to stand immeasurably above nature, and to possess within his own resources, if the proper key could only be found, the means of unlocking all her secrets, and compelling her subservience to his wants. If Bacon's philosophical labours had been of no other service than to beat down this presumptuous temper, and explode this notion of the finality of science, they must have been regarded as of inestimable value. He shared to the full in the eager and sanguine temper which we have shown to be characteristic of the age ; he takes for his motto Plus ultra ; he revels in the view of the immensity of the field lying open before the human faculties ; and the title - page of the original edition of his Instauratio Magna bears the meaning portraiture of a ship in full sail, with a consort following in her wake, bearing down to pass between the fabled Pillars of Hercules, the limit of the knowledge, and almost of the aspirations, of the ancient world. He repeats more than once that in the sciences ' opinion of store is found to be one of the chief causes of want.' He is unjust, indeed, in attributing this presumptuous persuasion of the completeness of science to Aristotle, whom he sometimes strangely depreciates, even going so far as to say that in the general wreck of learning consequent upon the invasion of the 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 257 Empire by the barbarians, the flimsy and superficial character of Aristotle's system buoyed it up, when the more solid and valuable works of the earlier philosophers perished. It is true that those who had attempted to philosophise, ever since the time of Aristotle, had been unduly influenced by his great name, and had often acquiesced blindly in his conclusions. Aristotle, how- ever, is not justly chargeable with the errors of his followers. It 'is clear that Bacon was keenly alive to the comparative worthlessness of all that had been done by the philosophers who preceded him towards a real knowledge of nature. What made him prize this knowledge so highly "? Not so much its own intrinsic value, nor even its effects on the mind receiving it, as the persuasion which he felt that, if obtained, it would give to man an effective command over nature. For his aim in philosophising was eminently practical ; he loved philosophy chiefly because of the immense utility which he felt certain lay enfolded in it, for the improving and adorning of man's life. This is the meaning of the well-known Baconian axiom, ' Knowledge is power.' To know nature would always involve, he thought, the power to use her for our own purposes ; and it seems that he would have cared little for any scientific knowledge of phenomena which remained barren of practical results. 83. The end, therefore, was to know nature in order to make use of her ; from this end all previous philosophy had wandered away and lost itself. Let us try now to conceive distinctly what Bacon believed himself to have accomplished for its realisation. In few words, he believed that he had dis- covered an intellectual instrument of such enormous power, that the skilful application of it would suffice to resolve all the problems which the world of sense presents to us. This 'new instrument,' or Novum Organum, he describes in the book so named. Armed with this, he considered that an ordinary intellect would be placed on a par with the most highly gifted minds ; and this supposed fact he uses to defend himself from the charge of presumption, since, he says, it is not a question of mental gifts or powers, but of methods ; and just as a weak man, armed with a lever, may, without pre- sumption, think he can raise a greater weight than a strong man using only his bare strength, so the inquirer into nature, who has found out the right road or method, may, without vanity, expect to make greater discoveries than he, however great his original powers, who is proceeding by the wrong road. The instrument thus extolled is the Baconian * method of instances,' of which it may be well here to give a short account. Let it be premised that the object of the philosopher is to R 258 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. ascertain the form, that is, the fundamental law, 1 of some property common to a variety of natural objects. He must proceed thus : First, he prepares a table of instances, in all of which the property is present ; as, for example, in the case of heat, the sun's rays, fire, wetted hay, &c. Secondly, he prepares a table of instances, apparently cognate to those in the first table, or some of them, in which, nevertheless, the given property is absent. Thus, the moon's rays, though, like those of the sun, they possess illuminating powers, give out no heat. Thirdly, he prepares a table of degrees, or a com- parative table, showing the different degrees in which the property is exhibited in different instances. Fourthly, by means of the materials accumulated in the three preceding tables, he constructs a table of exclusions, or a 'rejection of natures;' that is, he successively denies any property to be the/orm of the given property, which he has not found to be invariably present or absent in every instance where the latter was present or absent, and to increase and decrease as the latter increased and decreased. Thus, in the case of heat, he denies light to be the form of heat, because he has found light to be present in the instance of the moon's rays, while heat was absent. The fifth and final step is, to draw an affirmative conclusion the ' interpretation of nature in the affirmative ; ' that is, to affirm that residuary property, which, if the pro- cess has been carried far enough, will be found remaining when all others have been excluded, to be the form of the given property. Thus he affirms motion to be the form of heat. The weak point in this method, or, at any rate, one weak point, seems to be indicated by the words printed in italics, * if the process has been carried far enough.' There would be no difficulty in doing this, if it were really such an easy matter to break up every instance or concrete phenomenon into the 'natures,' or abstract properties, entering into its com- position, as Bacon assumes it to be. But how far is even modern science, aided by all the resources of chemistry and electricity, from having accomplished this : and how hopeless was it then to make this process the foundation of a philo- sophic method, when chemistry could not as yet be said to exist ! It seems that Bacon himself partly fell into that error, to which he rightly ascribes the sterility of philosophy in his day, 2 the tendency, namely, to frame wide generalisations from insufficient data, and to neglect the laborious establish- 1 Novum Organum, book ii. ch. 17 : ' The form of heat, or of light, means exactly the same as the law of heat, or the law of light.' 2 Novum Organum, book ii. 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 259 ment of partial or medial generalisations. Thus it is that he is led to attempt to define the inmost nature of heat, when as yet the materials for so wide and difficult a generalisation had not been collected as they can only be collected by means of a searching investigation into all the laws which regulate its operation and manifestation. Considerations of this kind, coupled with the now admitted fact, that, fond as Bacon was of experiments, he made and multiplied them to little profit, and left no important con- tribution to .any single branch of physical science, induce the latest editors of his works, 1 whose admirable performance of their task marks them out as in every way competent judges, to acknowledge that nothing can be made of his peculiar system of philosophy. ' If we have not tried it, it is because we feel confident that it would not answer. We regard it as a curious piece of machinery, very subtle, elaborate, and ingenious ; but not worth constructing, because all the work it could do may be done more easily another way.' All this may be true ; still the claims of Bacon to the ad- miration and gratitude of his countrymen rest upon grounds which nothing alleged here, or that can be alleged, will ever weaken. He used his life and his genius in preaching per- petually, that men should go to nature, and investigate the facts ; that, in all matters cognisable by the understanding, with the sole exception of revealed religion, experience, not authority, should be taken as the guide to truth. When he himself indeed went to nature, the instrument which he used was too much encumbered with those metaphysical notions, the futility of which it was reserved for a later age to discover, to permit of his effecting much. But his general advice was followed, though his particular method was found unworkable. It may be doubted whether his influence has not been almost too great in this direction : whether he has not led his country- men too far away from the path of speculation and the considera- tion of general principles ; whether the incessant accumulation of observations and experiments, to which our men of science, as Baconians, have devoted themselves ever since the sixteenth century, has not been too exclusively prosecuted, to the detri- ment of the departments of pure thought. 2 But, however this may be, the reality and the greatness of his influence can be denied by none who contemplate the immense material benefits which the prevalence of the inductive spirit, and the resort to 1 Bacon's Works, edited by Ellis and Spedding. 2 See some valuable remarks on this point in the chapter on the Scottish intellect in the eighteenth century, in the second volume of the late Mr. Buckle's History of Civilization. 260 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. CHAP. III. experiment, have conferred upon England, and, through Eng- land, upon Europe and America. Again, it must be remembered that if anything was wanting to Bacon in exact scientific faculty, it was more than com- pensated in moral wisdom. Certainly, when we consider with what a grasp of understanding he took in all the parts of human society, how he surveyed all its ranks and subdivisions, noting the elements of strength and weakness natural to each ; and again, how profoundly he analysed the false appearances, or * idols,' which beset individual minds and prevent them from attaining to truth, the idols of the tribe, or false notions common to the race, the idols of the cave, or false notions proper to the individual, the [idols of the market-place, or the false notions imposed upon us by the ambiguities of language, lastly, the idols of the theatre, or the specious theories of false philosophy ; when we review these and many other deep and subtle thoughts that lie thickly scattered through his works, it is impossible not to rank Bacon among the most powerful and sagacious thinkers that have ever instructed mankind. 84. With these general remarks on the Baconian philosophy, we proceed to note down the date of appearance and general scope of Bacon's principal works. Of the Essays we have already spoken. 1 His philosophical views are contained in three principal works, besides many detached papers and frag- ments. The three works are, the Advancement of Learning, the Instauratio Magna, and the De Augmentis Scientiarum. The first was composed in English, and first published in 1605. 2 Its general object was to take a survey of the whole field of human knowledge, showing its actual state in its various departments, and noting what parts had been cultivated, what were lying waste, without, however, entering upon the difficult inquiry as to erroneous methods of cultivation ; his purpose in this work being only 'to note omissions and deficiencies,' with a view to their being made good by the labours of learned men. It may throw light on what has been said as to the nature of Bacon's method, if his mode of procedure in the work now under con- sideration be examined somewhat more fully. After dividing human learning into three parts, history, poetry, and philosophy, corresponding respectively to the three principal faculties of the mind, memory, imagination, and reason, he first examines how far history and poetry have been adequately cultivated. Literary history is noted as de- ficient, a remark which Bacon certainly would not have made at the present day. Coming to philosophy, he again makes i See ante, 65. 2 Extract Book, art. 67. 1.V.S lG2. r . ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 261 a threefold division into divine, natural, and human philosophy. By divine philosophy he means natural theology, or ' that knowledge or rudiment of knowledge concerning God, which may be obtained by the contemplation of His creatures ; which knowledge may be truly termed divine in respect of the object, and natural in respect of the light.' Natural philosophy he divides into two parts, the inquisition of causes, and the production of effects ; speculative and opera- tive ; natural science and natural prudence. Now the reader, unacquainted with the precise light in which Bacon regarded his own method, would expect to find him noting down natural science as extremely deficient, and giving some sketch, by way of anticipation, of the improvements which he hoped to intro- duce into its cultivation. But he does nothing of the kind ; and for this reason, because the method from which he expected so much did not appear to him in the light of an improvement on old modes of inquiry, but rather as a piece of new intel- lectual machinery, by him first invented ; he does not, there- fore, refer it to the philosophy of nature, but, as we shall see, to the philosophy of the human mind. Human philosophy he divides into two parts knowledge of man as an individual, and knowledge of man in society, or civil knowledge. Again, the knowledge of man, as an individual, is of two kinds, as relating either to the body or to the mind. To the first kind are referred human anatomy, medicine, &c. ; the second kind includes knowledge of the substance or nature of the mind, and knowledge of its faculties or functions. And since these faculties are mainly of two kinds, those of the understanding and reason, and those of the will, appetite, and affection, this part of human philosophy naturally falls into the two great leading divisions, rational and moral What is said of the state of moral or ethical philosophy is exceedingly interesting, but it is with his account of ' rational knowledge, or arts intellectual,' that we have here to do. The first of these, he says, is the 'art of inquiry or invention,' which, in that department of it which deals with arts and sciences, he notes as deficient, and proceeds, in a very striking passage, 1 to explain the grounds of this opinion. Rejecting the syllogistic method as inadequate, he pronounces in favour of the inductive method, as the true art of intellectual invention the sole genuine interpreter of nature and promises to expound it on a subsequent occasion. 85. This promise was redeemed, partially at least, by the publication of the Novum Organum in 1620. This is the second part of what he intended to be a vast philosophical 1 Vol. iii. p. 392 (Ellis's edition). 262 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. system, in six divisions, entitled the Instauratio Pliilosophice. The De Augmentis Scientiarum, which is in the main a Latin version of The Advancement of Learning, about one-third of its bulk consisting of new matter, covers most of the ground which the first of these divisions was intended to occupy ; the second is the Novum Organum. The third division was to consist of a complete Historia Naturalis, founded on the most accurate observation and the most diligent and extensive re- search. To this part Bacon only contributed what he called his Centuries of Natural History, containing about one thousand observed facts and experiments ; at the same time he enume- rated one hundred and thirty particular histories which ought to be prepared under this head. The Scala Intellectus, or history of analytical investigation, was to form the fourth division. By this appears to have been meant a description of the actual processes employed by the intellect in the investi- gation of truth, with an account of the peculiar difficulties and peculiar facilities which it encounters on the road. Of this part Bacon has only written a few introductory pages. The fifth division was to have contained samples of the new method of philosophising, and specimens of the results obtained, under the title Prodromi sive Anticipations Pliilosophice Secundoe. Two or three separate tracts under this head are all that Bacon could accomplish. The sixth division, Philosophia Secunda sive Scientia activa, which should have been the full system, properly digested and harmoniously ordered, of the new philo- sophy itself, he despaired of living to accomplish. Indeed, to use Mr. Hallam's words, ' no one man could have filled up the vast outline, which he alone, in that stage of the world, could have so boldly sketched.' 85a. The De Veritate of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, a treatise in which the necessity of a divine revelation of religion is im- pugned, came out at Paris in 1624. About this a strange story is told by the author in his Autobiography. He says that, being in doubt whether to publish the De Veritate or to sup- press it, one fine day, while the sun was shining into his room, he took the book into his hands, and, kneeling devoutly, prayed that the 'eternal God' would enlighten him; and if the publication would be for His glory, give him a sign from heaven. A sound was immediately heard, ' a loud though yet gentle noise ' in the sky, which Lord Herbert took as a sign of divine approbation, and published the book ! Bishop Kennett, referring to this, calls the De Veritate ' a book strongly imbued with the light of revelation, . . . and yet most strangely in- tended to impugn the validity of that revelation itself, designed 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 263 to question the necessity and truth of any communication from the Deity, and yet professing to rely for its sanction on a sup- posed miraculous interposition of that very kind.' Political Science : Buchanan, Spenser, Raleigh. 86. It was impossible but that the general intellectual awakening which characterised the period should extend itself to political science. The doctrines of civil freedom now began to be heard from many lips, and in every direction penetrated the minds of men, producing convictions which the next generation was to see brought into action. Not that these opinions were wholly new, even the most advanced of them. To say nothing of the ancients, the great Aquinas, in his treatise De Regimine Principum, had said, as far back as the middle of the thirteenth century, that ' Kex datur propter regnum, et non regnum propter regem/ l and had declared the constitutional or limited form of monarchy to be superior to the absolute form. But the class to which literature appealed in the thirteenth century was both too small, and too much absorbed in professional interests, to admit of such views becoming fruitful. After the invention of printing and the revival of learning they were taken up by many thinkers in different parts of Europe, and rapidly circulated through the educated portion of society. In 1579, the stern old George Buchanan, James I.'s pedagogue, crowned a long and adven- turous life, in which his liberal opinions had brought on him more than one imprisonment, besides innumerable minor perse- cutions and troubles, by the publication, in his seventy-fourth year, of the work, De jure Regni apud Scotos. 2 This treatise, which is in Latin, is in the form of a dialogue between the author and Thomas Maitland, upon the origin and nature of royal authority in general, and of the authority of the Scottish crown in particular. In either case, he derives the authority, so far as lawful, entirely from the consent of the governed ; and argues that its abuse inasmuch as its possessor is thereby con- stituted a tyrank exposes him justly even to capital punishment at the hands of his people, and that not by public sentence only, but by the act of any private person. Views so extreme led to the condemnation and prohibition of the work by the Scottish parliament in 1554. It may be granted that Buchanan's close connection with the party of the Regent Murray, whose interest 1 ' The king exists for the sake of the kingdom, not the kingdom for the sake of the king.' 2 ' Upon Scotch Monarchical Law.' 264 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. III. it was to create an opinion of the lawfulness of any proceedings, to whatever lengths they might be carried, against the person and authority of the unhappy Queen, then in confinement in England, was likely to impart an extraordinary keenness and stringency to the anti-monarchical theories advocated in the book. Nevertheless similar views were supported in the six- teenth century in the most unexpected quarters; the Jesuit Mariana, for instance, openly advocates regicide in certain contingencies ; and it was quite in character with the daring temper of the age to demolish the awe surrounding any power, however venerable, which thwarted the projects of either the majority or the most active and influential party in a state. William Bellenden, after writing a treatise which he called Ciceronis Princeps, on monarchy, another, Ciceronis Consul, on aristocracy, and a third, De Statu Prisci Orbis, on the politics of the ancient world gene- rally, cast the three treatises into one, and published them under the title Bellendenus de Statu (1615). Mr. Hallam (Lit. of Eur. iii.) gives considerable praise to Bellenden as a political reasoner. The book was republished, with a violent preface by Dr. Parr, in 1787. 87. Among the political writings of this period there is none more remarkable than Spenser's View of the State of Ireland, which, though written and presented to Elizabeth about the year 1596, was not published till 1633. This is the work of an eye-witness, who was at once a shrewd observer and a profound thinker, upon the difficulties of the Irish question, that pro- blem which pressed for solution in the sixteenth century, and is still unsolved in the nineteenth. Spenser traces the evils afflict- ing Ireland to three sources, connected respectively with its laws, its customs, and its religion; examines each source in turn ; suggests specific remedial measures ; and, finally, sketches out a general plan of government calculated to prevent the growth of similar mischiefs for the future. 88. In England, the active and penetrating mind of Raleigh was employed in this direction among others. It is very in- teresting to find him, in his Observations on Trade and Com- merce, advocating the system of low duties on imports, and explaining the immense advantages which the Dutch, in the few years that had elapsed since they conquered their independence from Spain, had derived from free trade and open ports. The treatise on the Prerogative of Parliament, written in the Tower, and addressed to the King, was designed to induce James to summon a Parliament, as the most certain and satisfactory mode of paying the crown debts. It is true, he adapts the reasoning in some places to the base and tyrannical mind which he was attempting to influence ; saying, for example, that although the 1558-1625. ELIZABETHAN PERIOD. 265 King might be obliged to promise reforms to his Parliament in return for subsidies, he need not keep his word when Parliament was broken up. But this Machiavelian suggestion may be explained as the desperate expedient of an unhappy prisoner, who saw no hope either for himself or for his country except in the justice of a free Parliament, and, since the King alone could call Parliament together, endeavoured to make the measure as little unpalatable as possible to the contemptible and unprin- cipled person who then occupied the throne. Much of the historical inquiry which he institutes into the relations between former parliaments and English kings is extremely acute and valuable. In the Maxims of State, a short treatise, not written, like the one last mentioned, to serve an immediate purpose, Raleigh's naturally honest and noble nature asserts itself. In this he explicitly rejects all the immoral suggestions of Machiavel, and lays down none but sound and enlightened principles for the conduct of governments. Thus, among the maxims to be observed by an hereditary sovereign, we read the following : 15. To observe the laws of his country, and not to encounter them with his prerogative, nor to use it at all where there is a law, for that it maketh a secret and just grudge in the people's hearts, especially if it tend to take from them their commodities, and to bestow them upon other of his courtiers and ministers. It would have been well for Charles I. if he had laid this maxim to heart before attempting to levy ship-money. Again : 17. To be moderate in his taxes and impositions ; and when need doth require to use the subjects' purse, to do it by parliament, and with their consents, making the cause apparent to them, and showing his unwilling- ness in charging them. Finally, so to use it that it may seem rather an offer from his subjects than an exaction by him. A political essay, entitled The Cabinet Council, was left by Raleigh in manuscript at his death, and came into the hands of Milton, by whom it was published with a short preface. Though acute and shrewd, like all that came from the same hand, this treatise is less interesting than those already mentioned, be- cause it enters little into the consideration of general causes, but consists mainly of practical maxims, suited to that age for the use of statesmen and commanders. Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) was the attempt of an intelligent and humane man to convince his countrymen of the large part which imposture played in the annals of witchcraft, and of the cruelty and absurdity of the treatment often dealt out to the witches. ( 266 CHAPTER IV. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 1625-1700. 1. THE literature of this period will be better understood after a brief explanation has been given of the political changes which attended the fall, restoration, and ultimate expulsion of the Stuart dynasty. The Puritan party, whose proceedings and opinions in the two preceding reigns have been already noticed, continued to grow in importance, and demanded with increasing loudness a reform in the Church establishment. They were met at first by a bigotry at least equal, and a power superior, to their own. Archbishop Laud, who presided in the High Commission Court, 1 had taken for his motto the word ' Thorough,' and had persuaded himself that only by a system of severity could con- formity to the established religion be enforced. Those who wrote against, or even impugned in conversation, the doctrine, discipline, or government of the Church of England, were brought before the High Commission Court and heavily fined ; and a repetition of the offence, particularly if any expressions were used out of which a seditious meaning could be extracted, frequently led to an indictment of the offender in the Star Chamber (in which also Laud had a seat), and to his imprison- ment and mutilation by order of that iniquitous tribunal. Thus Prynne, a lawyer, Bastwick, a physician, and Burton, a clergy- man, after having run the gauntlet of the High Commission Court, and been there sentenced to suspension from the practice of their professions, fined, imprisoned, and excom- municated, were in 1632 summoned before the Star Chamber, and sentenced to stand in the pillory, to lose their ears, and be imprisoned for life. In 1633 Leighton, father of the eminent Archbishop Leighton, was by the same court sentenced to be publicly whipped, to lose both ears, to have his nostrils slit, to 1 Established by Queen Elizabeth to try ecclesiastical offences. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 267 be branded on both cheeks, and imprisoned for life. In all these cases the offence was of the same kind ; the publication of some book or tract, generally couched, it must be admitted, in scurrilous and inflammatory language, assailing the govern- ment of the Church by bishops, or the Church liturgy and ceremonies, or some of the common popular amusements, such as dancing and playgoing, to which these fanatics imputed most of the vice which corrupted society. To these ecclesiastical grievances Churles I. took care to add political. By his levies of ship-money, and of tonnage and poundage by his stretches of the prerogative, by his long delay in convoking the Parliament, and many other illegal or irritating proceedings, he estranged most of the leading poli- ticians, the Pyms, Hampdens, Seldens, and Hydes, just as by supporting Laud he estranged the commercial and burgher classes, among whom Puritanism had its stronghold. In November 1640 the famous Long Parliament met; the quarrel became too envenomed to be composed otherwise than by re- course to arms ; and in 1642 the civil war broke out. Gradu- ally the conduct of the war passed out of the hands of the more numerous section of the Puritan party the Presbyterians into those of a section hitherto obscure the Independents who were supported by the genius of Milton and Cromwell. This sect originally bore the name of Brownists, from their founder, Robert Browne (1549-1630) : they went beyond the moderate Puritans in regarding conformity to the Establishment as a sin, and therefore forming, in defiance of the law, separate congregations. But their later writers, such as Milton and Owen, compensated for this indomitable sectarianism by main- taining the doctrine of toleration ; against the Presbyterians they argued that the civil magistrate had no right to force the consciences of individuals. They took care, indeed, to make one exception ; there was to be no toleration for the Roman Catholic worship. 'As for what you mention about liberty of conscience,' said Cromwell to the delegates from Ross, ' I meddle not with any man's conscience. But if by liberty of conscience you mean a liberty to exercise the mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing, and to let you know, where the Parliament of England have power, that will not be per- mitted.' 1 Still it was a great thing to have the principle once boldly asserted and partially applied ; for Catholics as well as others were sure to benefit sooner or later from its extension. 2. In the civil war, the clergy, four-fifths of the aristocracy 1 See Carlyle's Letters and Speeches of Cromwell. 268 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. and landed gentry, with the rural population depending on them, and some few cities, adhered to the King. The poets, wits, and artists, between whom and Puritanism a kind of natural enmity [subsisted, sought, with few exceptions, the royal camp, where they were probably more noisy than serviceable. On the other hand, the Parliament was supported by the great middle class, and by the yeomen or small landed proprietors. It had at first but one poet (Wither was then a royalist), but that one was John Milton. The King's cause became hopeless after the defeat of Naseby in 1645 ; and after a lengthened imprisonment he was brought to the block by the army and the Independents, ostensibly as a traitor and malefactor against his people; really, because, while he lived, the revolutionary leaders could never feel secure. There is a significant query in one of Cromwell's letters, written in 1648, ' whether " Salus populi summa lex " be not a sound maxim.' But before the fatal window in Whitehall the reaction in the public sentiment and conscience commenced. Cromwell, indeed, carried on the government with consummate ability and vigour; but after all he represented only his own stem genius, and the victorious army which he had created ; and when he died, and in the rivalries of his generals the power of that army was neutralised, England, by a kind of irresistible gravitation, returned to that position of defined and prescrip- tive freedom which had been elaborated during the long course of the Middle Ages. 2a. To this result a little book largely contributed, the Eikon Basililcc, or ' kingly image.' Issuing from the press on the day (January 31, 1649) after the execution of Charles I., and professing to be 'The Pourtraicture of his sacred Majestic in his Solitudes and Sufferings,' drawn by his own hand, it instantly obtained a wide circulation, and awakened on all sides an intense sympathy and sorrow, which, when the question came on of restoring to the throne the son of the sufferer, became a political factor of great power. In the first edition l the book is in twenty -seven chapters, followed by a separate paper headed ' Meditations upon Death.' The first chapter is ' Upon His Majesty's calling this last Parliament,' i.e., the Parliament which met in October 1640. The second is on Strafford's execution ; the third on the affair of the Five Members ; the fourth on the ' Insolency of the Tumults,' referring to the disturbances in London in the winter of 1641-2. The seventh is ' Upon the Queen's departure and absence out of England ; ' the eighth, on the fate of the Hothams. 1 There is a copy of this first edition in the Bodleian. On the title page, after the Latin motto, appears only the date ' MDCXLVIII.,' whereas in other editions, printed during the two months after the king's execution, are the words 'Reprinted in R. M. [regis memoriam] An. Dom. 1648.' (See o. Reprint of this first edition with an Introduction by Mr. E. Scott, of the Brit. Mus., 1880.) 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 269 The other chapters deal with various occurrences in the Civil^War in which the king was concerned, up to the twenty-seventh and last, which is addressed 'To the Prince of Wales.' In each chapter Charles (assuming him to be the author) first discusses the facts, justifying or blaming his own ^^ or others' conduct in regard to them, and then subjoins a prayer, such as would easily be suggested to a man of a religious temper by the preceding considerations. It is well known that the authorship of this book has been vehemently disputed from time to time. A certain Dr. John Gauden, a Cambridge man a time-serving person who, for a sermon preached to the House of Commons, in November 1640, against images and other 'superstitions of popery,' had been installed in the living of Booking, and then privately obtained institution of it from Laud, the patron, is believed by many to have written the book. Writing to Lord Clarendon in January 1661, to urge his claim to a good (i.e., a lucrative) bishopric, Gauden specified, as the invaluable and unique service which he had rendered to the royal cause, that he was the author of Eikon Basilike. The book and figure [frontispiece], he says, ' was wholly and only my invention, making, and designe, in order to vindicate the king's wisdom,' c. Clarendon long delayed to reply ; at last he wrote that he should treat Gauden's com- munication as a secret, that he wished he had never heard it, and thought, if it became public, no one but ' Mr. Milton ' would be glad of it. Gauden died in 1662. His widow, who survived him some years, left a written statement behind her, giving a circumstantial narrative of her husband's connection with the Eikon, of which she declared him to be the sole author. This narrative came to light about 1690, and gave occasion for a paper war, lasting some twenty years. The matter was again keenly debated about forty years ago, when Dr. Wordsworth wrote Tracts on the Ikon Basilike, to prove the royal authorship, and was answered by Todd and others. The external evidence which has been produced on one side or the other is far too complicated and voluminous for examination in these pages. I can only say that, being unconscious of any prior bent, I have myself arrived, after considerable study of the matter, at the following conclusions : 1. That Gauden was not a truthful man. A notable instance is his having written to the King, about the beginning of 1662, that he had told the secret to none but him and his brother, while, in fact, as we have seen, he had told it the year before to Clarendon (Clarendon Papers). 2. That not one of the five witnesses, named either by Gauden or his wife as persons who knew and could attest the truth of his story, appears ever to have actually confirmed it. One of them, indeed. Bishop Morley, is said to have expressed in 1674 the contrary belief (Church Quarterly Review, vol. vii.). 3. That a considerable body of evidence has been adduced to show, that the earlier chapters of the Eiko-n were composed by the king before the battle of Naseby (June 1645), taken by the enemy among other papers in his cabinet on that field, and restored to him soon afterwards on an application being made to Fairfax. Now Gauden's story is to the effect that he did not begin to busy himself with the composition of the Eikon before 1647. 4. That the style of several of the later chapters does not give the same clear impression of genuineness as that of the earlier. Gauden probably had some hand in composing these later chapters, and, being a mean, self- seeking man, scrupled not, when he thought the falsehood would serve his turn, to assert that he had written the entire work. 270 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. IV. The internal evidence, it appears to me, affords the means of arriving at a more decisive conclusion than the external. It is impossible to believe that the writer of the chapter on the ' Insolency of the Tumults ' was not himself resident in London at the time when they took place. Charles I., we know, was so resident ; but Gauden was at that time living faraway from such scenes, at his Oxfordshire parish of Brightwell. There is something terrible in the surge and sway of a great crowd in London at the present day, even when no political excitement possesses it ; but when, as in 16412, such excitement was superadded, we cannot wonder that the writer described the disturbances as ' not like a storm at sea, but like an earthquake shaking the foundation of all.' It would never have occurred to a forger who had not himself been present thus to write. Again, the chapter ' On the Departure and Absence of the Queen ' bears every mark of genuineness. The delicacy, the deep affection, the chivalrous tenderness, the anguish caused by difference of religion, are quite compatible with the authorship by the king, whom even his worst enemies will allow to have been a gentleman, but altogether incompatible with the claims of Dr. Gauden, a mere vulgar, ignoble, preferment-hunting parson, whose pub- lished works show not a trace of any such elevation of sentiment, while in his letters it is conspicuously absent. A third point, trifling though it be, has, I think, great evidential force. In the chapter addressed to the Prince of Wales, the writer speaks of ' deceiving the injury of his long restraint ' by employing himself in giving counsel to his son. ' Deceive : is here a literal translation of the French tromper, the idiomatic use of which in the sense of this passage is well known. That such a phrase should rise to the lips of Charles, in whose court French must have been a medium of daily intercourse, has in it nothing surprising ; but that it should have been used by Gauden seems to me in the last degree improbable. The conclusion at which I am disposed to arrive is, that the Eikon Basil'lke, as a whole, was the work of Charles I., but that Gauden had a share, not now capable of exact assignment, in the composition of the later chapters. Hume, who was a good judge of style, speaks thus on the question of the internal evidence : ' These meditations resemble in elegance, purity, neatness, and simplicity, the genius of those performances which we know with certainty to have flowed from the royal pen, but are so unlike the bombast, perplexed, rhetorical, and corrupt style of Dr. Gauden, to whom they are ascribed, that no human testimony seems sufficient to convince us that he was the author. Yet all the evidences which would rob the king of that honour tend to prove that Dr. Gauden had the merit of writing so fine a performance, and the infamy of imposing it on the world as the king's.' ! It is curious to observe how the opinions of historians, essayists, and publicists, on this literary problem, tend to match the colour of their political sympathies. Liberals and Freethinkers, e.g., Toland the Deist, Burnet, Hallam, Mackintosh, Macaulay, and the late Mr. Pattison, cannot resist the force of the evident for Gauden ; High Church and Conserva- tive writers are almost as una, us the other way. 3. At the Eestoration \ 60), the courtiers, wits, and poets returned from exile not unir fluenced, whether for good or evil, by their long sojourn abroad; the Anglican clergy saw their church established on a firmer footing than ever; and their 1 Hist, of England, vii., 154 (quoted by the writer in the Church Quar- terly Review). 1'Vj:. 1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 271 Puritan adversaries, ejected and silenced, passed below the surface of society, and secretly organised the earlier varieties of that many-headed British dissent which now numbers nearly half the people of England among its adherents. The theatres were reopened ; and every loyal subject to prove himself no Puritan tried to be as wild, reckless, and dissolute as possible. Yet in the course of years the defeated party, with changed tactics indeed, and in a soberer mood, began to make itself felt. Instead of asking for a theocracy, they now agitated for toleration ; and, renouncing their republicanism as imprac- ticable, they took up the watchword of constitutional reform. The Puritans and Roundheads of the civil war reappear towards the close of Charles II.'s reign under the more permanent appellation of the Whig party. One of the points in which the party was found least altered after its transformation was its bitter and traditional hostility to the Church of Rome. 1 Hence, after it became known that the heir-presumptive to the crown, James Duke of York, had changed his religion, the Whigs formed the design of excluding him on that ground from the throne, and placing the crown upon the head of the next Protestant heir. The party of the court and the cavaliers (who began about this time to be called Tories) vigorously opposed the scheme, and with success. James II. succeeded in 1685, and immediately began to take measures for the relief of Catholics from the many disabilities under which they laboured. But he pursued his object with all the indiscretion and unfairness habitual to his family. Though the Whigs had been defeated and cowed, though the great majority of the nation desired to be loyal, though the Anglican clergy in particular had committed themselves irre- vocably to the position that a king ought to be obeyed, no matter to what lengths he might go in tyranny, James so managed matters as almost to compel the divines to eat their own words, and, by forfeiting the affection and confidence of the people, to throw the game into the hands of the Whigs. The Revolution came ; James II. was expelled ; the Act of Settlement was passed ; and the Catholics of England again became an obscure and persecut- * minority, which for a hundred years almost disappea ' om the public gaze and from the page of history. 1 One Samuel Johnson, chaplain to the ijord Russell who was beheaded in 1683, published in 1682 a pamphlet entitled Julian the Apostate, against the Duke of York, on account of his having changed his religion. For this and other publications conceived in a similar spirit, he was sentenced in the next reign to stand in the pillory and be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. After the Revolution he was compensated. 272 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. CHAP. IV, Under William IIL, from 1688 to 1700, there was a lull, comparatively speaking, in political affairs. The Toleration Act, passed in 1689, amounted to a formal renunciation of the claim of the state on account of which so much blood had been shed in this and the previous century to impose religious uniformity upon its subjects. Towards the middle of William's reign the .Tories began to recover from the stunning effects of the moral shock which they had sustained at the Revolution ; and the modern system of parliamentary government, though complicated for a time by the question of Jacobitism, began to develop its outlines out of the strife of the opposing parties. Having thus reviewed the course of events, we proceed to describe the development of ideas, as expressed in literature, during the same period. Poetry before the Restoration ; Jonson : The Fan- tastic School; Cowley, Crashaw, &c. ; Milton, Marvell. 4. Under the Stuarts the court still, as in the days of Eliza- beth, opened its gates gladly to the poets and playwrights. Jonson's chief literary employment during his later years was the composition of masques for the entertainment of the king and royal family. That quarrelsome, reckless, intemperate man, whose pedantry must have been insufferable to his contempo- raries had it not been relieved by such flashes of wit, such a flow of graceful simple feeling, outlived by many years the friends of his youth, and died, almost an old man, in 1637. His beautiful pastoral drama of the Sad Shepherd was left unfinished at his death. To a collection of his miscellaneous poems he gave the strange title of * Underwoods.' - No. XY. is the famous epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke : Underneath this sable herse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother ; Death, ere thou hast slain another, Learn'd, and fair, and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee ! A diligent reader of Jonson's masques will find, scattered up and down them, some of the airiest and prettiest songs in the world. 'Rise, Cynthia, rise,' is one of these; another is the merry catch in the Masque of Oberon, beginning Buz, quoth the blue flie, Hum, quoth the bee ; Buz and hum they cry. And so do we. it;-j.-, 1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 273 Among the numerous epigrams, this is noteworthy : Underneath this stone doth lie As much beauty as could die ; Which in life did harbour give To more virtue than doth live. The famous song ' To Celia,' l which begins Drink to me, only, with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine is No. 9 in the group of poems called The Forest. The elegiac yerses addressed * To the memory of my beloved master, Wm. Shakspeare, and what he hath left us,' are interesting. Jonson's love of his subject seems to be genuine, and to transport him out of himself. Here occurs the fine line : He was not of an age, but for all time. The refinement, the true gentleness of Shakspere's nature are glanced at in the following lines, which may be compared with what Lydgate wrote of Chaucer (ante, ch. i. 71) : Look how the father's face Lives in his offspring ; even so the race Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines In his well-turned and true-filed lines : In each of which he seems to shake a lance As brandished at the eyes of ignorance. Sweet Swan of Avon ! what a sight it were To see thee in our water yet appear, And make those flights upon the banks of Thames That so did take Eliza and our James ! 5. The younger race of poets belonged nearly all to what has been termed by Dryden and Dr. Johnson the Metaphysical school, the founder of which in England was Donne. But in fact this style of writing was of Italian parentage, and was brought in by the Neapolitan Marini. 2 Tired of the endless imitations of the ancients, which, except when a great genius like that of Tasso broke through all conventional rules, had ever since the revival of learning fettered the poetic taste of Italy, Marini resolved to launch out boldly in a new career of invention, and to give to the world whatever his keen wit and lively fancy might prompt to him. He is described by Sismondi 3 as * the celebrated innovator on classic Italian taste, who first seduced the poets of the seventeenth century into that laboured 1 Crit. Sect. I. 58. 2 Born 1569, died 1625 ; author of the Adone and the Sospetto di Herode. 3 Literature of the South of Europe (Roscoe), vol. ii. p. 262. 8 274 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. and affected style which his own richness and vivacity of imagination were so well calculated to recommend. The most whimsical comparisons, pompous and overwrought descriptions, with a species of poetical punning and research, were soon esteemed, under his authority, as beauties of the very first order.' Marini resided for some years in France, and it was in that country that he produced his Adone. His influence upon French poetry was as great as upon Italian, but the vigour and freedom which it communicated were perhaps more than counterbalanced by the false taste which it encouraged. The same may be said of his influence upon our own poets. Milton alone had too much originality and inherent force to be carried away in the stream ; but the most popular poets of the day Donne, Cowley, Crashaw, Waller, Cleveland, and even Dry den in his earlier efforts gave in to the prevailing fashion, and, instead of simple, natural images, studded their poems with conceits (concetti). This explains why Cowley was rated by his contemporaries as the greatest poet of his day, since every age has its favourite fashions, in literature as in costume ; and those who conform to them receive more praise than those who assert their independence. Thus Clarendon 1 speaks of Cowley as having ' made a flight beyond all men ; ' and Denham, in the elegy which he wrote on him, compares him with Shakspere, Jon son, and Fletcher, to the disadvantage of the three older poets. A few specimens will, however, better illustrate the Metaphysical, or, as we should prefer to term it, the Fan- tastic manner, than pages of explanation. The first is from Donne's metrical epistles : describing a sea-voyage, he says : There note they the ship's sicknesses, the mast Shaked with an ague, and the hold and waist With a salt dropsy clogged. Cleveland compares the stopping of a fountain to a change in the devolution of an estate : As an obstructed fountain's head Cuts the entail off from the streams, And brooks are disinherited ; Honour and beauty are mere dreams, Since Charles and Mary lost their beams. Cowley talks of a trembling sky and a startled sun : in the Davideis, Envy thus addresses Lucifer : Do thou but threat, loud storms shall make reply And thunder echo to the trembling sky ; Whilst raging seas swell to so bold a height, 1 Autobiography, vol. i. p. 30. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 275 As shall the fire's proud element affright. TV old drudging sun, from his long-beaten way, Shall at thy voice start, and misguide the day, &c. Dryden, in his youthful elegy on Lord Hastings, who died of the small-pox, describes that malady under various figures : Blisters with pride swelled, which through 's flesh did sprout Like rose-buds, stuck in the lily-skin about. Each little pimple had a tear in it, To wail the fault its rising did commit. To such a pitch of extravagance did talented men proceed in their endeavour to write in the fashion, in their straining after the much admired conceits ! 6. Of Donne, who died in 1631, we have already spoken. 1 The other poets just mentioned of the Fantastic school, namely, Cowley, Crashaw, Waller, and Cleveland, together with Thomas Carew, Robert Herrick, Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, George Herbert, Sir John Denham, and Francis Quarles, were all ardent royalists. Cowley, like Horace driven from Athens, Dura sed emovere loco me tempora grato, was dislodged from both Universities in turn by the victorious arms of the Parliament, and, attaching himself to the suite of Henrietta Maria, was employed by her at Paris for many years as a confidential secretary. After his return to England in 1656, he published his entire poems, consisting of Miscellanies, Anacreontics? Pindaric Odes, the Mistress, and the Davideis. In the preface he advised peaceful submission to the existing Government ; and this tenderness to * the usurpation ' was maliciously remembered against him after the restoration of monarchy. He was fully included in the act of oblivion which Charles II. is said to have extended to his friends. His last years were spent in retirement at Chertsey. He died in 1667, from the effects of a cold caught by staying too long among his labourers in the hay-field. It will be more easy to assign his proper rank to Cowley,. if one remembers that he had a remarkably quick and apprehen- sive understanding, but a feeble character. One reads a few of his minor pieces, and is struck by the penetrating power of his wit, and dazzled by the daring flights of his imagination ; one conceives such a man to be capable of the greatest things. Yet it is not so ; a native weakness prevents him from soaring with a sustained flight; the hue of his resolution is ever 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought ; ' or rather his resolution is 1 See p. 198. 2 See Grit. Sect. ch. I., Lyrical Poetry, 62. 276 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. CHAP. IV. not of that tried and stable quality at the outset which would enable it to brush away subsequent and conflicting impulses from its path. He began the Davideis at Cambridge, with the idea of producing a great epic poem on a scriptural subject; but he completed no more than four cantos, and then gave up the design. It needed a more stern determination than his to carry through such a work to a successful issue. He felt this, nor doubted that the right poet would be found. He says of the Davideis, ' I shall be ambitious of no other fruit for this weak and imperfect attempt of mine, but the opening of a way to the courage and industry of some other persons, who may be better able to perform it thoroughly and successfully.' As in this preface (written in 1656) he was endeavouring to conciliate the party in power, it seems not unlikely that in this passage he actually refers to Milton, who in more than one of his prose works had spoken of his wish and intention to take up the harp some day, and sing, to the Divine honour, ' an elaborate song for generations/ There was something in Cowley of extraordinary power, both to kindle affection and to disarm malice ; never was any man more truly loved by his friends ; and this personal charm may explain in part their excessive admiration of his genius. But he, if left to himself, preferred solitude ; professing always, says his biographer, Sprat, ' that he went out of the world, as it was man's, into the same world, as it was nature's, and as it was^God's.' He once wrote, All wretched and too solitary he Who loves not his own company. He'll feel the weight of 't many a day, Unless he call in sin or vanity To help to bear 't away. In truth a mind so active and penetrating as his could never allow time to hang heavy, or be unemployed. When, for example, upon his return to England, during the Protectorate, his friends advised him to study medicine, his compliance with their advice, instead of leading him to a profitable practice, carried him no farther than the Pharmacopoeia ; the subject of herbs so fascinated him that he wandered on from the con- sideration of their medicinal, to that of their general properties, and thence to the study of their modes and conditions of growth. From herbs he passed on to flowers; which in turn suggested the study of trees, first those of the orchard, next those of the forest. The result was a Latin poem in six books, Of Plants, a work of wonderful cleverness and brilliancy. Several hands gladly engaged in translating it into English. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 277 7. Tliis remarkable fertility and brilliancy of wit is perhaps still better seen in another work, a Latin play, Naufragium Joculare, ' The Comic Shipwreck/ which he wrote and caused to be acted at Cambridge, in his twentieth year. It is in the style of Terence ; and the dialogue proceeds with an easy flow of jest, anecdote, and repartee, which exhibits Cowley's linguistic resources in a most remarkable light. His only other dramatic attempts were, Love's Riddle, a pastoral comedy, which he com- posed while still a Westminster boy, and The Gutter of Coleman Street, a prose comedy of no great merit. His shorter poems have now to be considered ; and it is among these that we shall find what may approach nearest to a justification of the praises of his contemporaries. As to the Mistress, a collection of love poems, Cowley, if his own account may be believed, wrote them, not in the character of a lover impelled to clothe his feelings and wishes in song, but rather in that of a professional verse-maker ; for poets, he says, * are never thought freemen of their company, without paying some duties, and obliging themselves to be true to love,' These poems ac- cordingly may be taken for metrical exercises, displaying much ingenuity but no living power. One, however, which is very gracefully and happily expressed, and more carefully rimed and measured than is the author's wont, shall be given at a future page. 1 But it was the daring flight which he essayed in his Pindaric odes that most dazzled and charmed the age. This style, which Dry den often tried, and Pope and Gray occasionally, was, he tells us, accidentally suggested to him ; the works of Pindar having chanced to fall in his way at a time when no other books were to be had, and the compulsory familiarity thus occasioned having led to a deliberate preference for Pindar's irregular metres. But even if this was the correct account of it, it is certain that the permitted lawlessness of the metre, in which long and short lines are mingled together haphazard, and rimes are either coupled, alternate, or even more widely sepa- rated, was peculiarly suitable to the vehement rush of thoughts which were ever pressing for utterance through Cowley's brain, and which no adequate solidity of judgment controlled or sifted. But Cowley is not even regular in dealing with irregularity ; while many of his ' Pindariques ' preserve a wild harmony of their own amidst all their flings and sallies, which is enough to satisfy the critical ear, there are others in which lines occur that trail their huge length laboriously along like wounded snakes, and by no possible humouring or contraction of the syllables can be reduced to harmony. Take, for instance, the conclusion 1 See Grit. Sect. ch. I., Lyrical Poetry, 60. 278 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. of the ode to Mr. Hobbes a really fine poem ; what mortal ear can tolerate the last line 1 And that which never is to die, for ever must be young. Dryden's correcter ear, when he Pindaricised, scarcely ever suffered him to make such slips. The subjects of Cowley's Pindaric odes are very various. Sometimes he translates or imitates Pindar or Horace ; some- times he devotes them to the cause of philosophy, dedicating one to Hobbes, another to the Royal Society then recently founded, another to Harvey on his discovery of the circulation of the blood. The ode To the Duke of Buckingham, on his marriage with the daughter of Lord Fairfax, possesses some peculiar interest, as bringing before us, in the day of his happy and brilliant youth, the same Villiers whom Dryden satirised under the character of Zimri, and whose end afforded a theme for Pope to moralise upon in his third Epistle. He dis- charged his loyal duty to his prince in the ode Upon his Majesty 1 s Restoration and Return. Among all similar compositions of that age, Cowley's Restoration ode is by far the best, because the most genuine. It is true that his loyalty makes him depart from truth, when Charles II., or his father, or any other Stuart is in the case, almost as much as Dryden. But such exaggera- tion is more excusable in the older poet, who had suffered long years for the cause which he now saw triumphant, and whose loyal logic seems to have almost honestly reasoned thus : 1 Being the rightful king, he must be -all that is excellent.' With even greater sincerity, one cannot doubt, Cowley ab- horred the Protector, with whom he had never, like Dryden, or Waller, or Milton, been brought into close contact. In a prose Discourse concerning the Government of Oliver Cromwell he burst forth into a set of vigorous stanzas, pathetically deprecating the recurrence of such a horrible tyranny as the nation had just been freed from : Come the eleventh plague, rather than this should be ; Come sink us rather in the sea ; Come rather Pestilence and reap us down ; Come God's sword rather than our own ; Let rather Roman come again, Or Saxon, Norman, or the Dane ; In all the ills we ever bore, We grieved, we sighed, we wept ; we never blushed before. If for our sins the Divine vengeance be Called to the last extremity, Let some denouncing Jonas first be sent, To see if England will repent ; L620 1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 279 Methinks at least some prodigy, Some dreadful portent from on high, Should terribly forewarn the earth, As of good princes' deaths, so of a tyrant's birth. We shall have occasion to notice farther on the very dif- ferent impressions which this great ruler and his policy left on Dryden and Milton. 1 One, and that one perhaps the best of the Pindariques, is called The Complaint ; in the language of decent, but firm and not undignified remonstrance, it speaks of the neglect in which the gentle poet lay, after his long and faithful service to the court. 2 A poem called * A Vote ' (i.e. a wish or prayer), written when he was but thirteen, ends with this remarkable stanza : Thus would I double my life's fading space, For he that runs it well, twice runs his race ; And in this true delight, These unbought sports, and happy state, I would not fear nor wish my fate, But boldly say each night, To-morrow let the sun his beams display, Or in clouds hide them ; / have lived to-day? As a prose writer, Cowley is copious and easy, with much the same faults that we shall have to notice in Dryden. 8. If, after this examination of his writings, the reader should still ask wherein lies the secret of the extraordinary admiration with which Cowley was regarded by his contempo- raries, I can only say that, so far as I can discover, the feeling which his writings excited of difficulties overcome, and various learning employed in the work of composition, was the chief incentive to that admiration. Poetry was then looked upon as a kind of art or craft, in which no one could or ought to excel, who had not been regularly instructed in all the tech- nical details, and through a classical education had become familiar at first hand with the great poets of antiquity. All these requirements were fulfilled in Cowley, and they were undeniably united to brilliant talents, so that, according to all the prevailing notions of the time, he could not fail to be con- sidered a great poet. Thus it happened that Shakspere, who 1 See below, 24, 30. 2 Other fine lines from Cowley are : Nothing so soon the drooping sp'rits can raise, As praises from the men whom all men praise : (On verses of Lord Broghill.) and ' life should a well order'd poem be ' ; (Ode upon Liberty.) 8 Extract Book, art. 95. 28o HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. was thought to have written easily, employing little labour and no learning, was ranked, even by able men, below Ben Jonson ; a judgment to our present ideas wholly incomprehensible. Cleveland, for instance, writes as follows, in an elegy on Ben Jonson : Shakspeare may make griefe merry ; Beaumont's style Ravish and melt anger into a smile ; In winter nights, or after meals, they be, I must confess, very good company. But thou exact'st our best hours' industry ; We may read them, we- ought to study thee ; Thy scenes are precepts ; every verse doth give Counsel, and teach us not to laugh, but live. The truth is that the whole doctrine of hero-worship, as we now conceive it, is modern. Whether they would have avowed it or not, the real upshot of the criticisms on poetry passed by most thinking men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, amounted to a reversal of the old maxim, 'Poeta nascitur, non fit ; ' they assume on the contrary that * Poeta fit, non nascitur.' The mysterious spontaneity of genius, which constitutes the ineffable charm of the masterpieces of all great artists, and links together in one fraternity Mozart, and Raphael, and Shakspere, was considered by critics of this class rather as a disqualification than otherwise ; they asso- ciated and confounded ease of composition with shallowness of endowment, and a stock of classical phraseology with creative power. 9. The lyrics of Edmund Waller can never die. When he tried the heroic style, some inherent disqualification for the task perhaps a want of true inborn dignity caused him fre- quently to sink per saltum from the sublime to the ridiculous. What more perfect instance of the bathos could be given than the following lines from his elaborate elegy Upon the Death of the Lord Protector ? Our bounds' enlargement wns his latest toil, Nor hath he left us prisoners to our isle : Under the tropics is our language spoke, And part of Flanders hath, received our yoke. His heroics To the Queen are stiff and artificial, while those To the Queen Mother of France unpleasantly remind one of the ' Loyal Effusions ' of Fitzgerald, so amusingly parodied in the Rejected Addresses. But now turn to the lyrics, and though it cannot be alleged that their taste is always perfect, their diction always faultless, yet we are forced to confess that 1625 1700. . CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 281 the author * cum magnis vixisse/ and has not fallen below his opportunities ; he treads on sure ground while using to culti- vated men, or polished, gifted women the language of graceful, airy compliment ; nor are times lacking when a vein of deeper feeling is touched in that ordinarily frivolous heart, and he surprises us by strains pensive, musical, and lingering in the memory like a requiem by Mozart. The song To Flavia, beginning 'Tis not your beauty can ingage My wary heart ; the well-known lyric, Go, Lovely Hose, 1 the song To Chloi-is, and that To a very Young Lady, are all in their several ways exceedingly charming. The fine lines Upon Ben Jonson are so appropriate to Shakspere, and so ^appropriate to Jonson, that one could almost believe the heading to be a blunder. The genius of Jonson was, we are told, nor this, nor that, but all we find, And all we can imagine in mankind. Towards the close of his long life, the muse of Waller ap- proached with trembling the mysteries of death and personal accountability. He was past eighty when he wrote these noble lines : When we for age could neither read nor write, The subject made us able to indite : The seas are quiet when the winds give o'er ; So calm are we when passions are no more ; For then we know how vain it was to boast Of fleeting things, too certain to be lost. Clouds of affection from our younger eyes Conceal that emptiness which age descries. The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decayed, . . Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made ; Stronger by weakness, wiser men become, As they draw near to their eternal home. Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, Who stand upon the threshold of the new. Waller lived into the reign of James II., dying in the year 1687. 10. Richard Crashaw was, like Cowley, ejected from the University of Cambridge by the Puritans, and deprived of his fellowship. He became a Roman Catholic, and, after suffering great hardships from poverty in Paris, was discovered and generously aided by his friend Cowley. He died at Loretto in 1650, and was mourned by Cowley in one of the most moving 1 Extract Book, art. 89. 282 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. CHAI>. IV. and beautiful elegies ever written. Besides writing many mis- cellaneous pieces 1 of a serious cast, he translated the Sospetto di Herode of Marini. All these are grouped together under the heading ' Steps to the Temple.' He wrote also poems of a more mundane cast, ' The Delights of the Muses ' ; among which is ' Music's Duel,' imitated from Strada, the story of a contention between a musican and a nightingale in which the bird is worsted. The unequal texture of Crashaw's poetry, and his predilection for conceits, have greatly dimmed a poetical reputation which force of thought and depth of feeling might otherwise have rendered a very high one. Some of the songs of this period seemed to be destined to, and may be held to deserve, as enduring a fame as those of Beranger. Such are, besides those by Waller already men- tioned, Carew's He that loves a rosy Cheek, Lovelace's song To Althea, from Prison, Wither's Shall /, wasting in despair, and many more. Never before or since has English life so blossomed into song. Scotland has since had her Burns, and Ireland her Moore, but to find the English chanson in perfection, we must go back to the seventeenth century. 11. George Herbert, the brother of Lord Herbert of Cher- bury, is the author of religious poetry, conceived in a vein which reminds one of Southwell. That he was influenced by the older poet is evident from a sonnet, composed in his seven- teenth year, in which he rails, exactly in the manner of South- well, against the abuse by which poetry is enslaved to human instead of Divine love. A collection of his poems, entitled The Temple, 2 was published in 1635, two years after his death. A prose work, The Priest to the Temple, or, The Country Parson, appeared among his Remains in 1652. The Church Porch, the introductory poem of The Temple, is highly characteristic ; the style is sententious, antithetical, often quaint, and a little ver- bose. But for didactic pithiness it cannot easily be matched ; take such lines, for instance, as this, in relation to drunkenness and careless companions : Pick out of tales the mirth, but not the sin. or this in relation to veracity, Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie. A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby ; or, with reference to the common neglect of education, Some till their ground, but let weeds choke their son ; 1 Extract Book, art. 90. 2 Ibid. art. 81. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 283 or, Envy not greatness ; for thou mak'st thereby Thyself the less, and so the distance greater. The collection is closed by The ' Church Militant, a long poem enunciating the singular theory (which was afterwards applied by Berkeley to 'the course of empire'), that religion always has and always will travel westward. On account of the lines, Religion stands on tip-toe in our land, Ready to pass to the American strand ; the Vice-Chancellor at Cambridge refused for some time to license the printing of the work. George Sandys, the seventh son of a Protestant Archbishop of York, educated at Oxford and by foreign travel, he was for a time treasurer to the newly planted colony in Virginia, executed while he was in America a metrical translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which was published in 1626, and superseded that of Golding before mentioned. For the rest of his life Sandys devoted himself to sacred poetry. His Paraphrase of the Psalms * (1636) was dedicated to the King and Queen ; Charles I. is said to have much admired it. It is, however, inferior in merit to the Para- phrase on Job, in the heroic couplet, which is composed with an evenness and harmony of versification that our heroic measure had scarcely yet attained to. Dryden, the great reformer of our verse, must have studied Sandys carefully. He also wrote Christ's Passion, a Tragedy (1640), freely translated from the Latin of Grotius, the substance of which must resemble the Ammergau play, and Paraphrases, on Ecclesiastes and the Canticle of Canticles. The face of the poet (see his portrait in Mr. Hooper's edition of his poems), taken in middle life, with laced falling collar, a loose striped jerkin, longish hair, peaked beard, and large thoughtful eyes, is singularly dignified and pleasing. 1 2. Sir Henry Wotton and Bishop Corbet both died before the breaking out of the Civil War. Wotton's serious thoughts were given to diplomacy, but he wrote two or three pretty tilings. 2 His Farewell to the Vanities of the World breathes the detachment of a hermit, and the idealism of a Platonist ; yet he took orders late in life to qualify himself for the comfortable post of Provost of Eton. Corbet was a convivial sinner, with plenty of good common-sense; disposed to be lenient to the Puritans, not on principle, but merely from his hearty bluff English good-nature, which would not let him bear hardly on the weak. His poetry, like the man himself, is of a coarse fibre. His Journey into France, written in what may be called the ' Sir Thopas ' 3 metre, is sorry doggerel. In his Farewell to the Fairies, this jovial soul, thirsting for pleasure 1 Extract Book, art. 78. - Ibid. art. 74. 3 From the ' Rime of Sir Thopas ' in the Canterbury Tales. 284 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. sighs for the good old mediaeval days of dancing, May-poles, love-making, and all sorts of riotous fun, \vhich the fairies were supposed to patronise. Thomas Randolph, a Cambridge man, whom Ben Jonson owned for his son in the Muse, wrote many poems, chiefly amatory, of no great import- ance, but is chiefly remembered as the author of a curious play, The Muses' Looking Glasse, which retains some of the features of the old moralities. Randolph is an Aristotelian, and is philosophically severe on the Puritans, as men who were always in extremes, and would not see that excellence lies in a mean. Two ridiculous Puritans, Bird and Mrs. Flowerdew, are introduced in the piece. One Roscius with his troop is exhibiting a play ; Flowerdew says, ' What do you next present ? ' Rose. The severall virtues. Bird. I hope there be no Cardinall Vertues there. Rose. There be not. Bird. Then I'll stay ; I hate a Vertue That will be made a Cardinal ; Cardinal -vertues, Next to Pope- vertues, are most impious ; And Bishop-vertues are unwarrantable ; I will allow of none but Deacon-vertues, Or Elder- vertues. 13. Thomas Carew, who had a post in the court of Charles I., was cut off in his prime about the year 1639. His poems, which are mostly amatory, are of a level standard of merit ; none rise very high, and none are altogether bad. 1 He is full of similitudes and conceits, but they are less extravagant than those of Donne or Crashaw. He platonises very prettily in the song Ask me no more where Jove bestows. The rose-form, which, the philosophers would say, exists, apart from actuality, in the eternal archetype, the one Primal Eorm which is the cause of all forms, reposes, according to the philo- sophy of the lover, in the fathomless deep of his lady's mystic and heavenly beauty. 14. William Drummond, of Hawthornden, a vain, self- conscious man, with slender stamina and much febrile ex- citability, is the author of a quantity of poems, some of which were published in his lifetime, while the entire series were edited and printed in 1656, a few years after his death, by Edward Philips, Milton's nephew, the author of the Theatrum Poetarum. They consist of * Teares on the Death of Meliades ' (Prince Henry, eldest son of James I.), ' Urania, or Spiritual Poems/ * Madrigals and Epigrams,' * Forth Eeasting,' ' Elowers of Sion,' and ' Posthumous Poems.' The first-named piece is an elegy in decasyllabic rime; it first appeared in 1613, and, i See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 59, and Extract Book, art. 77. 1625-1700. 1'IVIL WAR PERIOD. 285 though of far inferior power, seems to have suggested some of the thoughts and images in Milton's LycMas : Queen of the fields, whose blush makes blush the morn, Sweet Rose ! a prince's death in purple mourn ; Oh hyacinths, for aye your AI keep still, Nay, with more marks of woe, your leaves now fill. Hence may have come the hint for the bonnet of Comus, ' in- wrought with figures dim,' and Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe. 1 The poems in Urania are of little account ; one stanza of Southwell or Herbert is worth the whole of them. * Madrigals and Epigrams ' are mostly in tripping metres, and on amatory themes. Perhaps the best among Drummond's poems, because it seems to express genuine feeling, is ' Forth Feasting,' written in 1617. The river addresses the king on his visiting Edin- burgh, his native city. The conclusion, which is very spirited, runs as follows : O ! love these bounds where of thy royal stem More than a hundred wore a diadem ; So ever gold and bays thy brow adorn, So never time may see thy race outworn ; So of thine own still mayst thou be desired, Of strangers feared, redoubted, and admired : So memory thee praise, so precious hours May character thy name in starry flowers ; So may thy high exploits at last make even With earth thy empire, glory with the heaven. The poems of Lord Herbert of Cherbury scarcely merit the care which their latest editor, Mr. Churton Collins, has bestowed upon them. The ' Elegy over a Tomb,' and two or three other pieces, may be read with pleasure ; but, on the whole, they deserve no more favourable sentence than that given by Park, the editor of Warton, who says : 'They consist chiefly of metaphysical love- verses, ingenious but unnatural, platonic in sentiment, but frequently gross in expression.' 15. John Cleveland was a violent boisterous Royalist, the Wildrake of real life and literary history. Had his fire and force been supported by a keener and more cultivated intellect, he might have been a great poet. He is best known for his tirades against the Scotch, whom he hated both as Presbyterians and as traitors. The old joke against the Scotch, on account of their attachment to their native land appearing to increase in i Lycidas, 106. 286 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. the ratio of their distance from it, was cleverly expressed by Cleveland in The Rebell Scot : Had Cain been Scot, God would have changed his doom ; Not forced him wander, but confined him home. His attachment to episcopacy may be gathered from the following lines, taken from The Hue and Cry after Sir John Presbyter : Down, Dragon-Synod, with thy motley ware, While we do swagger for the Common Prayer, That dove-like embassy, that wings our sense To heaven's gate in shape of innocence ; Pray for the mitred authors, and defy These Demi-casters of Divinitie. For when Sir John with Jack-of-all-trades joyns, His finger's thicker than the Prelate's loyns. These lines are a fair illustration of the rough vigour which characterised the man. 16. Sir John Suckling, born of a good Middlesex family, was well known as a dissolute courtier and amatory poet in the time of Charles I. When the Scotch Covenanters rose in insurrection in 1639, Suckling raised, mounted, and armed at his own expense a troop of a hundred horse, and presented them to the king. At the affair of Newburn, he and his troop joined in the rapid movement to the rear executed by the English cavalry on that disgraceful day ; and his enemies at court seized the opportunity to write many satirical songs and lampoons at his expense. Some of these may be read in the Musarum Delicice. Engaging in a plot in 1641 to rescue Strafford from the Tower, Suckling was impeached of high treason by the House of Commons, and had just time to make his escape to France. Finding himself a friendless exile in a foreign land, with broken health and in poverty, poor Suckling took poison, and ' shuffled off this mortal coil,' before the end of -1642. His poems and letters were published in 1646. In his lifetime he had given to the world three plays, 1 in one of which, Aglaura, occurs the pretty, piquant song, ' Why so pale and wan, fond lover ? ' His poems are gay and witty, but he was a careless versifier. The following lines, taken from a poetical epistle to John Hales of Eton, the 'ever memorable/ furnish a slight example of his manner. He tells his friend to 1 Suckling's plays are, Aglaura, a play with two fifth acts, one of which ends happily, the other tragically ; The Goblins, a comedy ; Brennoralt, a tragedy ; and The Sad One (unfinished), a tragedy. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 287 * bestride the college steed,' and ride up to town, where he would find wit and wine Flowing alike, and both divine. The sweat of learned Jonson's brain, And gentle Shakspeare's easier strain, A hackney-coach conveys you to, In spite of all that rain can do ; And for your eighteen pence you sit The lord and judge of all fresh wit. The verses of William Cartwright belong chiefly to the poetry of conceit. The young poet-clergyman repaired to the royal camp after Edgehill, and was cut off by a malignant fever in 1643. Among his poems, * A Valediction ' is pretty and ingenious. He entreats his depart- ing mistress to display to him all her charms, that they may be indelibly graven on his heart : So by this art, fancy shall fortune cross, And lovers live by thinking on their loss. The lines on Sir Bevil Greenvil, slain in the battle of Lansdown, have a gallant ring, but no more. Cartwright is also the author of plays, The Royal Slave and The Lady Xrrant, tragi-comedies, and two others : these were all printed along with his plays in 1651. 17. Robert Herrick, after being ejected by the Parliamen- tarians from his living in Devonshire, came up to London, and published his poems under the title of Hesperides, or Works both Human and Divine. The poems of Herrick are classed by Mr. Hallam among the 1 poetry of kisses ' ; it would be more exact to say that they are the outcome of a lazy, amorous temperament, which cannot or will not put time to better use. He candidly tells us that he has seen, and still can prove, The lazy man the most doth love. While the Long Parliament was making war and framing treaties, Herrick could only talk of the ' Parliament of roses ' ; red-handed battle was raging in every English county, but he can only bemoan ' the death that is in Julia's eyes.' Herrick's melody is not invariably perfect, yet there are not a few of his little 'poems they are all very diminutive which either have a beautiful tripping movement, or excel in rhythmic evenness and sweetness. The divisions of the collection, after certain opening invocations to gods and goddesses, are 'Amatory Odes/ 'Anacreontic and Bacchanalian,' and an 'Epithalamium.' 18. Colonel Richard Lovelace wrote a few pretty things, 1 one or two of which are to be found in most collections, and i See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 51. 288 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. IV. Sir John Denham, the intimate friend of Cowley, wrote the first English descriptive poem of real merit Cooper's Hill. 1 Of Denham's other poems the chief part are translations from Homer, 2 Virgil, Cicero, and Mancini. The 'Progress of Learning,' a poem in Pindaric verse, theorises, from the point of view of a Cavalier, who is at the same time an admirer of Hobbes, on the obstacles which have troubled the advance of learning and refinement amongst mankind. The revival of learning, and the discredit fallen on the ' lazy cells where superstition bred,' promised a halcyon period ; but the enemy of mankind, inspiring Loyola, Luther, and Calvin with an infernal spirit of bigotry, had dashed those hopes to the ground. Fanaticism, dislodged from the monasteries, had taken possession of the printing press. Authority had fallen only to give place to sectaries and schismatics of a hundred types, all quarrelling with one another, and inflated with spiritual pride and a boundless presumption : But seven wise men the ancient world did know, We scarce know seven who think themselves not so. In a poem on Lord Stratford, Denham calls him ' Three kingdoms' wonder, and three kingdoms' fear.' He also wrote some interesting memorial verses ' On Mr. Abraham Cowley 's death, and burial amongst the ancient poets.' 19. William Habington, the representative of an old Catholic family settled at Hindlip, in Worcestershire, is known as the author of the collection of pretty love-poems and quaint paraphrases on verses in the Psalms published in 1635 under the title of Castdra. 3 This was the name which he gave to the fair and noble maiden who had won his heart, Lucy Herbert, a daughter of the first Lord Powis. The poetry of Habington is sweet, pleasing, and pure ; this last characteristic distinguishes it favourably from nearly all the love-verses of the period. The tender, pacific nature of the man is well shown in the following lines, which come at the end of a poem ' To the Honble. Mr. Wm. G.' And tho' my fate conducts me to the shade Of humble quiet, my ambition payde With safe content, while a pure virgin fame Doth raise me trophies in Castara's name ; No thought of glory swelling me above The hope of being famed for virtuous love j Yet wish I thee, guided by better starres, To purchase unsafe honour in the warres, Or envied smiles at court ; for thy great race, And merits, well may challenge th' highest place ; Yet know, what busie path so ere you tread To greatnesse, you must sleep among the dead. i See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 45. - Extract Book, art. 94. 3 Ibid. art. 86. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 289 Francis Quarles, a Cambridge man, is the author of Divine Emblems, .\ri/id. art. 103, 324 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. Theology : Hall, Jeremy Taylor, Bull, Baxter, Penn, &c. 59. This is the Augustan period of Anglican divinity. If we examine the literature of the controversy that raged, in this as in the previous period, between the Church of England and the Puritans, we shall find that, if we put aside the writings of Milton, the episcopalian writers immeasurably excelled their opponents both in talent and learning. Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich, comes next for mention in order of time after Bishop Andrewes. By his reply to the pamphlet produced by five Puritan ministers, who wrote under the fictitious name of ' Smectymnuus,' l he drew upon himself the fierce invectives of Milton. His Meditations and Characters will be noticed in the next section. Ejected by the Puritans from the see of Norwich in 1643, he retired to a small estate at Higham, where he died at a very advanced age in 1656. 60. William Chilling-worth, a native of Oxford, received his education at Trinity College in that University, and was elected a fellow in 1628. Making the acquaintance of the Jesuit Fisher, he was convinced by his arguments, made his submis- sion to the Roman Church, and settled at Douay. Laud, who was his godfather, induced him to return in 1631 ; he became again a Protestant, and studying with intense application the questions involved in the controversy between authority and private judgment, he produced in 1637 his treatise entitled The Religion of Protestants a safe Way to Salvation. To make the terms of union among Protestant Christians as simple and comprehensive as possible, Chillingworth proposed that the Apostles' Creed should be taken as the universal basis and formula of belief ; whoever accepted that was a Christian, and belonged to the Church. He imposed no particular interpreta- tion of this creed, and since it was freely accepted by those who denied the divinity of Christ, Chillingworth thus brought upon himself the suspicion and the charge of Socinianism. He signed the thirty-nine Articles, though with much misgiving, and then obtainepl preferment in the Established Church ; but the tempest of civil war dislodged him, like so many others ; and being made prisoner on the surrender of Arundel Castle in 1644 to the parliamentary forces, he died soon afterwards at Chichester. 61. John Hales, sometimes called ' the ever memorable,' may be considered as belonging to the same tolerant * Broad i See p. 292, n. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 325 Church ' school, which engaged the later convictions of Chilling- worth, and the earlier convictions of Taylor. He was educated at C. C. C., Oxford, and started in life with Calvinist opinions, but is said to have been converted to Arminian sentiments by listening to the debates at the Synod of Dort, in 1618, where he 'was present as chaplain to the 'English ambassador. He used to tell his friends that 'at the well pressing St. John iii. 16, by Episcopius [a leading divine at Dort], there he bid John Calvin good night.' He was a fellow of Eton and Canon of Windsor, and his winning manners, the ease of his society, his ready wit and vast knowledge, made him a favourite with the poets and courtiers of his day; see ante, 16. In his sermons and other writings, he was never weary of inculcating the duty of tolerating our neighbour's honest opinions, and the uncharitableness of inferring that any one will lose salvation on account of any religious belief conscientiously held. His works were published in 1659, three years after his death, under the title of Golden Remains. 62. Jeremy Taylor, the most eloquent of English writers, was bom at Cambridge in 1613. Like nearly all the Anglican divines of this period, he inclined to the tenets of Arminius, a Dutch theologian who died in 1608, and whose opinions were vehemently anathematised after his death by the Calvinistic Synod of Dort. If asked what precisely the Arminians held, one might answer, as Morley is said to have done l when a country squire put him the question, ' All the best bishoprics and deaneries in England ; ' it will be sufficient, however, to say that Arminianism was a species of Pelagianism, and arose by way of reaction against the predestinarian extravagances of the Calvinists. Coleridge gives the following graphic account of the English Arminians : ' Towards the close of the reign of our first James, and during the period from the accession of Charles I. to the restoration of his profligate son, there arose a party of divines, Arminians (and many of them Latitu- dinarians) in their creed, but devotees of the throne and the altar, soaring High Churchmen and ultra-Royalists. Much as I dislike their scheme of doctrine and detest their principles of government, both in Church and State, I cannot but allow that they formed a galaxy of learning and talent, and that among them the Church of England finds her stars of the first magni- tude. Instead of regarding the Reformation established under Edward VI. as imperfect, they accused the Reformers, some of them openly, but all in their private opinions, of having gone too far ; and while they were willing to keep down (and, if they 1 Clarendon's Autobiography. 326 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. could not reduce him to a primacy of honour, to keep out) the Pope, . . . they were zealous to restore the hierarchy, and to substitute the authority of the Fathers, Canonists, and Councils of the first six or seven centuries, and [some of the] later Doctors and Schoolmen, for the names of Luther, Melanc- thon, Bucer, Calvin, and the systematic theologians who rejected all testimony but that of their Bible.' l 63. Taylor, whose parents were in humble life, was first admitted to a scholarship in Caius College, Cambridge, but afterwards went to Oxford, was admitted ad eundem, and elected fellow of All Souls, through the influence of Archbishop Laud. When the war broke out, he was made one of the royal chap- lains, and it was at the request of Charles I. that he wrote his first treatise, Episcopacy Asserted. The line of argument in this treatise much resembles that used by Hooker in his seventh book, and by Hall in his Episcopacy by Divine Right. In the appeal to antiquity, in order to find arguments for episcopacy against the Presbyterians, Taylor is cogent and copious ; he is also strong when ( 36) he comments on the intolerable, all- embracing strictness of the Presbyterian jurisdiction, and says that men would be no better off who should exchange for it the lighter yoke of ,'episcopal government. But when he conies to what was the really 'burning question' of his day, the en- forcement by the bishops of religious uniformity, his words read like a solemn mockery. The jurisdiction of bishops, he says, is enforced only by excommunication and other church censures. * But yet this internal compulsory, through the duty of good princes to God, and their favour to the church, is assisted by the secular arm, either superadding a temporal penalty in case of contumacy, or some other way abetting the censures of the church, and it ever was so since commonwealths were Christian.' The war proceeded ; Taylor was ejected from his living of Uppingham, and, settling in Wales, supported himself by his pen and by tuition. He now wrote, and published in 1647, his famous Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying, addressed to Christopher Lord Hatton. The position of the different parties in the civil war, at the time when this work appeared, goes far to explain the line of argument pursued in it. It was after Naseby field, and the king was in the hands of the army ; the bishops had been banished from their sees, and it seemed that the old prelatical jurisdiction, which had been used so long for the persecution of nonconformists, was now gone past recovery. The five eventful years since the publication of 1 Literary Remains, vol. iii. p. 385. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 327 Episcopacy Asserted had produced a marked change in Taylor's sentiments, and the successful stand made by the persecuted had effectually opened his eyes to the beauty of toleration. Taking a survey of all religious systems, past and present, he concludes that infallibility nowhere exists on earth, that reason, proceeding upon the safest grounds procurable, is the best judge of controversies that can be obtained, and that till, in exercising their reason, men learn to be unanimous, they should bear with one another's mistakes. He discovers accord- ingly that ecclesiastical punishments ought to be purely of a spiritual nature, and ought not to touch the person or the goods of the offender. The- church, he says ( 15), may proceed in restraining false opinions, so far as to ' convince by sound doctrine, and put to silence by spiritual censures/ but no farther. Moreover, as the result of the destructive analysis to which he has subjected the history of religion, he concludes that, while the belief in some few necessary doctrines must still be maintained, unless Christianity is to vanish altogether under the scalpels of its interpreters, those doctrines must be the simplest, most primitive, and most universally received that can be found. The common basis required, Taylor, following Chillingworth, finds in the Apostles' Creed. 64. After the Restoration, Taylor was appointed Protestant Bishop of Down. Episcopacy was now again dominant, and we find Taylor 'disclaiming and disavowing the principle of toleration,' and excusing himself as best he could for his late liberalism. Of his remaining works, the most remarkable are, Of Holy Living and Of Holy Dying?- devotional treatises, of which it is impossible not to admire the depth of thought, the fervour, and the eloquence. The Ductor Dubitantium is a manual of casuistry, and the Golden Grove (1654), a collection of prayers and litanies, with an appendix containing hymns for festivals. Taylor died in 1667. 65. The discouraged Puritans felt little inclination to renew those controversies on church government which events had so decisively settled one way ; and besides, the great power and commanding influence which the Roman Church progressively acquired during the reign of Louis XIV. alarmed all Protestant bodies on this side into an unacknowledged but valid alliance against the common antagonist. If Baxter thundered from the Presbyterian camp, the Anglican bishops and divines were not less vigilant, copious, and argumentative. Isaac Barrow wrote his learned work on The Supremacy; and George Bull, not yet a bishop, addressed to the Countess of Newburgh his 1 See Grit. Sect. ch. IT. 40, and Extract Book, art. 97. 328 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. Vindication of the Church of England from the Errors of the Church of Rome; and Burnet, with an express controver- sial intention, published in 1679 and 1681 his History of the Reformation, for which he received the thanks of both houses of Parliament. However, the most remarkable theological works of the last quarter of the century were rather directed against infidelity, or at least against opinions subsisting on the outer- most verge of Christianity, than either against Puritanism or 1 Popery.' And these works, as we shall see, form a link of transition between the theology of this age and that of the next, that seculum rationalisticum, when theology will have to defend, not the mere outworks and. dispensable additions, but the very body of the fortress. Bishop Bull's Defensio Fidei Nicence (1685) is a systematic endeavour to prove, against the Arian writers who were now beginning to make a stir both abroad and in England, that the Christian writers who lived before the Council of Nice (A.D. 325), in spite of occasional looseness and vagueness of language, held really that very doctrine respecting the Trinity which is affirmed in the Nicene Creed. The Judicium Ecclesice Cathoiicce (1694) is a work of similar scope ; it is to elucidate and set forth the judgment of the Church in every age respecting Christ's divinity. Robert Nelson, a friend of Bull's, sent this work in 1699 to the great Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux ; and in a pleasant, cordial letter of thanks, Bossuet, after stating that he desired to express not his own sense merely, but that of the French bishops in general, of the obligations under which ' le Docteur Bullus ' had laid the Christian world, expressed his surprise that so learned and penetrating a mind could fail to recognise the claims of the existing Catholic Church to his allegiance. Bull replied to these expressions in a short pamphlet called Corrup- tions of the Church of Rome, but Bossuet was dead before it was finished. 1 Bull also wrote Animadversions on the works of the Unitarian Gilbert Clarke, and Harmonia Apostolica (1669), an attempt to reconcile the passages respecting justifi- cation found in the writings of St. Paul and St. James. 66. Touched, perhaps, by the ungenerous attitude which the Church, restored by Presbyterian aid, held towards gagged and persecuted nonconformity, after the passing of the repressive acts consequent upon the Eestoration, the purer and nobler minds yearned for some scheme of comprehension, under which, concessions being made on both sides, the greater part of the Nonconformists might be brought within the pale of the Church. Archbishop Leighton, Henry More, Ralph Cud- 1 See The Life of Bishop Bull, by Nelson. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 329 worth, and Bishop Wilkins were the principal men of this school ; they were called Latitudinarian divines. Leighton, son of the unhappy Presbyterian who was cruelly mutilated by sentence of the Star Chamber in 1629, was one of those excellent men who give living and practical proof of the divine power of Christianity. He was on terms of the most intimate friendship with Bishop Burnet, who declares, in the History of his Oicn Times, that he * reckoned his early know- ledge of him, and long and intimate conversation with him, that continued to his death, for twenty-three years, amongst the greatest blessings of his life ; for which he knew he must give account to God in the great day, in a most particular manner.' Leighton's chief work is the Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Peter, which drew forth the ardent admi- ration of Coleridge. Of Cudworth and More we shall have to speak in another place. 67. Pearson is the author of a well-known exposition of the Apostles' Creed (1659). He was a man of vast learning, fitter, according to Burnet, to be a divine than a bishop. His Vindication of the authenticity of the Epistles of Ignatius is a very masterly production. Lightfoot's Horce Hebraicoe and Harmony of the Four Gospels are works of a different kind. In these the writer's profound acquaintance with Rabbinical literature enables him to throw a flood of light on the various Jewish usages and rites current in Palestine at the time of the Christian era, and referred to in the New Testament, as well as upon obscure points in the topography. 68. Two thousand Presbyterian ministers were ejected from their parishes in 1662, under the Act of Uniformity. Among them the most eminent was Richard Baxter, a voluminous but not very instructive writer, except where he confines him- self to themes purely devotional. He is the author of a well- known manual of religious meditation, The Saint's Everlasting Rest (1649). In the long series of his controversial writings occur such titles as A Winding-slieet for Popery (1657), The Grotian Religion Discovered (in which he censures Grotius' leanings towards Rome), The, Certainty of Christianity with- out Popery (1672), Against Revolt to a 'Foreign Jurisdiction (1691), &c., &c. Tillotson 1 no mean authority says of Baxter that 'he loved to abound in his own sense, could by no means be brought off his own apprehensions and thoughts, 1 Tillotson, who stepped into the place of Sancroft as primate, was a Cam- bridge man, as was to be expected ; his father was a clothier, of Sowerby, near Halifax ; his Sermons were once famous ; Byron's mother forced the poor boy to read them. 330 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. but would have them to be the rule and standard for all other Sherlock, author of a Treatise on Death, once widely popular, after refusing for some time to take the oaths to William, and losing the master- ship of the Temple in consequence, came round, moved, it was said, by the incessant remonstrances and reproaches of his wife, to the opinion that the new oath was lawful, wrote The Case of Allegiance to Sovereign Powers stated (1691) in defence of it, and was rewarded with the rich preferment of the Deanery of St. Paul's. Soon afterwards he wrote a Vindication of the doctrine of the Trinity against the Unitarians ; in this the angry Jacobites saw, or pretended to see, a leaven of Tritheistic heresy ; and, in the bitter style of controversy common in those days, it was declared to be not surprising that Dr. Sherlock should recognise two kings one de facto, the other dejure since he began by believing in more than one God. Robert South, the son of a London tradesman, educated at Westminster School and Oxford, was noted, even before the Restoration, for the strong Anglican spirit which made him oppose Dr. Owen, the Independent Dean of Christ Church, and insist upon using the proscribed liturgy of the Church of England. After the Restoration he was made a Canon of Christ Church, and his keen, scornful wit found full employ- ment in lashing the baffled Puritans. Once, preaching at the consecration of a chapel he said that God had brought in a miraculous revolution, reducing many from * the head of a triumphant rebellion to their old condition of masons, smiths, and carpenters, that in this capacity they might repair what, as colonels and captains, they had ruined and defaced.' South was, however, al good and conscientious man ; and when ap- pointed rector of Islip by the Dean and Chapter of "Westminster, he soon made himself greatly beloved there. He took the oaths to William once, as king de facto, just as a Scotsman might have recognised Macbeth after the murder of Duncan ; but he refused all offers of preferment, and resolutely declined to succeed any one of the bishops who had been deposed as non-jurors. South was never married. Of all his works, the Sermons are much the most striking and characteristic pro- ductions of his genius. The titles of some of them are, * God's peculiar regard to places set apart for divine worship/ 'The odious sin of ingratitude,' 'Against long extempore prayers,' 'Pretence of conscience no excuse for rebellion/ 'No man ever went to heaven whose heart was not there before.' Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells under James II., one of the seven bishops sent to the Tower in 1688, and after- wards deprived for refusing to take the oaths to William, is known as the author of a Morning and an Evening Hymn, the simple beauty of which every one must feel. In the copies of 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 331 these printed at the end of his prose works (ed. by Round, 1838), and extending to fourteen and twelve verses respec- tively, there are many verbal deviations from the versions commonly used, but not such as to affect the sense. Ken also wrote An Exposition on the Church Catechism. Humphrey Prideaux, an Oxford man, published in 1697 TJie] True Nature of Imposture fully displayed in the Life of Mahomet, with a vindication of the Christian religion from that charge, addressed to the Deists. This had been intended as part of a larger work, the ' History of the ruin of the Eastern Church'; but Prideaux says that the course which the late Trinitarian controversy (that in which Sherlock was accused of Tritheism) had taken was enough to show him what would happen if another dogma, that of the Hypostatic union, on which the ancient controversies hinged, were brought under discussion, and that he had therefore refrained from providing fuel for the scoffs of the free-thinkers. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, began his preach- ing about 1648, when Puritanism had the upper hand. He and his followers, since they rejected sacraments and church ordi- nances, preferred the { inward light ' to the Scriptures as a rule of faith, and maintained the unlawfulness of war, were dealt with by the Puritans with great severity. Fox had but small literary talent ; * it was therefore left for Robert Barclay, a Scotch convert, to methodise, and present in the most agree- able form, the doctrines of the new sect. This he did in his Apology for the true Christian Divinity, as the same is held forth and preached by the people called in scorn Quakers (1676). In the dedication to Charles II., Barclay says that God has given to Christians the inward light of His Spirit to guide them, seeing that Scripture cannot be such a guide, through the uncertainty and fallibility attending its interpretation. 69. In spite of the political pliancy alleged against him by Lord Macaulay, it may be said that English Protestantism has seldom appeared in so attractive a light as in the character and career of William Penn. Joining the rising sect of the Quakers while at Christ Church, this young Buckinghamshire squire steadfastly endured family and social persecution, and frequent imprisonment, for what he deemed the holiest of causes ; and became in middle life, through his religious earnestness, con- viction, and activity, aided by an exuberant flow of language, a very noteworthy and influential person ; a man who would have to be reckoned with. He had for several years thrown 1 His Journal, continued to the day before his death, and published bv William Penn in 1694, is, of course, very interesting for what it contains. 332 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. himself with characteristic energy into the work of colonising America, when in 1681 Charles II., in recognition of the ser- vices of his father, the Admiral Penn who took Jamaica, granted to him and his heirs * that province lying on the west side of the river Delaware in North America, formerly belonging to the Dutch, and then called the New Netherlands.' The king changed the name of the province to Pennsylvania, and made Penn the absolute proprietor and governor of it. He visited his splendid dominion in 1682, and again in 1699, remaining a year or two each time ; the fruit of these visits was a Descrip- tion of Pennsylvania. But it was in religious treatises and pamphlets that his pen was chiefly employed. Among these the most important is No Cross, No Grown, written in prison. 1 His steady advocacy of toleration by the State of all ' but those who maintain principles destructive of industry, fidelity, justice, and obedience,' frequently brought on him the imputation of being a concealed Jesuit and emissary of Komef Other tracts from his hand are The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, once more briefly debated and defended, and A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People called Quakers. He lived to a good old age, dying in 1718. * Thomas Burnet, a Yorkshire man, educated at Cambridge, is the author of Telluris Theoria Sacra, published in Latin in 1681, and in English three years later. The work is a fanciful cosmogony, passing into a strain of equally fanciful prophecy: it is in four books, entitled 'The Deluge,' 'Paradise,' 'The Burning of the World,' and 'The New Heaven and the New Earth.' In the last book he advocates the Millennium. Burnet was Master of the Charter House. In 1692 he published Archcvologicv Philosophical, ruining thereby his hopes of advancement, since in this work he treated the Mosaic account of the fall of man as an allegory. Philosophy : Hobbes, Cudworth, Locke, Harrington, Barclay. 70. Though the philosophical teaching of the English Uni- versities remained in statu quo during this period, speculation was common among cultivated minds, and developed in certain branches of inquiry marked and important results. In meta- physics occur the name of Thomas Hobbes, and the still more famous name of John Locke. Political reasoning was earnestly followed by Milton, Hobbes, Sidney, Harrington, Filmer, and Locke. Essay writing was attempted by Feltham, and more successfully by Bishop Hall and Sir Thomas Browne. Lastly, the ' new philosophy/ as it was called in that age, that is, the i Extract Boole, art. 107. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 333 philosophy of experiment, received a strong impulse through the incorporation, in 1662, of the Royal Society. Hobbes, the * philosopher of Malmesbury,' was born in the year of the Spanish Armada, and is said to have owed the nervous timidity of his constitution to the terror with which his mother regarded the approach of the invading host. After a residence of five years at Oxford, he travelled on the Con- tinent, and made the acquaintance of several eminent men. Returning to England, he devoted himself to the careful study of the classical historians and poets. He early conceived a dis- like to the democratical or movement party of that day, and in 1628 published a translation of Thucydides, 'that the follies of the Athenian democrats might be made known to his fellow- citizens.' For the greater portion of his long life, after attain- ing to manhood, he resided as a tutor or as a friend in the family of the Earls of Devonshire. The stormy opening of the Long Parliament in 1640 led him to apprehend civil war, from which his timid nature instinctively shrank ; he accordingly went over to France, and took up his abode in Paris. Among his philo- sophical acquaintances there were Gassendi and Father Mer- senne. The former was as great a sceptic as himself; the latter, he says, 1 once when he was dangerously ill, tried to make him a Roman Catholic, but without the least success. His political treatise, De Give, was published at Paris in 1646. The Leviathan, containing his entire philosophical system, 2 appeared in 1651 ; the De Oorpore, a physiological work, in 1655, and the De Homine in 1658. At the age of eighty he wrote his Behemoth, a history of the civil war, and, about the same time, a Latin poem on the rise and growth of the Papal power. In his eighty-seventh year he published a metrical version of the Odyssey, and in the following year one of the Iliad ; both, however, are worthless. He died in 1679, being then ninety-one years old. 71. Cudworth, who has been already mentioned as one of the Latitudinarian divines, takes rank among the philosophers on account of his Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), a work designed to be in three parts, and to refute three several doctrines which he calls * Fatalisms.' The first is that of an atheistic fate or necessity, which, with Lucretius, accounts for the material world by the fortuitous meeting and interaction of atoms. The second is that of a divine fate immoral, which admits a God but denies Him to be good or just. The third is 1 See his curious Latin autobiography, prefixed to the edition of his works by Sir W. Molesworth. 3 See Crit. Sect. II., 47, and Extract Book, art. 84. 334 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. that of a divine fate moral, which admits God to be good and just, and allows the reality of moral distinctions, hut neverthe- less considers all human actions as inevitably concatenated and necessary. But, of these three parts, Cudworth only executed the first, the argument against atheism ; nevertheless, as he con- sidered it right always to state the arguments of his adversaries fully and in their own words, his work is one of unwieldy bulk. The De Legibus Naturce of Dr. Eichard Cumberland appeared in 1672. Mr. Hallam (Literature of Europe, iv. 159) seems to regard Cumberland as the real founder of utilitarianism, saying that he does not base moral ideas on revelation or authority, nor on the verdict of conscience, but tests their soundness by their tendency to promote the common good. He proceeds to analyse the work at considerable length. Cumberland's standpoint seems to resemble that of Puffendorf, whose great work ' On the Law of Nature and of Nations ' appeared the same year. 72. Few names occur in the history of our literature which are more noteworthy than that of John Locke, because there are few writers to whose influence important changes or ad- vances in general opinion upon divers important questions can be so certainly and directly attributed. His political doctrines have been persistently carried into practice by his own country ever since his death, and recently by other countries also ; and the results have to outward appearance, at least been singu- larly encouraging. By his famous Essay on the Human Under- standing, he effectually checked the tendency to waste the efforts of the mind in sterile metaphysical discussions, and opened out a track of inquiry which the human mind has earnestly prosecuted ever since, with ever-increasing confidence in the soundness of the method, considered as a testing pro- cess, applicable to matters of fact. Lastly, his Treatise on Education, from which Rousseau is said to have largely bor- rowed in his Emile, contains the first suggestion of a large number of those improvements, both in the theory and practice of education, which the present age has seen effected. Locke resided for many years after leaving Oxford in the house of his patron and friend, Lord Shaftesbury, the Achito- phel of Dryden's satire, whose character the poet portrayed in those famous lines, Restless, unfixed in principles and place, In power tinpleased, impatient of disgrace ; A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay, And o'er-informed the tenement of clay. 1 1 Absalom and Achitophel, part i. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 335 Sharing the Whig opinions of his patron, Locke came in also for his full share of the enmity of the Court, which even demanded, in 1685, his extradition from the States-General of Holland, to which country he had followed Shaftesbury after his disgrace in 1682. His friends, however, concealed him, and Locke had the satisfaction of returning to England in the fleet of the conquering William of Orange. Strange that of the two greatest literary Englishmen of that day John Locke and John Dry den the resemblance of whose portraits must have struck many an observer, the one should date his personal advancement and the triumph of the cause to which he ad- hered from the same event which brought dismissal, ruin, and humiliation to the other ! 73. Locke's own account of the origin of the Essay is in- teresting. In the prefatory Epistle to the Reader, he says : * Were it fit to trouble thee with the history of this Essay, I should tell thee that five or six friends, meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties that rose on every side. After we had a while puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which per- plexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course ; and that, before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with. This I proposed to the company, who all readily assented ; and thereupon it was agreed that this should be our first inquiry. Some hasty and undigested thoughts on a sub- ject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next meeting, gave the first entrance into this discourse ; which, having been thus begun by chance, was continued by intreaty ; written by incoherent parcels ; and, after long in- tervals of neglect, resumed again, as my humour or occasions permitted ; and at last, in a retirement where an attendance on my health gave me leisure, it was brought into that order thou now seest it.' The Essay concerning Human Understanding is divided into four books. 1 In the first, Locke, leaning towards the tenets of the Peripatetics in earlier, and the materialists in later times, endeavoured to disprove the theory of innate ideas or principles. Xo knowledge, he maintains, is at any time possessed by the human intellect that did not come to it through the senses; nihil in intellects, quod non prius in sensu. Leibnitz is said to have completed, and at the same time partially overturned, the 1 Extract Book, art. 105. 336 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEEATURE. CHAP. IV. aphorism, by adding the words 'prceter intellectum ipsum ' (ex- cept the intellect itself) ; the measures and forms of which are inherent in its constitution, and could not have been supplied to it through the senses. In the second book Locke gives his own theory of ideas, showing how they are simple or complex, derived from sensation or reflection, or both, and so on. The third book treats of Words, or Language in general, as the in- strument of the understanding. The fourth book is concerning Knowledge and Opinion. The tenth chapter of this book is devoted to the proof of the proposition that ' we are capable of knowing certainly that there is a God.' 74. The order in which Locke's principal works appeared was as follows : his first Letter on Toleration was published in Holland in 1688; the Essay on the Human Understanding appeared in 1689; the two Treatises on Government in 1690, 1 the Thoughts upon Education in 1693 ; and the treatise on the Reasonableness of Christianity in 1695. He died unmarried at the house of his friend, Sir Francis Masham, in Essex, in the year 1704. 75. Many remarkable works on political science appeared in this agitated period. Speaking generally, these works represent the opinions of five parties : cavalier Tories, and philosophical Tories ; Puritan Whigs, and Constitutional Whigs ; and philo- sophical or practical Kepublicans. Sir Robert Filmer, author of the Patriarcha, 2 in which the doctrine of ' the right divine of kings to govern wrong ' was pushed to its extreme, was the chief writer of the first party ; Hobbes represented ,the second ; Milton the third ; Locke the fourth ; Harrington and Algernon Sidney the fifth. Milton's chief political treatises are, the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), 3 and The ready and easy Way to establish a free Commonwealth (1660). Har- rington's Oceana, the name by which he designates England, as his imagination painted her after being regenerated by re- publicanism, was published in 1656. The Protector's govern- ment at first, refused to allow it to appear, but Cromwell, at the request of his favourite daughter, Elizabeth, gave his con- sent to the publication, coupled, however, with the dry remark that ' what he had won by the sword he should not suffer him- self to be scribbled out of.' Tn his travels Harrington had visited Venice, and thought the government of that republic the best and wisest in the world. The leading idea in the Oceana is, that ' empire follows the balance of property.' The late war, he thought, was chiefly attributable, neither to the 1 Extract Book, art. 105. - See Grit. Sect. IT., 47. 3 See above, 25. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAE PERIOD. 337 encroachments of the king nor to the factious conduct of the people, but to a slow and silent change which had taken place in the balance of property in England, rendering the lower gentry and the trading classes relatively wealthier, and there- fore more influential, than in previous centuries. Algernon Sidney, in his Discourses on Government 1 (first published in 1699, sixteen years after his execution), sets him- self to refute the work of Filmer. The key-note of the essay is in the sentence, c God leaves to man the choice of forms in government.' The style is earnest and clear, but somewhat too diffuse. ' Sidney does not condemn a limited monarchy like the English, but his partiality is for a form of republic which would be deemed too aristocratic for our popular theories.' (Hallam, iv. 202.) Ben Jonson's Discoveries, one of his latest works, are for the most part detached passages, jottings from his commonplace book, but they contain some interesting pages of criticism. What he says of Shakspere is, in the main, generous and dis- cerning ; he censures, however, what he considers his too facile exuberance, that unrevised production which made Pope say (erroneously), And fluent Shakspere ne'er effaced a line ; but declares that he c honours his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.' John Earle, an Oxford man, is the author of Microcosmographie, or a Peece of the world discovered, in Essayes and Characters. The title was suggested by the Microcosmos (1622) of Heylin, a treatise on geography ; but Earle takes the word as it has been often applied to man and his attributes, and gives us a series of ' characters ' in imitation of Overbury. There were fifty-four articles in the first edition ; twenty-four were after- wards added. No. 10 is a melancholy picture of a compromising Catholic in those days, going to church once a month ' to keep off the church- warden ' ; 'his wife more zealous than he and therefore more costly ; 2 and he bates her in tyres what she stands him in religion. But we leave him hatching plots against the State, and expecting Spinola.' Earle was made Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Worcester after the Restoration. Bishop Hall's Characters of Virtues and Vices is a work of the same kind. It is in two books, one on eleven virtuous, the other on fifteen vicious characters. This kind of writing was thought at the time to be at once attractive and morally edifying. (See the edition of Bishop Hall's works in twelve volumes ; Oxford, 1837.) A contemporary biographer says of James Howell that he wrote above forty works, ' useful to all posterity ' ; but posterity has declined to make much use of them. His Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642) are meanly 1 Extract Book, art. 100. 2 On account of the fines imposed for non-attendance at church. Y 338 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. IV. written and without liveliness. In virtue of his Epistolce Ho-Eliance (1645) he has been called the first of English letter- writers ; but one letter of Margaret Paston's is worth the whole collection. 76. The Latin romance of Argenis (1622), by John Barclay, a Scottish Catholic, contains several chapters which have a political bearing, and are intended to recommend constitutional limited government. The story is partially allegorical, and shadows forth the course of events in France during the last years of Henry III. The Latinity of this work is praised warmly by Coleridge, and more temperately by Hallam. Essay Writing and Miscellaneous Subjects : Hall, Browne, Izaak Walton : Criticism ; Dryden, Rymer, Philips. 77. The examples of Bacon and Burton were followed by several gifted men in this period, who preferred jotting down detached thoughts on a variety of subjects, making, as it were, ' Guesses at Truth ' in a variety of directions, to the labour of concentrating their faculties upon a single intellectual enter- prise. Thus Bishop Hall wrote, in the early part of the century, Three Centuries of Meditations and Voivs, each century containing a hundred short Essays or Papers. 1 Feltham's Resolves ('resolve,' in the sense of 'solution of a problem'), published in 1637, is a work of the same kind. 78. From the fierce semi-political Christianity of the Puri- tans, and the official historical Christianity of the Churchmen, it is refreshing to turn to the philosophical and genial system of faith confessed in the Religio Medici of the good Sir Thomas Browne. 2 Browne was a mystic and an idealist ; he loved to plunge into the abysses of some vast thought, such as the Divine wisdom or the Divine eternity, and pursue its mazes until he was forced to cry an ' altitudo ! ' and instead of being tempted to materialism by the necessary investigations of his profession investigations which he evidently pursued with keen zest and in perfect steadiness of judgment he re- r garded all the secondary laws which he discovered, or beheld in operation, as illustrations of the regular government of the Power, whose personality, and disengaged freedom, and supre- macy over the laws through which he ordinarily works, were to him antecedent truths of conscience and reason. The Religio Medici, which had already appeared in a surreptitious and unauthorised form, was first published by its author* in 1 Extract Book, art. 70. " Ibid. art. 88. 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 339 1643. In the first few pages, his tenderness and charity towards the Roman Church, and his genial and innate repugnance to the spirit of Puritanic bitterness, are made apparent. * We have reformed from them,' he says, ' not against them.' His own temper, he admits, inclines him to the use of form and ceremonial in devotion. ' I am, I confess, naturally inclined to that which misguided zeal terms superstition.' 'I could never hear the Ave Mary bell without an elevation.' On the whole, he finds that no church * squares unto his con- science ' so well in every respect as the Church of England, whose Articles he thoroughly embraces, while following his own reason where she and the Scripture are silent. Though at present free, as he alleges, from the taint of any heretical opinion, he entertained in his youth various singular tenets, among which were, the death of the soul together with the body, until the resurrection of both at the day of judgment ; the ultimate universal restoration of all men, as held by Origen; and the propriety of prayers for the dead. But he declares that there was never a time when he found it difficult to believe a doctrine merely because it transcended and con- founded his reason. 'Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith.' He can answer all objections with the maxim of Tertullian, Cerium est quid im- possibile est, and is glad that he did not live in the age of miracles, when faith would have been thrust upon him almost without any merit of his own. He collects ( 15-19) his divinity from two books the Bible and Nature. Yet he is not disposed so to deem or speak of Nature as to veil behind her the immanence and necessary action of God in all her phenomena. ' Nature is the art of God.' Again, he will not, with the vulgar, ascribe any real power to chance or fortune ; ' it is we that are blind, not fortune ; ' which is but another name for the settled and predetermined evolutions of visible effects from causes the knowledge of which is inaccessible to us. He could himself (21) produce a long list of difficulties and objections in the way of faith, many of which were never 'before started. But if these objections breed, at any time, doubts in his mind, he combats such misgivings, ' not in a martial posture, but on his knees.' From this description of the contents of the first few sec- tions, the reader may form some notion of the peculiar and most original vein of thought which runs through the book. As % the first part treats of faith, so the second gives the author's meditations on the virtue of charity. A delightful ironical humour breaks out occasionally, as in the advice which he 340 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. gives to those who desire to be strengthened in their own opinions. ' When we desire to be informed, 'tis good to con- test with men above ourselves ; but to confirm and establish our opinions, 'tis best to argue with judgments below our own, that the frequent spoils and victories over their reasons may settle in ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our own.' The treatise on vulgar errors, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, is an amusing examination of a great number of popular customs and received explanations, which, after holding their ground for ages, during the long night of science and philosophy, were now breaking down on all sides under the attacks of the enfranchised intellect. The Garden of Cyrus is an abstruse dissertation on the wonderful virtue and significance of the quincuncial form. This is mere mysticism, and of no more value than the dreams of the Pythagoreans as to the virtue of particular numbers. 79. Few books in our language have been read with such steady relish during more than two centuries as The Corn- pleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man's Recreation, by Izaak Walton. As if to point out to dominant Puritanism its essential limitations, and the transitory nature of its rule, the book appeared in year 4 of the English Kepublic (1653), when the king was in exile, the clergy silenced, and the nobility help- less; yet in reading it one might fancy that everything was going on in old England as in the days of Shakspere. It is a kind of commentary on Sir Toby's question to Malvolio, ' Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be more cakes and ale 1 ' A fishing expedition to the Hertfordshire rivers between Ware and Waltham furnishes a slight narrative frame- work. The elder of the two anglers, Piscator, extols his art, and kindly gives lessons in it to the younger man, Viator, who is good at a song or a ballad. Engravings of different fishes, the Trout, the Barbel, the Perch, &c., executed with a delicate skill and carefulness, appeared in the first edition. Izaak's tone may be to some extent gathered from the following extract. Piscator has caught a chub, and says to Viator : 1 Look you, Sir, there he is, that very Chub that I showed you, with the white spot on his tail ; and I'l be as certain to make him a good dish of meat, as I was to catch him. I'l now lead you to an honest Alehouse, where we shall find a cleanly room, Lavender in the windowes, and twenty Ballads stuck about the wall ; there my Hostis (which I may tel you, is both cleanly and conveniently handsome) has drest many a one for me, and shall now dress it after my fashion, and I warrant it good meat.' 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 341 Izaak was born at Stafford, but followed the trade of a sempster for many years in London. His second wife was a sister of Bishop Ken. Among miscellaneous writings, the Sylva of John Evelyn deserves a prominent place. It is a ' Discourse of Forest Trees, and the propagation of timber in his Majesty's dominions,' and was originally read before the Royal Society in 1662. The parliamentary grantees of royalist estates, feeling their tenure insecure, had made enormous waste of the timber on them, cutting down and selling in all parts of the country. Thus, at the Restoration, there was an alarming dearth of good timber for shipbuilding ; and yet the preservation and increase of the fleet were matters of prime necessity. The Admiralty con- sulted with the King, who referred the matter to the Royal Society, and Evelyn's treatise was the result. It was the first book printed by order of the Society. Evelyn was a great planter himself, and his successors at Wotton, his estate in Surrey, have to this day religiously observed his precepts. The publication of the Sylva (1664) led to an immense development of planting all over England. Another interesting tract, from the same hand, entitled An Apology for the Royal Party, in the form of a ' Letter to a person of the late Councel of State,' was written in November 1659. This was a bold action, for to speak for the King had been pro- hibited. The indignant vehemence of eloquent invective against the whole Puritan party, Presbyterians, Independents, Quakers, and all, is surprising in the gentle and polished Evelyn. Among the pamphlets of the time, the terrible energy of destroying hate has given a certain notoriety to the ' Killing no Murder ' of Colonel Titus. This ultra- Republican, the Nihilist of the seventeenth century, thus addresses Cromwell : 'To your highness justly belongs the honour of dying for the people ; and it cannot choose but be an unspeakable consolation to you in the last moments of your life to consider with how much benefit to the world you are likely to leave it. It is then only, my lord, the titles you usurp will be yours. You will then be, indeed, the deliverer of your country, and free it from bondage little inferior to that from which Moses delivered his.' The writer says that the true remedy against a tyrant is 'Ehud's dagger'; and that assassination is better than an open attack ; for it is clearly unreasonable to hold that ' it would be lawful for me to destroy a tyrant with hazard, blood, and confusion, but not without.'' 79a. Dryden's Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668) is the first sample of really valuable literary criticism that we possess. The striking and graphic exordium * brings four literary friends naturally together, Dorset (Eugenius), Sir R. Howard (Crites), Sir Charles Sedley (Lisideius), and Dryden (Neander) ; a con- 1 Extract Book, art. 104. 342 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. versation among them on poetry and the drama arises no less naturally ; and when their boat lands them at * Somerset stairs ' in the evening, we have listened to the vigorous asser- tion by Lisideius of the superiority of the French stage in all things, to the vindication by Crites of the claims of blank verse, and to the qualified assertion by Neander of the superior advantages of rime. In the argument of the latter occurs a noble passage on Shakspere. In words, Dryden ranks Ben Jonson almost on a level with Shakspere; but when we read his deliberate critical estimate of each it is manifest that he is as fully alive to the unapproached elevation of Shakspere as we are at the present day. Edward Philips, whose mother was Milton's sister, composed, besides many other works, a Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, or a ' Complete Collection of the poets ... of all ages' (1685). Hallam thought meanly of this production ; yet the notices of some of the poets, e.g. Shakspere and Spenser, are not without interest. Philips also wrote a Life of John Milton (1694). Gerard Langbaine, of University College, Oxford, is the earliest of our dramatic historians. His work, entitled An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, was published in 1691. Thomas Eymer wrote two critical treatises, The Tragedies of the last Age considered and examined by the Practice of the Ancients (1678), and A Short View of Tragedy, . . . with some Reflections on Shakespear (1693). Rymer is severe upon the moderns, but his strokes are feeble. He was better employed in the next age in editing the great compilation of public documents and State papers of all kinds known as ' Rymer's Foedera.' Physical Science. 80. The present Koyal Society, incorporated with a view to the promotion of physical science in 1662, arose out of some scientific meetings held at Oxford in the rooms of Dr. Wilkins, 1 the President of Wadham College. They soon had the honour of numbering among their fellows the great Newton, some of whose principal discoveries were first made known to the world in their Proceedings. Newton was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge ; in the chapel of which society may be seen a noble statue of him by Roubillac, with the inscription, ' Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit.' A History of the Royal Society, by Thomas Sprat, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, appeared in 1667. 1 John Wilkins, Cromwell's brother-in-law, was an upright, courageous, humane man ; very intelligent and inquiring. He was warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and afterwards master of Trinity, Cambridge. In his Discovery of a New World he speculated on the possibility of the moon's being inhabited, and of human beings making their way thither. He also wrote propounding a Philosophical Language. (Hallam, iv.) 1625-1700. CIVIL WAR PERIOD. 343 Isaac Newton, the son of a Lincolnshire yeoinan, distinguished himself at Cambridge soon after the Restoration by his extraordinary mathe- matical ability. In 1686 he gave to the world his theory of universal gravitation in the Philosophies Naturalis Principia Mathematica, commonly called ' Newton's Principia.' His Treatise on Optics, being a theory of light and colours, first appeared in 1704. In the quarto edition of his works, edited by Horsley (1779-85), the fifth volume contains his non- scientific writings. The chief of these are, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms amended, and Observations upon the Prophecies; in this last work are many curious and fanciful interpretations, and accounts of imagined fulfilments. He also wrote 'An Historical Account of two notable Corruptions of Scripture,' referring to the passage on the three heavenly witnesses (1 John v. 7), and that beginning tfs tyavep&dT) in 1 Tim. iii. 16. His Letters (to Oldenburg, Huygens, &c. ) are admirable for their force, clearness, and sagacity. Robert Boyle, a son of the first Earl of Cork, was a diligent student of experimental philosophy. At the same time he was a religious man, and had a clear perception of the claims of literature ; and in the great folio edition of his works (1744), side by side with ' New Experiments ' and 1 Essays on Effluviums,' we meet with such titles as ' The Style of the Holy Scriptures,' and ' Greatness of Mind promoted by Christianity.' A work of considerable length bears the following title, ' The Christian Virtuoso, showing that by being addicted to Experimental Philosophy a man is rather assisted than indisposed to be a good Christian.' In the previous generation, Thomas Lydiat, fellow of New College, Oxford, an astronomer, had published a Prcelectio Astronomica (1605), and addressed to Savile an Epistola Astronomica (1621) on the measurement of the solar year. Johnson names him in the Vanity of Human Wishes as an example of struggling and ill-rewarded genius. Sir Kenelm Digby, son of the Everard Digby who was executed for his share in the Gunpowder Plot, was brought up a Protestant, but returned when grown to manhood to the religion of his father. After suffering imprisonment and exile in the cause of Charles I., he was allowed to return to England by the Protector, with whom he came to be on intimate terms. He is the author of a Treatise on the Nature of Bodies (dr. 1645), a Con- ference about a Choice of Religion (1638), a fanciful tract On the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy (1658), and many other works. (Enci/clopcedia Britannica. ) 80a. A few words must be given to some minor writers who have not found a place in our classifications. Thomas Killigrew, the son of a Middlesex baronet, was from early life attached to the Stuart court ; there is frequent mention of him in Pepys' Diary. Italian opera was first domiciled in London through his instrumentality. He wrote several comedies and tragi-comedies, printed in fol. in 1664, and now forgotten. Sir George Mackenzie, whom Dryden calls in his Essay on Satire ' that noble wit of Scotland,' was a staunch loyalist. James II. could not bring him into his plans for a toleration of the Scotch Catholics ; never- theless he stood up alone in the convention parliament at Edinburgh to oppose the resolution that the king had forfeited his crown. He wrote poetry and several moral essays, one on the advantages of Solitude as compared with Public Employment (1664) ; to this Evelyn wrote an answer. Hallam calls his essays ' empty and diffuse ' ; but this is rather hard measure. At any rate he seems to have been the first Scotchman who attained to a decent prose style. His Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland from the Restoration were first printed in 1821. The poems of John Pomfret appeared in 1699. ' Perhaps,' says Johnson, ' no compo- 344 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. IV. sition in our language has been oftener perused than Pomfret's Choice.' Yet The Choice to modern notions is a poor and commonplace poem. Its quality may be judged by the opening lines : I'd have a clear and competent estate, That I might live genteelly, but not great ; As much as I could moderately spend : A little more sometimes t' oblige a friend. Roger L'Estrange is the author of the spirited ballad 'Loyalty Con- fined.' He was can indefatigable pamphleteer, and holds a high place among the patriarchs of journalism, having set up ' The News ' and ' The Intelligencer ' in 1663, and the ' Observator ' in 1679. He lived to a great age, and was eighty years old when he was arrested (1696) on a charge of plotting against William's government. ( 345 ) CHAPTER V. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 1. WE will commence, as in the last period, with a brief summary of the political history. The opening of the century "beheld the firm establishment of the state of things brought in at the Revolution of 1688, by the passing of the Act of Settlement, limiting the succes- sion to the crown to Sophia, wife of the elector of Hanover, and the heirs of her body, being Protestants. Upon the acces- sion of Anne in 1702, a Tory ministry came into power" for a short time. But its principal member the able and unprin- cipled Godolphin passed over to the Whigs, and it was Whig policy which engaged the nation in the war of the Spanish succession. Marlborough, the great Whig general, was closely connected with Godolphin by marriage. Every one has heard of the victories of Blenheim, Ramillies, and Oudenarde. The Whig ministry was dismissed in 1710, and their Tory suc- cessors, Harley Earl of Oxford, and St. John Lord Bolingbroke, concluded the peace of Utrecht in 1713. But at the death of Anne in the following year the Tory ministers, who showed symptoms of favouring the claims of the Pretender (the son of James II.), were at once hurled from power, and the long period of Whig rule commenced, which only ended with the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole, in 1742. This celebrated minister practically ruled the country for twenty-one years, from 1721 to 1742, during which period England, through him, preserved peace with foreign powers ; and such wars as arose on the Continent were shorter and less destructive than they would otherwise have been. But in 1741 the temper of the country had become so warlike that a peace policy was no longer practicable, and Walpole was forced to succumb. The administration which succeeded, in which the leading spirit was that fine scholar and high-minded nobleman, Lord Carteret (afterwards Earl Granville), engaged in the Austrian succession war on the side of Maria Theresa. England played no very distinguished part in this war, the success at Dettingen (1743) 346 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. being more than counterbalanced by the reverse at Fontenoy two years later. The intrigues of the Pelhams drove Lord Granville from office in 1 744, and the Duke of Newcastle, with his brother, Mr. Pelham, formed, with the aid of the leaders of the opposition, what was called the ' Broad bottom ' ministry. Newcastle a man of small ability, but strong in his extensive parliamentary influence remained prime minister for twelve years. In 1745 occurred the insurrection of the Highland clans in favour of the Prince Charles Edward, grandson of James II. After defeating the royal troops at Prestonpans, the Prince marched into England, and penetrated as far as Derby. But, meeting with no support, he was compelled to retreat, and in the following year his followers were totally routed by the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden. The con- tinental war was terminated by the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. At the breaking out of the Seven Years' "War in 1756, in which England was allied with Frederick of Prussia against France and Russia, the Duke of Newcastle's incapacity caused everything to miscarry. Minorca was lost, and the Duke of Cumberland capitulated with his whole army to the French at Closter-seven. Pitt, the great commoner, the honest states- man, the terrible and resistless orator, had to be admitted, though sorely against the king's will, to a seat in the Cabinet. The force of his genius and the contagion of his enthusiasm effected a marvellous change; and the memorable year 1759 witnessed the triumph of the allies at Minden, the victory of Wolfe on the heights of Abraham, which led to the con- quest of Canada, and the defeat of the French fleet by Hawke off Belleisle. 2. Pitt had to resign in 1761, making way for the king's favourite, Lord Bute, who concluded the treaty of Fontaine- bleau at the end of 1762, by which Canada, Cape Breton, part of Louisiana, Florida, the Senegal, and Minorca were ceded to Britain. For the next twelve years England was universally regarded as the most powerful and successful nation in Europe. But the war had been frightfully expensive, and Mr. Grenville, who was prime minister from 1763 to 1765, conceived in an unlucky hour the idea that a revenue could be raised from America, by taxes laid on the colonies by the authority of Parliament. The Repeal of the Stamp Act in 1776 delayed the bursting of the storm ; but fresh attempts at taxation being made, and resisted by the people of Boston, the War of Independence broke out in the year 1775, and, through the help of France, which allied itself with the new republic in 1778, resulted in the recognition by Great Britain of the inde- 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY. 347 pendence of the United States in 1783. Lord Chatham, who had all along condemned the awkward and irritating measures of coercion employed by the ministry, vainly opposed, in his memorable dying speech in the House of Lords, * the dismem- berment of this ancient monarchy.' The administration which conducted the American war was presided over by the Tory premier, Lord North, who governed the country for twelve years, from 1770 to 1782. Up to the former date the powers of government had, ever since 1688, been exercised, with the exception of a few brief intervals, by the great Whig families the Russells, Pelhams, Fitzroys, Bentincks, &c. (together with the commoners whom they selected to assist them) who prided themselves on having brought about the Revolution. It cannot be denied that on the whole this junto governed with great vigour and suc- cess, and that the English aristocracy never showed itself to greater advantage. With the advent of Lord North, who only represented Court influence, to power, all was changed. Great questions were handled by little men, and the pre- ponderance of intellectual power remained always on the side of the Opposition, which numbered Fox, Burke, Barr, Dunning, and Sheridan in its ranks. At length, in 1782, Lord North was driven from the helm, and after the brief adminis- trations of the Marquis of Rockingham and Lord Shelburne, and that which resulted from the coalition of Fox with Lord North, the younger Pitt came into power at the end of 1783, and commenced his long and eventful career as prime minister. His policy was at first purely Whig and constitutional, like that of his father: but, after 1789, the attitude which he was compelled to take in relation to the extreme or revolutionary liberalism of France, gradually changed the position of his government to such an extent as to make it practically Tory, as being supported by the Tory party in Parliament and in the country. In the long revolutionary wars, commencing in 1793, England played an essentially conservative part. The English aristocracy, allying itself with the legitimate dynasties of Europe and with the Holy See, fought successfully to save some of the institutions and many of the principles which had been bequeathed by the Middle Ages, in the tempest of destruction which, issuing from the clubs of Paris, threatened the entire fabric of European society. 348 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. General Characteristics: Pope and Johnson; Poetry from 1700 to 1745 : Pope, Addison, Gay, Parnell, Swift, Thomson, Prior, Garth, Blackmore, Defoe, Tickell, Savage, Dyer, A. Philips, J. Philips, Watts, Ramsay. 3. The eighteenth century was a period of repose and stability in England's political history. Saved by her insular position from the desolating wars which ravaged the Continent, and acquiescing in the compromise between theoretical liberty and prescriptive right established at the Revolution of 1688, the nation enjoyed during the whole of the period, except in the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, profound internal peace. Then was the time, it might have been imagined, for the fructification under the most favourable circumstances of what- ever germs of thought the philosophy and poetry of preceding ages had implanted in the English mind, in the noblest and purest forms of literature and art. Such, however, was far from being the case. The litera- ture of the eighteenth century, though occupying a large space to our eyes at the present day, from the proximity of the time and the want of other thinkers who have taken up the ground more satisfactorily, is for the most part essentially of the fugitive sort, and will probably be considered in future ages as not having treated with true appreciation one single subject which it has handled. To speculate upon the cause of this inferiority does not lie within the scope of the present work ; we have simply to note the fact. The rising of the clans in 1745 divides our period into two nearly equal portions, of the first of which Pope may be taken as the representative author ; of the second, Johnson. 4. Alexander Pope was born at the house of his father, a linen merchant residing in Lombard Street, London, in the year 1688. A sojourn at Lisbon had led to the father's con- version to the Roman Catholic faith, and young Pope was brought up, so far as circumstances would allow, in the rigid belief and practice of his father's creed. His religion excluded him from the public schools and universities of England ; his education was therefore private, and not, it would appear, of the best kind. Such as it was, it was not continued long ; so that^Pope may be considered as eminently a self-taught man a self-cultivated poet. His poetic gift manifested itself early : As yet a child, nor jet a fool to fame, I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 349 The classical poets soon became his chief study and delight, and ho valued the moderns in proportion as they had drunk more or less deeply of the classical spirit. The genius of the Gothic or Romantic ages inspired him at this time with no admiration whatever, so that in the retrospect of the political and critical masterpieces of past times, which concludes the third book of the Essay on Criticism, he can find no bright spot in the thick intellectual darkness from the downfall of the Western Empire to the age of Leo X. The only native writers whom he deigns to mention are Roscommon and Walsh ! To the author of the Essay on Translated Verse he was indeed largely indebted, not only for the general concep- tion of the Essay on Criticism, but even for some of the best expressions in it. 1 Walsh, too, who was a man of fortune, was his patron and kind entertainer, and gratitude led Pope to do him, as a poet, a little more than justice. But in spite of minor blemishes one cannot be blind to the transcendent merits of this production, which, taken as the composition of a youth of twenty or twenty-one, is an intellectual and rhythmical achievement perhaps unparalleled. 2 5. The ultimate impulse which actuated Pope in projecting and com- posing this remarkable poem may be traced to his youthful study and intense, passionate admiration of the classic poets. The music of their verse, the grace of their phrase, and the elevation of their thoughts, made deep impressions on that strongly receptive intelligence ; he felt that they were still not half so well known by his countrymen as they deserved to be ; that their comparative obedience to rules arose out of a real freedom of the spirit, and a pure perception of the beautiful, with which the English licence was incompatible ; and he has left a tribute which is itself imperishable to these 'immortal heirs of universal praise,' in the passage commencing at 1. 181 of this poem Still green with bays, each ancient altar stands. Yet it is not to be supposed that his admiration was all spontaneous, and stood in no relation to the general state of culture and tendency of criti- 1 Roscommon has, speaking of Drydcn 'And with a brave disorder shows his art.' Pope follows with ' From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part.' Again, Roscommon has ' Then make the proper use of each extreme, And write with fury, but correct with phlegm.' Of this Pope's lines are but the echo ' Our critics take a contrary extreme, They judge with fury, but correct with phlegm.' 2 Crit. Sect. I. 33. 350 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. CHAP. V. cism in Europe. Both in Italy and in France the tide had been running strongly for several generations against the Middle Ages and all their works ; Christian' antiquity was deemed Gothic and rude ; and the lite- rary class, clergy and laity alike, fixed its gaze on the art and poetry of the Pagan world. Boileau in France was the eloquent exponent of this feeling ; he cared not for Dante, but he bowed to Horace And Boileau still in right of Horace sways. His Art Poetique, the leading principle of which is, that critical good sense is the most important of poetical qualities, was doubtless well known to Pope. The controversy in which he had been engaged with Perrault, and which had spread to England Sir William Temple, Dryden, and Swift taking up the one side, and Wootton, Bentley, and a number of obscure persons the other respecting the comparative merits of ancient and modern learning, must have excited a keen interest in the young poet. Dryden himself had written with great force on questions of literary and dramatic criticism ; particularly in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in which he had critically compared the ancient with the modern stage, and the French drama with the English. The work of Bossu, Reflections, on Epic Poetry, had been read with attention beyond the limits of France, and our own Rymer had published in 1694 a translation of Rapin's Reflections on the Poetics of Aristotle. John Dennis, about the same time, in The Impartial Critic, analysed with considerable skill the grounds of Waller's poetic reputation, and compared the exigencies of the Greek and English theatres. Lastly, when we consider Pope's extreme sensitiveness how truly he said of himself, ' touch me and no minister so sore,' it may seem probable that the circumstance of Dennis having spoken unfavourably of his Pastorals in clubs and coffee-houses, was some inducement to him to write a poem which should include a severe castigation of English critics in general, and John Dennis in particular. 1 6. In a memorable passage, containing not a few illustrious names, Pope has told us how he came to publish : But why then publish ? Granville the polite And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write : Well-natured Garth inflamed with early praise, And Congreve loved, and Swift endured my lays ; The courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield, read ; E'en mitred Rochester would nod the head : And St. John's self (great Dryden's friend before) With open arms received one poet more. 2 Dryden he had just seen and no more (' Virgilium tantum vidi' is his expression), in the last year of the old poet's life, he being then a boy of twelve. He knew Wycherley, the dramatist, then a somewhat battered, worn-out relic of the gay reign of Charles II., and wrote an excellent letter on the occasion of his death in 1716. His relations to Addison were characteristic on both sides. Steele introduced them to each other in 1712, shortly after Addison had written a favourable notice of the Essay on 1 Selections from Pope, p. vi., Longmans, 1876. 2 Imitations of Horace. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 351 Criticism in No. 253 of the Spectator. Several trifling circum- stances which occurred in the three following years conspired to create an unpleasant state of feeling between them, which was brought to a climax in 1715 by the encouragement given by Addison to his friend Tickell in his project of a rival translation of Homer. Pope's version and that by Tickell came out nearly together, and nothing can be clearer than the great superiority of the former. Yet Addison (one cannot but fear, out of jealousy), while praising both translations, pronounced that Tickell's ' had more of Homer.' This was the occasion of Pope's writing that wonderful piece of satire which will be found at a subsequent page. 1 Addison made no direct reply, but a few months later, in a paper published in the Freeholder, he spoke in terms of high praise of Pope's translation. The poet's susceptible nature was touched by this generosity, and he, in his turn, immortalised Addison in his fifth satire : And in our days (excuse some courtly strains) No whiter page than Addison remains ; He from the taste obscene reclaims our youth, And sets the passions on the side of truth ; Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art, And pours each human virtue in the heart. Far more close and cordial were the relations between Pope and Swift. Their acquaintance began at the time of Swift's residence in London, between 1710 and 1713. The famous dean was twenty-one years older than Pope ; but there must have been a strong inherent sympathy between their characters, for they became fast friends at once, and continued so until Swift's mind broke down. Each had all the tastes of the author and man of letters ; each was audacious and satirical ; each saw through, and despised, the hollowness of society, though in their different ways each strove to raise himself in it. Swift's ambition was for power ; he wished that his literary successes should serve merely as a basis and vantage-ground whence to scale the high places of the State ; Pope's ambition was purely for fame, and he regarded literary success not as a means but as an end. It certainly shows some real elevation of soul in both, that two men, each so irritable, and whose very points of resemblance might have made it easier for them to come into collision, should have remained steady friends for twenty-five years. The utter absence of jealousy in both will perhaps account for the fact. Soon after they became acquainted, Swift was able to do Pope a great service. In 1713 the pro- 1 See Crit. Sect. ch. L, Satirical Poetry. 352 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEEATURE. CHAP. V. spectus of the translation of the Iliad 1 appeared; and Swift, who was at that time a real power in London society, used his opportunities to get the subscription list well filled. Chiefly by his exertions, the list became such a long one that the proceeds amounted to a small fortune for Pope, and set him at ease on the score of money matters for the remainder of his life. His labours in connection with the translation of Homer extended from 1713 to 1725. He employed in translating the Odyssey the services of two minor poets, Fenton 2 and Broorne, so that only one-half of the version is from his own hand. The Pastorals? Windsor Forest * and the Hope of the Lock 5 appeared in the years 1709, 1713, and 1714 respectively. 7. In 1725 Pope published an edition of Shakspere. His preface shows a juster appreciation of the great dramatist than was then common ; yet his own taste pointed too decidedly to the French and classical school to admit of his doing full justice to the chief of the Eomantic. He was the first to amend two or three corrupt readings by slight and happy alterations, which have since been generally adopted. Such is his substitution of ' south ' for the old reading ' sound ' in the lines in Twelfth Night Oh ! it came o'er mine ear like the sweet south That breathes over a bank of violets ; > and of ' strides ' for ' sides ' (and Tarquin's ravishing ' strides ') in Macbeth. 8. The first three books of the Dunciad, which was dedicated to Swift, appeared anonymously in 1728. In it the poet re- venges himself on a number of obscure poets and feeble critics, who had though'not without provocation attacked and libelled him. The very obscurity of these individuals detracts much from the permanent interest of the satire. The persons and parties introduced by Dry den in his Absalom and Achitophel occupied elevated situations upon the public stage, and, as the satire itself is conceived and composed in a corresponding strain 1 Extract Book, art. 136. 2 Elijah Fenton, the son of a Staffordshire attorney, translated for Pope books I., IV., XIX., and XX. of the Odyssey. His tragedy of Mariamne was a marked success. There is a certain terseness and effectiveness in passages which occur in his poems ; thus in his Verses on the Union, addressing Queen Anne, he says, Ev'n vice and factious zeal are held in awe, Thy court a temple, and thy life a law. , Again, By your great wisdom and resistless might, Abroad we conquer, and at home unite. 3 See Grit. Sect! ch. I. 43. 4 Ibid. 46. 5 Ibid. 13. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 353 of elevation, it is probable that, so long as English history interests us, that satire will be read. But the Cookes, Curlls, Concanens, and other personages of the Dunciad, are to us simple names which suggest no ideas ; and even the intellectual mastery of the author, great though it be, is hardly so evident to us as the frantic vindictiveness which strains every nerve to say the most wounding and humiliating things. 9. The Essay on Man appeared anonymously in 1732. It was the fruit of Pope's familiar intercourse with the sceptic Lord jfolingbroke, and reflects in the popular literature the opinions of a philosophical school presently to be noticed. No poem in the language contains a greater number of single lines which have passed into proverbs. 1 Mandeville and others had recently impugned the benevolence and sanctity of the Deity by pointing out a variety of evils and imperfections in the system of things, and asserting that these were necessary to the welfare and stability of human society. This is the whole argument of the Fable of the Bees. Pope in his Essay undertakes to ' vindicate the ways of God to man.' And how does he do so? Not with regard to physical evil by admitting that the 'whole creation grmnftth ~g.nd travaileth in pain togeTEr.' but connecting its imperfect condition with th~e origlnst sin and fall of moral agents ; not with regard to moral evil by tracing it to man's abuse of his free will, permitted but not designed by his Creator, and to the ceaseless activity of evil spirits ; but, by repre- senting evil, moral as well as physical, to be a part of God's providential scheme for the government of the universe, to be in fact not absolutely and essentially evilpaut only relatively and incidentally so : All partial evil, universal good. All this was pointed out, shortly after the appearance of the Essay, in a criticism from the pen of Crousaz, a Swiss professor. Warburton, in the commentary which he attached to a new edition of the poem in 1740, replied to the strictures of Crousaz, and with much pains and ingenuity endeavoured to give an innocent meaning to all the apparently question- able passages. Ruffhead, in his Life of Pope, gives it as his opinion that Warburton completely succeeded. Johnson was more clear-sighted. In his Life of Pope, after saying that Bolingbroke supplied the post with the principles of the Essay, he adds, ' These principles it is not my business to clear from obscurity, dogmatism, or falsehood.' And again 'The posi- tions which he transmitted from Bolingbroke he seems not to have under- stood, and was pleased with an interpretation which made them orthodox.' 1 For example ' A mighty maze, but not without a plan.' * The proper study of mankind is man.' ' The enormous faith of many made for one. ' ' Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow ; The rest is all but leather or prunella. ' ' An honest man's the noblest work of God.' ' Damn'J to everlasting fame.' ' But looks through Nature up to Nature's God.' ' From grave to gay, from lively to severe,' &c. &c. 354 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. What sense but one is it possible to attach to such passages as the following ? If plagues or earthquakes break not Heaven's design, Why then a Borgia or a Catiline ? Who knows, but He, whose hand the lightning forms, Who heaves old Ocean, and who wings the storms, Pours fierce ambition in a Caesar's mind, Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind ? From pride, from pride, our very reasoning springs ; Account for moral as for natural things : Why -charge we Heaven in those, in these acquit ? In both, to reason right is to submit. Evidently God is here made not the permitter only, but the designer, of moral evil. Again Submit in this or any other sphere, Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear. From this dictum, left unguarded as it is, it might be inferred that virtue, and the acting in obedience to conscience or against it, had nothing to do with man's blessedness. Again Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall. Yet we are told, 'You are of more value than many sparrows.' Pheno- mena in the moral world are here confounded with phenomena in the natural. With God there is neither small nor great in a material sense ; so far these lines convey a just lesson. But how can anything which affects the welfare of a human soul be it that of a ' hero ' or of a pauper be measured by a standard of material greatness ? Alive to the weak points in the morality of the Essay, Pope wrote the Universal Prayer, as a kind of compendious exposition of the mean- ing which he desired to be attached to it. In this he says that the Creator, Binding Nature fast in fate, Left free the human will. How this can be reconciled with the suggestion to Account for moral as for natural things, Warburton never attempted to explain. Mr. Carruthers, in his Life of Pope, speaks of this controversy as if it could have no interest for people of the present generation, who read the Essay for the sake of its brilliant rhetoric and exquisite descriptions, and do not trouble themselves about the reasoning. But whether they are conscious of it or not, the moral tone of the poem does influence men's minds, as the use which is constantly made of certain well-known lines sufficiently demonstrates. 1 1 For instance ' For forms of government let fools contest, Whate'er is best administered is best ; For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, His can't be wrong whose life is in the right. ' 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 355 10. The various satirical pieces known as the Moral Essays and the Imitations of Horace, 1 with Prologue and Epilogue, were published between the years 1731 and 1738. A fourth book was added to the Dunciad in 1742, and the whole poem was re-cast, so as to assign the distinction of king of the dunces to Colley Gibber, the poet-laureate, instead of Theobald. Pope died in May 1744. 11. Politically, Pope occupied through life a position of much dignity. Both Halifax and Secretary Craggs desired to pension him, but he declined their offers. Thanks to Homer, he could say truly I live and thrive, Indebted to no prince or peer alive. The neutral position which he affected. is indicated in the lines In moderation placing all my "glory, While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory. In principle, it seems clear that he preferred the politics of Locke to those of Filmer. This may be inferred from such lines as For sure, if Dulness sees a grateful day, 'Tis in the shade of arbitrary sway. May you, my Cam and Isis, preach it long, 'The right divine of kings to govern wrong.' On the other hand, all the friends with whom he was really intimate Swift, Arbuthnot, Bolingbro'ke, Marchmont, &c. belonged to the Tory party ; a score of passages in his poems show the dislike and disgust with which he regarded the Hanoverian family which had come in under the Act of Settle- ment; that which attracted him in Johnson (whose London appeared on the same day with the Epilogue to the Satires) was clearly his strong Jacobite feeling ; finally, the Caryl corre- spondence, lately published for the first time under the editor- ship of Mr. Elwin, shows Pope to have been influenced by the Catholic, loyalist, and conservative associations which surrounded him in his youth far more than is commonly supposed. 12. Yet, although he remained a Catholic through life, there are many pages of his poetry in which the leaven of that and * Heroes are much the same the point's agreed From Macedonia's madman to the Swede.' and 'Whatever is, is right.' i See Crit. Sect. ch. I., Satirical Poetry. 356 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. CHAP. V. scepticism which pervaded the society in which he moved may be distinctly traced. At the court of the Prince of Wales at Richmond, where Pope was a frequent and welcome guest, free-thinking was in favour, and Tindal, the Deist, was zealously patronised : But art thou one whom new opinions sway, One who believes where Tindal leads the way ? The religious indifierentism which he assumed had un- doubtedly many conveniences, in an age when serious and bond fide Romanism was repressed by every kind of vexatious penal disability, and the literary circle in which he lived was composed exclusively of Protestants or unbelievers. He styled himself Papist or Protestant, or both between, Like good Erasmus, in an honest mean. Perhaps, too, it may be said, that, independently of external influences, his own highly intellectualised nature predisposed him to set reason above faith, to value thinkers more than saints. But he would not let himself be driven or persuaded into any act of formal apostasy. When, upon the death of his father in 1717, his friend Bishop Atterbury hinted that he was now free to consult his worldly interests by joining the established church, Pope absolutely rejected the proposal upon singular and chiefly personal grounds, it is true but so decidedly as to make it impossible that the advice should be repeated. As he grew older, Pope's sympathies with the free- thinking school, at least with the rank and file of their writers, seem to have declined ; very disrespectful mention is made of them in the Dunciad. Their spokesman is thus introduced in the fourth book : ' Be that my task,' replies a gloomy clerk, Sworn foe to mystery, yet divinely dark ; Whose pious hope aspires to see the day When moral evidence shall quite decay, And damns implicit faith and holy lies, Prompt to impose, and fond to dogmatise. Finally, whatever may have been the aberrations of his life, its closing scene was one of faith and pious resignation. The priest who administered to him the last sacrament ' came out from the dying man, . . . penetrated to the last degree with the state of mind in which he found his penitent, resigned and wrapt up in the love of God and man.' 1 Bolingbroke, like the friends of Be"ranger on a like occasion, is said to have flown into a great fit of passion at hearing of the priest being called in. 1 Carruthers' Life of Pope. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 357 13. The reign of Anne was considered in the last century to be the Augustan age of English literature ; nor, when we re- member the great number of poets who then nourished, the high patronage which many of them received, and the extent to which literary tastes then pervaded the upper ranks of society, shall we pronounce the term altogether misplaced. At any rate, by contrast to the middle period of the century, its opening was bright indeed. Johnson, in the Life of Prior, observes : ' Every- thing has its day. Through the reigns of William and Anne no prosperous event passed undignified by poetry. In the last war [the Seven Years' War], when France was disgraced and overpowered in every quarter of the globe, when Spain, coming to her assistance, only shared her calamities, and the name of an Englishman was reverenced through Europe, no poet was heard amidst the general acclamation ; the fame of our coun- cillors and heroes was entrusted to the gazetteer.' The genius of Chatham the heroism of Wolfe are unsung to this day. 14^ Addison, the son of a Westmoreland clergyman, was singled out, while yet at Oxford, as a fit object for Government patronage, and sent to travel with a pension. In that learned, but then disloyal, university, a sincere and clever Whig was a phenomenon so rare that the Whig ministry seem to have thought they could not do too much to encourage the growth of the species. While on the Continent, Addison produced several poems in praise of King William, written in the heroic couplet in which Dryden had achieved so much. In 1704 he celebrated in The Campaign l the battle of Blenheim. For this he was rewarded with the post of Commissioner of Appeals. His well-known hymns ' The spacious firmament on high,' and * The Lord my pasture shall prepare ' though the imagery is unreal, have yet a certain mingled sweetness and force about them, which will not let them be easily forgotten. His dra- matic and prose works will be noticed presently. 15. The poet Gay was also dependent on patrons, but they were in his case private noblemen, not ministers of State. This kindly-natured man, whom Pope describes as In wit a man, simplicity a child, belongs to the race of careless, thoughtless poets, described by Horace, 2 who are ill fitted to battle with the world. But the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry took him into their house during the later years of his life, and managed his affairs for 1 See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 12. 2 Eput. II. i. 119. 358 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. CHAP. V. him, thus relieving him from the embarrassments which beset him. He died at the early age of forty-four. Gay is the author of Rural Sports, a poem in heroic metre, answering to the description of the ' lesser epic ' ; of The Fan, a mock-heroic poem in three books, evidently suggested by Pope's Rape of the Lock ; of the Shepherd's Week, a burlesque upon the Pastorals of Ambrose Philips ; and of Trivia (1716), a sort of humorous didactic poem on the art of walking the streets of London. None of these poems rise above mediocrity, though each presents certain points of interest. It is in right of his inimitable songs and ballads that Gay's name still lives and will live. Among these are, 'All in the Downs,' 1 ''Twas when the seas were roaring,' the glori- ously absurd ballad of ' Molly Mog,' a story of a Quaker's courtship called ' The Espousal,' 'Newgate's Garland,' and others. His well-known Fables are neatly and flowingly turned, and that is all. 2 The ' Granville ' named in the extract in 6 was George Lord Lans- down, one of the twelve peers created by Harley in 1711 to reverse the majority in the House of Lords. He was grandson to the brave Sir Bevil Granville, who fell fighting for his king in the battle of Lansdown. His poems are generally short and seldom impressive ; many of them are addressed to ' Myra,' by whom Lady Newburgh was meant ; but the person really in his thoughts is believed often to have been Mary of Modena, for whom he had an enthusiastic admiration. He wrote several plays, of which The British Enchanters (1706) is the most important; it is in rime, with a great deal of singing, dancing, and other scenic embel- lishments ; in fact, it is a quasi opera. John Hughes, the son of a London citizen, wrote in heroic verse The Triumph of Peace (1697) and The Court of Neptune (1699), and a Pindaric ode called The House of Nassau; all three are mere Orange puffs in honour of King William. He was, as we shall see, a contributor to the Spectator, and also to the Toiler and the Guardian. There is a pleasant, demure kind of wit in his ' Advice to Mr. Pope ' on his translation of the Iliad. Homer, he says, sang to an age which praised him but gave him nothing ; do you proceed more prudently : If Britain his translated song would hear, First take the gold, then charm the listening ear ; So shall thy father Homer smile to see His pension paid, though late, and paid to thee. John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, afterwards Duke of Buckinghamshire, whose name has met us before, 3 is the author of a poem once greatly admired, the Essay on Poetry. 4 There is an amatory turn about most of his shorter pieces ; in many a reckless immorality. In satire he is some- times very successful ; the lines headed ' The election of a Poet Laureat ' (1719) are full of telling hits. A bigot is chosen, after much debate, who had long been known as 'a hater of verse and despiser of plays.' He accepts ; the poets are surprised : But the hypocrite told them, he well understood, Though the function was wicked, the stipend was good. 16. Parnell is now only remembered as the author of the i Extract Book, art. 135. 2 See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 25. 3 Ch. IV. 31. 4 Extract Book, art. 109. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 359 Hermit* a poem of which the design is to inculcate a belief that, in spite of adverse appearances, the events which befall beings endowed with free-will are all providentially pre-arranged. He was the friend of Harley, Earl of Oxford, to whom Pope sent the edition of his poems, of which he superintended the publication after his death, recommending them to the fallen statesman in a few graceful lines, musical but weighty, such as Pope alone could write. Matthew Green, a Nonconformist, is the author of a poem in Hudi- brastic verse called The Spleen (1737), giving remedies for low spirits. Tom D'Urfey, who lived to a great age, published a collection of his ballads, songs, sonnets, &c., in 1720, with the title Wit and Mirth, or Pills to purge Melancholy. Pope, in the Essay on Criticism, makes him the butt end of a comparison : From Dryden's Fables down to D'Urfey's Tales. 17. Swift, to whom Pope dedicated the Dunciad, in the well-known lines Oh ! thou, whatever title please thine ear, Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver ; Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air, Or laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair ; Or praise the court, or magnify mankind, Or thy grieved country's copper chains unbind was a copious writer in verse no less than in prose. His poems extend to nearly twice the length of those of Thomson, and consist of Odes, Epistles, Epigrams, Songs, Satires, and Epitaphs. Of Swift's poetry he has himself taken care that much should not be said in praise. A man of his powers could have written a great satire or didactic poem which would have delighted the world. But he loathed the world, and therefore did not wish to delight it ; and because the general taste of the age was in favour of the serious character and dignified movement of heroic verse, he carefully avoided that metre, and wrote nearly all his poetry in jingling, careless octosyllabics. Most of his poems, which are very numerous, are essentially of a fugitive character. Many short epigrammatic things were written with a diamond ring on inn- windows, a practice of which he was very fond. Many take the form of sallies and rejoinders, passing to and fro between the Dean and one or other of his lively Dublin friends. Many are addressed to Stella, 2 or written in her honour. One of the longest, Cadenus and Vanessa, 3 was addressed to Esther Vanhomrigh, the lady whose intellectual education was directed by Swift, and who conceived an ardent passion for him, 1 Extract Book, art. 128. 2 The real name of Stella was Hester Johnson ; this lady lived in Swift's house for twenty-eight years, but is said, even after her marriage to him in 1716, never to have seen him except before a third person. 3 Extract Book, art. 117. 360 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. which he described, while he checked, in this poem. The disappointment of her hopes, added to the discovery of his private marriage to Stella, brought poor Vanessa to her grave. A long and unclouded friendship subsisted between Swift and Pope ; they corresponded regularly, and their letters have been published. 18. James Thomson, the author of the Seasons, 1 was the son of a Scotch Presbyterian minister. Showing a bias to litera- ture, he was advised to repair to the great stage of London, ' a place too wide for the operation of petty competition and pri- vate malignity, where merit might soon become conspicuous, and would find friends as soon as' it became reputable to be- friend it.' 2 The proceeds of the sale of Winter (1726) were all that he had to depend upon for some time after his arrival in the metropolis. By degrees he acquired a reputation, and a fair share of patronage, from which only his invincible laziness prevented him from reaping greater benefit. Pope countenanced his tragedy of Agamemnon by coming to it the first night, and expressed his personal regard for him in a poetical epistle. Besides The Seasor^s, he wrote Liberty a tedious, high-flown production, which no one read, even at its first appearance; Britannia, an attack on Sir Robert Walpole's government; and The Castle of Indolence. 3 After Walpole's downfall he obtained a sinecure place through the influence of his friend Lyttleton, but did not long enjoy it, dying, after a short illness, in 1748. 19. Matthew Prior, a native of Dorsetshire, from an obscure origin rose to considerable eminence, both literary and political. In early life he was a "Whig, and first came into notice as the author, jointly with Charles Montague, of the City Mouse and Country Mouse. In 1701 he ratted to the Tories, and made himself so useful to the party as to be selected to manage several delicate negotiations with foreign Powers, in particular that which resulted in the treaty of Utrecht. His behaviour on this occasion exposed him, though it would appear unjustly, to heavy charges from the Whig ministry which came into power in 1714, and he was thrown into prison, and kept there for more than two years. His old associates probably regarded him as a renegade, and dealt out to him an unusual measure of severity. There is much that is sprightly and pointed in Prior's loyal odes, which he designed to rival those which Boileau was composing at the same time in honour of the Grand Monarque, Louis XIV. But it is in his epigrams and ' verses of society ' that Prior is most successful. How charmingly, 1 See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 47. 2 Johnson. 3 See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 24. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 361 for instance, has he turned the stanzas in which he describes his doubtful cure by Dr. Radcliffe, 1 or those upon a lady refusing to continue a dispute with him, or the lines upon ' The Lady's Looking-glass ' ! How manly, English, and sensible is the advice to a jealous husband in the ' Padlock ' not to immure his wife or set spies over her, as they did abroad, but give her free liberty to range over this wretched world, and see how hollow and false it is ! This poem ends with some far-famed lines : Be to her faults a little blind, Be to her virtues very kind ; Let all her ways be unconfined, And clap your padlock on her mind. In his longer poems Prior was less successful. His Henry and Emma, an amplified re-cast of the old ballad of The Nut-brojcn Mayde, is ad- mirably versified, and contains at least one line which is a part of our current sententious or proverbial speech : That air and harmony of shape express, Fine by degrees and beautifully less ; but most people would prefer to its artificial strains the greater brevity, directness, and distinctness of the old ballad. But the immense service which Dryden had rendered to English poetry, in imparting to the heroic couplet a smooth rapidity, as well as an air of lofty audacity, which it had not known before, is noticeable in all the best heroics of Prior and Addison. Alma, or the Progress of the Mind, in three cantos, is a satirical account in Hudibrastic verse of the vagaries with which the mind, at different periods of life, and acting through, or controlled by, different parts of the animal economy, troubles her possessor. There is something cynical, and tending to materialism, in the tone of this poem, which was written towards the close of Prior's life. His last and most ambitious effort was Solomon, a didactic poem in three parts. It is a soliloquy, and represents the royal sage as searching by turns through every province, and to the utmost bounds of knowledge, pleasure, and power, and finding in the end that all was ' vanity and vexation of spirit.' 20. Congreve the dramatist left a number of pretty songs, and some Pindaric poems of more or less merit. In a 'Dis- course on the Pindaric Ode ' prefixed to an ode addressed to Queen Mary, he drew attention to the fact that this kind of poetry had its metrical laws, and was not the mere chaotic fruit of lawless imagination, as English writers seemed to think ; in it the ' tria Stesichori,' the strophe, antistrophe, and epode, ought to be strictly observed. There is a pretty extra- vagance in the following distich : See, see, she wakes, Sabina wakes ! And now the sun begins to rise ; Less glorious is the morn that breaks From his bright beams, than her fair eyes. 1 Extract Book, art. 171G. 362 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. CHAP. V. With light united, day they give, But different fates ere night fulfil ; How many by his warmth will live ! How many will her coldness kill ! 21. Charles Montague (ante, ch. IV. 35), after being the leader of the House of Commons under William III., was created Earl of Halifax in 1714. His staunch Whiggism as- sumes a not unattractive form in The Man of Honour (1687), in which he shows that English gentlemen cannot stoop to do what James requires : Our lives and fortunes freely we'll expose, Honour alone we cannot, must not lose. Some manly lines, imitated from a passage in the sixth /Eneid, occur further on. Other nations, he says, may till a more fer- tile soil, and have more taste in the arts, than we : But to instruct the mind, to arm the soul With virtue which no dangers can control ; Exalt the thought, a speedy courage lend, That horror cannot shake, or pleasure bend : These are the English arts, these we profess, To be the same in misery and success ; To teach oppressors law, assist the good, Relieve the wretched, and subdue the proud. 22. Of 'well-natured Garth,' author of the mock-heroic poem, the Dispensary, the idea of which he took from Boileau's Lutrin, we can only say that he was a physician, and a staunch adherent to Eevolution principles during the reign of Anne, for which he was rewarded with a due share of professional emolument, when his party came into power in 1714. He was an original member of the Kit-cat Club, ' generally mentioned as a set of wits ; in reality, the patriots that saved Britain.' l The Dispensary is about a bitter quarrel which broke out in the year 1687, between the College of Physicians and the apothecaries, concerning the erection of a dispensary in London. Perhaps the subject is somewhat dull ; granting, however, that the conception was a good one, the execution lags considerably behind it ; as a whole, the poem is heavy, and far too long. 23. Sir i Richard Blackmore was another patriotic poet. He was the city physician, and was knighted by King William. Blackmore has met, chiefly from his own faults, with harder measure than he deserves. The sarcasms of Pope and Dryden raise the impression that Blackmore can never have written anything but what was lumbering, inane, and in the worst possible taste. Yet let any one, without prejudice, 1 Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 363 take up The Creation, and read a couple of hundred lines, and he will probably own that it is a very different sort of poem from what he had expected. It is by no means dull, or heavy, or soporific ; the lines spin along with great fluency and animation, though not exactly sparkling as they go. The plan is thoroughly conceived and digested, and the argu- ment ably and lucidly, if not always cogently, sustained. But Blackmore was ruined, as a literary man, by his enormous self-confidence and utter want of measure or judgment. He attacked with indiscriminating fury the atheists, free-thinkers, wits, and critics of his day, as if these names were interchangeable ; and naturally he met with no mercy from the two last. The characters of staunch Whig and somewhat narrow pietist are blended in him in the oddest manner. His lack of judgment is illustrated by his continuing to write and publish epic poems (Eliza, Alfred, Prince Arthur, &c.) long after the world had ceased to read them. Yet it would be unjust to judge by these of The Creation (1712), respecting which Addison's eulogy, 1 though it gives all the lights without the shadows, is not so entirely extravagant as it seems at first reading. 24. Defoe must be named in this connection, on account of his once famous satire, The True-born Englishman. His motive for writing it was the indignation which he felt at what he called English ingratitude, as showing itself in* the attacks continually made on William and his Dutch guards as foreigners, and in the peevish, discontented air which most Englishmen wore after so great a deliverance. The composition is of a very coarse kind ; and the satire stands to those of Dryden in about the same relation as the Morning Advertiser, the organ of the publicans, does to the Times. The strange opening is well known : Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The devil always builds a chapel there ; And 'twill be found upon examination, The latter has the largest congregation. This must be understood as ironical, for Defoe was himself a Dissenter. The vigorous lines entitled ' A Hymn to the Pillory ' - were written at the time when Defoe was condemned to that ignominious punishment for writing the ironical pamphlet, The SJiortest Way with the Dissenters. 25. Nicholas Rowe, whose translation of Lucan's Pharsalia Johnson, with hyperbolic praise, calls ' one of the greatest productions of English poetry,' wrote an 'Epistle to Flavia' (in which he attacks Dryden for having corrupted not only the stage, but the English language, by the 'crew of foreign words' which he had brought into it), and also some pastoral ballads which have much grace and melody. ' Colin's Complaint' is among these ; it opens Despairing beside a clear stream, A shepherd forsaken was laid ; And while a false nymph was his theme, A willow supported his head. One sees where Shenstone got his manner. 26. Thomas Tickell resided for many years at Oxford, being a fellow of Queen's College. Although a Whig and an adherent of Addison, he is the author of some spasmodic stanzas, worthy of the most uncompromis- ing upholder of the divine right of kings, entitled ' Thoughts occasioned 1 The Spectator, No. 339. = Extract Book, art. 114. 364 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. by a Picture of the Trial of Charles I.,' in which lines such as the follow- ing occur, Such boding thoughts did guilty conscience dart, A pledge of hell to dying Cromwell's heart ! Tickell's version of the first book of the Iliad has been already noticed. Among his other poems, which are not numerous, I find only two worth naming the ballad of ' Colin and Lucy,' and the memorial lines upon Addison. 1 The ballad is pretty, but the story improbable : Colin having jilted Lucy, she dies of a broken heart ; the coffin containing her remains meets the marriage procession ; the faithless Colin is struck with remorse, and dies immediately ; they occupy the same grave. Do not these lines sound like an echo from our nurseries ? I hear a voice you cannot hear, Which says I must not stay ; I see a hand you cannot see, Which beckons me away. 27. The unhappy history of Richard Savage has been detailed at length by Dr. Johnson in one of the longest and most masterly of his poetical biographies. 2 His life and character were blighted by the circumstances of his birth and rearing. To these he refers only too plainly and pointedly in his poem of The Bastard, a very forcible piece of writing containing a line often quoted : He lives to build, not boast, a generous race ; No tenth transmitter of a foolish face. His principal work was The Wanderer, a moral or didactic poem in five cantos (1729), containing many materials and rudiments of thought, half worked up as it were, which one recognises again, transformed after passing through the fiery crucible of a great mind, in Pope's Essay on Man. Savage, like most of the English poets of the eighteenth century, employed the heroic metre for the majority of his compositions, dazzled by the glory and success with which Dryden and Pope had employed it. 3 28. John Dyer, who after failing as a painter became a clergyman late in life, is, or was, known as the author of Grongar Hill (1727) and The Fleece (1757). The latter is in blank verse, and totally worthless ; the former, however, is a pretty poem of description and reflection, breathing that intoxicating sense of natural beauty which never fails to awaken in us some sympathy, and an answering feeling of reality. These lines may serve as a specimen : Ever charming, ever new, When will the landscape tire the view ? The fountain's fall, the river's flow, The woody valleys warm and low, The windy summit, wild and high, Roughly rushing on the sky ! The pleasant seat, the ruined tower, The naked rock, the shady bower ; The town and village, dome and farm, Each gives each a double charm, As pearls upon an Ethiop's arm. 1 Extract Book, art. 132. 2 Lives of the Poets. 3 Extract Book, art. 141. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 365 Lady Mary Pierrepont, daughter of a Duke of Kingston, married at twenty-two Mr. Edward Wortley Montagu. The love-letters between the pair, both before and after marriage, are some of the prettiest reading imaginable. But she found out eventually that she had thrown herself away on a cold-hearted, weak-minded man, who neither deserved nor could rightly value the treasure of her affection. She accordingly, after her daughter's marriage, broke up her English home, and lived nearly all the rest of her life abroad. She accompanied her husband to Constan- tinople when he was sent out as ambassador to the Porte in 1716. Here she observed the eastern practice of inoculation ; tried it successfully on her own little boy ; and, as every one knows, introduced it into England. This same son grew up to be a cause of shame and distress to her and all connected with him. Her Town Eclogues (1715), in the heroic metre, can still be read with pleasure. Her ' Verses to the Imitator of Horace's Satires,' written in conjunction with Lord Hervey, were their reply to Pope's ferocious attacks. Pope had in the most ridiculous manner made love to her ; she laughed at him ; and he never forgave her. Though the lord and lady cannot use words that burn and wound like those of the unscrupulous little poet, yet they give some rather hard blows ; calling him, amongst other things, A sign-post likeness of the human race, That is at once resemblance and disgrace. Lady Mary's works, with an interesting Memoir prefixed, were published by her grandson, Lord Wharncliffe, in 1837. 29. Ambrose Philips, a Cambridge man and a zealous Whig, became a hack writer in London. His Six Pastorals are rubbish ; nevertheless they were dogmatically praised, probably on party grounds, by Steele in the Guardian. This was in the year 1713. Pope, who some years be- fore had published pastorals that were really worth something, but had attracted scarcely any notice, in a later Guardian, No. 40, ironically con- tinued in the same tone, but by instituting a regular comparison between his own pastorals and those of Philips exposed effectually the silliness and emptiness of the latter. Philips, when he had discovered the cheat, was exceedingly angry, and is said to have hung up a rod at Button's (the club frequented by Addison), with which he threatened to chastise Pope. Thereby he but increased his punishment ; for Pope not only got Gay to write the burlesque mentioned above, in ridicule of the Six Pastorals, but affixed to his enemy the nickname of 'Namby-pamby Philips,' which is too just and appropriate ever to be forgotten while Philips himself is remembered. Ambrose also wrote the tragedy of The Distressed Mother, founded on the Andromaque of Racine ; this is named with partial praise by Addison in No. 335 of the Spectator ; it is the play which Sir Roger de Coverley sees performed on the night of his visit to the theatre. 30. John Philips wrote the Splendid Shilling, a mock-heroic poem in blank verse, in which the design of parodying the Paradise Lost is apparent. Cider and Blenheim are also in blank verse, a preference due to the author's serious admiration of the English epic. In fact, he seems to have been the earliest genuine literary admirer of Milton. Robert Blair, the son of a Scottish minister, is the author of The Grave, a didactic poem in blank verse. It is rather dismal reading. William Somervile, a Warwickshire gentleman of old family, wrote The Chase, a descriptive, and Ifobbinol, a pastoral poem, both in blank verse ; besides many fables and tales in the octosyllabic couplet, some of which are spirited enough. 366 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. V. 31. Isaac Watts, educated as a Dissenter, was employed for some years as an Independent minister ; but his health failed, and he was received into the house of a generous friend, Sir Thomas Abney, of Stoke Newington, where he spent the last thirty-six years of his life. He is the author of three books of Lyric Poems, or Horce Lyricce, mostly of a devotional and serious cast, though the friend of the Revolution and Hanoverian succes- sion comes out strongly here and there ; and of Divine Songs, for children. His Hymns and Spiritual Songs are the well-known ' Watts's Hymns.' l 32. Allan Ramsay, of Scotch extraction on his father's, of English on his mother's side, settled in Edinburgh as a wig-maker about the year 1710. He joined a society of wits and literary dilettanti called the Easy Club, and many of his pieces were composed to enliven their social gather- ings. His Evergreen is a collection of ancient Scottish poems. The work on which his reputation rests, The Gentle Shepherd, is a story of real country life in Scotland, in the form of a riming pastoral drama. 2 The dialect is the Lowland Scotch, and the sentiments natural and suitable to the persons represented ; the story is clearly told, and pleasing in itself ; in short, there is nothing to find fault with in the poem ; the only thing wanting is that life-giving touch of genius, which, present alike in the artificial pastorals of Pope and the artless songs of Burns, forbids true poetry to die. The Drama, 1700-1745 : Addison, Kowe, Thomson, Young, Southern, Steeleu Prose Comedy: Far- quhar, Vanbrugh, Gibber, Centlivre ; ' The Beggar's Opera.' 33. Since the appearance of Congreve's Mourning Bride, a tragedy of the old school, no tragic work had been produced deserving of mention up to the year 1713. By that time the classic drama of France, the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine, had become thoroughly known and appreciated in England ; and, in the absence of any native writers of great original power, it was natural that our dramatists, both in tragedy and comedy, should model their plays upon the French pattern. This is the case with Addison's celebrated tragedy of Goto? It was projected and partly written in the year 1703 ; but Addison had laid it aside, and only finished and brought it on the stage in 1713, at the urgent request of his political associates. Goto is in form a strictly classic play ; the unities are observed, and all admixture of comic matter is avoided, as carefully as in any play of Racine's. The brilliant prologue was written by Pope. The play met with signal success, be- cause it was applauded by both political parties, the Whigs cheering the frequent allusions to liberty and patriotism, the Tories echoing back the cheers, because they did not choose to be thought more friendly to tyranny than their opponents. 1 Extract Book, art. 124. 2 Ibid. art. 133. 3 See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 10, and Extract Book, art. 122. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 367 34. Rowe produced several tolerable tragedies, one of which, the Fair Penitent (1703), is a re-cast of Massinger's Fatal Doicry. His Jane Shore is an attempt to write a tragedy in the manner of Shakspere. Ulysses and Lady Jane Grey, and a comedy named The Biter, were failures. Thomson, the author of the Seasons, wrote the tragedy of Sophonisba (1727), 1 in the style of Cato. The success of this play is said to have been marred by a ridiculous circumstance. In the third act there is an absurdly flat line, Sophonisba ! Sophonisba, ! at the recital of which a wag in the pit called out, O Jemmy Thomson ! Jemmy Thomson, O ! The parody was for some days in every one's mouth, and made the continued representation of the play impossible. Young, the author of the Night Thoughts, wrote several tragedies, among which are Busiris (1719) and Revenge (1721) ; the latter still keeps possession of the stage. 35. Southern, an Irishman, produced, near the beginning of his long career, two tragedies, The Fatal Secret and Oroonoko (1692), which were popular for many years. He was notorious for his adroitness in dealing with managers and booksellers, whence he is addressed by Pope as Tom, whom Heaven sent down to raise The price of prologues and of plays. He is praised by Hallam for having been the first English writer to speak with abhorrence, in his Oroonoko, of the slave trade. However, neither the thoughts nor the style of his tragedies rise above the com- monplace. 36. Steele's comedies of TJie Tender Husband and The Conscious Lovers (1721), produced at a long interval of time, achieved a marked success. The plot of the last-named play is slight, and has few or no turns ; but there is a good recognition scene at the end. The humour of the editor of the Tatler is not wanting ; take for instance this little passage from the fifth act : Myrtle. But is he directly a trader at this time ? Cimberton. There is no hiding the disgrace, sir j he trades to all parts of the world. Myrtle. We never had one of our family before, who descended from persons that did anything. 37. The ' Comedy of Manners,' in prose, of which the first suggestion clearly came from the admirable works of Moliere, 1 Thomson also wrote the tragedies of Agamemnon (1738) and Tancred and Sirjismunda (1745), and the masque of Alfred (1740). In this last piece, to which Mallet contributed some portion, the famous song ' Rule Britannia ' first appeared. 368 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. Y. had been successfully tried, as we have seen, by Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve, in the preceding period. To the same school of writers belonged, in this period, Farquhar, Vanbrugh, and Gibber. Farquhar, a native of Londonderry, is the author of The Constant Couple (1700), Sir Harry Wil- dair (1701), and The Beaux' Stratagem, the latter written on the bed of sickness to which neglect and want had brought him, and from which he sank into an untimely grave in his thirtieth year. Sir John Vanbrugh wrote the famous come- dies of The Provoked Wife and The Provoked Husband, the latter being left unfinished at his death and completed by Gibber. Colley Gibber, a German by extraction, was not only a dramatist, but an actor and theatrical manager. He has left us, in the Apology for My own Life, published in 1740, an amusing account of his own bustling, frivolous existence, as well as of the state of the stage from the Restoration down to his own time, adding lifelike sketches of the principal actors and actresses. His play of The Nonjuror (1718), altered by Bickersteth so as to assail the Dissenters instead of the Non- jurors, and renamed The Hypocrite, contains the celebrated characters of Dr. Cantwell and Mawworm. Mrs. Centlivre produced a number of comedies in the same period, which commanded a temporary popularity. The best of these (and a truly excellent comedy it is) is A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718); in it first appears that well-known person- age, the * real Simon Pure.' As an acting play, the Busy Body also has great merit ; one of the characters is an inqui- sitive, meddlesome, blundering fellow called Marplot ; hence comes that now familiar word. The Siege of Damascus, a tragedy, by John Hughes, was received with great applause on the same day on which the author died. There seems to be little either in the thoughts or the diction that rises above the com- monplace ; but probably it is a good acting play, with telling situations. 38. In the work of Gibber just mentioned there is a com- plaint that the Continental taste for opera had lately extended to England, to the detriment of the legitimate drama. Gay's Beggar's Opera was a clever attempt to gratify this taste by an operatic production truly British in every sense. The subject is the unhappy loves of Captain Macheath, the chief of a gang of highwaymen, and Polly Peachum, the daughter of a worthy who combines the functions of thief-taker and receiver of stolen goods. The attractiveness of the piece was greatly en- hanced by the introduction of a number of beautiful popular airs ; indeed, but for these the coarseness of the plot and the 170U-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 369 grossness of much of the language would have ere now condemned it, in spite of all its wit and drollery. There is no recitative, as in a modern opera ; its place is supplied by colloquial prose. The opera was first produced, with enormous applause, in 1727. Henry Brooke, the singularly clever son of an Irish Protestant clergy- man, went to London in 1724 to study law, and was much petted by Pope, Lyttelton, and other literary men. He sided eagerly with the party opposed to Sir Robert Walpole ; and a tragedy which he produced about 1740, Gustavus Vasa, was prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain on account of the violently democratic, almost republican, spirit pervading it. Thus he writes (act i. sc. 1) Wherefore this, good Heaven ? Is it of fate that, who assumes a crown, Throws off humanity ? In the first edition of the play was the line Who rules o'er freemen should himself be free ! Dr. Johnson, who loved the Hanoverian family as little as Brooke, but for a different reason, made on this the parody : Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat. (See Life by Boswell, iv. 284.) Learning, 1700-1745 : Bentley, Lardner. 39. The greatest of English scholars flourished at the same time with Pope and Swift, and fell under the satire of both. Richard Bentley was a native of Yorkshire, and received his education at Cambridge, where he rose to be Master of Trinity College in 1700. The famous controversy between him and Boyle on the Epistles of Phalaris occurred in the last years of the seventeenth century, but we delayed to notice it until we could present a general view of Bentley's literary career. The dispute arose in this way : Sir William Temple, 1 taking up the discussion which had been carried on between Boileau and Perrault on the comparative merits of ancient and modern authors, sided with Boileau against the moderns, and, amongst other things, adduced the Epistles of Phalaris (which he sup- posed to be the genuine production of the tyrant of Agri- gentum, who roasted Perillus in a brazen bull) as an instance of a work which in its kind was unapproached by any modern writer. Dr. Aldrich, author of the well-known Treatise on Logic, who was then Dean of Christ Church, was induced by Temple's praise to determine upon preparing a new edition of 1 Temple wrote many works, which were published in four volumes in 1770 ; but, apart from the historical Memoirs, from 1672 to 1681, there is little in them of much value. He was a courtier and also a prudent Whig ; and succeeded but ill, as Macaulay shows in his brilliant essay, in reconciling the two characters. 2 A 3?o HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. V. the Epistles for the press. He committed this task to young Charles Boyle, grandson of Roger, Earl of Orrery, and great nephew of the celebrated natural philosopher, Eobert Boyle. A MS. in the King's Library, of which Bentley was then librarian, had to be consulted. Bentley, though he lent the MS., is said to have behaved ungraciously in the matter, and refused sufficient time for its collation. In the preface to his edition of the Epistles, which appeared in 1695, Boyle com- plained of the alleged discourtesy. Bentley then examined the Epistles carefully ; and the result was that when Wotton, in reply to Temple, published his Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning, a dissertation was appended to the work, in which Bentley demonstrated that the Epistles could not pos- sibly be the work of Phalaris, but were the forgery of a later age. In proving his point he was lavish of the supercilious and contemptuous language to which his arrogant temper naturally impelled him. Nettled at this sharp attack, the Oxford scholars clubbed their wits and their learning together \ Atterbury (who was Boyle's tutor), Smallridge, and Eriend had each a hand in the composition of the reply, which, published still under the name of Boyle, was expected to establish Phalaris in the authorship of the Epistles, and to cover Bentley with con- fusion. For a long time the great critic was silent; he was supposed to be vanquished, and to feel that he was so. But in 1699 appeared the Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, the finest piece of erudite criticism that has ever proceeded from an English pen. By an analysis of the language of the Epistles, Bentley proved that they were written, not in Sicilian, but in Attic Greek, and that of a period many centuries later than the age of Phalaris ; while, by bringing to bear his intimate know- ledge of the whole range of Greek literature upon various topo- graphical and historical statements which they contained, he' demonstrated that towns were named which were not built, and events alluded to which had not occurred, in the lifetime of their reputed author. The controversy was now at an end ; his opponents promised a reply, but it was never forthcoming. Bentley, however, with all his wit and penetration, was without that realising power of imagination which the greatest German critics of our days, such as the brothers Grimm, have united to the former qualities ; he was an acute, but not a genial critic. His edition of the Paradise Lost, published in 1732, is an astonishing production. Pope's lines upon it in the Dunciad Not that I'd tear all beauties from his book, Like slashing Bentley, with his desperate hook 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 371 are not too severe. Among his other works are editions of Horace and Terence, to the latter of which is prefixed a valu- able dissertation on the Terentian metres. 40. Nathaniel Lardner, a dissenting divine, published, be- tween 1730 and 1757, a bulky work, the fruit of great learning and painstaking research, entitled the Credibility of the Gospel History. Lardner was himself an Arian, but his book fur- nished Paley afterwards with the materials for his popular View of the Evidences of Christianity. Thomas Hearne, the son of a parish clerk in Berkshire, was sent up to Oxford at the expense of a discerning patron, for whom he had done some work ; and, obtaining after a time the post of sub-librarian at the Bodleian, spent the rest of his life at the University, and rose to the well-deserved distinction of being the first archaeologist and antiquarian of his day. A sturdy Jacobite, he resigned his post on the accession of George I. rather than take the oaths to a Hanoverian prince. His literary industry seems to have been sufficient for his support. He is known as the editor of Robert of Gloucester and Robert de Brunne, of Alfred of Beverley, of Leland's Collectanea, &c. Thomas Tanner, a Wiltshire man, after holding a fellowship at All Souls, and a canonry at Christ Church, was appointed Bishop of St. Asaph in 1732. His Notitia Monastica, which contains in an abridged form the material portions of the information given in Dugdale's Monasticon, arranged by counties, appeared after his death in 1744. His Bibliotheca Britannico-Hlbcrnica (1748) is a valuable dictionary (in Latin) of British and Irish writers, from the earliest times to the beginning of the seven- teenth century. Prose Fiction, Oratory, Pamphlets, Miscellanies, 1700- 1745 : Swift, Defoe, Steele, Addison. 41. Under the first head we have Swift's satirical romance (first published anonymously in 1726), the* Travels of Lemuel Gulliver, including the Voyages to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, La- puta, and the country of the Houyhnlmms. The first sketch of the work occurs in Martinus Scrillerus, the joint produc- tion of Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot. But Swift soon took the sole execution of the idea into his own hands, and renouncing personal satire, to which Pope was so much addicted, made this extraordinary work the vehicle for his generalising con- tempt and hatred of mankind. This tone of mind, as Scott observes, gains upon the author as he proceeds, until, in the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, he can only depict his fellow-men under the degrading and disgusting lineaments of the Yahoos. TJie True History of Lucian and Rabelais' Voyage of Panta- fjruel furnished Swift with a few suggestions, but, in the main, this is a purely original work. 372 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. CHAP. V. 42. Internal peace and security, prolonged through many years, while enormously augmenting the national wealth, occa- sioned the rise, about the middle of the present period, of that large class of readers to whom so much of modern literature is addressed persons having leisure to read, and money to buy books, but who demand from literature rather amusement than instruction, and care less for being excited to think than for being made to enjoy. The stage, especially after Jeremy Collier's attacks upon it, became ever less competent to satisfy the wants of this class, or gratify this new kind of intellectual appetite. The periodical miscellany, the rise of which will be described presently, was the first kind of provision made for this purpose. When Addison and his numerous imitators had written themselves out, and the style had become tiresome, a new and more permanent provision arose in the modern novel. The first of the English novelists l was Daniel Defoe, born in 1661. After a long and busy career as a political writer, he was verging on his sixtieth year when, as a sort of relaxation from his serious labours, he tried his hand at prose fiction. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, -founded on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor cast by a shipwreck on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez, appeared in 1719. It was followed by Religious Courtship, The History of Colonel Jack, Memoirs of a Cavalier, Moll Flanders, Captain Singleton, and several others. It was Defoe's humour to throw the utmost possible air of reality over every one of his fictions, so as to palm it off on the reader as a narrative of facts. Thus the famous physician Dr. Mead is said to have been deceived by the pretended Journal of the Great -Plague, and Lord Chat- ham to have recommended the Memoirs of a Cavalier as the best authentic account of the civil war. 43. No oratory worthy of notice dates from this period. On the other hand, pamphleteers and political satirists abounded. On the Whig side, Defoe wrote an ironical pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), which the House of Commons, then running over with Tory and High Church feeling, voted scandalous and seditious ; he was fined, pilloried, and imprisoned. From the same cause several of his other political writings were at the time considered libellous, and exposed him to persecution ; to escape which, he, late in ' life, renounced political discussion, and indemnified himself for 1 This description is not, I think, impugned by the fact that Mrs. Aphra Behn, in the reign of Charles II. , published several short stories or novelettes (Oroonoko, The fair Jilt, Agnes de Castro, &c.), not one of which attains the length of a hundred pages. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 373 being debarred ffom describing the busy world of fact by creating a new world, in semblance hardly less real, out of his own prolific fancy. On the Tory side more powerful pens were engaged. No pamphlet ever produced a greater im- mediate effect than Swift's Conduct of the Allies, written in 1712, in order to persuade the nation to a peace. 'It is boasted that between November and January eleven thousand were sold; a great number at that time, when we were not yet a nation of readers. To its propagation certainly no agency of power and influence was wanting. It furnished arguments for conversation, speeches for debate, and materials for parlia- mentary resolutions.' l This was followed by Reflections on the Barrier Treaty, published later in the same year, and The Public Spirit of the Whigs, written in answer to Steele's Crisis, in 1714. The Examiner, which had been commenced by Prior, and had provoked Addison to start a counter publication in the Whig Examiner, was taken up by Swift soon after his introduction to Harley in October 1710, and continued till about the middle of the next year. In all these productions Swift, who had commenced life as a Whig, writes with the usual rancour of a political renegade. Differently aimed, but equally effective, were the famous Drapier's Letters. The fol- lowing were the circumstances which gave occasion to them : Since the Treaty of Limerick, in 1691, Ireland had been treated in many respects as a conquered country. This was indeed unreservedly and openly the case, so far as the mass of the population were concerned ; but the Irish Protestants also were compelled to share in the national humiliation. When some enterprising men had established, about the year 1700, an Irish woollen manufacture, the commercial jealousies of England were aroused, and an act was passed, which, by pro- hibiting the exportation of Irish woollens to any other country but England, destroyed the rising industry. This was but one out of a number of oppressive acts under which Irishmen chafed, but in vain. Swift's haughty temper rose against the indignities offered to his country, and he only waited for an opportunity to 'strike a blow. That opportunity was given by the proceedings connected with Wood's contract for supplying a copper coinage, to circulate only in Ireland. Commercially speaking, it was ultimately proved that the new coinage was calculated to benefit Ireland, not to injure her. The coins were assayed at the Mint, under the superintendence of no less a person than Sir Isaac Newton, and proved to be of the proper 1 Johnson's Life of Swift. 374 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEEATUKE. CHAP. Y. weight and fineness. But the way in which the thing was done was, and deservedly, the cause of offence. The privilege of coining money, which had always been considered to apper- tain to the royal prerogative, was in this instance, without the consent or even knowledge of the Lord Lieutenant or the Irish Privy Council, delegated to an obscure Englishman, who had obtained the preference over other competitors by paying court to the king's mistress. It was this heaping of insult upon injury which excited the ferment in the Irish mind, of which the memorable Drapier availed himself. The first letter appeared some time in the year 1724. In it [and the two following letters Swift artfully confined himself to those ob- jections and accusations which were open to the perception of all classes of the people. He declared that the new coins were of base) metal; he pulled Wood's character to pieces; he asserted that the inevitable consequence of the introduction of the new coinage would be the disappearance of all the gold and silver from Ireland. Such charges as these came home to the feelings and understanding of the lowest and most ignorant of his readers, and the excitement which they caused was tremendous. In the fourth and following letters Swift followed up the attack by examining the general question of the wrongs and humiliations which Ireland had to suffer from England. A proclamation was vainly issued by the Irish Government, offering a reward of .300 to any one who would disclose the author of the Drapier's fourth letter. The danger was great, but Sir Robert Walpole was equal to the occasion. He first tried a compromise, but without success, and then wisely cancelled the obnoxious contract. From this period to his death Swift was the idol of the Irish people. He said once to a Protestant dignitary, in the course of an altercation, * If I were but to hold up my little finger, the mob would tear you to pieces.' 44. Arbuthnot, the joint author, with Pope and Swift, of Martinus Scriblerus, of whom Swift exclaimed, ' Oh, if the world had a dozen Arbuthnots, I would burn my [Gulliver's] Travels ! ' wrote, about the year 1709, the telling political satire named the History of John Bull, levelled against the Godolphin ministry. The great war in which Europe was involved was repre- sented by a law-suit carried on by John Bull against my Lord Strutt (the king of Spain) : Nicholas Frog and Esquire South (the Dutch Republic and the Emperor) being parties to the suit on the one side, John paying their expenses ; and Lewis Baboon (the king of France) on the other. John Bull's .1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 375 attorney, Humphrey Hocus (Duke of Marlborough), contrives so to manage his suit for him as to plunge him into a bottomless gulf of expense. Addison replied with The Late Trial and Conviction of Count Tariff (1713), an attack on the Tory ministry for submitting to disadvantageous terms at the Peace of Utrecht. But the humour here is not so broad and hearty as in the History of John Bull, which yet evidently served it for a model. 45. From this period dates the rise of the periodical miscel- lany. 1 To Richard Steele, an Irishman, who was employed by the Whig Government to write the Gazette during the Spanish succession war, the nature of his employment suggested the design of the Tatler, a tri-weekly sheet, giving the latest items of news, and following them up with a tale or essay. To this periodical Addison soon began to contribute papers, and continued to write for it nearly to the end. The first number appeared on the 22nd April 1709, the last on the 2nd January 1711. The success of the Tatler being decisive, it was followed up by the Spectator (1711-12), the plan of which, 'as far as it regards the feigned person of the author and of the several persons who compose his club, was projected ' by Addison c in concert with Sir Richard Steele.' 2 In the first number, which was from the pen of Addison, the imaginary projector of the undertaking gives a portrait of himself that is full of strokes of delicate humour. From childhood, he says, he had ' distinguished himself by a most profound silence,' and in mature age lived in the world ' rather as a Spectator of mankind than as one of the species.' He announces his intention of publishing 'a sheet- full of thoughts ' every morning ; repudiates political aims ; declares that he will preserve a tone and character of rigid impartiality ; invites epistolary assistance from the public ; and requests that letters may be addressed to the Spectator at 'Mr. Buckley's in Little Britain.' No. 2, by Steele, contains sketches of the different persons composing the Spectator's club ; (literature supposed itself hardly able to hold its ground in those days without its clubs ;) the fine old country gentle- man, Sir Roger de Coverley ; the retired merchant, Sir Andrew Freeport; Capt. Sentry, the old soldier; Will Honeycomb, the beau; besides a stage-bitten barrister, and a clergyman. There is no doubt that Addison believed himself to be engaged in an important work, tending to humanise and elevate his 1 Usually, but not very correctly, called the periodical essay; a word which can hardly be stretched so as to include the allegories, sketches of manners and characters, tales, gossipping letters, &c., with which the Tatler and Spectator abound. 3 See the preface to Addison's works, by Tickell. 376 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. countrymen : ' It was said of Socrates that he brought philo- sophy down from heaven to inhabit among men ; and I should be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought philo- sophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.' l By turning to fresh intellectual fields the minds of the upper classes the people in good society to whom the theatre was now a forbidden or despised excitement, Addison did without doubt allay much restlessness, still or amuse many feverish longings. The millennium, it seemed, was not to come yet awhile ; the fifth monarchy was not to be yet established ; no, nor was the world to become a great Armida's garden of pleasure and jollity ; nor did blind loyalty to the true prince commend itself now even to the heart, much less to the reason. Eobbed of its ideals, disenchanted, and in heavy cheer, the English mind, though not profoundly interested, read these pleasant chatty discoursings about things in general, and allowed itself to be amused, and half forgot its spiritual per- plexities. Nothing was settled by these papers, nothing really probed to the bottom ; but they taught, with much light grace and humour, lessons of good sense, tolerance, and moderation ; and their popularity proved that the lesson was relished. As the Tatler professed to be written by ' Isaac Bickerstaffe Esquire,' so the nominal author of the Guardian was ' Nestor Ironside Esquire.' In No. 98 Addison humorously describes the three periodicals in which he had borne a part : 'The first who undertook to instruct the world in single papers was Isaac Bickerstaffe of famous memory. A man nearly related to the family of the Ironsides. We have often smoked a pipe together, for I was so much in his books, that at his decease he left me a silver standish, a pair of spectacles, and the lamp by which he used to write his lucubrations. ' The venerable Isaac was succeeded by a gentleman of the same family, very memorable for the shortness of his face 2 and of his speeches. This ingenious author published his thoughts, and held his tongue, with great applause, for two years together. ( I, Nestor Ironside, have now for some time undertaken to fill the place of these my two renowned kinsmen and prede- cessors. For it is observed of every branch of our family, that we have all of us a wonderful inclination to give good advice, though it is remarked of some of us that we are apt on this occasion rather to give than take.' The Spectator extended to 635 numbers, including the eighty of the resumed issue in 1714. Upon its suspension in 1 Spectator, No. 10. 2 See Nos. 3 and 101 of the Spectator. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 377 December 1712, the Guardian took its place. Of the 271 papers in the Tatler, Steele wrote 188, Addison 42, and both conjointly 36. Of 635 Spectators, Addison wrote 274, Steele 240, Eustace Budgell 1 37, and John Hughes 11; and of 175 Guardians, Steele wrote 82, and Addison 53. Several Tatlers were contributed by Swift, and a few Spectators and Guardians by Pope. Among the subjects treated of in the Spectator are the following : Masquerades, clubs, operas, vulgar superstitions, ghosts, devotees, the shortness of life (in the famous * Vision of Mirzah,' No. 159), and the poetical merits of Milton's Paradise Lost, in an elaborate criticism, extending over seven- teen numbers, written by Addison. 46. At the end of 1715 Addison commenced writing the Freeholder, at the rate of two papers a week, and continued it till the middle of the next year. ' This was undertaken in the defence of the established Government ; sometimes with argument, sometimes with mirth. In argument he had many equals, but his humour was singular and matchless. Bigotry itself must be delighted with the Tory fox-hunter.' 2 The daily miscellany passed by insensible degrees into in- ferior hands, and at last became insufferably dull. From the nature of the case, intellectual gifts are required to recommend this style, with which the novel can dispense. There are ten persons who can write a tale which people will read, for one who can compose a passable criticism, or a jeu d'esprit, or seize the fugitive traits of some popular habit, vice, or caprice. Even the importation of politics, as in the Freeholder, failed to give a permanent animation. So, after the town had been deluged for some time with small witticisms and criticisms that had no point or sap in them, the style was agreed on all hands to be a nuisance, and was discontinued. Some years later it was revived by Dr. Johnson, as we shall see. Works of Satire and Humour : Swift. 47. It will be remembered 3 that Swift's patron, Sir William Temple, took a leading part in the discussion upon the relative merits of ancient and modern authors. Swift himself struck in 1 Budgell was a kinsman of Addison, who behaved towards him with great and steady kindness. His papers in the Spectator are signed with the letter X, those in the Guardian with an asterisk. In 1733 he set up a weekly paper called The Bee ; but it was soon dropped. A satirical couplet in the Prologue to the Satires of Pope refers to the forgery of Dr. Tindal's will, which Budgell was believed to have been guilty of. Soon after this he committed suicide. 2 Johnson. 3 g ee p> 359. 37S HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. CHAP. V. on the same side, in the brilliant satire of the Battle of the Books, 1 which was written in 1697, but not published till 1704. In this controversy the great wits, both in France and England, were all of one mind in claiming the palm for the ancients. In the reaction towards the mediaeval and Gothic antiquity which marked the close of the last and the beginning of the present century, this enthusiasm for Greece and Rome was much abated. At present there are symptoms of a partial revival of the feeling. 48. The Tale of a Tub was also published in 1704, though written in 1696. The title is explained by Swift to mean that, as sailors throw out a tub to a whale, to keep him amused, and prevent him from running foul of their ship, so, in this treatise, his object is to afford such temporary diversion to the wits and free-thinkers of the day (who drew their arguments from the Leviathan of Hobbes) as may restrain them from injuring the State by propagating wild theories in religion and politics. The allegory of the three brothers, and the general character and tendency of this extraordinary book, will be examined in the second part of the present work. 2 History, 1700-1745 : Burnet, Rapin. 49. Burnet's History of His Own Times, closing with the year 1713, was published soon after his death in 1715. Burnet was a Scotchman, and a very decided Whig. Exiled by James II., he attached himself to the Prince of Orange, and was actively engaged in all the intrigues which paved the way for the Revo- lution. The History of His Own Times, though ill-arranged and inaccurate, is yet, owing to its contemporary character, a valuable original source of information for the period between the Restoration and 1713. 3 Rapin, a French refugee, published in 1725 the best complete history of England that had as yet appeared. It was translated twice, and long remained a standard work. Dr. White Kennett, who rose to be Bishop of Peterborough, was an indefatigable worker in the fields of history and archaeology. His History of Ambrosden and Burcester (1695), one of the first examples of a topographical monograph, is a local investigation of rare interest and value. He wrote the third of a set of three folio volumes (1706) containing the general history of England down to 1702. In his narrative of the times of Charles II. Kennett's drift was, according to his critic Roger North, to show that that king's whole reign ' was but a series of court tricks to introduce i See Grit. Sect. ch. II. 7. 2 Ibid. 6. 3 Extract Book, art. 112. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 379 popery, tyranny, and arbitrary power.' This history was minutely criti- cised in a hostile spirit by Roger North (the biographer of his three brothers, Lord Guildford, Sir Dudley North, and the Rev. Dr. John North), in a work called, Examen, or an enquiry into the credit and veracity of a Pretended Complete History (]740). North does all in his power to vindicate the memory of Charles II. and to relieve his government from the imputations heaped upon it. John Strype, a plodding German clergyman, naturalised in England, wrote several folio volumes between 1694 and 1718, containing the Lives of the men most instrumental in the change of religion in England, viz. Cranmer, Sir T. Smith, Sir John Cheke, Parker, Grindal, and Whitgift. He is also the author of Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion (1709-28), but it is a dull and confused production. Of the theology and philosophy of the period we reserve our sketch till after we have examined the progress of general literature between 1745 and 1800. Johnson. Poetry, 1745-1800 : Gray, Gloyer, Aken- side, Young, Shenstone, Collins, Mason, Warton, Churchill, Falconer, Chatterton, Beattie, Gold- smith, Cowper, Burns, Darwin, Wolcot, Gifford, Bloomfield. 50. The grand yet grotesque figure of Samuel Johnson holds the central place among the writers of the second half of the eighteenth century. In all literary reunions he took the un- disputed lead, by the power and brilliancy of his conversation, which, indeed, as recorded by Boswell, is a more valuable pos- session than any, or all, of his published works. His influence upon England was eminently conservative ; his manly good sense, his moral courage, his wit, readiness, and force as a dis- putant, were all exerted to keep English society where it was, and prevent the ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau from gaining ground. His success was signal. Not that there were wanting on the other side either gifted minds, or an impressible audience ; Hume, Gibbon, and Priestley were sceptics of no mean order of ability ; and Boswell's own example l shows that, had there been no counteracting force at work, an enthusiastic admiration for Rousseau might easily have become fashionable in England. But while Johnson lived and talked, the revolutionary party could never gain that mastery in the intellectual arena, and that ascendency in society, which it had obtained in France. After his death the writings of Burke carried on the sort of conservative propaganda which he had initiated. Johnson was born at Lichfield in the year 1709. His father 1 See Hume's Autobiography. 380 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEEATUEE. CHAP. V. was a native of Derbyshire, but had settled in Lichfield as a bookseller. After having received the rudiments of a clas- sical education at various country schools, he was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford, in the year 1728. His father about this time suffered heavy losses in business, in consequence of which Johnson had to struggle for many years against the deepest poverty. ISTor was either his mental or bodily con- stitution so healthful and vigorous as to compensate for the frowns of fortune. He seems to have inherited from his mother's family the disease of scrofula, or the king's evil, for which he was taken up to London, at the age of three years, to be touched by Queen Anne the ancient superstition con- cerning the efficacy of the royal touch not having then wholly died out. His mind was a prey during life to that most mysterious malady, hypochondria, which exhibited itself in a morbid melancholy, varying at different times in intensity, but never completely shaken off and also in an incessant haunt- ing fear of insanity. Under the complicated miseries of his condition, religion constantly sustained him, and deserted him not, till, at the age of seventy-five, full of years and honours, his much-tried and long-suffering soul was released. In his boyhood, he tells us, he had got into a habit of wandering about the fields on Sundays, reading, instead of going to church, and the religious lessons early taught him by his mother were considerably dimmed. But at Oxford the work of that excellent man, though somewhat cloudy writer, William Law, entitled A Serious Gall to a Holy Life, fell into his hands, and made so profound an impression upon him that from that time forward, though he used to lament the shortcomings in his practice, re- ligion was ever, in the main, the actuating principle of his life. After leaving Oxford he held a situation as undermaster in a grammar-school for some months. But this was a kind of work for which he was utterly unfitted, and he was compelled to give it up. He went to Birmingham, where he obtained some trifling literary work. In 1735 he married a Mrs. Porter, a widow, and soon afterwards, as a means of subsistence, opened a boarding-school, in which, however, he failed. He now re- solved to try his fortune in London. He settled there with his wife in 1737, and supported himself for many years by writing principally by his contributions to the Gentleman's Magazine, which had been established by Cave about the year 1730, and is still carried on. His Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1747. The price stipu- lated for from the booksellers was .1575, and the work was to be completed in three years. The Rambler, a series of 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 381 papers on miscellaneous subjects, on the model of the Spectator, was commenced by him in 1750, and concluded in 1752. This and various other works, which appeared from time to time, joined to his unrivalled excellence as a talker, which made his company eagerly sought after by persons of all ranks, gradually won for Johnson a considerable reputation ; and, after the accession of George III., he received, through the kindness of Lord Bute, a pension of 300 a year. This was in 1762. He continued to reside in London with but short intervals, on the occasions of his tours to the Hebrides, to Wales, and to France till his death in 1784. 51. Johnson's works excepting the Dictionary, a tragedy called Irene, a few poems, the Lives of the Poets, 1 some other biographies, and a short novel, the famous Rasselas consist of essays, very multifarious in their scope, discussing questions of politics, manners, trade, agriculture, art, and criticism. The bulk of these were composed for the Rambler, the Idler, and the Adventurer. His way of writing, cumbrous," antithetical, and pompous, yet in his hands'possessing generally great dignity and strength, and sometimes even, as in Rasselas, rising to remarkable beauty and nobleness, was so influential upon the men of his day that it caused a complete revolution, for a time, in English style. The change was not for the better; since inferior men, though they could easily appropriate its pecu- liarities or defects its long words, its balanced clauses, its laboured antitheses could not with equal ease emulate its excellences. Among Johnson's poems, London? an imitation of the third satire of Juvenal, and the fine didactic poem on The Vanity of Human Wishes? a free version of the tenth satire of the same poet, in which Charles XII. of Sweden is substituted for Hannibal, are the most deserving of notice. The lines on Shakspere, 2 which he wrote for Garrick, are in the same sounding and rather ponderous style. The verses on the death of Levet 2 show the softness of the strong man's heart. 52. Gray, the son of a scrivener in London, was educated and lived the greater part of his life at Cambridge. In the small volume of his poems there are several pieces which have gained a permanent place in our literature. The Bard? the Progress of Poesy, and the Ode On a distant Prospect of Eton College, 4 ' are all, in their different ways, excellent. As a writer he was indolent and fastidious ; to the former quality we pro- bably owe it that his writings are so few, to the latter that 1 See Grit. Sect. ch. II. 30. 2 Extract Book, art. 146. 3 See Crit. Sect. ch. I. 57. 4 Extract Book, art. 150. 382 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAI>. V. many of them are so excellent. The famous Elegy in a Country Churchyard 1 was first published in a magazine in 1750. The melancholy beauty of these lovely lines is enhanced by the severity and purity of the style. 53. Richard Glover, the son of a London merchant, produced the first edition of his blank verse epic, Leonidas, in 1737. It has not much merit, but at the time of its first appearance was extravagantly praised for political and party reasons ; since every high-flown sentiment in praise of patriotism, disinterestedness, and love of liberty was interpreted by the Opposition into a damning reflection on the corrupt practices, and the truckling spirit towards foreigners, by which Sir Robert Walpole's govern- ment was supposed to be characterised. In its present finished state, as a poem of twelve books, it first came out in 1770. The Athenaid, a sequel to the Leonidas, and in the same metre, but extending to thirty books, was published after the author's death in 1785 : it is a dull versified chronicle of the successes gained by the Athenians in the Persian war. The ballad of Hosier's Ghost 2 is still remembered for its fire and music, though we cannot enter into the political animosity that dictated it. Glover also wrote London, or the Progress of Commerce, and a poem ' to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton.' 54. Mark Akenside was the son of a butcher at Newcastle-on-Tyne The poem by which he is best known, the Pleasures of Imagination (1744), was suggested by a series of papers on the same subject (Nos. 41] -421), contributed by Addison to the Spectator. But the analysis of the pleasur- able feelings which are awakened in the mind by whatever excites the imagination, though suitable enough as a subject for an essay, becomes insupportable when carried on through a poem of more than two thousand blank verses. Akenside had no sense of humour and no wit, but was an ardent lover of [nature ; he may be called a second-rate Wordsworth, whose style that of some of his Odes much resembles. He was an ardent politician, and attached himself to the faction which, assuming the name of 'the patriots,' inveighed so long against the government of Sir Robert Walpole. Finding, after Sir Robert's fall, that everything remained much the same as before, Akenside wrote his Epistle to Curio** (1744), in which, addressing Pulteney, he charges him with having betrayed the just expectations of the country ; this was afterwards altered into the Ode to Curio. Lord Macaulay, exaggerating as was his wont, calls the Epistle the best thing that Akenside ever wrote, but sets down the Ode as worthless. 55. The Night Thoughts 4 " of Young appeared between the years 1742 and 1746. This didactic poem, which has been read and praised beyond its deserts, is in blank verse, and is said to have been inspired by the melancholy into which the poet was plunged by the death, within three years, of his wife and her two children. Moralising forms the staple of the poem, just as philosophising forms the staple of Wordsworth's Excursion, and microscopic description of Crabbe's Borough; but tales are inserted here and there by way of episode, just as in the 1 Extract Book, art. 150. 2 Ibid, art. 147. 3 Ibid. art. 154. 4 The full title is 'The Complaint ; or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality.' (See Extract Book, art. 129.) 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 383 other two poems mentioned. There is a fine, fluent, sermonising vein about Young ; but a flavour of cant hangs about his most ambitious efforts. To use a phrase of the day, he is a sad * Philistine ' ; and through the admiration long felt or professed for him, his influence must have much tended to propagate false taste. The work is divided into nine Nights, the headings of some of which will serve to indicate its general character ; they are 'On Life, Death, and Immortality,' 'Narcissa,' 'The Christian Triumph,' 'The Infidel Keclaimed,' 'Virtue's Apology,' &c. A few lines occur here and there, stamped with a terseness and significance which have made them almost, if not quite, proverbial ; such are Procrastination is the thief of time ; and Pigmies are pigmies still, though perched on Alps : And pyramids are pyramids, in vales. In philosophy Young was a follower of Berkeley, whose idealism he reproduces at some length in the sixth Night : Objects are but the occasion ; ours th' exploit : Ours is the cloth, the pencil, and the paint, Which Nature's admirable picture draws, And beautifies creation's ample dome. In theology he leans on Butler, speaking of A scheme analogy pronounced so true, Analogy, man's surest guide below. Young found an ardent admirer, and even in part a translator, in Ganganelli, Pope Clement XIV., a man prone like himself to bow before the power and splendour of this world. His Odes are worth very little ; many of them teem with fulsome praise of George II. and the House of Hanover. Among his other works are, The Last Day (1713), The Universal Passion (1725). and Resignation (1762). 56. Shenstone, a native of Halesowen, near Birmingham, not far from which lay his beautiful little estate of 'The Leasowes,' which is still shown to the curious traveller, published his poem of The Schoolmistress in the year 1741. It is in the Spenserian stanza, and affects an antique dress of language ; but it has really very little merit. Shenstone was a vain and frivolous, yet withal querulous, person; his poems are full of com- plaints that his estate is too small to admit of his gratifying his refined tastes. Same of his ballads, e.g. ' Valentine's Day,' and ' Jenny Dawson,' have some pretty and pathetic stanzas. The ' Pastoral Ballad ' is a charm- ing piece of pretty trifling. 1 1 Extract Book, art. 149. 384 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. A deeper feeling inspired the lines ' Written at an Inn at Henley ' : Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think, he still has found The warmest welcome, at an inn. 57. Collins, the son of a hatter in Chichester, published his once famous Odes in 1746. Nor can these ever be entirely forgotten, so beautiful is the diction, so clear and profound are the thoughts. With some occa- sional exaggeration and over-luxuriance, this author's language is for the most part exquisitely musical and refined. The odes 'To Simplicity,' on ' The Manners,' and on ' The Passions,' l are among those most deserving of notice. 58. Mason, the friend of Gray, wrote in 174.8 a poem, called Isis, con- taining a petulant attack upon the University of Oxford as the nursery of Jacobitism and disaffection. This drew forth a brilliant reply, the Triumph of Isis, from Thomas Warton, then a young student at Trinity College, Oxford, and afterwards distinguished as the historian of English poetry. Mason wrote a number of Odes, and also tried his hand at satire in the ' Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers,' which, however, has more ill-nature than wit. We shall meet with him again as a dramatist. 59. Churchill, the son of an Essex clergyman, took orders, married, obtained preferment, and appeared to be on the high road to a deanery, when the example of a [good-for-nothing schoolfellow, 2 an innate thirst of pleasure, and an irritable vanity, turned him aside into the perilous career of the satirist and the wit. He flung off his gown, and after a first unsuc- cessful attempt with The Conclave, a satire on the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, obtained at a bound all the notoriety which he desired by the publication of The Rosciad (1761). This is a clever personal satire on the actors who then trod the London stage, with many dramatic criticisms not without value. By the sale of this, and of the Apology for the Rosciad, published soon after, he cleared more than a thousand pounds. This success completely turned his head; he produced poem after poem, with great rapidity, endeavouring to rival the satirico-didactic vein of Pope ; allied himself closely with the demagogue Wilkes ; fell into profligate ways ; and died of fever at Boulogne in 1764, bankrupt in health, money, and good name. Among his many poems I shall single out for mention, Night, and the Prophecy of Famine. The former, dedicated to Lloyd, appeared at the end of 1761 ; its purpose is to vindicate himself and his friends from the attacks which were levelled against them on the score of irregular life. It is spirited and clever, reminding the reader often of Pope's 1 Extract Book, art. 153. 2 Robert Lloyd, author of The Actor, a poem which had attracted much notice. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 385 Imitations of Horace, but just without that marvellous preter- natural element which makes the one an immortal work of genius, the other a brilliant but ephemeral copy of verses. These lines are a good specimen : What is't to us, if taxes rise or fall ? Thanks to our fortune, we pay none at all. Let muckworms, who in dirty acres deal, Lament those hardships which we cannot feel. His grace who smarts may bellow if he please ; But must I bellow too, who sit at ease ? By custom safe, the poet's numbers flow Free as the light and air some years ago ; No statesman e'er will think it worth his pains To tax our labours and excise our brains : Burthens like these vile earthly buildings bear ; No tribute's laid on castles in the air. In the Prophecy of Famine, which appeared in 1763, the chief wit lies in his ascribing to the Scotch, against whom the satire is aimed, exactly the opposite virtues to their (supposed) notorious bad qualities. But there is no proper arrangement ; one often does not see what he is driving at ; he seems to have written straight on as notions rose in his head, without having formed a clear intellectual plan. The goddess of Famine, after the battle of Culloden, is supposed to prophesy to two Scotch shepherd boys Jockey and Sawney the elevation of Lord Bute to the premiership, the exaltation of the whole nation con- sequent thereupon, and their fattening at England's expense. 60. Paul Whitehead, author of The State Dunces (1733) and Manners (1738), in which he tried to ape the manner of Pope, after having long acted with the Opposition, took a place under Government about 1760. Churchill branded this proceeding in a well-known couplet : May I, can worse disgrace on manhood fall ? Be born a Whitehead, and baptized a Paul ! Falconer, a Scotch sailor, published his descriptive poem of the Ship- wreck, in heroic verse, in 1762. It is too laboured and artificial to com- mand permanent popularity. The author was himself lost at sea a few years afterwards. The publication of Percy's Rdiques of Ancient English Poetry, in 1765, was one of the first symptoms of that great literary and religious reaction from classical to Christian antiquity, the waves of which have since spread so far. Naive old ballads, such as ' Chevy Chase ' for instance, which had stirred the blood of Sir Philip Sidney two hundred years before, were resuscitated from their long sleep, and supplied to imaginative youth towards the close of the century a mental food quite different from that on which their fathers and grandfathers had been reared. The appearance of Fingal, an ancient poem in six books, and Temora, an epic poem in eight books, said to be composed by Ossian, the son of 2 B 386 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V Fingal, and to have been translated from the Gaelic language by James Macpherson (1762-3), belonged to the same movement of Romanticism. In a prefatory dissertation Macpherson professed to refute the claim of the Irish to the possession of Ossian, who, he contended, was a genuine Caledonian, and preserved the tradition of the first migration of his countrymen into Ireland. No MS. of the supposed original poem 'in eight books ' has ever been forthcoming ; the use of the term * translation ' was therefore unwarranted ; and, so far, Macpherson seems to have been a forger. But it may be reasonably believed that he had taken down many songs, embodying ancient traditions, from the lips of the Highland peasantry, and that to this extent his work had a genuine basis. How- ever this may be, there must be allowed to be a strange charm in the poetical prose presented to us as the translation of Ossian ; nor is it easy to believe that an absolute forgery could have so powerfully impressed the mind of Goethe, as the readers of Werthcr know to have been the case. Temora opens thus: 'The blue" waves of Ullin roll in light. The green hills are covered with day. Trees shake their dusky heads in the breeze. Grey torrents pour their noisy streams. Two green hills, with aged oaks, surround a narrow plain. The blue course of a stream is there ; on its banks stood Cairbar of Atha.' 61. Chatterton, 'the wondrous boy that perished in his prime,' be- longed to a family which for several generations had supplied the sexton of the noble church of St. Mary Redcliffe, at Bristol. In an old muni- ment-room above the north porch, the boy had come across mouldering parchment records connected with the ancient history of the church, and the strange idea seized him of attributing poems of his own composition to an imaginary monk, whom he called Rowley, of the fifteenth century, and pretending that he had found the original MSS. of these poems in the muniment-room. His forgeries met with considerable acceptance in the West of England, but he was foiled in an attempt to palm off some of them upon Horace Walpole. He came up to London in 1770, and, after a vain attempt to support himself by the pen, died there in the course of a few months, while yet in his eighteenth year according to one account by taking poison, according to another of actual starvation. A few years later a celebrated and keenly contested controversy arose concerning the genuineness of the Rowley poems. 62. Seattle produced the first canto of his Minstrel in 1771. I think that Mr. Craik l is unjust to this poem when he says that, in comparison with Thomson's Castle of Indolence, it is like gilding compared to gold. Beattie had not the same power of luscious delineation, nor the same command over language, which belonged to Thomson ; yet, on the other hand, he sometimes rises to a strain of manly force and dignity which was beyond the compass of the other. The metre is the Spenserian stanza ; the tone is like that of Gray in the Elegy ; it is the chord struck by Rousseau, the superiority of simple unbought pleasures to luxury and pomp, of nature to art, &c. The great defect of the poem is its want of plot. The following is one of the finest stanzas : For know, to man as candidate for heaven, The voice of the Eternal said, Be free ; And this Divine prerogative to thee Doth virtue, happiness, and heaven convey ; For virtue is the child of liberty, And happiness of virtue ; nor can they Be free to keep the path, who are not free to stray. 1 History of English Literature, v. 170. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 387 G3. Goldsmith's poems are few in number, but several are of rare merit. More than one recent biography has made known the story of the failures, the sorrows, the erratic youth of this child of genius, who retained his Irish heedlessness, generosity, sensibility, and elasticity to the last moment of his life. His didactic poem, The Traveller, appeared in 1765, at which time he had long been settled in London, doing miscel- laneous literary work for the booksellers. Both the form and the philosophy of this poem (which teaches that the consti- tuents of human happiness vary with climate, place, and cir- cumstances) bespeak strongly the influence of Pope. Great intellectual growth is visible in the Deserted Village (1771). We have the same charming type of the village pastor, ' passing rich on forty pounds a year,' which is presented to us in the Vicar of WaJcefteld ; but the poet strikes here a deeper and graver key, when, in lines to which the walls of St. Stephen's have so often re-echoed, he bewails the extension of the English and Irish latifundia, 1 and the decay of the peasantry : 111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay : Princes and lords may flourish or may fade ; A breath can make them, as a breath has made : But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied. All Goldsmith's drollery comes out in the Elegy on Madame Blaise, and that On a Mad Dog ; all his wit, rapidity, and luminous discernment in the Retaliation, a series of imaginary epitaphs on his chief friends, among whom are included Burke, Garrick, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. 64. Cowper was designed by his father for the bar, but after a time, his unfitness for that profession becoming mani- fest, he was appointed to a clerkship in the House of Lords. But an overpowering nervousness prevented him from dis- charging the duties of the post ; he resigned it, and went to live in the country, which he never afterwards left. He formed an intimate friendship with a man of great force of character and fervid piety, the Rev. John Newton, curate of Olney. In the poems of his first volume, published in 1782, this friend's influence is very manifest. These poems consist chiefly of some long didactic compositions, of several hundred lines each, in blank verse, entitled, Table Talk, The Progress of Error, Truth, Expostulation, Hope, Charity, Conversation, and Retirement. Their tone is generally desponding, and leaning to the side of censure ; he declaims against the novelists and 1 The name given to the vast landed estates of the Roman nobles. 388 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATUEE. CHAP. V. the mischief they cause, indulges in a tirade against the press, and talks of 'the free-thinkers' brutal roar.' Yet there is so much grace and delicacy and lightness of touch, even in most of the censure, and he is so every inch a gentleman everywhere and always, that an affectionate admiration for the writer pre- dominates over every other feeling. Tirocinium appeared in 1784; it is an earnest attack on the public-school system, on the ground of its demoralising influence on character. There are many vigorous lines, and some cutting satire, as in the line The parson knows enough who knows a duke. There is also a beautiful tribute to John Bunyan, whom he will not name, lest a name then generally despised should awaken only derision. His second volume, containing The Task, appeared in 1785. This is a didactic or reflective poem, in six books. The poet, having been asked to write a poem on a sofa, commences with a sketch of the history of seats, which he tells with a mild humour, reminding one of the playfulness of a kitten, graceful and pretty, and never vulgar, though sometimes trivial. After having come down to the creation of the sofa, fancy bears him away to his school days, when he roved along Thames' bank till tired, and needed no sofa when he returned ; then he be- comes dreamy, traces his life down the stream of time to the present hour, noting what has made him happy, stilled his nerves, strengthened his health, raised his spirits, or kept them at least from sinking ; and finds that it has ever been the free communion with Nature in the country. Many charming descriptive passages are interwoven in all this.. The tale of ' Crazy Kate ' is admirably told. Then he maunders on about the gipsies ; then launches if the word is not too vehement into a tirade against town life, in which occurs the well-known line God made the country, and man made the town. An additional shade of melancholy and despondency is evidently thrown over the poet's mind by the humiliations which England about this time had to brook the treaty of Fontainebleau, the loss of America. Among the smaller poems, the merry history of ' John Gilpin ' is familiar to every one. The * Negro's Complaint ' was written to expose the cruelties of the African slave trade. The forcible and beautiful lines on 'The Loss of the Eoyal George' are an enduring monument to the victims of that great calamity. The stanzas on ' Boadicea ' are finely expressed, 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 389 and with a more sustained elevation than is usual with him, for Cowper's art is certainly very defective ; he seems hardly to have believed that poetry had any rules at all. His versifica- tion is careless, and to rhythm and choice of words he pays far too little attention; weak and trivial are continually annexed to weighty lines. This is noticeable even in that admirable poem, ' On the receipt of my Mother's Picture.' Though his vein is usually serious, he has a genuine native humour which can be frolicsome when it pleases. For an example, take some of his lines, ' On a Mischievous Bull,' which the owner sold at the poet's instance : Ah ! I could pity thee, exiled From this secure retreat ; I would not lose it to be styled The happiest of the great. But thou canst taste no calm delight ; Thy pleasure is to show Thy magnanimity in fight, Thy prowess : therefore go I care not whether east or north, So I no more may find thee ; The angry muse thus sings thee forth, And claps the gate behind thee. The * Castaway ' is exquisite in its mournful pathos, and the * Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk,' though in a jingling metre, are full of striking turns of thought which ensure to them a permanent popularity. Cowper's last work of any consequence was his translation of the Iliad, in blank verse; this appeared in 1791. 65. In Scotland, where no truly original poet had arisen since Dunbar, the last forty years of the century witnessed the bright and brief career of the peasant poet, whose genius shed a dazzling glow over his country's literature. Many beautiful songs, 1 mostly of unknown authorship, circulated in Scotland before the time of Burns ; and Allan Ramsay, though an imi- tator as far as the substance of his poetry was concerned, had so written in the native dialect as to show that original and truly national forms lay ready for the Scottish poet. With this foundation to work upon with the education of a Scottish primary school, a knowledge of Pope and Shenstone, and a sound, clear intellect Robert Burns made himself the greatest song- writer that our literature has ever known. 2 Force per- 1 For an interesting account of them see an article by the late Professor Shairp in Macmillans Magazine for May 1801. = See Grit. Sect. ch. I. ' 53, 61. 390 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. V. vaded his whole character ; he could do nothing by halves. At the age of eighteen, that passion, from which proceeds so much alike of the glory and of the shame of man's existence, de- veloped itself in his burning heart, and remained till death the chief motive power of his thoughts and acts. He fell in love ; and then his feelings, as he tells us, spontaneously burst forth in song. Two other strongly marked tendencies in his char-j acter must be mentioned, to which some of his most famous productions may be attributed. The first was his ardent spirit of nationality ; the second, his repugnance to, and revolt from/ the narrow sectarianism of his age and country. Almost the first book he ever read was the life of Sir Williarn Wallace, the Scottish patriot, whose hiding-places and ambushes, as pointed out by history or local tradition, he visited with a pilgrim's fervour. It was this spirit which produced suoh poems as Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled, or the Address to the Scottish Members of Parliament. His repugnance to Presbyterianism. exemplified in such poems as Holy Willie's Prayer, the Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, Esq., and the Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly Righteous redounds partly to the disgrace of the system which he satirised, and partly to his own. If he rebelled against the ceremonial and formal, he rebelled no less against the moral teaching of Presbyterianism. His protest against religious hypocrisy must be taken in connection with his own licentiousness. His father, an earnest adherent of that creed and system which the son broke away from and despised, though wrestling all his life against poverty and misfortune, endured his troubles with patience, and died in peace, because he had learnt the secret of the victory over self. His wondrously gifted son never gained that victory, and the record of his last years presents one of the most sad, disastrous spectacles that it is possible to contemplate. Burns' first volume of poems was published in 1786, and a second edition appeared in the following year. Tarn d 1 Shanter, a fairy story burlesqued, the Cotter's Saturday Night, and The Vision, are among the most noteworthy pieces in this collec- tion ; none of them attain to any great length. After his marriage to Jean Armour, he settled on the farm of Ellisland, uniting the functions of an exciseman to those of a farmer. But the farm proved a bad speculation Spem mentita seges, bos est enectus arando, and, having received a more lucrative appointment in the excise, Burns gave up Ellisland, and removed to Dumfries. Here the 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 391 habit of intemperance, to indulge in which the nature of hid employment unhappily supplied more than ordinary tempta- tions, gradually made him its slave ; disappointment and self- reproach preyed upon his heart ; want stared him in the face ; and the greatest of Scottish poets, having become a mere wreck of his former self, sank, in his thirty-seventh year, into an un- timely grave* 65a. Burns may truly be called the poetic child of Robert Ferguson, whose sad and short career ended in a lunatic asylum in 1774. The younger poet was unwearied in the praises of his precursor, whose favourite metre was that strange, but most effective, six- lined stanza, in which Burns accomplished so much. In ' Braid Claith,' a good-humoured satire, occur the following lines : Ye wha are fain to hae your name Wrote in the bonny book of fame, Let merit nae pretension claim To laurel'd wreath, But hap ye weel, baith back and wame, In gude Braid Claith. Braid Claith lends fouk an unco heese, 1 Makes mony kail- worms butterflies, Gies mony a doctor his degrees For little skaith ; 2 In short, you may be what you please Wi' gude Braid Claith. John Logan, a Scotch farmer's son, is the author of an ' Ode to the Cuckoo,' warmly praised by Burke. John Armstrong, the son of a minister in Roxburghshire, lived to be a successful medical man in London ; he is the author of The Art of pre- serving Health (1774) and other pieces. 66. The Rolliad was a satirical effusion, commenced in 1784, by several writers belonging to the party of Fox and the recently defeated coalition, and directed against Mr. Pitt and his supporters in Parliament. The chief of these writers was a Dr. Lawrence ; he was assisted by George Ellis, a Mr. Fitzpatrick, and two other persons named Richardson and Tickle. The origin of the name was this : Mr. Rolle, the member for Devonshire, in a speech made on the Westminster Scrutiny, 3 had informed the public that he was descended from 'Duke Rollo.' A ludicrous pedigree of 'John Rolle, Esq.,' thereupon appeared, said to be 'extracted from the records of the Herald's Office.' This was followed by the ' Dedication of the Rolliad, an Epic poem in twelve Books,' written by Fitzpatrick, and addressed to Mr. Rolle. Amidst a great deal of sarcastic eulogy, copiously garnished with puns, the dedicator congratulates Mr. Rolle, because, as his ancestor Rollo fought for William the Conqueror, So you with zeal support through each debate The conquering William [Pitt] of a later date. 1 Hoist, lift. 2 Trouble. 3 Instituted by the Government with the view of unseating Fox for West- minster, 'after the famous election of 1784. 392 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. After this one would expect the poem itself ; but the joke is that there is no poem. The Rolliad itself, though affirmed by its critics to have reached the twentieth edition, is wholly imaginary ; we only know of it through the supposed extracts from the poem given in the Criticisms on the Rolliad, which appeared in twenty-one successive numbers. In these Pitt, Dundas, the India Board, and Warren Hastings, with many other persons and things, were assailed; often with cruel wit and pungent sarcasm ; yet it seems that the victims were not sufficiently interesting, nor the satire quite potent enough, to prevent the Rolliad from having almost fallen into oblivion. John Byrom, whose ' Colin and Phoebe ' is in No. 603 of the Spectator, a Lancashire man and a Cantab, is the author of the trimming benediction on King and Pretender, which begins ' God bless the King I mean the faith's defender.' l 67. Dr. Darwin, an eminent physician, published his Loves of the Plants in 1789. In this strange poem there is a great deal about botany and electricity, and the steam engine, and weaving, and cotton-spinning, but nothing about any subject suitable for poetic treatment. Here, for in- stance, is an invocation to steam : Soon shall thy arm, unconquered Steam, afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car ; Or, on wide waving wings expanded, bear The flying chariot through the fields of air. Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above, Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move ; Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd, And armies sink beneath the shadowy cloud. The Loves of the Plants is only a portion of a larger work, entitled The Botanic Garden. 68. Dr. John Wolcot, better known as 'Peter Pindar,' wrote coarse and fluent satires against the king, the Royal Academicians, Dr. John- son, James Boswell, Gifford, and others. The Lousiad, in which a little incident, said to have occurred at the royal table, is made the subject of a long satirical and mock-heroic poem, appeared in 1785. 2 Gifford, besides a reply to Wolcot, called an 'Epistle to Peter Pindar,' is the author of the Baviad (1794) and Mceviad (1796), two clever satires on a coterie of namby-pamby poets and poetesses, whom he calls, from the assumed name (Delia Crusca) of their leader, a Mr. Merry, Della-Cruscans. Lastly, Robert Bloomfield, a farmer's boy in early life, and then a shoemaker, gave to the world in 1800 his excellent descriptive poem of The Farmer's Boy, Anna L. Aikin, better known as Mrs. Barbauld, wrote innumerable reviews, poems, and tales in the course of her long career. She once reviewed Charles Lamb with considerable severity ; the author of ' Elia ' only replied by calling her and Mrs. Inchbald ' the bald women.' She was intimate with Sir Walter Scott, and brought to his knowledge Biirger's poem of ' Lenore.' Her Evenings at Home (1792) were written in con- junction with her brother, Dr. Aikin. Charles Dibdin is the author of the immortal sea-song ' Tom Bowling,' and hundreds^more. Hannah More, one of three blooming sisters in a Quaker family in Gloucester, to whom the aged Johnson took kindly, wrote much both in poetry and prose with most benevolent and virtuous intentions, but her works are now rather fatiguing to read. Her poem The Bas Bleu (1786 ; 1 On Ferguson and Byrom see Ward's English Poets. - See Crit. Sect. ch. I. 39. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 393 whence the phrase 'blue stocking'), her successful tragedy Percy, and a didactic novel, Calebs in search of a Wife (1809), are among the best of her productions. The Drama, 1745-1800: Home, Johnson, Moore, Mason, Colman, Murphy, Goldsmith, Foote, Sheridan. 69. The tragic stage resumed in this period, under the able management of Garrick, a portion of its former dignity. But no original tragedies of importance were composed. Home's play of Douglas, known to all school- boys as the source of that familiar burst of eloquence, beginning, My name is Norval, on the Grampian hills My father feeds his flocks, &c., appeared in 1757. Johnson's tragedy of Irene, produced at Drury Lane by Garrick in 1749, was coldly received, owing to the want of sustained tragic interest. When asked how he felt upon the ill-success of his tragedy, the sturdy lexicographer replied, ' Like the Monument.' When we have mentioned Moore's Gamester (1755), celebrated for its deeply affecting catastrophe, and Mason's Elfrida (1752) and Caradacus (1759), our list of tragedies of any note is exhausted. Byron, in the preface to Marino Faliero, gives high praise to The Mysterious Mother (1781), by Horace Walpole ; but the subject of the tragedy is too horrible for representation on the stage. 70. The comedy of manners, as exemplified by the plays of Congreve and Farquhar, had gradually degenerated into the genteel or sentimental comedy, in which Colman the elder l and Arthur Murphy were proficients. Goldsmith's Good-natured Man (1768) was a clever attempt to bring back the theatrical public to the old way of thinking, which ' demanded little more than nature and humour, in whatever walks of life they were most conspicuous.' Delineation of character was therefore his principal aim. She Stoops to Conquer, a piece written on the same plan, appeared, and had a great run, in 1773. Foote, the actor, wrote several clever farces between 1752 and 1778, of which the Liar and the Mayor of Garratt are among the most noted. George Colman the younger is the author of The Heir at La.iv (1797), John Butt, a piece praised by Scott, and many other comedies. Later in life he wrote Broad Grins (1802), and an autobiography called Random Records. (See Chambers's English Literature, ii. 122.) 1 Author of The Jealous Wife, a play 'founded on Tom Jones, and The Clandestine Marriaye. 394 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. Y. Richard Cumberland, a descendant of the theologian of the same name, wrote The West Indian (1771) and The Wheel of Fortune. 71. Sheridan, the son of an Irish actor and a literary lady, after marrying the beautiful actress, Miss Linley, in defiance of a crowd of rivals, and after being for years the life of society at Bath, connected himself with the stage, and produced The Rivals in 1775. All his other comedies appeared in the en- suing five years ; viz., The Duenna, The School for Scandal, The Critic, and The Trip to Scarborough. All these plays are in prose, and all, with the exception of The Duenna, reflect con- temporary manners. In the creation of comic character and the conduct of comic dialogue, Sheridan has never been sur- passed. His wit flashes evermore ; in such a play as The Rivals, the reader is kept in a state of continual hilarious delight by a profusion of sallies, rejoinders, blunders, contrasts, which seem to exhaust all the resources of the ludicrous. Mrs. Malaprop's * parts of speech ' will raise the laughter of unborn generations, and the choleric generous old father will never find a more perfect representative than Sir Anthony Absolute. In the evolution of his plots he is less happy ; nevertheless, in this respect also, he succeeded admirably in The School for Scandal, which is by common consent regarded as the most perfect of his plays, and is still 'an 'established favourite in our theatres. Mrs. Inchbald, whose maiden name was Simpson, a native of Suffolk, wrote about nineteen comedies and farces, and edited a serviceable collec- tion of plays, The British Drama, in twenty- five volumes. But her novel A Simple Story (1791) is her chief title to literary distinction. George Lillo, son of a Dutch jeweller settled in London, is the author of a melodrama, George Barnwell, which had an enormous success on the stage. The hero, a London apprentice, murders his old uncle that he may have money to give to the woman Milwood. To a simple taste the old ballad on the same subject is much better than the play. Learning, 1745-1800 : Poison, Lowth, Pococke. 72. The progress of classical and oriental learning owed little to England during this period. The one great name that occurs (Edward Gibbon) will be mentioned when we come to speak of the historians. Sloth and ease reigned at the Univer- sities ; and those great foundations, which in the hands of monks and churchmen in former times had never wholly ceased to minister to learning and philosophy, were now too often the haunts of port-drinking fellows, and lazy, mercenary tutors. 1 Person, the delicacy of whose Greek scholarship 1 See Gibbon's Memoirs. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 395 almost amounted to a sense, and who admirably edited several of the plays of Euripides, Bishop Lowth, author of the Prcdectiones on Hebrew Poetry, and of a translation of Isaias, and Samuel Horsley, Bishop of St. Asaph, the editor of Newton and antagonist of Priestley, are the only learned writers whose works are still of value. Prose Fiction, 1745 - 1800 : Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Goldsmith ; Miss Burney, Mrs. Radcliffe. 73. Favoured, in the manner before explained, by the con- tinued stability of society, the taste for novels grew from year to year, and was gratified during this period by an abundant supply of fiction. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne worked on at the mine which Defoe had opened. Richardson, who was brought up as a printer, produced his first novel, Pamela, in 1740. A natural and almost accidental train of circumstances led to his writing. He had agreed to compose a collection of specimen letters a polite letter- writer, in fact for two booksellers ; and it occurred to him, while engaged in this task, that the work would be greatly enlivened if the letters were connected by a thread of narrative. The booksellers applauded the notion, and he accordingly presented under this literary form the true story of a young woman the Pamela of the novel which had come to his knowledge a few years before. Henry Fielding, sprung from a younger branch of the noble house of Denbigh, wrote his first novel Joseph Andrews in 1742, to turn Pamela into ridicule. Richardson's master- pieces, Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison, appeared successively in 1748 and 1753 ; Fielding's Tom Jones and Amelia in 1749 and 1751. Coleridge's remarks (Literary Remains) on Tom Jones may be read with profit. With Thackeray we take supreme delight in Amelia, on account of the sweet and lovely heroine of the tale. She is the best and most endearing character that Fielding has drawn. Her innocence, simplicity, freshness, gentleness, fl4elity, tenderness, devotion, energy in service, meekness in sufficing, show her like a pure white lily, fresh from a garden, placed among the soiled and partly withered flowers on a market st creature Booth, her husband, is immeasurably beneath ier7 She is a true Christian wife, and loose notions as to the sacred- ness of the marriage tie are as repulsive to her as to her good clerical friend and guide, Dr. Harrison. The satirical History of Mr. Jonathan Wild (1743), the 396 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. Journey to Lisbon (1754), and a number of comedies, nearly make up the list of Fielding's writings. Smollett, a Scotchman, wrote, between 1748 and 1771, a number of coarse, clever novels upon the same general plan as those of his English contemporaries; that is, on the plan of 'holding the mirror up to Nature,' and showing to the age its own likeness without flattery or disguise. The best are Roderick' Random and Humphrey Clinker. This last was the mine whence Sheridan dug The Rivals ; the testy, irascible Mr. Bramble is evidently the original of Sir Anthony Absolute, Tabitha Bramble of Mrs. Malaprop, and the Irish adventurer, Sir Ulick Mackilligut, of Sir Lucius O'Trigger. Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, whose father, Colonel Ramsay, was Lieutenant- Governor of New York, wrote The Female Quixote (1752). 74. In Sterne, humour is carried to its farthest point. His novel of Tristram Shandy is like no other novel ever written it has no interest of plot or of incident ; its merit and value lie, partly in the humour with which the characters are drawn and contrasted, partly in that other kind of humour which displays itself in unexpected transitions and curious trains of thought. The first two volumes of Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759. The Sentimental Journey, being a narrative of a tour in France, in which the author assumes credit for the utmost delicacy of sentiment and liveliness of sensibility, was pub- lished shortly before his death in 1768. The character and life of Sterne have been admirably portrayed by Thackeray, in his Lectures on the English Humourists. 75. Johnson's tale of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, appeared in 1759. In Lord Brougham's Life of Voltaire, Johnson is reported to have said that, had he seen Voltaire's Oandide, which appeared shortly before, he should not have written Rasselas, because both works travel nearly over the same ground. Nothing, however, can be more different than the tone and spirit of the tales. Each writer rejects the optimism of Leibnitz, and pictures a world full of evil and misery ; but the Frenchman founds on this common basis his sneers at re- ligion, and at the doctrine of an overruling' Providence, while the Englishman represents the darkest corners of the present life as irradiated by a compensating faith in immortality, which alone can explain their existence. 76. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, the book which, by its picturesque presentation of the manners and feelings of simple people, first led Goethe to turn with interest to the study of English literature, was published in 1766. The Man of Feeling, 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 397 by Henry Mackenzie, appeared in 1771. Its author, who wrote it while under the potent spell of Sterne's humour and the attraction of Johnson's style, lived far on into the nine- teenth century, and learned to feel and confess the superior power of the author of Waverley. The Man of the World and Julia de Roubigne are later works by the same hand. Frances Burney created a sensation by her novel of Evelina, published in 1778, 'the best work of fiction that had appeared since the death of Smollett.' 1 It was followed by Cecilia (1782), and at a long interval, both of time and merit by Camilla, in 1796. William Beckford, to whom his father, Alderman Beckford, bequeathed enormous wealth, is the author of the gorgeous and powerful romance of the Caliph Vathek, written originally in French (1784) and appearing two years later in English. Henry Brooke (ante, 38) is the author of a remarkable novel, The Fool of Quality (1766), which was lately edited by Mr. Kingsley. The title seems to have been suggested by a line in the Dunciad. The book describes the education of an ideal nobleman by an ideal merchant prince. In the high value set by Brooke on sensibility and enthusiasm may perhaps be traced the influence of Rousseau, whose Nouvelle Heloise had appeared in 1761. Though an idealist, the writer seems to have no sense for the beauty of form or the significance of ceremonial, measuring all things by utility. Wisely, he thinks, judged the cock, who preferred a grain of corn to a diamond. 77. Between the works just mentioned and the writings of Godwin there is a gulf interposed, such as marks the transition from one epoch of world-history to another. Instead of the moralising, the sketches of manners and delineations of char- acter, on which the novelists of this age had till then employed their powers, we meet with impassioned or argumentative attacks upon society itself, as if it were so fatally disordered as to require reconstruction from top to bottom. The design of Caleb Williams, published in 1794, is to represent English society as so iniquitously constituted as to enable a man of wealth and position to trample with impunity upon the rights of his inferiors, and, though himself a criminal of the darkest dye, to brave the accusations of his poor and unfriended oppo- nent, and succeed in fixing upon him, though innocent, the brand of guilt. Besides Caleb Williams, Godwin wrote the strange romance of St. Leon, the hero of which has found the elixir vitae, and describes the descent of his undecaying life from century to century. About the close of the period Mrs. Radcliffe wrote the Mysteries of Udolpho, and the Romance of the Forest two thrilling romances of the Kotzebue school in 1 Macaulay's Essays. 398 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. which stirring and terrible events succeed each other so rapidly that the reader either is, or ought to be, kept in a whirl of horror and excitement from the beginning to the end. Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto was meant as a satire upon novels of this class ; though, as he relates, with great enjoyment, numberless simple-minded novel-readers took it for a serious production of the romantic school. Oratory, 1745-1800 : Chatham, Burke, Sheridan, &c. 78. This is the great age of English eloquence. Perhaps no country in the world ever possessed at one time such a group of orators as that whose voices were heard in Parliament and in Westminster Hall during these fifty years. Chatham, Burke, Fox, Erskine, Pitt, and Sheridan in England ; and, in Ireland, Grattan and Curran. Our limits will only permit us to advert to a few celebrated orations. Every one has heard of the last speech of the great Lord Chatham, in April 1778, 'the expiring tones of that mighty voice when he protested against the dis- memberment of this ancient monarchy, and prayed that if England must fall, she might fall with honour. 5 1 The eloquence of Burke Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, And thought of convincing when they thought of dining 2 though it often flew over the heads of those to whom it was addressed, was to be the admiration and delight of unborn generations. The speech on the conciliation of America (1775), that addressed to the electors of Bristol (1780), 3 that on the Nabob of Arcot's debts (1785), and those delivered on the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788), may be considered his greatest efforts. Upon a subject connected with, and leading to, this impeachment the conduct of Warren Hastings to the Begums of Oude Sheridan delivered, in 1787, a speech which was unfortunately not reported, but which appears to have made a more profound and permanent impression upon the hearers than any speech recorded in the annals of Parliament. ' Mr. Windham, twenty years later, said that the speech deserved all its fame, and was, in spite of some faults of taste, such as were seldom wanting either in the literary or the parliamentary performances of Sheridan, the finest that had been delivered within the memory of man.' 4 Grattan during 1 Arnold's Roman History, vol. i. 2 From Goldsmith's Retaliation. 3 See Grit. Sect. ch. II. 14. 4 Macaulay's Essays ; article, 'Warren Hastings.' 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 399 many years was the foremost among a number of distinguished orators who sat in the Irish parliament ; and his fiery eloquence, exerted at a period when England lay weakened and humiliated by her failure in America, extorted for that body, in 1782, the concession of legislative independence. Pitt's speech on the India Bill in 1784, explaining and defending his proposal of the system of double government, which has been lately (1858) superseded, as well as his speeches on the Slave Trade and the Catholic Relief Bill, though not exactly eloquent, should be read as embodying the views of a great practical statesman upon subjects of deep and permanent interest. Erskine was a cadet of a noble but needy family in Scotland. He crossed the Border early in life, raised himself by his remarkable powers as an advocate to the position of Lord Chancellor, and died on his way back to his native country, in his seventy-third year. Pamphlets, Miscellanies, 1745-1800 : Junius, Burke, Johnson, Hawkesworth. 79. The famous Letters of Junius, addressed to the Public Advertiser, extend over the period from the 21st January 1769 to the 21st January 1772. Under his impenetrable mask, the writer first attacks the different members of the ministry of the Duke of Grafton, to whom, as premier, eleven of the letters are addressed ; in these the life and character, both public and private, of the minister are exposed with keen and merciless satire. The thirty-fifth letter is addressed to the King, and concludes with the well-known daring words, ' The prince, who imitates their [the Stuarts'] conduct, should be warned by their example ; and, while he plumes himself upon the security of his title to the crown, should remember that, as it was acquired by one revolution, it may be lost by another.' The mystery about the authorship, which volumes have been written to elucidate, has without doubt contributed to the fame of the Letters. The opinions, however, of the best judges have been of late years converging to a settled belief that Sir Philip Francis, a leading opposition member in the House of Commons, was Junius ; and that no other person could have been. 80. Johnson is the author of four pamphlets, all on the Tory side in politics. He was often taunted with writing in favour of the reigning dynasty, by which he had been pensioned, while his real sympathies lay with the house of Stuart. But while his feelings were Jacobite, common sense induced him to put up with the reigning family. He said that if holding up his little finger would have given the victory at Culloden to 400 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATUKE. CHAP. V. Prince Charles Edward, he was not sure that he would have held it up. And he jokingly told Bos well that ' the pleasures of cursing the House of Hanover, and drinking King James's health, were amply overbalanced by three hundred pounds a year.' The False Alarm appeared in 1770; the Thoughts on the late Transactions respecting the Falkland Islands (in which there is a well-known invective against Junius) in the following year. The Patriot came out in 1774, and Taxation no Tyranny in 1 775. This last pamphlet was written, at the desire of the incapable and obstinate ministry of Lord North, as a reply to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress. This tirade against brave men for defending their liberties in the style of their English forefathers, shows how mischievously a great mind may be blinded by the indulgence of unexamined prejudices. 81. The longer political writings of Burke we shall consider as contributions to political science, and treat under the head of philosophy. The remaining treatises may be divided into four classes, as relating, 1, to general home politics ; 2, to colonial affairs 3, to French and foreign affairs ; 4, to the position and claims of the Irish Catholics. Among the tracts of the first class, the Sketch of a Negro Code (1792), an attempt to mediate between the planters and the abolitionists, by proposing to place the slave trade under stringent regulations, and con- currently to raise the condition of the negroes in the "West Indies by a series of humane measures, borrowed mostly from the Spanish code, deserves special mention for its far-sighted wisdom. His tracts on American affairs were, like his speeches, on the side of conciliation and concession. Upon the subject of the French Revolution he felt so keenly that his dislike of the policy deepened into estrangement from the persons of its English sympathisers. He broke with his old friend Fox, and refused to see him even when lying on the bed of mortal sickness. The last of the four letters On a Regicide Peace is dated in 1797, the year of his death, and the MS. was found unfinished, as if the composition had been arrested only by physical inability to proceed. Against the penal laws then weighing upon the Irish Catholics, he spoke and wrote with a generous pertinacity. The memory of his mother had perhaps as much to do with this as the native enlightenment and capacity of his mind. His writings on this question, in its various aspects, extend over more than thirty years of his life, from 1766 to 1797. His last Letter on the Affairs of Ireland was written but a few months before his death. He avows that he has not ' power enough of mind or body to bring out his sentiments with their natural force,' but adds ' I do not wish to have it con- 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 401 cealed that I am of the same opinion to my last breath which I entertained when my faculties were at the best.' 81a. John Home Tooke, the son of a London poulterer, who was in youth a strenuous supporter of Wilkes, made a great mistake when he took orders in the Church, of England. This he saw too late, and wished to enter into a different profession, and sever himself from his clerical antecedents altogether. But the Act authorising the relinquishment of (Anglican) orders, under which this transformation can now be effected so easily and comfortably, had not yet been passed ; and Home Tooke found that doubts as to his status prevented his admission to the bar, and followed him within the precincts of Parliament. In 1771 he quarrelled with Wilkes, but continued to be a violent and bitter politician. Having written a pamphlet to promote a subscription for the widows of ' our American fellow-citizens murdered by the King's soldiers at Lexington ' (1775), he was tried for libel, fined, and sent to prison. In jail he wrote the Diversions of Purley, a brilliant and interesting treatise, written in the clearest and finest English, on the nature of language in general, and on the etymology of the English tongue in particular. His inducement to write it was, in his own words, his having ' been made the victim ' in a court of law ' of Two Prepositions and a Conjunction, ' of and concerning and that, ' the abject instruments of his civil extinction.' Tooke was the first to perceive to how large an extent a language consisted of abbrevia- tions, mere devices to enable men to get over the ground rapidly in the inter-communication of their thoughts. His chief error was the fancy that when the etymology of a word was discovered its true meaning was thereby determined ; e.g., if the word ' just ' be rightly derived from ' jubeo,' that it follows that actions are not just or unjust per se, but only as being commanded or forbidden. The Diversions of Purley were first published in 1786. Tooke was elected as member for Old Sarum in 1801 ; but on his entering the Hous the question of his eligibility was imme- diately raised, and Mr. Addington brought in a bill, which became law, enacting that no person in holy orders should be deemed eligible for a seat in the House of Commons. Tooke ended his stormy career in 1812. ' 82. The commencement of the Rambler in March 1750, marked an attempt on the part of Johnson to revive the periodical miscellany, which had sunk into disrepute since the death of Addison. Of all the papers in the Rambler, from the commencement to the concluding number, dated 2nd March 1752, only four were not from the pen of Johnson. Although many single papers were admirable, the miscellany was per- vaded by a certain cumbrousness and monotony which pre- vented it from obtaining a popularity comparable to that of the Spectator. The Adventurer was commenced by Dr. Hawkes- worth in 1753. In that and the following year Johnson fur- nished a few articles for it, signed with the letter T. The Idler, which was even less successful than the Rambler, was carried on during two years, from April 1758 to April 1760. All but twelve of the hundred and three articles were written by Johnson. For many years afterwards this style of writing remained unattempted. 2 C 402 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATURE. CHAP. V. Historians, 1745-1800 : Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Russell, Mitford, Warton. Biographers Bos- well, &c. , 83. The best, or at any rate the best known, historical compositions in our literature date from this period. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, availing himself of the materials which had been collected by Carte, the author of the Life of Ormond, published, between the years 1754 and 1762, his History of England. The reigns of the Stuarts were the first portion published; in the treatment of which his anti- puritanic tone much offended the Whig party, and for some years interfered with the circulation of the book. Johnson was probably right when he said that ' Hume would never have written a history had. not Voltaire written one before him.' For the Siecle de Louis XIV. appeared before 1753, and the influence of the Essai sur les Masters is clearly traceable in Hume's later volumes. William Robertson a Scottish Pres- byterian minister, who rose to be Principal of the Univer- sity of Edinburgh wrote his History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and King James VI. in 1759. In 1769 appeared his History of the Emperor Charles V., and in 1777 his History of America. As his first work had procured for Dr. Robertson a brilliant reputation in his own country, so his histories of Charles V. and of America extended his fame to foreign lands. The former was translated by M. Suard in France ; the latter, after receiving the warm approbation of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid, was about to be translated into Spanish, when the Government, not wishing their American administration to be brought under discussion, interfered with a prohibition. 84. Edward Gibbon, who was descended from an ancient family in Kent, was born in 1737. While at Oxford, he became a Catholic from reading the works of Parsons and Bossuet. His father immediately sent him to Lausanne, to be under the care of a Calvinist minister, whose prudent manage- ment, seconded as it was by the absence of all opposing influences, in a few months effected his reconversion to Protes- tantism. For the rest of his life he was a 'philosopher,' as the eighteenth century understood the term ; in other words, a disbeliever in revealed religion. Concerning the origin of his celebrated work, he says : 'It was at Rome, on the 15th October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple 1700-1800. . EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 403 of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. But my original plan was cir- cumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the empire ; and . . . some years elapsed . . . before I was seriously en- gaged in the execution of that laborious work.' 1 The several volumes of the History appeared between 1776 and 1787. The work was translated into several languages, and Gibbon ob- tained by European consent a place among the historians of the first rank/- The Rev. Joseph Berington, a Catholic priest, descended from an old Shropshire family, published between 1780 and 1793 several works which are important in their bearing on the history of the Catholic minority in England since the Reformation ; these are The State and Behaviour of English Catholics from the Reformation to 1780, an Account of the Present State of Roman Catholics in Great Britain, and the Memoirs of Panzani, translated from the Italian. In his History of Henry II. (1790) he vindi- cated St. Thomas h, Becket from the censures of Lord Lyttelton. In 1813 he joined Dr. Kirk in publishing a large work entitled The Faith of Catholics. Berington, however, was a minhniser on the subject of the authority and privileges of the Holy See, and this work is not now regarded as altogether trustworthy. His short Literary History of the Middle Ages is of little value. Isaac Milner, a senior wrangler at Cambridge, afterwards Dean of Carlisle, a friend of Wilberforce and Pitt, completed towards the end of the century the History of the Church of Christ, which had been begun by his brother Joseph (1744-1797). 85. Among the minor historians of the period, the chief were Goldsmith, the author of short popular histories of Greece, Rome, and England ; Russell, whose History of Modern Europe appeared between 1779 and 1784, and has been continued by Coote and others down to our own times ; and Mitford, in whose History of Greece, the first volume of which was published in 1784, the Tory "sentiments of the author find a vent in the continual disparagement of the Athenian democracy. Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry, a work of great learning and to this day of unimpaired authority, was published between 1774 and 1781. It comes down to the age of Elizabeth. If all her Professors of Poetry had so well repaid her patronage, the literary reputation of Oxford would have been more considerable than it is. Sharon Turner deserves notice, as one of the first Englishmen to study Anglo-Saxon literature and history in a scientific spirit. He was a very voluminous writer, and he had unfortunately too good an opinion of his style. The result is an uncouthness and absence of simplicity, which militate powerfully against his being read. The only work by which he is now remembered is his History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799). But this i Memoirs, p. 198. 2 See Grit. Sect. ch. II. 25. 404 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. was only part of a larger plan. Sharon Turner also wrote a History of the Middle Ages; being the History of England from the accession of William the Conqueror to the accession of Henry VIII. He even added what he called a Modern History of England, from the accession of Henry VIII. to the end of the reign of Elizabeth. His determination to be something besides an antiquarian, and to pose as a man of letters, is shown by two volumes of poetry, Prolusions on the present Greatness of Britain ; on Modern Poetry ; and on the present Aspect of the World, and a lengthy effort in heroic verse on Richard III. Sharon Turner was one of the first to attempt the rehabilitation of Richard's character. Both poems reach the lowest depths of bathos. His Anglo-Saxons is remarkable for the good use he makes of Beowulf and other remains of the earliest English literature. In this respect, and in the use sometimes uncritical enough which he makes of the earliest Welsh poetry, Sharon Turner deserves the credit due to a path-finder. He opened out a road which many inquirers since have trodden. His history is still useful as a reper- tory of the facts and documents which must be studied by any investigator of the Anglo-Saxon period. 1 Among works subsidiary to history, the chief were in Biography, Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1781), a dull Life of Pope by Ruffhead, Hume's Autobiography, edited by Adam Smith (1777), and BoswelTs Life of Johnson (1791). The records of seafaring enterprise were enriched by the Voyages of the great Captain Cook (1773-1784), Anson, Byron, and Vancouver. Theology, 1700-1800 : the Deists; Toland, Collins, and others ; answers of Bentley, Berkeley, Butler, and Warburton ; Methodism, Middleton, Challoner. 86. The English theological literature of this century in- cludes some remarkable works. On account of its celebrity rather than its merit, a few words may be given to the sermon of Dr. Sacheverell (1709), which overturned the Whig ministry. It was entitled 'The Perils of False Brethren.' It is a full- mouthed, voluble, roaring production ; one long * damnatory clause ' from the beginning to the end ; logic it spurns, yet has a certain weight, as proceeding from a solid and imperious, no less than passionate nature. Godolphin (whom he compares to Vol- pone in Ben Jonson's play of The Fox), the dissenters, and the Whig party in general, are bitterly assailed and denounced. A series of open or covert attacks upon Christianity, pro- ceeding from the school of writers known as the English Deists, began to appear about the beginning of the century. Toland led the way with his Christianity not Mysterious, in 1702 ; and the series was closed by Bolingbroke's posthumous works, published in 1752, by which time the temper of the public i This notice is by W. T. Arnold. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 405 mind was so much altered that Bolingbroke's scoffs at religion hardly aroused any other feelings but those of impatience and indignation. Collins, Tindal, Chubb, Wollaston, and others, took part in the anti-Christian enterprise. In order to reply to them, the Protestant divines were compelled to take different ground from that which their predecessors had chosen in the two previous centuries. Hooker, Andrewes, Laud, Taylor, and the rest of the High Church school, had based the obligation of religious belief to a large extent upon Church authority. But their opponents had replied that if that principle were admitted, it was impossible to justify the separation from Rome. The Puritans of the old school had set up the Scrip- tures, as constituting by themselves an infallible religious oracle. But the notorious, important, and interminable dif- ferences of interpretation which divided the Biblical party had discredited this method of appeal. The Quakers and other ultra-Puritans, discarding both Church authority and the letter of Scripture, had imagined that they had found, in a certain inward spiritual illumination residing in the souls of believers, the unerring religious guide which all men desired. But the monstrous profaneness and extravagance to which this doctrine of the inward light had often conducted its adherents had brought this expedient also into discredit. The only course left for the divines was to found the duty of accepting Christianity upon the dictates of common sense and reason. The Deists urged that the Christian doctrines were irrational ; the divines met them on their own ground, and contended that, on the con- trary, revelation was in itself so antecedently probable, and was supported by so many solid proofs, that it was but the part of prudence and good sense to accept it. The reasonableness of Christianity the evidences for Christianity the proofs of re- velation such was the tenor of all their replies. It has well been called a rationalising age Seculum Rationalisticum. 87. Among the crowd of publications issued by ihe Chris- tian apologists, there are three or four which have obtained a permanent place in general literature. The first is Bentley's Phileleutherus Lipsiensis (1713), written in answer to Collins' Discourse on Free .Thinking. This is a short and masterly tract, in which the great Aristarch proved, with reference to some cavilling objections which Collins had derived from the variety of readings in the manuscripts, that the text of the New Testament was on the whole in a better and sounder state than that of any of the Greek classical authors. 88. The second is Bishop Berkeley's Alciphron, published in 1732. This treatise is singularly delightful reading. The 406 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. beauty of the language, the ease and artless graces of the style, the lucidity of the reasoning, the fairness shown to the other side (for Berkeley always treats his opponents like a gentle- man, and gives them credit for sincerity, not with supercilious and censorious arrogance, like such writers as Bishop War- burton), are among its many excellences. In form it is a dialogue, carried on between Dion, Euphranor, and Crito, the defenders of the Christian doctrine and the principles of morals, and Alciphron and Ly sides, the representatives of free- thinking, or, as Euphranor names them in imitation of Cicero, 'minute philosophers.' Alciphron frankly avows that the pro- gress of free inquiry has led him to disbelieve in the existence of God, and the reality of moral distinctions ; he is, however, gradually driven from position after position by the ingenious questionings, Socratico more, of Euphranor and Crito, and, after a long and stubborn contest, allows himself to be van- quished by the force of truth. 89. The third is the Analogy of Religion, loth Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736), by Bishop Butler. Of this profound and difficult piece of argumentation, the exact force and bearing of which can only be mastered by close and continuous study, some notion as to the general scope can be derived from the summary, found near the conclusion, of the principal objections against religion to which answers have been attempted in the book. The first , of these objections is taken from the tardiness and gradual elaboration of the plan of salvation ; to which it is answered that such also is the rule in nature, gradual change c con- tinuity,' as we now call it being distinctive of the evolution of God's cosmical plan. The second stumbles at the appoint- ment of a Mediator ; to which the consideration is opposed, how God does in point of fact, from day to day, appoint others as the instruments of His mercies to us. The third proceeds from those who are staggered by the doctrine of redemption, and suggests that reformation is the natural and reasonable remedy for moral delinquency ; to which it is answered, among other things, that even the heathen instinct told them that this was insufficient, and led them to the remedy of sacrifice. The fourth is taken from the light of Christianity not being universal, nor its evidence so strong as might possibly have been given us ; its force is weakened or rebutted by observing, first, how God dispenses His ordinary gifts in such great variety, both of degrees and kinds, amongst creatures of the same species, and even to the same individuals at different times ; secondly, how ' the evidence upon which we are natu- 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 407 rally appointed to act in common matters, throughout a very great part of life, is doubtful in a high degree.' * Probability/ says Butler in another place, * is the guide of life.' As against the Deists, the controversy was now decided. It was abundantly proved that the fact of a revelation was, if not demonstrable, yet so exceedingly probable that no prudent mind could reject it, and that the Christian ethics were not in- consistent with, but a continuation and expansion of, natural morality. Deism accordingly fell into disrepute in England about the middle of the century. But in France the works of some of the English Deists became known through the trans- lations of Diderot and the Encyclopaedists, and doubtless co- operated with those of Voltaire in causing the outburst of irreligion which followed the Revolution of 1789. 90. One more of these apologetic works must be mentioned, the Divine Legation of Moses, by Bishop Warburton (1743). This writer, known for his arrogant temper, to whom Mallet addressed a pamphlet inscribed 'To the most Impudent Man alive,' had considerable intellectual gifts. His friendship with Pope, whose Essay on Man he defended against the censures of Crousaz, first brought him into notice. The favour of Queen Caroline, whose discerning eye real merit or genius seldom escaped, raised him to the episcopal bench. The full title of the controversial work above mentioned is, ' The Divine Legation of Moses demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist from the Omission of the Doctrine of a Future State of Reward and Punishment in the Jewish Dispensation.' The in- troduction is in the form of a * Dedication to the Free Thinkers,' in which, while protesting against the buffoonery, scurrility, and other unfair arts which the anti- Christian writers employed in controversy, Warburton carefully guards himself from the sup- position of being hostile to the freedom of the press. 'No generous and sincere advocate of religion,' he says, ' would desire an adversary whom the laws had before disarmed.' 1 91. The rise of Methodism dates from about 1730. It was a reaction against the coldness and dryness of the current Protestant theology, which has been described as ' polished as marble, but also as lifeless and cold.' With its multiplied 'proofs' and 'evidences,' and appeals to reason, it had failed to make Christianity better known or more loved by its gene- ration ; its authors are constantly bewailing the inefncacy of their own arguments, and the increasing corruption of the age. Methodism appealed to the heart, thereby to awaken the con- 1 The materials of the above sketch are partly taken from an able paper by the late Mr. Pattison in the volume of Essays and Review's. 408 HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. science and influence the will; and this is the secret of its astonishing success. It originated in the prayer- meetings of a few devoutly disposed young men at Oxford, whom Wesley joined, and among whom he at once became the leading spirit. He was himself much influenced by Count Zinzendorf, the founder of Moravianism ; but his large and sagacious mind refused to entangle itself in mysticism ; and, after a curious debate, they parted, and each went his own way. After fruit- lessly endeavouring for many years to accommodate the new movement to the forms of the Establishment, Wesley organised an independent system of ministerial work and government for the sect which he had called into existence. After the middle of the century multitudes of human beings commenced to crowd around the newly opened manufacturing and mining centres in the northern counties. Neither they nor their employers took much thought about their religious concerns. Hampered by their legal status, and traditionally suspicious of anything approaching to enthusiasm, the clergy of the Estab- lished Church neglected this new demand on their charity ; and miners and factory hands would have grown up as pagans in a Christian land had not the Wesleyan irregulars flung themselves into the breach, and endeavoured to bring the Gospel, according to their understanding of it, within the reach of these untended flocks. The movement obtained a vast ex- tension, and has of course a literature to represent it ; but from its sectarian position the literature of Methodism is, to use an American phrase, sectional merely ; it possesses no permanent or general interest. Wesley himself, and perhaps Fletcher of Madeley, are the only exceptions. 92. Conyers Middleton wrote in 1729 his Letter from Rome, in which he attempted to derive all the ceremonies of the Roman ritual from the Pagan religion which it had supplanted. An able reply, The Catholic Christian Instructed, was written by Challoner (1737), to the effect that Middleton's averments were in part untrue, in part true, but not to the purpose of his argument, since an external resemblance between a Pagan and a Christian rite was of no importance, provided the inward meaning of the two were different. The excellent Bishop Challoner was converted in early youth by the teaching of John Gother. Many years of his life were passed in the English college at Douai ; in 1741 he came over to England to take charge of the southern district, with the title of Bishop of Debra, in partibus. He died in his ninetieth year in 1781, saddened by the ruin and confusion wrought by the No-Popery riots of the previous year. Among his numerous works, chiefly controversial and devotional, none has a higher value than the Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1742) ; it 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 409 contains numberless details, which would otherwise have been lost, respect- ing the labours and sufferings of Catholic priests employed on the English mission, from the change of religion down to the bishop's own time. Dr. Prideaux (ante, iv. 66) is the author of The Connexion of the History of the Old and New Testaments (1715), a work still much prized by Angli- cans. The good Thomas Wilson, Protestant Bishop of Sodor and Man, author of two widely known devotional manuals, Sacra Privata and an In- troduction to the Holy Communion, closed a long and beautiful life in 1755. Philip Doddridge, the son of a London merchant, laboured for many years as a nonconformist minister at Northampton. He is the author of Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745), a Life of Colonel Gardiner, who fell at Prestonpans, and the Family Expositor. William Paley, a writer of great clearness of thought and force of character, after passing through Cambridge, took orders, and became eventually Archdeacon of Carlisle. His Horce Paulines (1790) is an endeavour, by pointing out various ' undesigned coincidences ' between passages in the Pauline epistles and the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles, to establish the historical credibility of both. In his Evidences of Christianity (1794) he popularised and put in a more striking and available shape the arguments supplied by Lardner (see above, 40). In Natural Theology (1802) he aims at proving the existence of an intelligent personal Creator by the numerous instances of apparent design which may be traced in the works of Nature. Philosophy, 1700-1800 : Berkeley, Shaftesbury, Hume, Reid, Butler, Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Hartley, Tucker, Priestley, Paley. 93. Nothing more than a meagre outline of the history of philosophy in this period can here be attempted. Those who devoted themselves to philosophical studies were numerous ; this, in fact, up to past the middle of the century, was the fashionable and favourite pursuit with the educated classes. The most famous work of the greatest poet of the age, Pope's Essay on Man, is a metaphysico-moral treatise in heroic verse. The philosophers may be classed under various heads : we have the Sensational school, founded by Locke, of whom we have already spoken ; the Idealists, represented by Bishop Berkeley ; the Sceptical school, founded by Hume ; the Common-sense or Scotch school, comprising the names of Reid, Brown, and Dugald Stewart; and the Moralists, represented by Butler, Smith, and Paley. There are few philosophers whose personal character it is more agreeable to contemplate than George Berkeley, the Pro- testant Bishop of Cloyne. He was born in 1684 at Kilevin, in the county of Kilkenny, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he obtained a fellowship in 1707. About four years later he went over to London, where he was received with open arms. There seems to have been something so 410 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. winning about his personal address that criticism, when it questioned his positions, forgot its usual bitterness ; and extra- ordinary natural gifts seemed for once to have aroused no envy in the beholder. Pope, whose satire was so unsparing, ascribes To Berkeley every virtue under heaven ; and Atterbury, after an interview with him, said, ' So much understanding, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but angels, till I saw this gentleman.' x Of Berkeley's share in the controversy with the Deists, we have already spoken. His Principles of Human Knowledge, published in 1710, contains the idealist system for which his name is chiefly remembered. 2 In devising this his aim was still practical ; he hoped to cut the ground away from beneath the rationalising assailants of Christianity by proving that the existence of the material universe, the supposed invariable laws of which were set up by the sceptics as inconsistent with re- velation, was in itself problematical, since all that we can know directly respecting it is the ideas which we form of it, which ideas may, after all, be delusive. His other philo- sophical works are, Hylas and Philonous, Siris, or Reflections on Tar-water, and a Theory of Vision. Sir James Mackintosh was of opinion that Berkeley's works were beyond dispute the finest models of philosophical style since Cicero. 93a. The philosophical essays and papers of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, were collected after his death, and published under the title of Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1716). Shaftesbury opposed the atheists, and supported the doctrine of an inherent moral sense in man; he writes, however, in a sceptical tone on the subject of revealed religion, and is therefore classed by Leland, in his View of the principal Deistical Writers, with the authors of that school. His style is pure, easy, and pleasing, while not deficient in dignity and impressiveness. Among the essays are, ' A Letter concerning Enthusiasm,' ' Sensus Communis,' 'Advice to an Author,' and 'An Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit.' In the first-named he insists upon the utility and power of ridicule to ' eject and exorcise the melancholy demon of Enthusiasm.' Eepression of ' panick outbursts of this nature' by law or the sword of the magistrate is, he maintains, both wrong and absurd. ' To prescribe bounds to fancy and speculation, to regulate men's apprehensions and 1 Mackintosh's Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy, article 'Berkeley.' 2 See Crit. Sect. ch. II. 45. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 411 religious beliefs or fears, to suppress by violence the natural passion of Enthusiasm, or to endeavour to ascertain it, or reduce it to one species, or bring it under any one modification, is in truth no better sense, nor deserves a better character, than what the comedian declares of the like project in the affair of Love : Nihilo plus agas, Quain si des operam ut cum rations insanias. This passage is very characteristic of Shaftesbury's style. Bernard de Mandeville, a native of Holland, published in 1714 a famous book, of which the long title sufficiently explains the purport. It is ' The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices Public Benefits : con- taining several Discourses, to demonstrate, That Human Frailties, during the degeneracy of Mankind, may be turned to the advantage of the Civil Society, and made to supply the place of Moral Virtues.' Mandeville's principles were attacked by, among others, William Law, Hutcheson, and Berkeley in his Aldphron. He replied to Berkeley in the Letter to Dion. 94. David Hume, born at Edinburgh in 1711, was educated for the bar. He was never married. He enjoyed through life perfect health, and was gifted with unflagging spirits, and a cheerful, amiable disposition. His passions were not naturally strong, and his sound judgment and good sense enabled him to keep them under control. He died in 1776. Hume's chief philosophical works are contained in two volumes of Essays and Treatises. The first volume consists of Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, in two parts, originally published in 1742 and 1752 respectively. The second volume contains the Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, 1 and other treatises, the whole of which are a revised condensation of the Treatise on Human Nature, published in 1738, and spoken of in the advertisement to the Essays and Treatises as a 'juvenile work,' for which the author declined to be responsible in his riper years. In these treatises Hume propounds his theory of universal scepticism. Berkeley had denied matter, or the mysterious somewhat inferred by philosophers to exist beneath the sensible properties of , objects ; and Hume went yet further, and denied mind, the substance in which successive sensations and reflections are supposed to inhere. That we do perceive, and do reflect, is, he admitted, certain ; but what that is which perceives and reflects, whether it has any independent being of itself, apart from the series of impressions of which it is the subject, is a point altogether obscure, and on which, he main- tained, our faculties have no means of determining. Philosophy was thus placed in a dilemma, and became impossible. 2 i See Grit. Sect. ch. II. 46. 2 See Lewes's History of Philosophy. 412 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. 95. The Scotch or common-sense school has received ample justice at the hands of Cousin in his Cours de Philosophie Moderne. Its rise dates from the appearance of Reid's In- quiry into the Human Mind upon the Principles of Common Sense, published in 1764. As a reaction against the idealism of Berkeley and the scepticism of Hume, the rise of the com- mon-sense school was natural enough. It said in effect * We have a rough, general notion of the existence of matter out- side and independently of ourselves, of which no subtlety can deprive us ; and the instinctive impulse which we feel to put faith in the results of our mental operations is an irrefragable proof, and the best that can be given, of the reasonableness of that faith.' 96. Among the moralists of the period Butler holds the highest place. The fact of the existence in the mind of dis- interested affections and dispositions, pointing to the good of others, which Hobbes had denied, Eutler, in those admirable Sermons preached in the Kolls Chapel, has incontrovertibly established. ' In these sermons he has taught truths more capable of being exactly distinguished from the doctrines of his predecessors, more satisfactorily established by him, more comprehensively applied to particulars, more rationally con- nected with each other, and therefore more worthy the name of discovery, than any with which we are acquainted ; if we ought not, with some hesitation, to except the first steps of the Grecian philosophers towards a " Theory of Morals." ' * Hutcheson, an Irishman, author of an Inquiry into Beauty and Virtue (cir. 1726), and whose System of Moral Philosophy appeared after his death, in 1747, followed in the same track of thought. Hume's Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals was considered by himself to be the best of his writings ; it is, at any rate, the least paradoxical. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, follows Hume in holding the principle of sympathy to be the chief source of our moral feelings and judgments. Hartley, in his remarkable book, Observations on Man (1749), teaches that the develop- ment of the moral faculty within us is mainly effected through the principle of the association of ideas, a term first applied in this sense by Locke. Tucker's Light of Nature is chiefly metaphysical : so far as he touches on morals, he shows a disposition to return to the selfish theory, in opposition to the view of disinterested moral feelings introduced by Butler. Priestley, who, brought up as a Calvinist, embraced Unitarian opinions, and sympathised with the French Revolution on 1 Mackintosh's Dissertation, p. 191. 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 413 which account a Birmingham mob set fire to his house in 1791 adopted in his Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity the belief as to the inevitable character of human actions which Auguste Comte has extended widely in our own times. In his Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion Priestley's entire system is laid bare. But neither as theologian nor as philosopher will he be remembered so long as for his claim to a place in the temple of Science, in right of his discovery of oxygen. Lastly, William Paley, following Tucker, elaborated in his Moral and Political Philosophy, published in 1785, his well-known system of Utilitarianism: 'Virtue,' he said, 'is the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.' Mackintosh re- marks that it follows, as a necessary consequence from this proposition, that ' every act which flows from generosity or benevolence is a vice.' Political Science : Bolingbroke, Burke, Godwin, Paine. 97. Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, who had, as before mentioned (sect. 1), been implicated in schemes for placing the Pretender 1 on the throne, fled to France in 1715, and was for some time associated with the Jacobite cause. Finding probably that, whatever might be its merits, that cause had incapable supporters, he succeeded in obtaining permission to return to England in 1723. He joined the party opposed to Walpole, and contributed powerful papers to their organ, the Craftsman. But a menacing speech from Walpole made him tremble for his safety, and he again retired to France in 1737. He returned in 1743, but his influence was gone; he was neither trusted nor respected ; and he lived in retirement till his death in 1751. His collected writings, edited by David Mallet, appeared in 1754. In the preface to the first essay, a 'Dissertation on Parties/ written about 1737, he repudiates the Pretender, and says that the general design of these essays was 'to assert and vindicate the justice and honour of the Revolution ; of the principles established, of the means em- ployed, and of the ends obtained by it.' A striking conversion, indeed, in the ex-Secretary of State to the Court of St. Ger- mains ! Of his historical writings the chief objects were to clear up his own character, and to justify the Peace of Utrecht. His ' Letter to Sir William Wyndham,' privately printed and circulated about 1717, is vigorously written, and shows his 1 * Pretender ' does not mean, as many persons imagine, one who makes a pretended and baseless claim, but merely one who puts forth a claim, like the French pretend-ant. 4H HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. style at its best. The 'Idea of a Patriot King/ a treatise fitter for the lecture-room than the council-chamber, seriously propounded, as a cure for the evils of the State, an extension of the royal prerogative, the sovereign being, as the constitution had come to be understood, unduly hampered by the House of Commons in his generous labours to promote the happiness of his people. Of course the king so enfranchised was to be very virtuous and truly patriotic ; but how this was to be secured did not appear. Hume's political writings, on the Origin of Government, the Protestant Succession, the Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, &c., &c., form a large portion of the two volumes of Essays and Treatises already mentioned. Hume regards political science as a speculative philosopher ; in Burke the knowledge and the tendencies of the philosopher, the jurist, the statesman, and the patriot, appear all united. The fundamental idea of his political philosophy was, that civil liberty was rather prescrip- tive than theoretic ; that Order implied Progress, and Progress presupposed Order ; that in a political society the rights of its members were not absolute and unconditional, but strictly relative to, and to be sought in conformity with, the existing constitution of that society. These views are put forth, in the most masterly and eloquent manner, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790. Among those who supported in this country the political theories of the French Jacobins and Rousseau, the most eminent were William Godwin and Thomas Paine. The former pub- lished his Inquiry concerning Political Justice in 1793; the latter was living in America during the War of Independence, and, by the publication of his periodical tracts entitled Common Sense, contributed not a little to chase away the despondency which was beginning at one time to prevail among the colonists, and to define their position and political aims. The Rights of Man appeared in 1792, and the Age of Reason, a work conceived in the extremest French free-thinking spirit, in 1794. Samuel Parr is the subject of an amusing paper by De Quincey, ' Dr. Parr, or Whiggism in its relation to Literature ' (1862). He is described as 'a little man, in a most plebeian wig,' with a lisp, like 'a little French gossipping abbe.' In person, character, and opinions he was the very antithesis of Johnson. He was a tyrannical and not very successful peda- gogue. He is the author of numberless tracts and sermons, but the only piece of good literary work that he ever did was the introduction, in flowing and correct Latin, to an edition of Bellenden's De Statu (ante, III., 87). 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 415 Political Economy : Adam Smith, Malthus ; Criti- cism : Warton, Burke ; ./Esthetics : Reynolds, Walpole. 98. The science of Political Economy was, if not invented, at least enlarged, simplified, and systematised by Adam Smith, in his celebrated Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (177 '6). The late rise of this science may be ascribed to several causes ; to the contempt with which the ancient Greek philosophers regarded the whole business of money-getting ; to the aversion entertained by the philosophers of later schools for luxury, as the great depraver of morals, whence they would be little disposed to analyse the sources of that wealth, the accumulation of which made luxury possible ; lastly, to the circumstance that during the Middle Ages the clergy were the sole educators of society, and were not likely to undertake the study of phenomena which lay quite out of their track of thought and action. Only when the laity came to be generally educated, and began to reflect intelligently upon the principles and laws involved in the every-day operations of the temporal life, could a science of wealth become possible. Certain peculiarities about the East Indian trade of the seventeenth century, which consisted chiefly in the exchange of silks and other Indian manufactures for bullion, gave occasion to a number of pamphlets, in which the true principles of com- merce were gradually developed. But what was called the ' mercantile system ' was long the favourite doctrine both with statesmen and economists, and, indeed, is even yet not quite exploded. By this was meant a system of cunning devices, having for their object, by repressing trade in one direction, and encouraging it in another, to leave the community at the end of each year more plentifully supplied with the precious metals (in which alone wealth was then supposed to consist) than at the end of the preceding. The tradition of over- government, which had come down from* the Roman empire, joined to the narrow corporate spirit which had arisen among the great trading cities of the Middle Ages, led naturally to such views of national economy. Every one knows what efforts it has cost in our own days to establish the simple principle of commercial freedom the right to ' buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market. 7 That this principle has at last prevailed, and that money, in so far as it is not itself a mere commodity, is now regarded, not as wealth, but as the variable representative of wealth, is mainly due to the great work of Adam Smith. 416 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. V. Thomas R. Malthus, a Cambridge man, published in 1798 his celebrated Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he endeavours to prove that it is the invariable tendency of population to increase faster, than the means of subsistence. 99. Joseph, brother of Thomas Warton, is the author of an able Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756). Burke published in the same year his celebrated philosophical Essay on the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He was then a young man, and had studied philosophy in the sensuous school of Locke; at a later period of his life, he would pro- bably have imported into his essay some of the transcendental ideas which had been brought to light in the interval, and for which his mind presented a towardly and congenial soil. The analysis of those impressions on the mind which raise the emotion of the sublime or that of the beautiful is carefully and ingeniously made ; the logic is generally sound ; and if the theory does not seem to be incontrovertibly established as a whole, the illustrative reasoning employed in support of it is, for the most part, striking, picturesque, and true. The reader may find it difficult to understand how these two judgments can be mutually consistent, yet it is perfectly intelligible. The theory, for instance, which makes the emotion of the sublime inseparably associated with the sense of the terrible (terror, 'the common stock of everything that is sublime,' part ii. sect. 5), is not quite proved ; for he gives magnificence such as that of the starry heavens as a source of the sub- lime, without showing (indeed, it would be difficult to show) that whatever was magnificent was necessarily also terrible. But at the same time he proves, with great ingenuity and completeness, that in a great many cases, when the emotion of the sublime is present, the element of terror is, if not a necessary condition, at any rate a concomitant and influential circumstance. His theory of the beautiful is equally ingenious, but perhaps still more disputable. By beauty he means (part iii. sect. 1) 'that quality, or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love or some passion similar to it/ He labours at length to prove that beauty does not depend upon proportion, nor upon fitness for the end designed ; but that it does chiefly depend on the five following properties : 1, smallness ; 2, smoothness ; 3, gradual variation ; 4, delicacy ; 5, mild tone in colour. That the emotion of beauty is unconnected with the perception of harmony or proportion is certainly a bold assertion. However, even if the analysis were ever so accurate and perfect, it might still be maintained that the treatise con- tains little that is really valuable towards the formation of a 1700-1800. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 417 sound system of criticism, either in aesthetics or literature. The reason is briefly this that the quality which men chiefly look for in works of art and literature is that which is variously named genius, greatness, nobleness, distinction, the ideal, &c. ; where this quality is absent, all Burke's formal criteria for testing the presence of the sublime or the beautiful may be complied with, and yet the work will remain intrin- sically insignificant. As applied to nature, the analysis may perhaps be of more value ; because the mystery of infinity forms the background to each natural scene ; the divine calm of the universe is behind the mountain peak or the rolling surf, and furnishes punctually, and in all cases, that element of nobleness which, in the works of man, is present only in the higher souls. Hence, there being no fear that we shall ever find Nature, if we understand her, mean, or trivial, or superficial, as we often find the human artist, we may properly concentrate our atten- tion on the sources of the particular emotions which her scenes excite ; and among these particular emotions those of the sublime and beautiful are second to none in power. 100. Sir Joshua Reynolds' excellent Discourses on Painting, or rather the first part of them, appeared in 1779. Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, compiled from the unwieldy collections of Virtue on the lives and works of British artists, were published between the years 1761 and 1771. William Gilpin, vicar of Boldre, in the New Forest, is the author of a delightful book, Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791). Sir Uvedale Price, in his Essays on the Picturesque, produced the first good book on Landscape gardening. 101. The Letters of Lord Chesterfield to his natural son, Philip Stanhope, were published soon after the writer's death in 1773. Johnson, who never forgave Lord Chesterfield for having treated him, at a time when he stood in great need of patronage, with coldness and neglect, said that the Letters 'taught the morals of a courtezan, and the manners of a dancing-master.' There is more point than truth in this cen- sure. There might have been some awkwardness in writing about morals, considering to whom the letters were addressed ; the subject of conduct, therefore, in regard to great matters, is not touched upon ; but good conduct in little things, self- denial in trifles, in a word, all that constitutes good breeding, is enforced with much grace and propriety. Johnson himself was only too vulnerable on this head ; Lord Chesterfield de- scribes him in the Letters under the character of a ' respectable Hottentot.' 2 D 418 CHAPTER VI. RECENT TIMES. 1800-1850. Ruling Ideas : Theory of the Spontaneous in Poetry. 1. As no summary which our limits would permit us to give of the political events between 1800 and 1850 could add mate- rially to the student's knowledge respecting a period so recent, we shall omit here the historical sketch which we prefixed to each of the two preceding chapters. At once, from the opening of the nineteenth century, we meet with originality and with energetic convictions; the deepest problems are sounded with the utmost freedom : de- corum gives place to earnestness ; and principles are mutually confronted instead of forms. We speak of England only ; the change to which we refer set in at an earlier period in France and Germany. In the main, the chief pervading movement of Society may be described as one of reaction against the ideas of the eighteenth century. Those ideas were, in brief, Rationalism and Formalism, both in literature and in politics. Pope, for instance, was a rationalist, and also a formalist, in both respects. In his views of society, he took the excellence of no institution for granted he would not admit that antiquity in itself constituted a claim to reverence ; on the contrary, his turn of mind disposed him to try all things, old and new, by the test of their rationality, and to ridicule the multiplicity of forms and usages some marking ideas originally irrational, others whose meaning, once clear and true, had been lost or obscured through the change of circumstances which encumbered the public life of his time. Yet he was, at the same time, a political formalist in this sense, that he desired no sweeping changes, and was quite content that the social system should work on as it was. It suited him, and that was enough for his somewhat selfish philosophy. Again, in literature he was a rationalist, and also a formalist ; but here in a good sense. For in literary, as in all other art, the form is of prime importance; and his 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 419 destructive logic, while it crushed bad forms, bound him to develop his powers in strict conformity to good ones. Now the reaction against these ideas was twofold. The conservative reaction, while it pleaded the claims of prescription, denounced the aberrations of reason, and endeavoured to vindicate or re- suscitate the ideas lying at the base of existing political society, which the rationalism of the eighteenth century had sapped, rebelled at the same time against the arbitrary rules with which, not Pope himself, but his followers, had fettered literature. The liberal, or revolutionary reaction, while, accepting the de- structive rationalism of the eighteenth century, it scouted its political formalism as weak and inconsistent, joined the conser- vative school in rebelling against the reign of the arbitrary and the formal in literature. This, then, is the point of contact between Scott and the conservative school on the one hand, and Coleridge, Godwin, Byron, Shelley, and the rest of the re- volutionary school on the other. They were all agreed that literature, and especially poetry, was becoming a cold, lifeless affair, conforming to all the rules and proprieties, but divorced from living nature, and the warm spontaneity of the heart. They imagined that the extravagant and exclusive admiration of the classical models had occasioned this mischief ; and fixing their eyes on the rude yet grand beginnings of modern society, which the spectacle of the feudal ages presented to them, they thought that by imbuing themselves with the spirit of romance and chivalry by coming into moral contact with the robust faith and energetic passions of a race not yet sophisticated by civili- sation they would wake up within themselves the great original forces of the human spirit forces which, once set in motion, would develop congenial literary forms, produced, not by the labor limce, but by a true inspiration. Especially in poetry was this the case. To the artificial, mechanical, didactic school, which Pope's successors had made intolerable, was now opposed a counter theory of the poetic function, which we may call the theory of the Spontaneous. As light flows from the stars, or perfume from flowers as the nightingale cannot help singing, nor the bee refrain from making honey ; so, according to this theory, poetry is the spontaneous emanation of a musical and beautiful soul. ' The poet is born, and is not made ; ' and so is it with his poetry. To pretend to construct a beautiful poem is as if one were to try to construct a tree. Something dead and wooden will be the result in either case. In a poet effort is tantamount to condemnation, for it implies the absence of inspiration. For the same reason, to be consciously didactic is incompatible with the true poetic gift. 420 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. VI. For whatever of great value comes from a poet is not that which he wills to say, but that which he cannot help saying that which some higher power call it Nature or what you will dictates through his lips as through an oracle. 2. This theory, which certainly had many attractions and contained much truth, led to various important results. It drove away from Helicon many versifiers who had no business there by depriving them of an audience. The Beatties, Aken- sides, Youngs, and Darwins, who had inflicted their dulness on the last century, under the impression that it was poetry a delusion shared by their readers had to ' pale their ineffectual fire ' and decamp, when their soporific productions were con- fronted with the startling and direct utterances of the disciples of the Spontaneous. On the other hand, the theory produced new mischiefs and generated new mistakes. It did not silence inferior poets ; but they were of a different class from what they had been before. It was not now the moralist or the dabbler in philosophy, who, imagining himself to have important infor- mation to convey to mankind, and aiming at delighting while he instructed, constructed his epic, or ode, or metrical essay, as the medium of communication. It was rather the man gifted with a fatal facility of rime with a mind teeming with trivial thoughts and corresponding words who was misled by the new theory into confounding the rapidity of his conceptions with the spontaneity of genius, and into thinking revision or curtailment of them a kind of treason to the divine afflatus. Such writers generally produced two or three pretty pieces, written at their brightest moments, amidst a miscellaneous heap of * fugitive poems ' rightly so called which were good for little or nothing. Upon real genius the theory acted both for good and for evil. Social success, upon which even the best poets of the eighteenth century had set a high value, was despised by the higher minds of the new school. They loved to commune with Nature and their own souls in solitude, be- lieving that here was the source of true poetic inspiration. The resulting forms were, so far as they went, most beautiful and faultless in art ; they were worthy of the profound and beautiful thoughts which they embodied. In diction, rhythm, proportion, melody i n everything, in short, that constitutes beauty of form no poems ever composed attained to greater perfection than Shelley's Ski/lark or Keats' Hyperion. Yet these forms, after all, were not of the highest order. The judgment of many generations has assigned the palm of superiority among poetic forms to the Epos and the Drama ; yet in neither of these did the school of poets of which we speak achieve any success of 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 421 moment. This was probably due to the influence of the theory which we are considering. The truth is, that no extensive and complex poem was ever composed without large help from that constructive faculty which it was the object of the theory to depreciate. Even Shakspere, whom it is or was the fashion to consider as a wild, irregular poet, writing from impulse, and careless of art, is known to have carefully altered and re- arranged some of his plays Hamlet, for instance and by so doing to have greatly raised their poetic value. Virgil Tasso Dante must all have expended a great amount of dry intel- lectual labour upon their respective masterpieces, in order to harmonise the parts and perfect the forms of expression. The bright moments are transitory, even with minds endowed with the highest order of imagination ; but by means of this labour tasks in hours of insight willed May be in hours of gloom fulfilled. But this truth was obscured, or but dimly visible, to minds which viewed poetry in the light we have described. Even Scott true worker though he was may be held to have pro- duced poems not commensurate with the power that was in him, owing to a want of due pains in construction, attributable to the influence of the prevalent ideas. Poetry: Sir Walter Scott, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Crabbe, Coleridge, Southey, Campbell, Wordsworth, Hood, Hogg, &c. 3. The Life of Scott, edited by his son-in-law, Lockhart, opens with a remarkable fragment of autobiography. Unhap- pily it extends to no more than sixty pages, and conducts us and the writer only to the epoch when, his education being finished, he was about to launch forth into the world ; but these few manly and modest pages contain a record of the early years of a great life, which cannot easily be matched in interest. Walter Scott was born at Edinburgh on August 15, 1771. His father, descended from the border family or clan of Scott, of which the chieftajn was the Duke of Buccieuch, was a writer to the signet, that is, a solicitor belonging to the highest branch of his profession. A lameness in the right leg, first contracted when he was eighteen months old, was the cause of his being sent away to pass in the country many of those years which most boys pass at school. He was fond of reading, and the books which touched his fancy or his feelings made an indelible 422 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. VI. impression on him. Forty years later he remembered the deep delight with which, at the age of thirteen, stretched under a plane tree in a garden sloping down to the Tweed at Kelso, he had first read Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry. ' From this time,' he says, ' the love of natural beauty, more especially when combined with ancient ruins, or the remains of our fathers' piety or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion, which, if circumstances had permitted, I would willingly have gratified by travelling over half the globe. 7 When he was nineteen years old his father gave him his choice, whether to adopt his own profession, or to be called to the bar. Scott preferred the latter ; he studied the Scotch law with that conscientious and cheerful diligence which distinguished him through life, and began to practise as an advocate in 1792, with fair prospects of professional success. But the bent of nature was too strong for him : literature engrossed more and more of his time and thoughts ; and his first publication, in 1796, of translations of Lenore and other German poems by Burger, was soon followed by various contributions to Lewis' Tales of Wonder, and by the compilation of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, many pieces in which are original, in the year 1802. In 1797 he had married Charlotte Carpenter (or Charpentier), and settled at Lasswade, on the Esk, near ' classic Hawthornden.' Foreseeing that he would never succeed at the bar, he obtained in 1799, through the influence of the Duke of Buccleuch, the appointment of Sheriff of Selkirkshire, to which, in 1806, was added a clerkship in the Court of Session, with a salary of 1300 a year. Both these appointments, which involved magisterial and official duties of a rather burthensome nature, always most punctually and con- scientiously discharged, Scott held to within a year before his death. 4. A mind so active and powerful as that of Scott could not remain unaffected by the wild ferment of spirits caused by the breaking out of the French Eevolution. But in the main, the foundations of his moral and spiritual being remained unshaken by those tempests. His robust common sense taught him to attend to his own business in preference to devoting himself to the universal interests of mankind ; and his love of what was ancient and possessed historic fame his fondness for local and family traditions and the predilection which he had for the manners and ideas of the days of chivalry made the levelling doctrines of the Revolution especially hateful to him. It was otherwise with most of the poets, his con- temporaries. Wordsworth, after taking his degree at Cam- bridge, in 1791 a ceremony for which he showed his contempt 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 423 by devoting the preceding week to the perusal of Clarissa Harlowe went over to France, and, during a residence there of thirteen months, formed an intimacy with Beaupuis, a Girondist general, and with many of the Brissotins at Paris. Southey, upon whose smaller brain and livelier temperament the French ideas acted so powerfully as to throw him com- pletely off his balance, wrote the dramatic sketch of Wat Tyler a highly explosive and seditious production while at Oxford in 1794, and for some time seriously contemplated joining Coleridge in establishing a Pantisocratic community 1 on the banks of the Susquehanna.' Coleridge, whose teeming brain produced in later life so many systems or fragments of systems, was in 1794 full of his wonderful scheme of 'Pan- tisocracy,' in anticipation of the phalansteres of Fourier, and the Icaria of Cabet. In his ode to Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, published in 1798, the Jacobin poet discharges the full vials of his wrath on Mr. Pitt, as the chief opponent of the progress of revolution. The three weird sisters, after expressing their deep obligations to the British statesman, exchange ideas on the subject of the best mode of rewarding him. Famine will gnaw the multitude till they * seize him and his brood ; ' Slaughter will make them 'tear him limb from limb.' But Fire taxes their gratitude with poverty of resource : And is this all that you can do For him who did so much for you ? I alone am faithful ; I Cling to him everlastingly. In 1804 Scott removed to Ashestiel, a house overlooking the Tweed, near Selkirk, for the more convenient discharge of his magisterial duties. The locale is brought picturesquely before us in the introduction to the h'rst canto of Marmion : 1 Late, gazing down the steepy linn, That hems our little garden in, Low in its dark and narrow glen, You scarce the rivulet might ken, So thick the tangled greenwood grew, So feeble trilled the streamlet through : Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen Through bush and brier, no longer green, An angry brook, it sweeps the glade, Brawls over rock and wild cascade, And, foaming brown with double speed, Hurries its waters to the Tweed. 5. Early in 1805 appeared the Lay of the Last Minstrel, the 1 Extract Book, art. 178. 424 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. VI. first of the series of Scott's romantic poems. Its composition was due to a suggestion of the beautiful Duchess of Buccleuch, who, upon hearing for the first time the wild border legend of Gilpin Homer, turned to Scott, and said, * Why not embody it in a poem ? ' The Lay at once obtained a prodigious popularity. 1 Marmion was published in 1808, and severely criticised soon after by Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review. Scott's soreness under the infliction, united to his growing aversion for the politics of the Edinburgh, led him to con centrate all his energies upon the establishment of a rival review, and the Quarterly was accordingly set on foot in 1809. The Lady of the Lake appeared in 1810. 2 Of these three poems Lockhart says : ' The Lay is generally considered as the most natural and original, Marmion as the most powerful and splendid, and the Lady of the Lake as the most interesting, romantic, picturesque, and graceful.' The Lay, however, was not entirely original. Scott himself, in the preface to the edition of 1829, acknowledges the obligation under which he lay to Coleridge's poem of Christabel. This striking fragment, he says, * from the singularly irregular structure of the stanzas, and the liberty which it allows the author to adapt the sound to the sense, seemed to me exactly suited to such an extrava- ganza as I meditated on the subject of Gilpin Homer. ... It was in Christabel that I first found [this measure] used in serious poetry, and it is to Mr. Coleridge that I am bound to make the acknowledgment due from the pupil to his master.' 6. His other romantic poems were, the Vision of Don Roderick, Rokeby, the Lord of the Isles, the Bridal of Triermain, and Harold the Dauntless all published between 1811 and 1817. The Lord of the Isles (January 1815), the scene of which is laid chiefly in the Western High- lands and islands, and affords full scope for Scott's admirable descriptive power, presents in graphic portraiture the latter part of the adventurous career of Robert Bruce, terminating with the battle of Bannockburn. Yet the poem had no great success with the public, which was by this time under Byron's fascination. Scott himself was heartily tired of Harold before it was finished, and worked off the con- cluding portion in an agony of impatience and dissatisfaction. When asked some years later why he had given up writing poetry, he simply said, 'Because Byron bet me.' Byron had returned from his long ramble over the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean in 1811, and in the course of the five following i Seo Grit. Sect. ch. I. 26, 54. 2 Ibid. 27. 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 425 years he published his Oriental Tales the Bride of Abydos, the Giaour, the Siege of Corinth, the Corsair, 1 Lara, and Parisina, which, by their highly coloured scenes and impassioned senti- ment, made Scott's poetry appear by comparison tame and pale. Writing to the Countess Purgstall in 1821, he says : * In truth, I have given up poetry ; . . . besides, I felt the prudence of giving way before the more forcible and powerful genius of Byron ; ' and would, moreover, he adds, hesitate ' to exhibit in my own person the sublime attitude of the dying gladiator ; ' alluding to the well-known passage in Childe Harold. 7. But in 1814 Scott struck out a new path, in which neither Byron nor any other living man could keep pace with him. Ransacking an old cabinet he happened one day, in the spring of that year, to lay his hand on an old unfinished MS., containing a fragment of a tale on the rising of the clans in 1745, which he had written some years before, but feeling dis- satisfied with, had put by. He now read it over, and thought that something could be made of it. He finished the tale in six weeks, and published it anonymously, under the title of Waverley, or a Tale of Sixty Years since. The impression which it created was prodigious. Waverley was soon followed by Guy Mannering and the Antiquary? Between 1816 and 1826 appeared seventeen other novels from the same practised hand ; but it was Scott's humour still to preserve the anony- mous ; and though many literary men felt all along a moral certainty that the author of Waverley was, and could be, no other than the author of Marmion, and Mr. Adolphus wrote in 1820 an extremely ingenious pamphlet, 3 establishing the identity of the two almost to demonstration, yet the public had been so mystified that it was not .till the occasion of a public dinner at Edinburgh in 1827, when Scott made a formal avowal of his responsibility as the author of the entire series, 4 that all uncertainty was removed. The noble and generous nature of Scott nowhere appears more conspicuously than in the history of his relations with the other eminent poets of his time. Byron, stung by the unsparing criticisms to which Jeffrey subjected his youthful effusions 5 in the Edinburgh Review, had replied by his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers? in which, including Scott among the poets of the Lake scjiool, he had made him the object of a petulant and unfounded invective. Scott alludes to this attack from the ' young whelp of a lord ' in many of his letters, but evidently 1 See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 28. 3 Extract Book, art. 178. 3 Letters on the Authorship of Waverley. 4 See Grit. Sect. ch. II. 4. 5 The Hours of Idleness. See Grit. Sect. ch. I. 30. 426 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. VI. without the slightest feeling of bitterness. When he visited London in the spring of 1815, and was enthusiastically received by the generation just grown to manhood, which had been fed by his verse, he became acquainted with Byron, and their mutual liking was so strong that the acquaintance in the course of a few weeks almost grew into intimacy. They met for the last time in the autumn of the same year, after Scott's return from Waterloo. Of Coleridge, Scott always spoke with interest and admiration, and endeavoured to serve him more than once. With Southey he kept up a pretty constant corre- spondence, and, besides serving him in other ways, procured the laureateship for him in 1813, after having declined it for himself. Towards Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, whose touchy and irritable pride would have provoked any less generous patron, his kindness was unvarying and indefatigable. With Moore he became acquainted on the occasion of his visit to Ireland in 1825, and received him at Abbotsford later in the same year. The Irish poet made a very favourable impression. Scott says in his diary * There is a manly frankness, with per- fect ease and good breeding, about him, which is delightful. Not the least touch of the poet or the pedant. A little, very little man ; '. . . but not insignificant like Lewis. . . . His countenance is plain but expressive ; so very animated, espe- cially in speaking or singing, that it is far more interesting than the finest features could have made it.' Of Scott's intercourse with Sir Humphry Davy himself a thorough poet in nature Lockhart relates an amusing anecdote : ' Scott, Davy, the biographer, and a rough Scotch friend of Sir Walter's, named Laidlaw, were together in Abbotsford in 1820; the two latter being silent and admiring listeners during the splendid colloquies of the poet and the philosopher. At last Laidlaw broke out with " Gude preserve us ; this is a very superior occasion ! Eh, sirs ! I wonder if Shakspere and Bacon ever met to screw ilk other up ! " ' 8. Scott's fortunes, which had seemed to be fitly crowned and distinguished when he was created a baronet in 1820, went all awrack in 1826, through the failure of the houses of Constable and Ballantyne. With the Ballantynes, who were printers, Scott had been in partnership since 1805, though even his dearest friends were ignorant of the fact. How bravely he bore himself in the midst of the utter ruin which came upon him how strenuously he applied his wonderful powers of thought and work to the task of retrieving his position how he struggled on till health, faculties, and life itself gave way these are matters which belong to the story 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 427 of the man rather than the author. The novels and other works composed between 1826 and his death in 1832, though they filled very many volumes, manifest a progressive decline of power. Woodstock was in preparation at the time when the stroke came ; but there is no falling off in the concluding portion, such as might tell of the agonies of mind through which the writer was passing. To Woodstock, however, suc- ceeded Anne of Geierstein, the Fair Maid of Perth, Count Robert of Paris, and Castle Dangerous, all of which, or at any rate the last two, betoken a gradual obscuration and failure of the powers of imagination and invention. In 1827 he published a Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Any one who would wish to acquire a just notion of the marvellous fertility of his powerful mind, should read the ' List of Publications ' at the end of the Life by Lockhart. Among those that have not been already mentioned, the most important are, complete editions of the works of Dryden (1808) and Swift (1814), each provided with an elaborate biography ; Essays on Chivalry and The Drama (1814) and on Romance (1823) ; Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816), in which there is a good description of the battle of Waterloo ; Lives of the Novelists, Richardson, Fielding, &c., down to Anne Radcliffe, (1820); Tales of a Grandfather (1827-30); and Demonology and Witchcraft (1830). In the summer of 1832 he visited Italy in a frigate which the Government placed at his disposal, to recruit, if that were possible, the vital energies of a frame which, massive and muscular as was the mould in which nature had cast it, was now undermined and worn out by care and excessive toil* But it. was too late ; and feeling that the end was near, Scott hurried homewards to breathe his last in his beloved native land. After gradually sinking for two months, he expired at Abbotsford in the midst of his children, on the afternoon of a calm September day in 1832. We proceed to name the principal works of the other poets, mentioning them in the order of their deaths. 9. Keats in his short life contributed many noble composi- tions to English poetry. His soul thirsted for beauty; his creed the substance of his religion was That first in beauty should be first in might. 1 But he was poor, of mean origin, weak in health, scantily be- friended : he could not always shut out the external world with its hard, unlovely realities ; like Mulciber, who Dropt from the zenith like a falling star On Lemnos, th' ^Egean isle, 1 From Hyperion. 428 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, CHAP. VI. he was sometimes driven out of the heaven of imagination, and then he fell at once into the depths of dejection. He died in his twenty-seventh year, and wished his epitaph to be, ' Here lies one whose name was writ in water. ' His first work, Endymion, and his last, Hyperion, 1 may be regarded, the former as an expansion, the latter as an interpretation, of portions of the my- thology of Greece. Hyperion is a fragment ; in it the sublimity of the colossal shapes of the Titans, contrasted with the glorious beauty of the younger gods, bespeaks an imagination worthy of Dante. The Eve of St. Agnes belongs to a different vein of ideas ; the legends and superstitions of the Middle Age furnish its subject and its colouring. The three wonderful Odes, * To Psyche,' 'To a Nightingale,' and 'On a Grecian Urn,' might furnish matter for a chapter to themselves. 10. Percy Bysshe Shelley, born in 1792, embraced with fervour, even from his schoolboy days, both the destructive and the constructive ideas of the revolutionary school. He was en- thusiastically convinced that the great majority of mankind was, and with trifling exceptions had always been, enslaved by cus- tom, by low material thoughts, by tyranny, and by superstition, and he no less fervently believed in the perfectibility of the individual and of society, as the result of the bursting of these bonds, and of a philosophical and philanthropic system of education. Queen Mob, written when he was eighteen, but never published with his consent, represents the revolutionary fever when at its utmost heat ; the court, the camp, the State, the Church, all are incurably corrupt; faith is the clinging curse which poisons the cup of human happiness ; when that is torn up by the roots, and all institutions now in being have been abolished, then earth may become the 'reality of heaven' ; there will then be free scope for the dominion of love, and reason and passion will desist from their long combat. The metre is rime- less and irregular ; but there are bursts of eloquent rushing verse, which for soul-fraught music cannot be surpassed. The Revolt of Islam (1817), a poem in twelve cantos, in the Spenserian stanza, though it has most beautiful passages, fails to rivet the interest through insufficiency of plot. It, too, has for its general drift the utter corruption and rottenness of all that is, involving the necessity, for a nation that desired truly to live, of breaking the chains of faith and custom by which it was held. Peter Bell the Third (1819) is a satirical attack upon Wordsworth, who had grown, in Shelley's opinion, far too conservative. To a mind like Shelley's it may be conceived how great was the attraction of the story of Prometheus, the great Titan who 1 Extract Boole, art. 205. 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 429 rebelled against the gods. To this attraction we owe the drama of Prometheus Unbound. His tragedy of The Cenci, written at Rome in 1820, shows great dramatic power, but the nature of the story renders it impossible that it should be represented on the stage. The lyrical drama of Hellas, written in 1821, was suggested by the efforts which the insurgent Greeks were then making to shake off the yoke of their Turkish tyrants. 1 Adonais is a wonderfully beautiful elegy on his friend Keats. The Masque of Anarchy (1819) was written upon the news reaching him of what has been called the ' Manchester Massacre.' Epi- psychidion (1821) is very lovely, but obscure. These are nearly all the longer poems. It is by his shorter pieces that Shelley is best known The Cloud, To a Skylark, The Sensitive Plant, Stanzas loritten in dejection near Naples, and many others in which that quality of ethereal and all-transmuting imagination, \vhich especially distinguishes him from other poets, is most conspicuous. 2 Having lived the last four years of his life in Italy, Shelley met with a premature death by drowning, in the Gulf of Spezzia, in the year 1822. 11. Byron represents the universal reaction of the nine- teenth century against the ideas of the eighteenth. We have seen the literary reaction exemplified in Scott; but the pro- test of Byron was more comprehensive, and reached to deeper regions of thought. Moody and misanthropical, he rejected the whole manner of thought of his predecessors ; and the scepticism of the eighteenth century suited him as little as its popular belief. Unbelievers of the class of Hume and Gibbon did not suffer on account of being without faith ; their turn of mind was Epicurean ; the world of sense and intelligence furnished them with as much of enjoyment as they required, and they had no quarrel with the social order which secured to them the tranquil possession of their daily pleasures. But Byron had a mind of that daring and impetuous temper which, while it rushes into the path of doubt suggested by cooler heads, presently recoils from the consequences of its own act, and shudders at the moral desolation which scepticism spreads over its life. He proclaimed to the world his misery and despair ; and everywhere his words seemed to touch a sympa- thetic chord throughout the cultivated society of Europe. In Childe Harold a poem of reflection and sentiment, of which the first two cantos were published in 1812 and also in the dramas of Manfred 3 and Cain, the peculiar characteristics of Byron's genius are most forcibly represented. 1 See Crit. Sect. ch. I. 57. 2 Extract Book, art. 202. 3 Ibid. art. 197. 430 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. VI. In these poems, and also in those mentioned on a former page l besides the splendour of the diction, the beauty of the versification, the richness of the unaccustomed imagery, and in some cases the interest of the narrative a personal element mingled, which f must be noticed as having much to do with the hold they obtained upon readers of all nations. Byron was generally supposed to be himself the great sublime he drew. In Conrad, or in Hugo, or in Lara, the reader thought he could trace the unconquerable pride, the romantic gloom, nay even some portion of the exterior semblance, of the man whom, in spite of protestations, all the world believed to have drawn his own portrait in Childe Harold. The turbulent, haughty, passionate, imperial soul of Byron seemed to breathe forth from the page ; and this was, and still is, the secret of its charm. The Hours of Idleness, his first work, written in ISO'J, when he was but nineteen, are poems truly juvenile, and show little promise of the power and versatility to which his mind afterwards attained. The satire of English Sards and Scotch Reviewers, already referred to, was written in 1809. All the leading poets of the day came under the lash ; but to all, except Southey, he subsequently made the amende honorable in some way or other. With the laureate he was never on good terms ; and their mutual dislike broke out at various times into furious discord. Byron could not forgive in Southey, whose opinions in youth had been so wild and Jacobinical, the in- tolerant toryism of his manhood. Southey 's feelings towards Byron seem to have been a mixture of dread, dislike, and dis- approval. In the preface to the Vision of Judgment, a poem on the death of George III., Southey spoke with great severity of the 'Satanic school 5 of authors, and their leading spirit, alluding to Byron's Don Juan, which had recently appeared anonymously. This led to a fierce literary warfare, conducted in the columns of newspapers and in other modes, which Byron would have cut short by a challenge, but his friends dissuaded him from sending it. It is little creditable to Southey that the most acrimonious and insulting of all his letters appeared in the Courier a few months after Byron had died in Missolonghi, a martyr to the cause of the liberty of Greece. The Prisoner of Ghillon, a soliloquy placed in the mouth of Bonnivard, whom, for his championship of the rights and i See p. 425. 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 431 liberty of Geneva, the Duke of Savoy imprisoned for six years (1530-36) in the castle of Chillon on the lake of Geneva, appeared in 1816. The tale of Mazeppa, a Cossack chief dis- tinguished in the wars of Charles XII., and Beppo, belong to the year 1818. Assailed and censured on every side, when his wife, who had gone on a visit to her father's house, expressed her intention of not returning to him, Byron left England in 1816, and saw his native land no more. How he lived in Italy it is painful to think; so bright and powerful a spirit, degraded by the indulgence of pride and passion to a state of such deep moral defilement ! Don Juan l appeared, by two or three cantos at a time, between the years 1819 and 1824. It was meant, Byron tells us, ' to be a little quietly facetious upon everything.' The readiness, fulness, and variety of Byron's mind are placed by this work in the clearest light ; nor less the unbounded audacity of his temper, and his contempt for all ordinary restraints. The metre is the same as the ottava rima of the Italian poets. Byron died in 1824. 12. There is no English poet of whom it is more difficult to express an opinion in few words than of Crabbe. His poems often raise our admiration ; but they also much too frequently provoke our derision. For though the powers of his mind were very considerable, yet they were attended with a kind of aesthetic blindness, a want of discernment, a deficient sense of what was fit to be said and what was not ; thus he was often led to mix up in the strangest manner what was vulgar and trivial with what was dignified and serious. He was a man of robust intelligence, but bereft, at least in his ordinary moods, of the finer and more delicate intuitions. The inequality thence arising appears, I think, in all his poems, except 'Sir Eustace Grey.' His early publications, The Library, The Village, and Ttie Newspaper, all in heroic verse, date from the eighteenth century. The Village was read and revised in the year 1783 by the venerable Samuel Johnson, then in his seventy-fourth year, and owes to him some of the best lines that it contains. 2 The collection of poems published in 1807 contained 'The Parish Register,' The Hall of Justice,' and ' Sir Eustace Grey. The first of these is in three parts, which treat of baptisms, marriages, and burials respectively. ' Sir Eustace Grey,' a poem written in stanzas of short lines, is the story, told by 1 Extract Book, art. 197. - ' Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong, Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song ? From truth and nature shall we widely stray, Where Virgil, not where fancy, leads the way ? ' 432 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. VI. himself, of an inmate of a madhouse, whom cruel injuries and the passions of an unbridled youth had bereft of reason, but whom religious meditation and faith have partially restored. The Borough 1 (1809), an heroic poem in a series of letters, unveils the modes of life of an English seaside town. This must certainly have been the poem which suggested the parody on Crabbe in the Rejected Addresses. The author's ridiculous anxiety to avoid giving any offence to any one is scarcely exag- gerated in the parody, which makes him say, ' My profession has taught me carefully to avoid causing any annoyance, how- ever trivial, to any individual, however foolish or wicked.' The sudden drops into the region of bathos are quite startling, and have a most cornic effect. For example : Nor angler we on our wide stream descry, But one poor dredger, where his oysters lie : He, cold and wet, and driving with the tide, Beats his weak arms against his tarry side, Then drains the remnant of diluted gin, To aid the warmth that languishes within. Such imbecilities are the more provoking, because they alternate with really fine descriptive passages, such as that on the sea and strand which may be found in the same letter. A set of Tales, twenty-one in number, treating to a great extent of subjects similar to those handled in the Borough, appeared in 1812. The Tales of the Hall (1819) have more of a regular plan than any other of the author's works. Two brothers, meeting late in life at the hall of their native village, which has been purchased by the elder brother, relate to each other passages of their past experience. These tales are composed in a more equable strain of language and thought than the Borough. They never rise very high certainly ; they are prosaic and commonplace in the flow of narrative ; the moral- ising is often threadbare ; but they keep clear of the ridiculous lapses which have been noticed in the former work. The character-painting is the best thing about them, being some- times very close and minute, and evincing much subtlety of appreciation. 13. Coleridge, whose equal in original power of genius has rarely appeared amongst men, published his first volume of poems in 1796. His project of a Pantisocratic community, to be founded in America, has been already noticed. 2 Visionary as it was, he received Southey's announcement of his withdrawal from the scheme with a tempest of indignation. For some years after his marriage with the sister of Southey's wife, 1 Extract Book, art. 169. 2 See p. 423. 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 433 ho supported himself by writing for the newspapers and other literary work. Feeble health, and an excessive nervous sensi- bility, led him, about the year 1799, to commence the practice of taking opium, and he was enslaved to this miserable habit for twelve or fourteen years. Its paralysing effects on the mind and character none better knew, or has more accurately de- scribed, than himself. "What impression he produced at this period upon others may be gathered from a passage in one of Southey's letters, written in 1804. 'Coleridge,' he says, 'is worse in body than you seem to believe ; but the main cause is the management of himself, or rather want of management. His mind is in a perpetual St. Vitus's dance eternal activity without action. At times he feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feeling never produces any exertion. I will begin to-morrow, he says, and thus he has been all his life long letting to-day slip. . . . Poor fellow ! there is no one thing which gives me so much pain as the witnessing such a waste of unequalled power.' Coleridge's poetical works fill three small volumes, and con- sist of Juvenile Poems, 1 Sibylline Leaves, the Ancient Mariner, 2 Christabel, and the plays of Remorse, Zapolya, and Wallen- stein the last being a translation of the play of Schiller. Coleridge's latter years were passed under the roof of Mr. Gillman, a surgeon at Highgate. One who then sought his society has drawn the following picture of the white-haired sage in the evening of his chequered life : Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of innume- rable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment had been small and sadly intermittent ; but he had, especially among young, inquiring men, a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician, character. ... A sublime man ; who alone in those dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood ; escaping from the black materialisms and revolutionary deluges, with ' God, Freedom, and Immor- tality ' still his ; a king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer ; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character ; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma, his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gillman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon. 3 Mr. Carlyle goes on to speak of the disappointing and hazy character of Coleridge's conversation, copious and rich as it was, and occasionally running clear into glorious passages of 1 Extract Book, art. 180. 2 Ibid. 3 Carlyle's Life of Sterling. 2 E 434 HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITEKATUKE. CHAP. VI. light and beauty. Such, indeed, is the general effect of his life, and of all that he ever did. One takes up the Biographia Literaria (1817), imagining that one will at least find some consistent and intelligible account of the time, place, motive, and other circumstances bearing upon the composition of his different works; but there is scarcely anything of the kind. The book possesses an interest of its own, on account of the subtle criticism upon Wordsworth's poetry and poetical prin- ciples, which occupies the chief portion of it; but when you have arrived at the end of all introductory matter, and at the point where the biography should commence, the book is done ; it is all preliminaries a solid porch to an air-drawn temple. Coleridge died in 1834. 14. Southey left Oxford as a marked man on account of his extreme revolutionary sympathies, and, being unwilling to take orders, and unable, from want of means, to study medicine, was obliged, as he tells us, 'perforce to enter the muster-roll of authors.' The prevailing taste for what was extravagant and romantic, exemplified in Mrs. KadclifiVs novels and Kotzebue's plays, perhaps led him to select a wild Arabian legend as the groundwork of his first considerable poem, Thalaba the Destroyer, published in 1801. Thalaba, 1 like Shelley's Queen Mab, is written in irregular Pindaric strophes without rime. Madoc, an epic poem in blank verse, founded on the legend of a voyage made by a Welsh prince to America in the twelfth century, and of his founding a colony there, appeared in 1805 ; and the Curse of Kehama, in which are represented the awful forms of the Hindu Pantheon, and the vast and gorgeous imagery of the Hindu poetry, in 1811. Roderic, the last of the Goths (1814), a long narrative poem in blank verse, celebrates the fall of the Visigothic monarchy in Spain. The Vision of Judgment (1820), in English hexa- meters, is a lament over the death of George III., whom it leaves in the safe enjoyment of Paradise. A Tale of Para- guay, as it was under Jesuit management, appeared in 1824. Besides these larger works, Southey wrote a multitude of minor poems. His characteristics as an author are, inde- fatigable industry, great skill at manipulating and shaping his materials, extraordinary facility of expression, and considerable powers of reflection and imagination. Nor can humour be denied him, though he had sometimes an unfortunate way of exhibiting it at the expense of the religious beliefs and prac- tices of other nations. In 1803 Southey settled at Greta Hall, near Keswick ; and here the remainder of his life was spent, in 1 Extract Book, art. 183. 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 435 the incessant prosecution of his various literary undertakings. After the death of his wife, in 1837, he became an altered man. * So completely/ he writes, ' was she part of myself that the separation makes me feel like a different creature. While she was herself I had no sense of growing old.' After his second marriage, in 1839, his mind began gradually to fail, and the lamp of reason at last went entirely out. In this sad condition he died in the year 1843. 15. Thomas Campbell, though born in Glasgow, was a Highlander both in blood and nature. His Pleasures of Hope (1799) was certainly the best continuation of the lines of thought marked out by Pope and the moralists that had appeared since the time of Goldsmith. The poem has little plan, as might be expected from the nature of the subject. It contains a sensational passage concerning slavery, accompanied by the fervent hope that it may some day be abolished. There are also some fine lines on fallen Poland, and a masterly sketch of the cheerless creed of the materialist, which is described in order to be rejected. Some lines occur that are now familiar to every ear; e.g. : What though my winged hours of bliss have been Like angel-visits, few and far between. 1 And, 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view. But the Pleasures of Hope is, after all, of the nature of a prize poem, though a brilliant one. Campbell's genius is most attrac- tive in those poems in which his loving Celtic nature has free play. Such are * O'Connor's Child,' ' Lochiel's Warning,' The Exile of Erin,' 2 and ' Lord Ullin's Daughter ; ' 3 in all of which, but especially in the first named, the tenderness, grace, and passion of the Celtic race shine forth with inexpressible beauty. And the childlike simplicity of love and sorrow, dwelling on minute circumstances, homish, clannish, gregarious, unselfish, not sturdily self-reliant, but yearning towards others, and feeling its own being incomplete without them, all this, so eminently Celtic in its character, is exhibited in the l Soldier's Dream.' 4 Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), a tale of Pennsyl- vania, written in the Spenserian stanza, is soft and musical in its versification, but deficient in sustained epic interest. If Campbell had understood his own temperament, which tended 1 The substance of this line is in Blair's Grave : or, if it did, its visits Like those of angels, short and far between. Campbell, like Pope, knew how to improve on what he borrowed. 2 Extract Book, art. 187. 3 Ibid. * Ibid. 436 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. VI. to be dreamy and meditative, he would surely not have selected such an elaborate and lingering measure as the Spenserian stanza for a narrative poem. His martial and patriotic songs, < Hohenlinden,' 'The Battle of the Baltic,' 'Ye Mariners of England/ l are rapid and spirit-stirring, but full of faults of ex- pression. ' The Last Man ' is interesting from the nature of the subject : it gives us the soliloquy of the last representative of the human race uttered from among tombs upon the crumbling earth ; but the effort is more ambitious than successful, and many ex- pressions and images are overstrained. Campbell died in 1844. 16. To Wordsworth, from his very childhood, life seems to have been a dream of beauty, a continual rapture. Those ac- cesses of intellectual passion, those ardours of intellectual love, which come but seldom to most men, and usually in the matu- rity of their powers, were to him an habitual experience almost from the cradle. This it was that made him say, ' The child is father of the man ; ' this explains such passages as the follow- ing in the ode on the ' Intimations of Immortality,' which else might sound like mere mysticism : Not in entire forgetfulness, Nor yet in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, who is our home : Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy ; The youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended ; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. His whole being was moulded in a singularly perfect balance ; the ' sound mind in the sound body ' was never more strikingly exemplified than in him. To keen senses acting in a healthy and hardy frame, he joined the warmest moral emotions and the most extended moral sympathies, together with a synthesis of the finest intellectual faculties, crowned by the gift of an imagination the most vivid and the most penetrating. This imagination he himself regarded as the royal faculty, by which he was to achieve whatever it was given him to do, calling it but another name for absolute power And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And Reason in her most exalted mood. 2 1 Extract Boole, art. 187. 2 The Prelude, conclusion. 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 437 Born on the edge of a mountain district, he had been familiar from the first with all that is lovely and all that is awful in the aspects of nature ; deep and tender sympathies bound him always to the lot of his fellow-creatures, especially the poor and the simple ; unceasing reflection was his delight, and, as it were, one of the conditions of his existence. It was there- fore upon no vacant or sluggish mind that the cry of revolu- tionary France burst, in her hour of regeneration. He was less shaken than others, because he had already seen in his reveries the possibility of better things for human society than it had yet attained to, better than even the Revolution promised to provide : If at the first great outbreak I rejoiced Less than might well befit my youth, the cause In part lay here, that unto me the events Seemed nothing out of nature's certain course, A gift that was come rather late than soon. 1 He visited France immediately after leaving Cambridge in 1792, and remained there above a year. At Orleans he formed an intimacy with an officer of Girondist opinions, who after- wards, as General Beaupuis, fell in battle with the royalists near the Loire : He on his part, accoutred for the worst, He perished fighting, in supreme command, Upon the borders of the unhappy Loire, For liberty, against deluded men, His fellow-countrymen ; and yet most bless'd In this, that he the fate of later times Lived not to see, nor what we now behold, Who have as ardent hearts as he had then. 2 With Beaupuis the poet talked over the oppressions of the old regime, and speculated hopefully on the new model of a regenerated society, which an uprisen people, whose natural virtues would be now free to exert themselves and find the career which they required, was about to exhibit to the world. Yet even in that hour of elation Wordsworth was saddened by the sight of an imtenanted and roofless convent : In spite of those heart -bracing colloquies, In spite of real fervour, and of that Less genuine and wrought up within myself, I could not but bewail a wrong so harsh, And for the matin-bell to sound no more Grieved, and the twilight taper, and the cross, High on the topmost pinnacle. 3 1 The Prelude, book ix. 438 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. VI. Compelled to return to England in 1793, he repaired ere long to his beloved mountains, and in the same year produced his first work, containing the ' Evening Walk,' and ' Descriptive Sketches, taken during a pedestrian tour among the Alps,' poems in which echoes of Pope, Goldsmith, and Crabbe are more apparent than any very decided indications of genius. At this period, England joined in the war against France ; and . Wordsworth's moral nature the whole frame of his aspira- tions and sympathies received a rude shock. He was even meditating a return to France, and the devotion of all his energies to 'political action. Perplexed and disappointed, he was in some danger of becoming permanently soured and morose. But from this state his admirable sister, who was now become his constant companion, raised him, and drew him gently towards the true and destined path for his footsteps, the vocation of a poet : She whispered still that brightness would return ; She, in the midst of all, preserved me still A poet, made me seek beneath that name, And that alone, my office upon earth. 1 But neither the brother nor the sister had at this time any patrimony. This want, however, was supplied in a sin- gular way, at the very moment when it began to be urgent, by the bequest of a young friend of the name of Calvert, whom Wordsworth had tenderly nursed through the last weeks of a decline. This was in 1794; and the pair, accustomed to the austere simplicity and plain fare of the North, lived con- tentedly upon this bequest (which did not exceed nine hundred pounds) for eight or nine years. In 1802, when this resource was nearly exhausted, the succession of a new Lord Lonsdale brought with it the payment of their patrimony, long unjustly withheld. Wordsworth then married, and settled at Gras- mere. During this period his poetry, as De Quincey says, was ' trampled upon ' ; and he had no other permanent resource for a livelihood. But in 1807 he received from Lord Lonsdale the appointment of distributor of stamps for the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and was set free thenceforward from pecuniary anxieties. Shelley, in his Peter Bell the Third, sneers at Wordsworth as a pensioner bought over by the Tories; but the taunt was false and groundless. Some few persons in England were wise enough to see that Wordsworth's function in this world was to write, and at the same time happy enough to have it in their power to say to him, ' Write, 1 The Prelude, book xi. 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 439 and you shall be fed.' Among these few were Calvert and Lord Lonsdale. It is hard to see how Wordsworth's mental and moral independence was more compromised by accepting an office from the lord lieutenant of his county, than was Shelley's by his deriving his income from landed property, the secure tenure of which depended upon the governmental re- pression of Jacobinical projects at home and abroad. 17. In 1798 appeared the Lyrical Ballads, to which a few pieces were contributed by Coleridge and Southey. Again, in 1800 and 1807, collections of detached poems appeared, and in 1814 was published the Excursion. This is the second part of a larger poem which was to have been entitled The Recluse, and to have been in three parts. The third part was only planned ; of the first only one book was ever written. A long poem in fourteen books, called The Prelude, written in 1804, was not given to the world till 1850. It contains a history of the growth and workings of the poet's mind, up to ' the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were suffi- ciently matured for entering upon the arduous labour which he had proposed to himself,' that namely of 'constructing a literary work that might live/ a philosophical poem containing views of man, nature, and society. This great work, the storehouse of his deepest and wisest thoughts, the author himself compared to a Gothic church, the Prelude to the ante- chapel of this church, and all his minor poems to ' the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses ordinarily included in such edifices.' 18. Of the general plan of the Excursion, I must try to give the outline. In the first book the poet meets the * Wanderer/ a Scotch pedlar, who, having by hard work earned enough to make him independent of his trade, wanders con- tinually from place to place, feeding his contemplative spirit on the varied physical aspects, or moral themes, which nature and human life supply. The Wanderer conducts him to the remote valley, where dwells the ' Solitary/ a man who after having lived some years with an adored wife and two children, and then seen them die before his eyes, having perplexed his brain with a thousand jarring tenets of religion and philosophy, having hailed with rapture the revolution in France, and groaned over the repression of the manifold activities which it had elicited by the hard hand of military power, now, in cynical despondency, unsocial and friendless, longs for the hour of death : Such a stream Is human life ; and so the spirit fares In the best quiet to her course allowed ; 440 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. VI. And such is mine, save only for a hope That my particular current soon will reach The unfathomable gulf, where all is still. In the fourth book, 'Despondency Corrected,' the Wanderer, with the true eloquence of a noble enthusiasm, endeavours to remove the morbid hopelessness of his friend by unfolding his views of the immense potentiality for good which every human existence, not utterly corrupted, contains within itself ; by en- larging on the blessings which, in every age and every land, religious hope, and even, were no better thing obtainable, superstitious reverence, have bestowed upon men : blessings more real than any which modern science apt to be blind to the higher while keenly conscious of the lower truth confers on its disciples; lastly, by pointing out the practical courses and methods of discipline which, in his judgment, lead to the perfection of the individual being. The beautiful ideal of human perfection here presented to us differs from that which we find in the pages of the New Testament perhaps only in this, that it implies an intellectual activity and culture possible only to the few, and must, therefore, for ever be unattainable by those unequal and imperfectly balanced characters who con- stitute, nevertheless, the chief portion of mankind. To such characters Christianity alone opens out the means of reaching the highest grade of perfection compatible with their nature. In the later books, from the fifth to the ninth inclusive, the chief figure is that of the 'Pastor,' who relates to the per- sonages already introduced numerous anecdotes drawn from the experience of his mountain parish. Among these is the story of 'wonderful "Walker,' the good pastor of Seathwaite, in the Vale of Duddon, which parish he held for sixty-six years. Among Wordsworth's minor poems I will mention, as espe- cially characteristic of his genius, ' Laodamia,' ' Matthew,' 1 the 'Primrose of the Rock/ the ' Solitary Reaper,' 2 the 'Evening Voluntaries,' the sonnets on the river Duddon, 'Yarrow Un- visited,' and ' Yarrow Visited.' 19. Moore, though of humble parentage, was enabled by his own striking talents, and by the self-denying and intelligent exertions of his excellent mother, to receive and profit by the best education that was to be obtained in his native Ireland. He went up to London in 1799 to study for the bar, with little money in his purse, but furnished with an introduction to Lord Moira, and with the manuscript of his translation of Anacreon. Through Lord Moira he was presented to the Prince Regent, 1 Extract Book, art. 177. 2 Tbid. 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 441 and permitted to dedicate his translation to him. The work appeared, and of course delighted the gay and jovial circle at Carlton House. Moore thus obtained the requisite start in London society, and his own wit and social tact accomplished the rest. Through Lord ! Moira's interest he was appointed, in 1803, to the Registrarship of the Bermudas. But he could not long endure the solitude and storms of the ' vexed Bermoothes,' and, leaving his office to be discharged by a deputy, he re- turned, after a tour in the United States, to England. Some of his prettiest lyrics, e.g. , the 'Indian Bark' and the 'Lake of the Dismal Swamp,' l are memorials of the American journey. In the poems of Corruption, Intolerance, and The Sceptic, published in 1808 and 1809, he tried his hand at moral satire, in imitation of Pope. But the role of a censor morum was ill suited to the cheerful, convivial temper of Tom Moore ; and, though there are plenty of witty and stinging lines in these satires, 2 they achieved no great success. He found at all times his most abundant source of inspira- tion in the thought of his suffering country, whose sorrows he lamented in many a lovely elegy, and whose oppression he de- nounced in many a noble lyric. Even in that poem which, as a work of art, must be regarded as his masterpiece, I mean Lalla Rookh, a work in which the reader is transported to the palaces of Delhi and the gardens of Cashmere, Moore himself tells us that he vainly strove, in several abortive attempts, to rise to the height of his own original conception, until the thought struck him of embodying in his poem a sketch of the history of the Ghebers, or fire-worshippers of Persia, a perse- cuted race who, like the Irish, had preserved the faith of their forefathers through centuries of oppression, and whose nation- ality had never been wholly crushed out by Moslem rule. Lalla Roolih (1817) consists of four tales, ' The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan,' ' Paradise and the Peri,' 3 ' The Fire-wor- shippers/ and 'The Light of the Haram.' A slight thread of prose narrative, gracefully and wittily told, connects them, inasmuch as they are all recited by the supposed Feramorz, who passes for a young poet of Cashmere, for the entertain- ment of Lalla Rookh, daughter of the Emperor Aurungzebe, while she is journeying from Delhi to Cashmere to wed her affianced lord, the prince of Bucharia. Fadladeen, the cham- 1 Extract Book, art. 191. 2 For instance- But bees, on flowers alighting, cease their hum ; So, settling upon places, Wtiv/s grow dumb. 3 See Crit. Sect. ch. I. 29. 442 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. VI. berlain of the princess's household, criticises each poem after it has been recited in a very lively and slashing manner. As a political satirist, Moore, on the Liberal side, was quite as cutting and far more copious than Canning, or Frere, or Maginn, on the Tory side. His * Political Epistles ' are of various dates ; among them is the far-famed * Epistle of the Prince Regent to the Duke of York,' in which the c first gentleman in Europe ' is made to say, partly in his own very words I am proud to declare, I have no predilections ; And my heart is a sieve, where some scattered affections Are just danced about for a moment or two, And the^ner they are, the more sure to run through. The Fudge Family in Paris l (1818), and Fables for the Holy Alliance (1819), were designed to stem the tide of reaction which, after the end of the great war, seemed likely to replace the throne and the altar in their old supremacy. The Two- penny Post-bag, a collection of imaginary intercepted letters, put into verse, in one of which there is a playful hit at Walter Scott, who had just published ' Rokeby,' dates from 1813. But all that was highest and purest in Moore's nature is best seen in his Irish Melodies* (1807-34), in which he appears as the Tyrtseus of his beloved Ireland. His Sacred Songs (1816) are less interesting. In his later years Moore took to prose- writing; compiled the Life of Sheridan (1825), and the Life and Letters of Lord Byron (1830) and also produced The Epicurean, a History of Ireland, the Memoirs of Captain Rock, and the Travels of an Irish Gentleman in search of a Religion. His mind, like Southey's, was gone for several years before his death, which occurred in 1852. 20. Thomas Hood was a man of rare powers. Pathos, sensibility, in- dignation against wrong, enthusiasm for human improvement all these were his ; but the refracting medium of his intelligence was so peculiarly constituted that he could seldom express his feelings except through witty and humorous forms. However gravely the sentence begins, you know that you will probably have to hold your sides before it is ended. The following well-known stanza is really a type of his genius : Mild light, and by degrees, should be the plan To cure the dark and erring mind ; But who would rush at a benighted man, And give him two Hack eyes for being blind? 3 His first work was Whims and Oddities, followed by the Comic Annual, commenced in 1830, and Up the Rhine (1838). The wonderful 'Song of the Shirt ' (1843) was nearly his last effort. He died of a chronic disease 1 Extract Book, art. 191. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. art. 207. 1800-1850. RECENT TIMES. 443 of the lungs in 1845. His works have been published in a collective form within the last few years. 1 The deep and strong nature of Eeble is reflected in The Christian Year? which has gone through innumerable editions. The expression is often negligent, the imagery sometimes tawdry ; but the unbroken logical thread pervading every hymn, and the intense devotional feeling in many,' com- mend them alike to the thinking and to the pious. Keble sometimes expressed himself with singular force and exactness on Catholic doctrines which he was not supposed to hold. In, for instance, the Lyra Innocentium he thus wrote of the privileges of Mary : Henceforth, Whom thousand worlds adore, He calls thee Mother evermore ; Angel nor Saint His face may see, Apart from what He took of thee. How may we choose but name thy name, Echoing below their high acclaim In holy creeds, since earthly song and prayer Must keep faint chime with the dread anthems there ? From the long roll of minor poets, the publication of whose works falls within the first half of the century, I select a few names. 21. Hogg, 3 the 'Ettrick Shepherd,' wrote The Queen's Wale (1813), which, says Mr. Chambers, 'consists of a collection of tales and ballads supposed to be sung to Mary Queen of Scots by the native bards of Scot- land, assembled at a royal wake at Holyrood.' Mrs. Hemans 4 published in 1828 Records of Women, and afterwards National Lyrics, Scenes and Hymns of Life, and other works. Much feeling, and a tender rnusic, characterise her best pieces ; e.g., ' The Homes of England,' ' The Trea- sures of the Deep,' 'The Lost Pleiad,' 'The Better Land,' 'He never smiled again,' &c. Miss London, once so widely known as L. E. L., is the authoress of 'The Improvisatrice,' and a multitude of other lyrics now seldom read. James and Horace Smith 5 were the authors of the Rejected Addresses (1812), a collection of parodies of the style of the prin- cipal living poets. Those on Crabbe, Byron, and Southey are especially telling. A copious didactic vein is exhibited in the moral poems of James Montgomery, 6 author of Greenland (1819), The Pelican Island, and other poems. Robert Follok's Course of Time (1827), however feeble and faulty as a poem, was so exactly adapted to the level of culture in the religious classes of Scotland that it obtained an extraordinary popularity, having passed through more than twenty editions. It con- sists of ten books of blank verse : the subjects handled are much the same as those met with in Young's Night Thoughts. Kirke White's few poems were for a time made famous through the publication of his Remains by Southey, soon after his death in 1806. The small posthumous volume of poems by Bishop Heber 7 contains, besides his Oxford prize poem of Palestine,' several good hymns and lyrics, and the fine lines on ' Europe,' hailing the uprising of the Spanish people in 1808 against the French invader. The Pleasures of Memory, by Rogers, 8 appeared as far back as 1792 ; it is in the heroic couplet. Italy, a descriptive poem of reflexion, not 1 On Canning and Frere, see Crit. Sect. ch. II. 8. 2 Extract Book, art. 200. 3 Ibid. art. 181. 4 Ibid. art. 203. 6 Ibid. art. 186. 6 Ibid. art. 179. 7 Ibid. art. 192. 8 Ibid. art. 171. 444 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. CHAP. VI. without merit, in blank verse, first came out in 1822. The Rev. Charles Wolfe * was the author of the fine elegy on Sir John Moore, who fell at Corunna in 1809. 22. The artist Haydon, complaining of the presumptuous tone of the art-criticism volunteered by Leigh Hunt, 2 said that he was a man en- dowed ' with a smattering of everything and mastery of nothing.' There is much truth in the remark ; this brilliant 'old boy,' the friend of Shelley and of Byron, could impart neither enough wit to his magazines, nor enough charm to his poems, to make them live. There was something both of Hood and Lamb in him ; but he seems to have lacked the power and fibre of the one, the tenderness and profound humour of the other. Among his poems A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and the Story of Rimini, deserve special mention. His various magazines, the Examiner, the Indicator, the Liberal, c., were, financially, all failures ; yet they contain the fruits of much keen observation and many clever criticisms, all written in a spirit of what is called advanced Liberalism. The char- acter of Leigh Hunt, as ' Mr. Skimpole,' was drawn with cruel satire by his protege Charles Dickens in his story of Bleak House. Hunt died in his seventy-sixth year in 1859. His Autobiography, published a few months before his death, is a lively and instructive record of the experi- ences of a struggling life. THE DRAMA. 1800-1850. Byron, Sheridan Knowles, Joanna Baillie. 23. During the present century the stage, considered as a field for literary energy, has greatly declined even "below the point at which it^ stood a hundred years ago. Why this is so, it would not be easy to explain ; but there is no doubt as to the fact that the dramas written by men of genius within the last sixty years have generally proved ill-adapted for the stage, while the authors of the successful plays have not been men of genius. The Doom of Devergoil and Auchindrane by Scott, the tragedy of Remorse by Coleridge, that of The Cenci by Shelley, Godwin's play of Antonio, and Miss Edgeworth's Comic Dramas, were all dramatic failures : either they were originally unsuited for the modern stage, or, when produced upon it, obtained little or no success. On the other hand, the Virginius, the Hunchback, the Wife,